THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

Papocchio is not, as one might think, a pejorative form of 'Papa', but an Italian word that means imbroglio, deception, or dupery, all of which would describe some major aspect of the Bergoglio pontificate.

As Jorge Bergoglio nears completion of five years as pope, here is a critique that is mostly unflinching but nonetheless gives him credit for
advocating a church of the poor and merciful as though none of the other beatitudes were worth any attention... The writer is a professor of theology
at Canada's McGill University.

The Francis 'Reformation'
The question is not whether the Church is to be a Church of the poor and of the merciful.
Of course it is - but it's more than that. It ought to be a Church
of all the beatitudes.
by Douglas Farrow

February 28, 2018


On March 13, 2013, five hundred years and two days after the election of Pope Leo X, Cardinal Bergoglio was elected as the 266th occupant of St Peter’s throne. He took a novel papal name, Francis, and began (in his own words of advice to youth) “making a mess.”

Cleaning up the curia, which many thought his primary task, never quite got underway; or where it did get underway, didn’t get the papal support it required. There were innovations all right, but of a kind that drove the Church deeper into crisis, a moral and doctrinal crisis not unrelated to the one that overtook Leo’s pontificate.

Leo X’s crisis was already brewing when he came to office, yet he neglected it for lesser things, allowing it to boil over and flood Christendom with scalding liquids the disfiguring effects of which we are still witnessing.

Francis’s crisis was also brewing when he came to office, but he was put there by the machinations of men who wished to turn up the heat. That was done chiefly by way of the two synods on the family and the production of Amoris laetitia, with its notorious eighth chapter, which reintroduces the proportionalism identified by John Paul II as a major root of the crisis. This pot also threatens to boil over, as the posing of dubia and the almost unheard-of attempt at a correctio bear witness. Meanwhile, Francis has been playing a role more like Luther’s than Leo’s.

Francis is the pope. He is not nailing theses to church doors or challenging anyone to a debate. In fact, he refuses to render judgments on debated matters. But he is very much the charismatic, even autocratic, leader – criticizing, cajoling, throwing verbal faggots on the fire.

Moreover, in this time of confusion he seems to be searching, like Luther, for an answer to the question: “How can I get a gracious God?” [An absurd question, to begin with! God is God, and we do not get to choose 'what kind of God' we want! Our belief in God, like our love for him, has to be total and unconditional, all or nothing!]

And, in that search, he does not shy from differing with magisterial tradition as regards faith and morals and the sacraments, though (unlike Luther) he presents these differences merely as new pastoral or missionary strategies. He has even found ways, through a synodical ecclesiology, to provide something close to de iure approval of de facto schisms in doctrine and discipline, effecting a Reformation-like turmoil in the Church. [[The pope is supposed to be the visible symbol of Church unity, but this pope revels in proactively, consciously and deliberately fostering disunity. "I am aware that someday I may be seen as someone who split the Church" - how can any pope worthy of the name and the office even dare to say that as Bergoglio has done?]

Now, it is not rare to hear from clergy and laity who support the Francis reformation, and even from Francis himself, that all this is a work of the Spirit that must not be challenged but faithfully, indeed irreversibly, pursued. This also sounds rather like Luther, both in style and in substance. It is language I find greatly disturbing.
- Does the Spirit make claims that are plainly contradictory (conscience is/is not the final arbiter in matters of sacramental discipline; adultery does/does not preclude a state of grace; capital punishment is/is not intrinsically evil; etc.)?
- Does the Spirit call for arrangements that will accommodate the sexual revolution?
- Does the Spirit set bishop against bishop?
- Speaking of bishops, does the Spirit first oppose, then propose, lay investiture or encourage “inculturation” by deposing faithful bishops in favour of quislings?
We need, I dare say, not only discernment of situation, but discernment of spirits. [And what isn't of the Holy Spirit, where the Church is concerned, is necessarily that of the anti-Spirit, Lucifer-Satan himself!]

Where shall we begin? Let us confess straight away that the Francis reformation has much to commend it, just as Luther’s did. A Church of the humble, a Church for the poor, a Church that goes out among the people, scouring the highways and byways to deliver unexpected invitations to the Great Feast, a Church that conveys the mercy of God to those most in need of it: such is the Church that is following its Lord. [Yes, but it is very deliberately selective. The Church is for all, not just the poor - and the only categories that matter, for the mission of the Church, are sinners who sincerely try to live up to the Lord's Gospel, and sinners who don't: the latter are the 'poor' who are most in need of the Church, not the materially poor.] Francis speaks to this, and tries to model it. Whether he speaks well or poorly, whether he models wisely and consistently, may be questioned, but not this basic fact. [The writer appears to completely ignore Bergoglio's self-servingly selective use (misuse/abuse) of the Gospel to promote his own agenda, which is largely political and social (and only incidentally, religious, because he is after all, the pope). Jesus is Truth himself, and to misrepresent his words by choosing and picking which of them to preach, is to violate the truth, and therefore, to blaspheme Jesus.]

And here we should take stock of his own background and agenda, not confusing it with the agendas of those whom we already knew and about which we already worried, though it is certainly disconcerting that Francis has drawn so many of the latter into his own confidence and into his administration of Church affairs.

Francis is rooted in his native Argentine teología del pueblo, which regards “popular religiosity” as a basic category. Taking his magisterial cue from the opening line of Gaudium et spes (of which he says, “here we find the basis for our dialogue with the contemporary world”), while worrying that the Church has lost the ninety-and-nine and must go in search of them, Francis desires a strategy for reconnection with the people. He rejects the restorationist program of traditionalists and seeks instead to cultivate in the Church “a real desire to respond, to change, to correspond” to the hopes and desires and sufferings of ordinary folk, in hopes of returning them to the fold. [That's a whole load of bullshit! He's not seeking to return anyone to the fold! He keeps saying "God accepts you as you are - you don't have to do anything" and "I'm not asking anyone to be Catholic"! And the only 'reconnection' he's interested in is the sort of celebrityhood that he already enjoys in over-abundance!]

This does not adequately account, however, for the most troubling features of his papacy, which Thomas Weinandy recounted in his letter to Francis of 31 July 2017, elaborated soon after by the pseudonymous author of Il Papa Dittatore.

One that Fr Weinandy does not mention is Francis’s deliberate distancing from St John Paul II, a man whose credentials for suffering with the people and whose capacity to rekindle faith among them far outstrip his own. [Perhaps Fr Weinandy does not say so in those words, but like all the well-meaning critics of AL, he surely underscores how AL alone, by itself, tramples down on the Polish pope-saint's Familiaris consortio and Veritatis splendor!]

How shall we explain that distancing, if not by his embrace of what Keith Lemna and David Delaney, in “Three Pathways into the Theological Mind of Pope Francis”, referred to as the “post-conciliar strategy to inculturate the gospel to modern tastes that was adopted by so many of his Jesuit confreres after the Second Vatican Council”?

Against John Paul II, Francis has clearly partnered himself with those who think it time “for the Church to seek a mediatory pact with contemporary secular culture” by bracketing out “contentious social disputes that appear to be peculiarly Christian concerns” – who indeed believe this “an indispensable first stage in the journey to reach the lost ninety-nine.” [Aw, shut up already about Bergoglio seeking to 'reach the lost' 99 or whatever! Besides, I thought the Biblical story was about 1 lost sheep that the shepherd goes out to seek - not 99 lost sheep (what, they all scattered to the four winds?), though with Bergoglio, 'the unfaithful shepherd', as Phil Lawler calls him in his book, the lost sheep are certainly far more than just one!]

Not only has he appointed such people to high office, despite in some cases their sexual or financial misbehaviour; he has worked with them to subvert the dicasteries and institutes that were carrying forward John Paul II’s agenda, while marginalizing the doctrinal oversight of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Even when we try to isolate the Bergoglian agenda from its European or American attachments, then, we run into trouble. That God regularly invites the Church to a fresh inculturation of its mission is not to be doubted, whatever the merits or demerits of the teología del pueblo and the Aparecida document (surely Bergoglio’s finest work) [Oh, that is such a disputable statement on many levels I shall not even begin to say how. Suffice it to say that it certainly has had no effect at all on re-evangelizing Latin America, and that since Aparecida, the Church in Latin America has continued to hemorrhage members unabated!] as a model for our time.

Yet the Francis reformation, as a call to go out among the poor and needy [Does he really believe he is the first pope ever to have made such a call? As if the Church, especially from the 20th century onwards, had not been the single institution that most consistently and widely provided health, education and welfare services globally to the neediest regardless of race or religion!], does not break much new missionary ground.

It is not that call that is generating a crisis in the Church, but rather the call for another kind of accompaniment, the call for an exercise of “mercy” that echoes Jesus in John 8 but somehow neglects his “Go, and sin no more” – the call that neglects halakah, that puts doctrine and discipline aside, that makes the rich and comfortable still more comfortable while doing little to challenge popular religiosity with the demands of authentic discipleship. Here “rules and prohibitions” and “the repetition of doctrinal principals” (Aparecida 12) are not thought to be insufficient, as indeed they are, so much as to be impediments, which they are not.

We will not get far, in this business of discernment, by asking whether the Church is to be a Church of the poor and a Church of the merciful. Of course it is. We must ask instead whether it is to be a Church of all the beatitudes.

The Francis reformation places emphasis on the fifth – “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” – but sometimes seems ambivalent about the fourth and the sixth: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness… Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” It stresses the first, in its Lukan version – “Blessed are the poor” – but has little to say about the last two: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake… Blessed are you when men revile you…”

And why is that? Not because of the preeminence of divine mercy, already emphasized by John Paul II in Dives in misericordia, but because of its tendency to oppose mercy and justice, despite Francis’s own statements in Misericordiae vultus that they cannot be opposed. [But one can and must know right away from the statements Bergoglio makes pro forma - he is the pope and there are certain things he must pay lip service to - without meaning any of it!]

That tendency, we may be confident, has much to do with the Humanae vitae rebellion and indeed with a determination to adopt something like the modern Protestant attitude towards sex and marriage, as R. R. Reno has trenchantly observed in “Bourgeois Religion.” With Francis himself things may be otherwise; but, if so, he is closing his eyes to a great deal of what is going on around him.

At all events, his constant railing against the evils of “rigidity” suggest that he has imbibed more than a little of what Augusto Del Noce characterized in The Crisis of Modernity as “a critique of authority in the name of conscience, or in the name of a historical process thought to be providential and irreversible because willed by God, a process which eliminates every ‘fixism.’”

Consider here the four principles of good governance he adopted many decades ago and, without warrant from scripture or tradition has introduced into his magisterial writings. Claudio Remeseira, leaning on Bergolio’s fellow Jesuit, Juan Carlos Scannone, tells us that these principles – “Time is greater than space; Unity prevails over conflict; Realities are more important than ideas; The whole is greater than the part” – were extrapolated from a letter written in 1835 by Juan Manuel de Rosas to Facundo Quiroga during the Argentine constitutional controversy. [I cannot believe anyone can seriously take such incoherent statements for principles that hold together! Five years ago, when I first came across them, I scoffed at them one by one as a risible attempt to sound 'profound'. And how, pray, does Bergoglio abide at all by his maxim "Unity prevails over conflict"?] They are “constantly invoked by Francis and constitute the mainstay of the fourth chapter” of Evangelii gaudium.

The first of them invites Francis to dismiss those “nostalgic” elements in the Church that remain stuck in the past and are unwilling to let tradition evolve. The second, we may add, recalling as it does the Teilhardian maxim that “incoherence is the prelude to unification,” underlies his advice to make a mess [And how does that fit into the role of the pope as the visible symbol of unity in the Church?]; while the third and fourth also relativize fixed notions and established practices to the needs of the present moment.

Remeseira stresses Francis’s capacity to combine progressivism with an anti-modernist note. “Many people still wonder whether he is a true progressive or a conservative camouflaged with soundbites and gestures that please the liberal crowds but that in the end have little or no consequence for the real life of the Church. The truth is that he is a little bit of both.”

His thinking proceeds like a fugue, as he wrestles with the “unresolved conflict at the heart of Catholicism,” even Vatican II Catholicism; namely, how to proclaim Christ in a relentlessly secularist age.

“When Francis says that he is nobody to judge a gay person, or when he asks forgiveness for the crimes committed by the Church during the so-called Conquest of the New World, or when he forfeits excommunication to women who had had an abortion, he is playing the liberal voice; it is the progressive line singing. When he ratifies the Vatican’s traditional teaching on contraception, priest celibacy, same-sex marriage and female priesthood, [Who really knows if he means his lip service against all these things, when there is no lack of indications to show that he is really 'soft' on these issues the rare times that he brings them up?] it is the conservative voice that comes up front. The important thing to keep in mind is that, as in counterpoint  – a fugue’s central device –  both voices are playing at the same time, only at different parts of the score.” [But counterpoint in music is harmonious. Bergoglio's doublespeak is simply and offensively discordant.]

But, leaving aside the fact that Francis’s mind does not seem anything like as tidy as a fugue, we must insist that this putative conflict at the heart of Catholicism, which is really a conflict between the Church and the world, cannot be resolved by some ad hoc human counterpoint.

Rather, it has already been resolved by the divine counterpoint in the cross and resurrection, the ascension and anticipated parousia, of Jesus Christ. That divine counterpoint instructs us to be very careful with inculturation, and to expect in the present age progress in evil as in good. This, surely, Francis knows. Yet he should also know, and apparently does not, that the divine counterpoint does not justify his maxims or their elevation into theological principles.

According to Evangelii gaudium, “a constant tension exists between fullness and limitation.” Fullness “evokes the desire for complete possession, while limitation is a wall set before us.” Time is greater than space in the sense that it breaks down this wall. It is a constant opening, says Francis, for we live “poised between each individual moment and the greater, brighter horizon of the utopian future as the final cause which draws us to itself.” Knowledge that time is greater than space “enables us to work slowly but surely, without being obsessed with immediate results” or anxieties about “inevitable changes in our plans.” [All nonsense, because whatever is accomplished in time requires space to accomplish it in! That should be evident to anyone, even if you are ignorant of the space-time continuum that is the reality of the physical world. What happens in time does not happen in a void!]

“Giving priority to space,” on the other hand, “means madly attempting to keep everything together in the present, trying to possess all the spaces of power and of self-assertion.” Time ought to govern spaces, for it “illumines them and makes them links in a constantly expanding chain, with no possibility of return. What we need, then, is to give priority to actions which generate new processes in society and engage other persons and groups who can develop them to the point where they bear fruit in significant historical events.”

This construct, I fear, is [ALL NONSENSE] not governed by the gospel or by the Eucharist. It intrudes as a foreign element that owes far more to Lessing and Hegel and the process theologians than Francis seems to realize.

Are we to adopt the Teilhardian slogan – one notes that the cry has gone up for Teilhard’s rehabilitation – L’En Haut et l’En Avant? Is it to be upwards and onwards, onwards and upwards? Then we must indeed dispense with every “fixism,” including even the fixing of Jesus to his cross and of the Church to the via crucis. Or (which comes to the same thing) we must reinterpret the cross as representing “the deepest aspirations of our age.” [What???? Bergoglio's 'church of nice' would do away with the Cross if it could! Oh no! No one must suffer anything, not even for their sins which Bergoglio effectively considers not sins any more or at all! Everything ought to be convenient and comfortable. And shut up about Hell and the Last Judgment! None of those 'terrors' must afflict the Bergoglian!]

Perhaps, if time really is greater than space, we may dispense also, as Luther did, with the Apostolic See itself? The step to Santa Marta is a step towards the walls, and Francis rightly wants the Church to go out beyond its walls into the highways and byways. [But is that not what she has been doing all these centuries through her missionary work around the globe? A mission that Bergoglio appears to have dropped because he thinks it is unnecessary - he doesn't want to make anyone Catholic, they are fine just as they are where they are.]

Yet the bones of Peter testify to the fact that the Church can only call people back to the future; that it can only call them to a very specific place and moment, as witnesses of the passion and the resurrection. It can only call them to a centre already fixed by God in space and time. That is what is “irreversible,” not some fancied progress in forging an ever-expanding chain of “significant historical events” or growing a “universal human consciousness” (Veritatis gaudium 4).

But let us allow that Francis is not a typical progressivist and press on with our attempt at discernment by recalling that one fixture of Catholic moral teaching that is already threatened by the desire to get outside the walls and beyond the past is the sixth commandment.

Unless adultery is not always adultery, it seems that adultery is not always wrong – or so many have concluded from Amoris, a conclusion blessed by Francis in the letter now ensconced in the Acta Apostolica Sedis. To put it a bit more accurately, adultery is always adultery and objectively wrong, but the person committing adultery may not be gravely culpable and may even be doing what God is asking of them.

Happily, this falsehood, which rests on an untenable notion of (subjectively) sinnerless sins and amounts to a form of situation ethics, does not touch as yet the infallibility doctrine; for nothing Francis has written or said meets the conditions of that doctrine, [That may be so, but he does not think that! He may not directly qualify his preaching as 'infallible' but the vigor with which he asserts them insistently, blasphemously invoking the Holy Spirit speaking through him, implies something more far-reaching: i.e., he would seem to imply that he is receiving'revelation' from the Holy Spirit, even if the Church postulates that 'revelation' ended with the Apostles] whether as stated by the First Vatican Council or as elaborated in Bishop Gasser’s relatio.

That is not to say that it can be tolerated or left unresolved, however, since it touches directly on dominical authority, on the moral order, and on the integrity of the gospel and the sacraments.

About all this so much has been said that one hardly knows where to begin. To confine ourselves to its impact on the Eucharist, the pope, it appears, is determined to treat that sacrament as what some among the Methodists and the Reformed call a converting ordinance; that is, as something that can be approached with the intention of enhancing faith, without too many inhibitions arising from consideration of one’s actual state of life or fitness for the sacrament – which, to be sure, is never anything other or less than medicine for the sick.

Though the Catholic Church does not deny what John Wesley chiefly meant by the expression “converting ordinance” (viz., that the sacrament is not a reward for perfect faith and holiness but a means of grace intended to nourish all the faithful), it does deny – or has until now – the use made of that idea among those who have argued for open communion. Francis, however, is making a mess by pushing for a limited form of open communion. And, if open here, why not there? If open to these (the divorced living more uxorio in a civil marriage or perhaps no marriage at all), why not also to those (make your proposal)? If we are not to discipline the one, why discipline the other? [Perhaps because he deliberately wishes for everyone to go down the slippery slope of his laissez-faire pastoral principle - 'Do as you please and do not worry, God is infinitely merciful!']

Our present lax attitude to discipline – discipline also is medicine for the sick – can hardly be put down to Francis. It has been with us since the temporary truce over Humanae vitae, and many bishops and priests have de facto permitted a kind of open communion.

But Francis is pope, and if his established teaching on the matter does not square with tradition, tradition itself can no longer be conceived in any distinctly Catholic way.

Moreover, it is not possible (as Veritatis makes clear) to isolate this “purely pastoral” matter from moral and doctrinal matters, such as Catholic teaching on the conscience and intrinsic evil, or on the unconditional grace of God in Jesus Christ.

If marital obligations are revocable, either marriage ceases to be a sacrament or that of which it is a sacrament is also revocable. If adultery is not a barrier to communion, then communion itself is something other than what the Church says it is.

The prayer of the Church governs the faith of the Church and the faith of the Church governs its pastoral practice. The moment this relation is reversed, we set foot on the same road Luther and his fellow reformers trod.

“How can we get a gracious God?” is the wrong question to ask [because it is inherently absurd!]. The right question is how we can be true to the grace of God that has already appeared for the salvation of all men; and the right answer is that we must allow it to train us “to renounce irreligion and worldly passions, and to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world, awaiting our blessed hope” (Tit. 2:12f.).

Now, whatever conclusions are reached about Francis – who, like Luther, seems by turns gentle and angry, transparent and inscrutable, clear and confused – it must not be overlooked that his pontificate comes at a time in which the contrary spirit that has been abroad in the Church for nearly a millennium has grown very bold.

The spirit of the nominalists who gave birth to skepticism, the spirit that reared its head in the Reformation to fracture rather than to unite, the spirit that has had to be dealt with again and again in ever more dangerous ideological iterations – the spirit of lawlessness rebuked in Veritatis splendor– now walks where it wills, even in the halls of the Vatican, and that by papal invitation. Though it has not, or not yet, stretched out its hands for the prize of some de fide proclamation, it has already begun to parlay with the Rock.

With the Rock? With Peter confessing Christ? Surely not, some say; but perhaps they are forgetting Jesus’s own temptation, and his remarkable rebuke to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!”

I recall being told by a senior churchman not long ago that it is dangerous to challenge the charism of a pope. That no doubt is true, but it is still more dangerous to let a pope pursue a false course. Besides, it begs the question as to what is and what is not a proper papal charism.

That popes have a charism beyond the mandate and promises given to Peter and his successors, that they have a charism peculiar to their own pontificate, is not a matter of doctrine; nor does it stand the test of history. Some popes served so briefly as to leave no discernible mark at all, while others left the Church in a much worse state than they found it. In any event, the notion that popes are always true to such additional charisms as they may have is quite obviously false.

At Vatican I, it was not claimed that popes have a peculiar charism, or any guarantee of personal faithfulness to their ex officio Petrine charism. It was claimed only that they do have the Petrine charism and that Providence would prevent their violation of it in formal acts of judgment on matters of faith and morals.

While St Bellarmine, as Bishop Gasser pointed out, had in his day ventured qualified support for Pighius’s “pious and probable” theory that, even as a particular person, a pope could never pertinaciously believe something contrary to the faith, the Vatican fathers did not so venture. Personally, I think this pious speculation very much less than probable. Pious speculation might also posit that there will be no popes in hell, but pondering Dante provides a cure for that.

To resist the task of discerning spirits on the assumption that no pope, even when not acting ex cathedra, would ever confuse or suppress the truth doctrinally, despite an abundance of evidence that he might do so morally, requires a much higher view of the papacy than is warranted by any judgment of the Church.

It also requires a blind eye to the contradictions that made their way into Amoris, contradictions that correspond to – and provide openings for – significant changes being effected on the ground. And, on the principle that reality is greater than ideas, there is every reason to suppose that these changes on the ground presage a still more concerted attempt to bring about doctrinal changes, changes that would bring the magisterium into self-contradiction. The “protestantization” of the Catholic Church would then be complete.

The present situation, thankfully, is not so dire as that. There is even something salutary about it, for it exposes those who are inclined to put their trust in popes, rather than in God and his Christ.

On the Feast of the Chair of St Peter in 2005, one enthusiastic priest wrote: “Can a Catholic dissent from the Papal Magisterium and still claim to be a Catholic in good standing? Can one refuse to render a ‘religious submission of mind and will’ to the Pope’s teachings? No! Absolutely not! … Catholics must obey the teachings of the Pope both from his Ordinary and his Extra-Ordinary Magisterium. Too often, I believe, the mistake is made of restricting the infallible teaching charism of the Holy Father exclusively to the ex cathedra forum. Dissident theologians have capitalized on this misinterpretation, leading many Catholics to believe that they are bound to follow only the de fide or ex cathedra teachings of the Roman Pontiff. This limitation was never the mind of the Church. It certainly was not the mind of the Fathers either of Vatican I or Vatican II.” I wonder what this priest would say now, were he still with us.

Benedict himself, when he took up that Chair, was far more clear-sighted:

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“The power that Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors is, in an absolute sense, a mandate to serve. The power of teaching in the Church involves a commitment to the service of obedience to the faith. The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law. On the contrary, the Pope’s ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to his Word. He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God’s Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism.”

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And where this commitment or guarantee is not made good on, what then? Many years earlier – sounding a bit like John Henry Newman, whose “minimist” view of infallibility commends itself as a prudent one – Cardinal Ratzinger warned that “criticism of papal pronouncements will be possible and even necessary, to the extent that they lack support in Scripture and the Creed, that is, in the faith of the whole Church.”

Well, now we are faced with just that necessity, thanks in part to his own decision to resign. We are faced in his successor with one who (if this exercise in discernment has not utterly failed) is compromising the faith and sacraments and unity of the Church.

We shall have to deal with that, not by doubling down on papolatry, but by ridding ourselves of it. Not by trying to save the appearances of things Francis says or does – what could that accomplish, other than to justify the Protestant view of Catholicism? – but by reckoning with them quite honestly and repudiating them where holy tradition demands they be repudiated.

And this cannot be a matter of every man for himself. It is a task ultimately for the bishops, divided as they are, and especially for the Sacred College, for all share the pontiff’s sacred duty to defend the faith.

But how then can it be said, cum Petro et sub Petro? How can it be insisted, “never apart from this head”? Will the church in Rome, with the blessing of the Bishop of Rome, be among those that deviate from the historic doctrine and discipline of the holy Catholic Church? Will Rome no longer be that church, of all the churches, to which (in Gasser’s words) “faithlessness has no access and with which, because of its more powerful primacy, every church must agree”? Will Rome itself (despite Cardinal Vallini’s admirable caution) have to be corrected?

Cum Petro et sub Petro: substitute aut for et and the crisis of which we have been speaking comes into focus. If it is not yet dire, it is certainly urgent. For Peter is divided from Peter, not as anti-popes are divided from the legitimate pope, whose office they covet, but as a successor from his predecessors. [Typically Bergoglian! If he thinks he would have been 'merciful' with Adam and Eve and not driven them out of Eden as God did, and if he thinks he knows better than Christ and the Apostles what the Church ought to be, how much easier for him to think he knows better than any of his predecessors as pope!]

It does not seem possible to follow Francis obediently and to remain at the same time with his predecessors – whether his recent predecessors, whose work he has systematically undermined, or his predecessors taken as a whole. It does not seem possible to follow Francis and remain within the boundaries of faith marked out by the Fathers of Trent, who had to defend from attack the very same sacraments that are threatened again today even in Rome itself.

No response that fails to escape the horns of this dilemma can hope to be successful. Rome must be corrected, yes, but it must be corrected by Rome. Peter must be corrected, but corrected in the time-honoured fashion by Paul.
- Which is to say: those in the college of bishops, in concert with those in the cardinalate who recognize what is at stake in this crisis and are prepared to act, must confront Peter in private and try to win their brother.
- If they are unsuccessful, they must oppose him to his face, before the church in Rome, demonstrating that he “stands condemned” by his own actions.
- Moreover, they must see to it that the church in Rome, to which the cardinal electors (though an international body) are de iure related, fully participates in this process.

Now, it will be pointed out that there is no canonical process for passing judgment on a pope; indeed, that there is no earthly court in which such judgment can be passed. To which two responses may be made:
- First, the process of which we are speaking is not a juridical one, and could never become such without a change in canon law. A pope can resign, but he cannot be removed from office by his brethren; he can only be removed “by the law itself” (canon 194), that is, by reason of having “publicly defected from the Catholic faith or from the communion of the Church.”
- Second, if the process, which is a personal and collegial one, were unsuccessful at its private stage, it would likely lead either to resignation or to the appearance of some formal heresy that would bring canon 194 into play. That this, or some still sadder or more troubling outcome, can be imagined is no reason for refusing the Pauline duty, to shirk which is to leave the faith itself at risk.

I have said that the immediate task of correcting particular errors on the part of Francis, errors which do not yet amount to heresy, and the larger task of rethinking the papal role as such and determining what good governance in today’s Church really means, must be undertaken by willing bishops and cardinals, acting in concert. [Which all sounds excellent in theory. But the fact that there are so few cardinals and bishops who have dared to publicly criticize this pope for his anti-Catholic word and deeds surely tells us there are not enough of them to be 'significant' in terms of achieving anything concrete. Ten or so cardinals and bishops constitute a pitiable fraction of the world's 5000-plus bishops and 200-plus cardinals!]

Neither of these tasks, however, whether they prove surprisingly simple in execution or difficult and protracted, should be allowed to obscure the fact that the Church as a whole is being asked to choose between two very different paths: the Protestant path that leads to individualism and sectarianism and thence, as the past half-millennium has shown, to cultural assimilation and statism; or the path that leads to a more authentic Catholicism that is both traditional and evangelical, unified and missionary – a communio Catholicism from which the contrary spirit has been fully exorcised.

It is for the sake of this choice, I believe, that an otherwise calamitous pontificate has been permitted. As Fr Weinandy put it at the end of his letter to Francis, perhaps our Lord does indeed want “to manifest just how weak is the faith of many within the Church, including many of her bishops.

“Ironically,” he adds, “your pontificate has given those who hold harmful theological and pastoral views the license and confidence to come into the light and expose their previously hidden darkness. In recognizing this darkness, the Church will humbly need to renew herself, and so continue to grow in holiness.”

Is that not a sound discernment? There are corrupt things in the Church that have been crawling slowly but surely into view, surviving even the harsh light cast on some of them in 2002 – old things that have been growing in the shadows for a very long time, fed by the spirit of lawlessness and recognizable as rebellion against the law of Christ, even when disguised as mercy and compassion or inculturation and accommodation.

Since the Church cannot renew herself by herself, but can and will be renewed by the Spirit of God, let us pray for our bishops, especially the Bishop of Rome, that they may name these things accurately and put them to flight.


I find the following commentary an appropriate postscript to the above:

Your Church, no matter what

March 1, 2018

The situation is, admittedly, dire. However, fleeing to a parallel reality is not the solution.

There is only one Church, and this is the deal we get. There is only one Pope (in charge, I mean) and that one is the guy we get.

The Church has gone through horrible crises and periods of extreme corruption before. This is clearly the worst crisis ever, but again we were never promised that we would never see a worse crisis than those the Church experienced in the past.

Also, in the bimillenarian history of the Church there had never been a period of defiance of Church teaching from within. Is it so surprising that the subsequent Divine Punishment would affect the Church also from within?

This is still your Church. It is covered in mud, but below the thick strata of Vatican II dirt it is as resplendent as ever. We are all expected to stay faithful to her, no matter how thick the mud; because, like Padre Pio, we love the Church even if she kills us.

It is the lot given to us to live in a time of heresy. But the Church will never be that heresy. We refuse obedience to a heretical Pope in everything in which obedience is not due to him. But we do not break our link to Christ’s Church.

We do not decide who is Pope. We do not decide whether the Church exists. Much less we decide whether she “deserves us”.

We accept this dire situation as, at the same time, our lot and our task. We accept that we might not have the consolation, on our deathbed, of knowing that the once great crisis has been overcome. We prepare ourselves to die in fidelity to that resplendent Church lying below the thick strata of mud, and we keep giving our allegiance to it.

You did not give up your passport when Obama became president. You do not give up on the Church when the Pope is a damn atheist, heretical Commie.

Don’t be a “not my President”-type Catholic.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “it’s the only Church you have”.

The new Vatican stamp - for Easter, mind you! - appears to be:
1) the latest unabashed public demonstration of homoerotic self-indulgence at the Bergoglio Vatican - or maybe, it's just a fascination with the male form and beefcake poses the same way normal men fantasize on the female form and cheesecake poses. The new stamp does recall uncomfortably the musclebound naked man in the Gaytivity scene in St. Peter's Square last Christmas; and
2) yet another example of the Vatican Philately Division's questionable taste and judgment on the illustrations they choose for their stamps (the travesty of the Crucifixion scene with Luther and Melancthon replacing Mary and St. John at the foot of the Cross, that the Vatican issued to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Luther's schism).

Who is responsible for these execrable examples? Should the Pontifical Council of Culture not have a say in any such 'cultural' manifestations from the Vatican? (On second thought, even if it did, its president, Cardinal Ravasi - whose main ambition seems to be to show just how 'cool' and 'groovy' he is with contemporary culture - probably applauds all this kowtowing to the dominant gay ethos of our day!)

Do we just turn a blind eye to these folies bergogliennes? Because I don't think the Vatican would issue any stamp whose design was not at first presented to the pope for his approval - the 'Reformation' stamp surely would have been! And we know he approved the Gaytivity enterprise incorporating the corporal works of mercy into the Nativity tableau, and so he may have seen the sketches and/or mock-ups for the project, and gave it his full and uncoditional approval nonetheless. Not a thing was changed in that appalling tableau despite all the criticisms.

After all, did this pope ever censure his Academy for Life president, Mons. Paglia, not just for having a homo-erotic mural painted in the Cathedral of Terni, but for being depicted in the mural himself among the homosexuals hauled up in a net towards the Lord at the Last Judgment? One would have to be extremely naive to ignore the impact of such a public self-confession by one of the leading prelates of the church of Bergoglio.

On top of two consummately pro-active promoters of the LGBT cause like Fathers Thomas Rosica and James Martin among the Vatican's top communications 'experts'. Can Bergoglio say that priests (and cardinals like Schoenborn) who go around saying the Catechism of the Church should be changed to accommodate the various deviant lifestyles of the LGBTQwhatever community are 'seeking the will of God', when they are instead trying to subvert it to their own will?

Yet this is only the visible tip of the iceberg which, for convenience, has been called 'the gay lobby' in the Vatican! Kyrie eleison!

A papacy of contradictions
Veteran journalist Phil Lawler asks hard questions in 'Lost Shepherd'
about where Pope Francis is — or isn’t — leading the Catholic Church
by Samuel Gregg

March 2, 2018

Of all the books written on the sex abuse crisis which shook the Catholic Church in America in 2002, one of the most thoroughly-researched was The Faithful Departed. Authored by the journalist and Harvard graduate Philip F. Lawler, its analysis of the crisis’s epicenter, the Archdiocese of Boston, chronicled how decades of coziness with Democratic politicians, a failure to confront widespread sexual malfeasance among priests, a forelock-tugging deference to secular psychology, the proliferation of theological dissent from Catholic sexual ethics, and that most perennial of ecclesiastical diseases — good old-fashioned clericalism —created the perfect storm from which some believe American Catholicism is still recovering.

The power of Lawler’s narrative was derived from its calm tone, a meticulous attention to facts, a refusal to overstate or downplay how bad things were, a comprehensive knowledge of Catholic teaching and history, and an obvious love for the Church. All these skills and inclinations have been brought to bear in Lawler’s latest book which addresses another Catholic crisis: one which he believes is being generated from the very top.

The title of Lawler’s analysis of Jorge Bergoglio’s pontificate Lost Shepherd: How Pope Francis is Misleading His Flock is slightly, well, misleading. For Lawler doesn’t believe that Francis is “lost” in the sense of not knowing where to go. Lawler’s contention is that the pope — and, even more, some of his closest advisors — wants to take the Catholic Church in a direction which looks rather like that of just another liberal Christian denomination: which is indisputably a path to irrelevance.

As in his previous work, Lawler doesn’t embellish facts. Indeed there’s nothing by way of fact in Lawler’s text which isn’t already known. Lawler’s focus is upon helping his readers understand Francis’s papacy and what it might mean for the Catholic Church in the long-term.

Lawler begins by stating that he, like millions of other Catholics, prays for the pope every day. He also mentions that, like millions of other Catholics, he was initially full of optimism about Francis’s pontificate. It was long past time for Peter’s successor to come from somewhere other than the faithless wasteland that constitutes much of the cocooned world of today’s Catholic Europe. And who better than a Vatican outsider to come in and clean out the Augean stables of the Holy See’s financial affairs?

But as time passed, Lawler relates, he became disillusioned with Francis. Like most Catholics, he wanted to attribute the best of intentions to the pope. But as strange incident piled upon strange incident and one incoherent statement followed another, Lawler found that there were aspects of Francis’s pontificate which he couldn’t dismiss as the type of mistakes any pope could make. Instead Lawler views them as symptomatic of what he portrays as a somewhat erratic and occasionally authoritarian personality: a persona that often goes hand-in-hand with the clericalist tendencies which Francis regularly and rightly denounces.

That’s just one of the contradictions which Lawler presents as characterizing Francis’s pontificate. As he sees it, Francis is full of contradictions.

In his 2015 visit to America, for example, Lawler notes that the pope spoke to America’s bishops about the importance of clergy avoiding harsh language. But according to Lawler, the pope has conspicuously failed to follow his own advice.

Francis has, Lawler writes, a habit of publically insulting unspecified groups of people who plainly annoy him: “rigid,” “real downers,” “smarmy idolater priest,” “Pharisees,” “doctors of the law” etc. The pope’s endless use of the latter two expressions, Lawler points out, eventually attracted criticism from the Holocaust survivor, the late Rabbi Giuseppe Laras. Without accusing Francis of anti-Semitism (for that would be false), Laras upbraided the pope for not grasping the historical anti-Semitic associations of these words. Most infamously, Lawler comments, Francis once “accused journalists who report on conflicts and scandals of coprophilia”. For the happily-uninformed, coprophilia denotes a sexual interest in fecal matter.

Put another way, far from speaking gently and with love, Francis regularly refers to people whom he apparently doesn’t like in a manner not unlike the late Hugo Chavez and the long-deceased Juan Peron: Latin American populists with a taste for demagoguery who not only drove their respective countries’ economies into the ground, but thoroughly corrupted their nations’ political institutions.

Francis is hardly the first “salty” pope. Lawler’s broader point is that Francis’s verbal invectives suggest that, for all his insistence upon dialogue, the pope isn’t really interested in listening to critiques and perhaps even resents them. That includes calm, measured disagreement from those who aren’t interested in confining the Church to a baroque cage and who can’t be accused of having legalistic mindsets.

Another contradiction which Lawler underscores as distinctive of this papacy concerns management. Few would question that when Francis was elected pope, part of his brief was to reform the Roman Curia. A major expectation of this pontificate was that it would terminate the rampant careerism of clerics and their lay hangers-on, the nepotism which provides otherwise-unemployable Italian relatives with undemanding jobs, and the outright financial corruption that’s produced a stream of scandals in the Holy See since the 1970s.

And yet, Lawler claims, five years after the reform process began, progress has been glacial. In fact, Lawler indicates that Benedict XVI achieved more by way of finance reform and streamlining processes for dealing with clerical sex-abuse. Moreover, Lawler demonstrates that there has been a great deal of two-steps forward, one-and-a-half steps back in the organizational changes advanced in Francis’s pontificate. By papal authority, responsibilities are given to particular bodies. Then, by papal fiat, these responsibilities are suddenly altered, scaled back, or spun off into someone else’s bailiwick.

Any management specialist will tell you that this pattern often reflects dysfunctionality at the top. Sometimes, such erratic decision-making mirrors a fitful personality, or someone who’s susceptible to manipulation by those anxious to restore the status quo, or who lacks command of details, or who doesn’t listen to those with knowledge of such things. Whatever the truth of the matter, Lawler is surely right to say that, thus far, the pope’s brief to “fix the Curia” remains sadly enough unfulfilled.

In the end, however, a pope’s primary responsibility isn’t management. Like Peter, a pope is called to go out and evangelize the world in what the Church teaches is the liberating Truth revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. Another papal charge is to confirm what the Church has always believed to be that Truth’s content and meaning.

Herein we come to the nub of Lawler’s concerns. Pope Francis has not, he carefully specifies, preached heresy. But according to Lawler, the pope is trying — via his 2016 exhortation Amoris Laetitia, his telling silences, his abstruse statements, etc. — to shroud aspects of Church doctrine in ambiguity. As one of many examples of the pope’s evasiveness in this area, Lawler cites Francis’s odd protestation that he couldn’t recall the contentious footnote around which much of the Amoris Laetitia debate has centered. That, Lawler writes, “strains credulity.”

Lawler’s thesis is that the pope doesn’t want to contradict firmly settled Catholic teaching on access to the sacraments. That would, after all, compromise the integrity of magisterial teaching. He is, however, willing to permit the proliferation of pastoral practices that, Lawler states, can’t be reconciled with that same magisterial teaching.
[That's really an uncalled-for bending over backwards to try to be charitable to someone who has shown himself to be not just consistently uncharitable but even mean and nasty when he wants to be!]

Accompanying the pope’s apparent unwillingness to respond directly and clearly to reasonable questions about what the Church holds to be true on certain faith and morals questions, Lawler sees yet another contradiction. Francis and some of those around him, Lawler holds, don’t have any inhibitions about speaking loudly, directly and — dare one say it — even judgmentally on subjects about which, strictly-speaking, they have no particular expertise and that Catholics are generally free to disagree about within the broad parameters of the church’s teaching.

What I’ll call the “new clericalism” is illustrated by one incident detailed by Lawler. In a March 2017 address, Pope Francis effectively rebuked the executives of an Italian company which had recently announced plans to downsize and restructure its operations. “He who shuts down factories and closes companies as a result of economic operations and unclear negotiations,” the pope stated, “depriving men and women from work, commits a very grave sin.”

What the pope meant by “economic operations and unclear negotiations” is uncertain. But, Lawler comments, does Francis really think that companies should keep operations running “even when they are losing money, until the corporation runs into bankruptcy — and the employees lose their positions anyway?”

To this, one could add: how could the pope possibly know all the specific elements that factored into a particular company’s resolution to reorganize its affairs? Perhaps a refusal by unions to engage in good-faith negotiations contributed to the business’s decision? Or maybe additional regulations and corporate taxes levied by one of the left-wing coalitions which presently control most Italian regional governments made specific operations in parts of Italy economically unfeasible?

The point, of course, is that the pope had no business speaking publically about such a precise subject about which he couldn’t possibly know many, if any of the details. And even then, his responsibility — and the main calling of any bishop or priest in such situations —would be to keep reminding all participants in an enterprise (owners, managers, employees, shareholders etc.) of the principles of Catholic social teaching. It’s then primarily up to lay people — not clerics — to apply these principles in the context of a particular business or corporation.

More could be said about other contradictions which Lawler considers to pervade Francis’s pontificate. But some of the questions running through my mind while reading Lawler’s analysis were as follows.

Why — given the undeniable collapse of all those Christian confessions that have enslaved themselves to the liberal zeitgeist and morphed into mere NGOs — would anyone think there is anything to learn from, say, contemporary German Catholicism (the epitome of Catholicism-as-just-another-progressive-NGO), except what not to do if you want to spread the Gospel?

Who in their right mind believes that reducing Christian morality to an “ideal” will encourage people to embrace unreservedly and with joy what Christ himself called the narrow way that leads to life? And how can anyone be unaware of these realities?

These are just some of the mysteries underlined by Lawler’s text. But one of his book’s strengths is that it tries, at every point, to give Francis the benefit of the doubt. In addition to avoiding the hyperbole, polemics, and more bizarre theories about Francis which populate some of the internet’s weirder outposts, Lawler prudently distinguishes between the pope’s words and actions, and the more flagrantly outrageous statements of some of the garrulous characters surrounding him.

This judicious approach won’t save Lawler from the barrage of insults, frenetic name-calling, splenetic tweets, conspiracy theories, and limp non sequiturs which, alas, we’re come to expect from some of Francis’s defenders. That, it seems, is how they roll. But just as Lawler’s The Faithful Departed made its case carefully and without exaggeration, so too does Lost Shepherd neatly and charitably summarize many faithful Catholics’ reservations about Francis’s pontificate.

Whether anyone in Rome will listen is a different matter altogether.

God help us all! - if this is an example of the propaganda blitz planned by the US's Bergoglio bishops to spread their new 'gospel', the infamous AL which now
seems to be held up by the Bergoglio universe as Bergoglio's very own, all in one, Ten Commandments, Revelation and 'Word of God'-directly-communicated-to-him
by Whom he blasphemes as the 'Spirit'. Imagine attributing all that incoherence and manifestly erroneous teaching to the Holy Spirit, when clearly the spirit that
has been lording it in Casa Santa Marta and Bergoglio's brain is the very antithesis of holy!

A demur on the AOW document
implementing Amoris laetitia

March 5, 2018

A single sentence threatens to undercut the good presented in “Sharing in the Joy of Love”, the graphically-attractive, 55-page pastoral plan published by the Archdiocese of Washington (DC) to implement Pope Francis’s document Amoris laetitia.

The problem sentence reads as follows: “Priests are called to respect the decisions made in conscience by individuals who act in good faith since no one can enter the soul of another and make that judgment for them.” SJL, p. 52.

This admonition can, of course, be appropriately applied in innumerable situations. But, if the sentence means that priests must “respect the decision” of divorced-and-civilly-remarried Catholics, living as though married to each other, to approach for holy Communion, and administer the Sacrament to them, then the admonition fails for violating Canon 915 and the Eucharistic discipline which that canon has always represented.

I say “if”, however, because whether that is what SJL calls for is not clear. The words “canon”, “law”, and “discipline”, for example, do not appear in SJL. Canon 915 is never mentioned — not attacked, mind, just never mentioned. [But that's a very Bergoglian tactic: if you ignore something altogether (like the DUBIA, e.g.), then it does not exist, not for you anyway!]

What makes one fear, however, that the sentence might be intended to sway ministers of holy Communion toward administration of the Eucharist under gravely illicit conditions — besides the fact that ministers so inclined could easily invoke SJL’s phrasing here in support of precisely such administration — is that the rationale offered for such a stance, namely, that “no one can enter the soul of another and make [a conscience] judgment for them”, is repeatedly put forth these days as if a would-be communicant’s conscience preempted a minister’s application of Canon 915.

But the claim that Canon 915 yields to the conclusions of personal conscience as reached by a Catholic approaching for holy Communion is, as I have pointed out many, many times, completely wrong. Canon 915, and the tradition upon which it stands, operate in the face of observable behavior and not personal conscience.

Civil marriage after divorce is observable behavior, behavior that is gravely contrary to Christ’s teaching on the permanence of marriage, to the Christian’s duty to avoid giving scandal, and to the Church’s law on reception of the sacraments.

In short, if encouraging ministers to give holy Communion to divorced-and-civilly-remarried Catholics is indeed what SJL intends by its wording here, then SJL is wrong; even if such is the use that some ministers intend to make of this passage in SJL, they are using the ambiguous wording of this sentence to avoid the clear directives of canon law and sacramental discipline.

When all the talk began about the Bergoglio Vatican seeking some sort of a deal with the Communist government in Beijing (with the immediate goal of establishing
diplomatic relations, thereby facilitating a visit by Bergoglio to Beijing, which would be a 'great' historic coup), what came to my mind right away was something
John Kennedy had said about “Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger (who) ended up inside the tiger" - the tiger in this case, of course,
being a behemoth tiger, and changing the word 'power' in JFK's line to the simpler 'deal' which is really what the pope has been negotiating. It is a measure of
Bergoglio's hubris that he thinks he can get away and not be eaten up the behemoth tiger that Beijing is!

Apparently, the Chinese have a similar proverb, if somewhat a weaker expression, that says "He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount" which is said about embarking
on a course of action which subsequently cannot safely be abandoned. So if Bergoglio commits to sacrifice the underground Church in China, as he seems
ready to do, to his ultimately foolish and naive personal political agenda - in which he fancies himself as the ultimate power broker who will single-
handedly and miraculously 'redeem' China from communism (in the same way he fancied himself as the one person who would finally bring Israel
and Palestine together) - then he is really riding for a fall from the tiger's back, straight into its open jaws!

In this article, the writer warns about the Albanian experience - in which we can ponder that if a tiny country and its Communist dictator could do what was
done to the Church in Albania, can Bergoglio really expect any 'mercy' from his prospective putative allies who have made it clear that they intend to
SINICIZE the Catholic Church in China? In which effectively, the 'Chinese Catholic Church' would be the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association,
which has been the de facto 'official catholic church' in China for decades. And which is certainly not going to take any direction from the Vatican
because to do so would mean 'foreign interference' in the official church.

Bergoglio thinks the Chinese will give the Vatican 'a say' in the appointment of bishops in China? Yeah right, that 'say' will be limited to saying Yes to
whoever the CPCA names - the meaningless proviso being a fig leaf the Chinese will concede to help Bergoglio save face. (Asians understand the importance
of saving face and will allow their adversaries that if they have already won the lion's share of the deal). The Bergoglio Vatican is deluding itself if it thinks it can
'ride' the Chinese tiger and not end up being devoured by it.

Ms. Murzaku is Professor of Church History and director of the Catholic Studies Program at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. Her research has been published in
multiple articles and seven books, and is currently writing a book entitled Mother Teresa: The Saint of the Peripheries Who Became Catholicism’s Centerpiece.

'The smaller cage is the better cage':
What has China to do with Albania?
The decades-long persecution of the Church in Albania by its Communist regime
provides a significant case for the Holy See to ponder as it seeks
a 'deal' with China
by Ines Angeli Murzaku

March 7, 2018


"There are two lions in the world today/
One in Asia and one in Europe,/
Mao Zedong in China/
And our Enver in Tirana."

This verse illustrates the friendly relations between Albania and China, which lasted for seventeen years (1961-1978), when Albania broke up relations with China and was hermetically sealed off from the rest of the Communist and Western world.

But, what has China to do with Albania? Tirana with Beijing? Mao Zedong with Enver Hoxha?

More than one might imagine: the building of socialism that would lead to Communism, the Cultural and Ideological Revolution, and suppression of religion, to mention some highlights in the Sino-Albanian relationship.

After Mao Zedong, otherwise known as Chairman Mao, unleashed the Cultural Revolution in China in 1965, Albania’s Communist leader Enver Hoxha launched his own version of Cultural and Ideological Revolution.

Following Chairman Mao’s model, Hoxha reformed the military, government, and economy.
- Military ranks were abolished and a system of political commissars was introduced in the army.
- Fighting against the bourgeois remnants and a white-collar mentality, salaries of mid-and high-level officials and intellectuals were slashed.
- People were required to work in the factories and in agriculture. - Collectivization of private property, farms, and husbandry spread to even the most remote regions of Albania.

For Mao, as for his satellite Hoxha, the Cultural and Ideological Revolution became a deadly weapon to regain total control and exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat all over the country.

Hoxha’s Cultural-Ideological Revolution instituted a reign of terror over dissident intellectuals, educators, writers, artists, and the Catholic Church — especially Catholic leaders and clergy. This Chinese-style reign of terror and persecution reached its peak in 1967 when Albanian authorities conducted an unprecedented campaign to eradicate religion from the country, claiming that the “reactionary religion” had been cause for division among Albanians and had kept the country “backward”.
- Churches, mosques, monasteries, seminaries, and religious-run schools were closed and then either destroyed or repurposed into warehouses, theaters, and gymnasiums.
- The campaign culminated in Albania becoming the world’s first atheistic state in 1967, applauded as Hoxha’s greatest achievement.

Albania was one of the Communist countries behind the Iron Curtain where the Holy See’s Ostpolitik principles for achieving partial and fast solutions were not applied. This actually served well for the preservation of the faith of the Catholic Church and the credibility of Catholic clergy among the people of Albania.

Although Catholicism is a minority religion in Albania, the severe persecution endured during Communism elevated the status of the Catholic Church among Muslims, Eastern Orthodox, and even atheists. The Communist persecution in Albania was so radical that even Sunni Islam, Bektashi, and Eastern Orthodox religious leaders who made “deals” with the government and were nationalized did not escape persecution, even though — to take up language used now to describe the current situation in China — their “cages were bigger.”

Instead, the Catholic Church in Albania became the twentieth-century Church of the catacombs: the cage got increasingly smaller, but the faithful became more faithful and the faith grew stronger. Endurance and perseverance won in the end. The Church was alive after five decades of persecution. As Tertullian wrote in the late second century: the blood of martyrs became the seed of Christians.

Before Hoxha’s regime reached its goal in 1967 — the extermination of religion, especially Catholicism, and making Albania the first atheistic country in the world — the Communist government’s focus from 1944 to 1948 was to create a National Albanian Catholic Church. It would have no connections to the Holy See or the Pope; bishops and priests would be ordained under government auspices. This, of course, sounds quite similar to the current situation in the People’s Republic of China and the negotiations with the Vatican.

How was the nationalizing platform applied in Albania? In May 1945 the Apostolic Delegate to Albania, Archbishop Leone G.B. Nigris, was expelled from the country. Then the regime summoned the Metropolitan Archbishop of Shkodra, Northern Albania, Primate of the Church Gasper Thaci, and the Archbishop of Durres Vincent Prendushi, demanding they sever any relations with Rome, establish a new Albanian National Church, and give the Catholic Church’s allegiance to the Communist regime. In exchange for the deal, Hoxha promised his government’s “conciliatory attitude” and dialoguing with the Church. Thaci and Prendushi refused to cooperate and never entertained the idea of separating from Rome — and they paid with their lives for their disobedience.

As the Iron Curtain was descending over the continent (as Winston Churchill declared on March 5, 1946), further restrictions were enforced upon the Church: under the motto “Religion is Reactionary,” - the Albanian Political Bureau decided not to allow the religious to leave the country for theological training.
- Seminary education was to be taught by national, government-approved clergy and the theological curricula were required to have the government’s seal of approval.
- Courses and theological-academic curricula in religious run schools, including the Albanian Pontifical Seminary, were required to follow “the party’s line.” But there was more infiltration:
- The government and the party officials would choose “the right” candidates for seminary training and religious vocations. Obviously, those individuals who had shown loyalty to the Communist regime were chosen to pursue seminary training, so the government planted spies among the clergy to undermine it from within.

When the first wave of Catholic clergy persecutions and executions had its effects, Enver Hoxha summoned Bishop Fran Gjini in Tirana and ordered him, as he had done in the past with Thaci and Prendushi, to sever ties to Rome and lead the Catholic population in professing allegiance to the government. Gjini became the substitute Apostolic Delegate. Hoxha threatened Gjini with persecution unless he led his flock to the government’s side.

Fearing great pressure, Gjini tried to bring some reconciliation and started a dialogue with the government. He wrote an open letter to Enver Hoxha offering the Church’s cooperation in “reconstructing the nation.” However, Hoxha ignored Gjini’s letter and arrested him on the charge of spreading anti-Communist propaganda and agitation. Gjini was executed in 1948 with eighteen other clergy and lay people.

Negotiations for a National Albanian Church resumed in 1949. This time the government strongly demanded a complete separation of the Albanian Catholic Church from the Holy See. In order to force an agreement, more clergy arrests were made.

After lengthy and difficult discussions, a compromise was reached: the government gave the Church freedom to keep sovereignty in spiritual matters and to keep its links with the Holy See.

But deception was on the way. The official Communist organ Zeri I Popullit (The Voice of the People) falsified the agreement between Church and state and announced that the Catholic Church of Albania had severed all ties to the Holy See. The Catholic clergy felt deceived and betrayed by the government. They confronted the government emphasizing their loyalty and allegiance to the Holy Father and the Vatican. Meanwhile, the government used nationalism to keep discontent among people in check as it prepared the final blow against the Catholic Church.

The Holy See today knows what happened in Albania and how the Church became the Church of the catacombs and martyrs for almost five decades. The Albanian prelates never agreed to nationalize, or albanize, the Catholic Church; they refused to make deals or give any concessions to the Communist government. They stood up and paid with their lives for their loyalty to Christ and to the Holy Father. They did not apostatize. Their last words were “Long live Christ the King! Long Live Albania.”

Albania is one more lesson from history to consider before the disturbing deal is finalized between the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China.

Cardinal Agostino Casaroli’s Ostpolitik during the pontificate of Pope Paul VI (1963-1978) did not quite make it to Albania. Casaroli’s modus non moriendi (way of not dying) became ars morendi (art of dying) for the clergy and the faithful who resisted and died for their faith in Albania. Their toils and innumerable sufferings in the concentration or re-education Communist camps were kept fresh in the minds and hearts of the believers and non-believers alike. The places of their deaths became Albania’s new shrines. The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, was with the people, suffering and martyred with them.

The Albanian Catholic Church never lost its credibility or let the faithful down by making deals with the government. It understood that the Communist government would betray it. If the Church would have nationalized, or albanized, it would not have been the universal Catholic Church anymore, but subservient to the Communist government and a department of the government. In the end, the smaller Albanian cage proved to be a far better cage.

More importantly, the Church evangelized by martyrdom, and produced “secret” martyrs. “How many today are Christ’s secret martyrs, bearing witness to the Lord Jesus!” commented Saint Ambrose, echoing Psalm 118.

No deal with an atheistic Communism regime is ever a good deal.
- St. John Paul II, who knew Communism “in his bones”, would have never made any deal with the Communist persecutor. He was not afraid to stand up and to discontinue the Vatican’s Ostpolitik, inspiring his bishops to stand up to the Communists as the Albanian bishops did.
- The same with Benedict XVI, who specifically warned that “compliance with those authorities is not acceptable when they interfere unduly in matters regarding the faith and discipline of the Church” in his 2007 Letter to the to the Bishops, Priests, Consecrated Persons and Lay Faithful of the Catholic Church in the People’s Republic of China.

So, what has China to do with Albania? The persecution of the Catholic Church in Albania by the Communist government provides a significant case for the Holy See to ponder.

Dialogue and pastoral-soft, ambiguous approaches do not work in Communist countries such as the People’s Republic of China, where the dictatorship of the proletariat is at work. In these countries, it is likely that the smaller cage is the better cage.


And how, one asks, can the Bergoglio Vatican keep silent, as it has been, in the face of the recent desecrations perpetrated by the Chinese regime on Catholic churches in China? Fr. Cervellera, editor of AsiaNews, an agency of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, took it upon himself to express the outrage that Magister's 'pope in waiting' Cardinal Parolin ought to be saying as the Vatican Secretary of State. But he won't, of course, because he appears to be the chief architect of Bergoglio's 'kowtow to China' policy... Sandro Magister entitled his reprint of this article "The Vatican bows, and here's how China says thanks".

Crosses, domes, statues destroyed:
The new Sinicizing Cultural Revolution
by Fr. Bernardo Cervellera
Editor

March 2, 2018

"It's a new Cultural Revolution": this was the most frequent online comment in reaction to photos of the church of Yining (Xinjiang)
stripped of the crosses that stood on the building, of the statues that stood on its tympanum and the decorations and paintings that
embellished the facade.



The photo above, left, shows the color, the momentum, the lightness of the domes and wall decorations, the crosses on the top
of the building, before their destruction. The photo on the right shows the "after".

Everything was destroyed by order of the government on February 27 and 28, just a few weeks after the meeting
between the Chinese and Vatican delegations, which reportedly resulted in the drafting of a "historic" agreement
on the nominations of bishops in the Chinese Catholic Church.

Yining, 700 km west of the capital of Xinjiang, Urumqi, has a Catholic community of a few hundred faithful.

The reference to the Cultural Revolution is inevitable: In the period from 1966 to 1976 the Red Guards mobilized by MaoZedong and the Gang of Four [which included his wife Jiang Qing - after Mao died in 1976, his successors imprisoned the Gang of Four, and in 1991, the fourth Madame Mao committed suicide in prison] implemented the most extreme form of communism by destroying churches, temples, pagodas, prayer books, statues, paintings to annihilate all religion.

But the Cultural Revolution today comes under the rubric of 'sinicisation', defined by [China's newly empowered Supremo for life,] President Xi Jinping, three years ago and reaffirmed at the Party Congress last October as "adhering to and developing religious theories with Chinese characteristics", adhering to the principle of "independence", adapting religion to socialist society, and resisting "religious infiltration from abroad".

The Cross is one such 'religious infiltration from abroad'. In the church of Yining, not only were the two crosses topping the domes taken down, but all the crosses inside the church were taken out, including the images illustrating the Stations of the Cross, and the crosses that decorated the pews.

The iconoclastic fury has also affected other cities. Even before last Christmas, all the crosses from the church of Manas were destroyed, and there are rumors that the same happened in the church of Hutubi.

The comparison with the Cultural Revolution does not stop there. Just like then, it is forbidden for believers to pray even in private, in their homes. The police threaten that if they find two people praying together in their home, they will be arrested and forced to undergo re-education.

Under the new regulations on religious activities, proposed last September and implemented last February 1st,
- worship can only be carried out in church, at the times set by the government. Any other place is considered an "illegal place" and those who break such regulations will be subject to prison, fines, expropriation of the building that houses illegal religious activity.
- Even private homes are now considered an "illegal place of worship": in every private house religious conversation or prayer is forbidden, under threat of arrest. The faithful can pray only in church, during Sunday service.
- All churches must display a sign at their entrance announcing that the building is "forbidden to minors under the age of 18" must be exposed because children and young people are prohibited from participating in religious rites.

It should be noted that the churches referred to here are officially registered churches. The point is that "sinicization" implies submission to the Chinese Communist Party, which must act as an "active guide" of religions, on which their life or death, every construction and every destruction, depends.

The ruthless and suffocating control of the Party on religions can only be explained by fear. It is now everyone's experience in China - confirmed by various sociologists - that the country is in the midst of an impressive religious renaissance, to the point that over 80% of the population has some spiritual beliefs and that at least one fifth of the Party members secretly adhere to some form of religion.

All this promises more control and persecution in the future. "I am very sad," a faithful of Urumqi confides to AsiaNews, "that the Vatican is compromising with this government. In this way it becomes an accomplice of those who want our annihilation".


In the following article, Steven Mosher, an American social scientist, pro-life activist and author who specializes in demography and in Chinese population control, speaks about the present China-Vatican 'collusion' to crush the underground Church in China, from his personal knowledge and first-hand exposure to the situation in China. He is the president of the Population Research Institute, an advocate for human rights in China, and has been instrumental in exposing abuses in China's one-child policy as well as other human rights abuses in population control programs around the world.

Parolin and the China negotiations:
He is so eager to get an agreement that he has
made it clear he would accede to any demand
by Steven W. Mosher

February 22, 2018

Not long after I became Catholic in the early 1990s, I traveled to China to learn more about the fate of my fellow believers under communism. They were divided into two opposing camps, or so I believed at the time, with some belonging to the state-controlled church – the so-called Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association – while others belonged to the Catholic Church in communion with Rome.

Truth be told, I did not think much of those who attended the “Patriotic churches.” I believed that these were small-“c” catholics who had compromised with, or entirely capitulated to, the party’s demands to sever ties with the Universal Church and its head, the bishop of Rome.

My sympathy was reserved for the Catholics of the Underground Church. These were bishops, priests, and lay Catholics who had courageously refused the party’s demands to break with Rome in 1958. Instead, they had gone into the catacombs, risking arrest, imprisonment, torture, and sometimes even death to remain faithful. Led over the decades by brave bishops secretly ordained by the pope, these Catholics had endured decades of persecution while remaining loyal to the one true faith.

In short, I believed that the members of the Underground Church were heroic, while the pewsitters in the Patriotic Church were more or less craven.

Then I paid a call to the Vatican’s unofficial emissary to China, whom we will call Monsignor Nonini. The monsignor’s status was, of course, anomalous, given the lack of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and China. He was accredited to the Republic of China in Taiwan and had his offices in British-governed Hong Kong, but nearly all of his day-to-day work involved dealing with the Church in China.

Monsignor Nonini was in close contact with the bishops of both the Underground and the Patriotic churches and had a surprising – and much more encouraging – story to tell about their relationship with each other, and with Rome.

“The deep divisions of the past are well on their way to being healed,” he told me. “After the end of the Cultural Revolution there was a general amnesty declared, and the Underground bishops and priests who had been imprisoned for decades for refusing to join the Patriotic church were released from jail and have been evangelizing throughout China.”

As far as the Patriotic church was concerned, Nonini surprised me by stating that one hundred percent of the laity, and nearly all its priests and bishops, had remained loyal to the Magisterium. “Nearly all the illicitly ordained bishops have asked the Holy Father to be recognized as legitimate,” he told me. “And nearly all, after we examine their character and behavior, have been so recognized. The only exceptions are the Patriotic bishops of Beijing, Shanghai, and a couple of other major cities. They have made too many compromises.”

He summed up by saying, “The Church is more unified now than at any time since the Communist Revolution. Churches are being rebuilt, and seminaries are being reopened. Although it may appear from the outside that there are still two churches in China, inside of China, there is only one.”

I was overjoyed to learn that the Underground Church was increasingly able to come out of the catacombs and was, in many parts of China, openly preaching the Gospel and making converts. Even more surprising to me was that the Patriotic church, which had begun as a communist front organization intended to co-opt and gradually extinguish Catholicism throughout China, had been transformed from within by faithful Catholics who saw themselves as part of the Universal Church.

The newfound unity of Catholics in China that Msgr. Nonini described to me had nothing to do with either political pressure from the party or political overtures to Beijing by Vatican diplomats. It had come about from the bottom up, not from the top down.

It was not a perfect solution – some of the deep wounds of decades of politically fomented division remained – but it was a workable one. It had, after all, been worked out at the parish and diocesan levels by the real stakeholders – Chinese Catholics themselves – with the quiet encouragement and support of the then-holy father, Pope John Paul II.

The officially atheistic Communist Party and its agents remained a brooding, hostile presence over both church communities but by common agreement, it was kept out of the local arrangements that allowed Catholics from both to coexist, even cooperate. Underground bishops, with the permission of the Vatican, named their own successors. The Patriotic Association named its own bishops, but these then almost always sought, and almost always got, consecration by the pope.

This was the more or less happy situation that obtained in the long-suffering Chinese Church at the dawn of the 21st century.

Then the Vatican Secretariat of State, which has representatives in all but a handful of countries around the world, decided to enter into formal talks with the PRC. Pietro Cardinal Parolin, who had earlier been involved with the establishment of diplomatic relations with Mexico and ongoing negotiations with Vietnam, was put in charge of the effort. He established direct contact with Beijing in 2005 with the goal of signing a written agreement with the atheistic regime over the appointment of bishops.

This was a major blunder on several counts.

First, it drew the attention of the Chinese Party-State to the activities of the Catholic Church in China. Whereas Mexico has been predominantly Catholic for centuries, and Vietnam has one of the largest Catholic populations in Asia, Catholics in China were a small minority, scattered in communities throughout the length and breadth of China. As such, they were able to evangelize, build churches, and even open seminaries, all while attracting relatively little hostile attention from the central government. “The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away,” as the Chinese say.

Once Beijing entered into formal negotiations with the Vatican, however, the Party-State began to pay a lot more attention to the activities of the domestic followers of this “hostile foreign power.” In other words, the mere fact of negotiations put a target on the backs of Chinese Catholics. The “space” in which it had operated began to shrink under the unblinking eye of state surveillance.

Vatican diplomats seem not to have realized that they were dealing with a one-party dictatorship that was far more brutal, and far less tolerant of any expressions of religious faith, than Mexico in the 1990s or Vietnam in the 2000s. For in the view of the CCP, all belief in transcendental religions, especially those with foreign connections like Catholicism, is suspect, even treasonous.

The problem goes even deeper than this. As I write in Bully of Asia, since the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, the Chinese Communist Party has been promoting an extremely toxic form of national narcissism. The Chinese people are constantly being told that they, their culture, and their country are naturally superior to any other people, culture, or country that has ever existed. To be numbered among the descendants of the dragon, party propaganda insists, is to be part of the greatest phenomenon in human history. It means that you are part of the “Kingdom at the Center of the Earth” and that you deserve dominion over the lesser folk from the fringes.

The state religion of China, in other words, is China itself. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is its catechism, the members of the party are its priesthood, and “core leader” Xi Jinping serves as its high priest. The whole of China serves as its temple, within whose sacred precincts its people are encouraged to worship their own collective greatness – and “core leader” Xi, of course.

This is why Cardinal Parolin’s insistence to Chinese leaders that “the Church in China does not want replace the state” fails to allay their suspicions. It draws upon a Western Church-state distinction that simply did not exist in Chinese history and that the Chinese Communist Party, in the present moment, is doing its level best to extinguish once again.

Indeed, this and other ill-informed statements may actually heighten the suspicions of China’s senior leaders, given that they believe, along with China’s ancient strategist, Sun Tzu, that “all warfare is deception.”

But even if they accept Cardinal Parolin’s claim that in China (unlike, say, in Poland) the Church does not want to replace the state as state, there is still the problem that it wants to replace the state as church. In China, remember, the state aspires to be the church, and all Chinese are expected to be loyal members.

But perhaps the biggest blunder made by Vatican diplomats in their on-again, off-again negotiations with China has been insisting, after the fashion in Western diplomatic circles, on the need for a formal written agreement. An informal understanding would have been far more appropriate in the Chinese cultural context.

Consider the position of a communist functionary in the Bureau of Religious Affairs who is, shall we say, not unsympathetic to the Catholic Church. Such a functionary might well find it possible to keep to the terms of an informal understanding about the creation of bishops, even if the terms of that understanding were not entirely pleasing to his superiors.

There is a precedent for such a situation. There was, for a while, an informal arrangement between the Bureau of Religious Affairs and the Vatican to the effect that the former would nominate, and the latter would approve, new bishops for the Patriotic church.

That arrangement, not surprisingly, went aground not long after formal negotiations began in 2015. Why? Primarily because the Vatican asked for it to be put in writing. As a result of this blunder, at least eight bishops have been illegally “ordained” by the Chinese Communist Party in the years since.

It is not hard to see why asking a communist functionary to draw up a formal written agreement would end any hope of real compromise. What functionary would dare draw up, much less urge his superiors to sign, an agreement giving the Vatican – which is to say a foreign power – any real control over the appointment of Chinese bishops in a Chinese-run church? Party leaders would be apoplectic at the mere suggestion that China’s sovereignty be violated in this way. Any functionary who suggested otherwise would, at a minimum, be removed.

As if the above missteps by Vatican diplomats were not enough, China itself, under Xi Jinping’s dictatorial rule, is becoming more and more hostile to religious belief and expression. At last October’s Party Congress, Xi demanded tighter controls over religious activity, insisting that the party “exercise overall leadership over all areas of endeavor in every part of the country.”

As a result, new regulations banning unauthorized religious activity were issued on February 1. According to a priest of the Underground Church, the new rules state that “all religious sites must be registered, no religious activities can be held beyond registered venues, non-registered clergymen are forbidden to host religious liturgies, and that minors and party members are forbidden from entering churches. … The living space for the Church is getting less and less.”

Has anyone in the Vatican read these new regulations, which make it clear that China is quickly reverting to Maoist type? Has it occurred to anyone there that now may be a particularly inauspicious time to force the Underground Church into the embrace of the Chinese Communist Party? [I suppose that a Vatican so shamelessly kowtowing to the Chinese simply chooses to 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' about the Chinese.]

Despite Beijing’s increasing intransigence, Cardinal Parolin has continued to pursue a written agreement. His unseemly eagerness has made it clear to everyone, not least to his counterparts in Beijing, that he would accede to almost any demand. Not surprisingly, Beijing has gone for the jugular: the complete extinction of the Underground Church, starting with its bishops.

In order to reach an agreement, China informed the Vatican’s Secretary of State, two things must happen:
- First, the Holy Father must, without exception, consecrate all the Patriotic bishops that he and Pope Benedict, for very good reasons, had previously rejected.
- Second, he must eliminate the Underground Church, starting with its bishops. Elderly Underground bishops must be forcibly retired and replaced with Patriotic bishops of Beijing’s choosing, while younger Underground bishops must be reassigned to subordinate roles in the Patriotic church.

On the mere promise of a future agreement, the Vatican has bowed to these demands. This is why we have recently been treated to the heartbreaking spectacle of 88-year-old Underground bishop Peter Zhuang being forced, by Cardinal Parolin’s emissaries, to hand over his Shantou diocese to excommunicated Patriotic bishop Huang Bingzhang. This is also why a younger Patriotic bishop, Joseph Guo of Fujian province, has been demoted to be an assistant to an illegitimate Patriotic bishop.

This process will obviously continue until the last of the 30-odd Underground bishops have been sidelined and silenced, one way or another.

It is the prospect of this “sell-out” of the Underground Church that sent Hong Kong’s Cardinal Joseph Zen to Rome, to plead the cause of his Chinese co-believers to the holy father himself.

Pope Francis reportedly told Cardinal Zen that “we don’t want another Mindszenty.” But these wrongheaded, politically naïve negotiations have already created, in Bishop Zhuang, “another Mindszenty.”

And now we have the prospect of several dozen more to follow.

Lord of the nasties.

Pope Francis has launched a new 'Renaissance' -
in the Borgia sense of the word
[Or, tell me who your friends are
and I'll tell you who you are]
By JOHN ZMIRAK

March 7, 2018

Management gurus tell us, “Personnel is policy.” Southern mothers say it differently. “You can tell everything about someone from his friends.” Historians will look at the men Pope Francis promoted. They will draw interesting conclusions.

Meet one of the pope’s closest aides. Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga. He faces appalling charges of financial corruption. They keep getting worse. Maradiaga’s handpicked deputy stands accused of sex abuse. [But no one in the MSM, Catholic and secular, has shown any more interest in the story after the initial reports based on L'Espresso's expose, and Maradiaga's own partial defense against L'Espresso's bill of charges! It's as if the entire episode has been willed out of existence - by the media as well as by the Vatican. Yet there is more concrete stuff in this one story than in all of the Vatileaks-1 allegations that the media blew up into 'the worst scandal ever to hit the Vatican'. None of the Vatileaks-1 'revelations' were investigated by any Vaticanista because there was really 'no there there' - but what about the allegations about Maradiaga and his deputy, which were unearthed by the pope's own personal 'investigator' - and to what avail??? A blatant display of the media's shameless double standard which turns a blind eye to the atrocious goings-on in the Bergoglio Vatican while falsely exaggerating every 'scandalous' bit that could be turned up against Benedict XVI's Vatican.]

Maradiaga seems to have more in common with Marxist politicians than we thought. In socialist systems from Venezuela to Soviet Russia, the oligarchs might sound like ascetics. But in fact they live like tsars. The only lubricant that can make a system as inhuman and pseudo-rational as socialism function at all is corruption.

We will deep-dive into the latest scoop about the “Red cardinal.” But first let’s review some other men Francis has boosted.

Pope Francis’s 'Renaissance' cardinals and advisors

Cardinal Godfried Danneels of Belgium. Pope John Paul II criticized him publicly. The reason? For allowing the complete collapse of faith in his country. Danneels waived on the legalization of abortion. And same-sex marriage. He retired in disgrace. Danneels had bullied into silence a young man abused by a bishop. (The bullying turned up on audiotape.) The coverup led Belgian police to pry open a dead bishop’s coffin. Why? To see if Daneels had hidden documents there. Yet Pope Francis plucked Danneels out of the obscurity that would have been lot after his retirement. He asked him to address the 2014 Synod on the Family. (Fair’s fair. Danneels had pushed Francis for pope in 2005.)

Bishop Marcelo Sorondo Sanchez. In 2015 he vaunted Pope Francis’s statements on climate change as being of equal weight to the Church’s 2000-year stance on abortion. He recently praised church-smashing Red China as the best implementor ever of “Catholic social teaching”. Sorondo serves Pope Francis as the highest church spokesman on both natural and social sciences [being chancellor of both the Pontifical Academy for Sciences and the Pontifical Aademoy of Social Sciences.

Fr. Antonio Spadaro. He edits the quasi-official Vatican magazine La Civilta Cattolica. In 2016, he denounced Catholic pro-lifers and their Protestant allies. How? As advocates of “theocracy.” He also smeared the Christian Right. He claimed it opposes civil rights for minorities.

Archbishop Víctor Manuel “Tucho” Fernández. He’s widely cited as the “ghostwriter” for Franciss’ Amoris Laetitiae. (A part of the baffling document apparently reverses 2,000 years of Catholic practice on divorce.) Fernández also wrote Heal Me With Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing. As Andrew Guernsey wrote, “This book, filled with erotic poetry and images, and written by a priest, now an archbishop, who took a vow of celibacy, provides disconcerting insights into the bizarre mind of one of the world’s most powerful theologians.”

Father James Martin, SJ, a gadfly media courtesan. He is working to obscure the Bible's 6,000 year-old teaching on homosexual activity. Martin praised same-sex couples kissing during Mass. Martin encouraged priests to get ready for same-sex marriage prep. He called for bishops to condemn doctrinally faithful Catholic laymen for what they write online. Martin also twisted the teaching of his own order’s founder, Ignatius of Loyola. The goal? To claim that Jesus “wants” priests to apostasize in the face of persecution. Pope Francis made Martin a special adviser on communications to the Vatican.

[Zmirak has omitted characters like Mons. Paglia at the Academy of Life, Cardinal Baldisseri and Mons. Bruno Forte of the infamous family synods, and Mons. Galantino (Bergoglio's hatchet man at the Italian bishops' conference).]

The Court of the Red Cardinal
Now to the Red Cardinal. Many have called Maradiaga the “vice-pope.” He was widely seen as a new broom. He would clean out decades-old financial corruption at places like the Vatican bank. Certainly, his frequently Leninist rhetoric fits someone driving out the money-changers. In a vaunting address at the University of Dallas, Maradiaga quoted Fidel Castro fanboy Jean Ziegler.

Maradiaga denounced the “world dictatorship of finance capital. … The lords of financial capital wield over billions of human beings a power of life and death. Through their investment strategies, their stock market speculations, their alliances, they decide day to day who has the right to live on this planet and who is doomed to die.”

Speaking for himself, Maradiaga dismissed systems like America’s. He damned “neoliberal dictatorships that rule democracies.” He warned, “To change the system, it would be necessary to destroy the power of the new feudal lords.”

But Maradiaga seems to have more in common with Marxist politicians than we thought. In socialist systems from Venezuela to Soviet Russia, the oligarchs might sound like ascetics. But in fact they live like Tsars. The only lubricant that can make a system as inhuman and pseudo-rational as socialism function at all is corruption. As socialists seek absolute power, they get corrupted absolutely. Or maybe a certain kind of envy-ridden, ruthless person craves socialism in the first place. So his palm is primed for grease.

The healing balm of hidden cash has been flowing. The centrist outlet Catholic News Agency cited Italian magazine L’Espresso. Apparently:

---

Maradiaga may have been involved in mismanaging Church funds, and may also have accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Catholic University of Tegucigalpa.

The article said that Maradiaga is being accused of investing more than $1.2 million in some London financial companies, including Leman Wealth Management. Some of that money has now vanished, it said.

Casaretto’s report was based on accounts from more than 50 witnesses, including diocesan staff members and priests, L’Espresso said.

---

That magazine kept digging. It turned up Martha Alegria Reichmann. She and her husband were longtime friends of the cardinal. She accuses him of fleecing her and her family of their savings. As Google translates the Italian text of that piece, Reichmann said of Maradiaga:

---

“In 2012, he pushed me and my husband to invest a lot of money into a London investment fund. Managed by a Muslim friend, Youssry Henien, who then disappeared into nothing with our money...

“We realized we were cheated. We did investigations, and found that this financier was already finished in the past in similar situations. I tried to contact Maradiaga, but was denied for months and months. I went to the Tegucigalpa cathedral when he celebrated Mass, and I managed to exchange a few words. He told me that he was an injured party like us, that he too had lost money from the diocese, but he asked me for discretion.”

---

Then there’s Juan José Pineda Fasquelle. Maradiaga handpicked him to manage his home archdiocese in Honduras. He’s also now accused of molesting his own seminarians. The eminently mainstream National Catholic Register reports:

---

According to the first former seminarian’s testimony to Bishop Casaretto, Bishop Pineda “attempted to have sexual relations … without my authorization, during the period I was in service with him. In the night he came close to me and touched my intimate parts and chest. I tried to stop him. …”

The second former archdiocesan seminarian testified that he witnessed firsthand an improper relationship between Bishop Pineda and a third seminarian, during a period when all three men were undertaking pastoral work together...

Subsequently, according to the second former seminarian’s testimony, Bishop Pineda undertook a series of punitive actions against him that defamed his reputation and culminated with his expulsion from the archdiocesan seminary.

---

These alleged events occurred under Maradiaga’s nose. However, the Cardinal has denied that a sexual abuse scandal even exists in the church. As Alan Dershowitz pointed out, in 2002 Maradiaga dismissed the epidemic of sex-abuse cover-ups. How? As the invention of Jews in the media. They allegedly targeted the church because of its advocacy for the Palestinians.

Pope Francis seems to have launched a new 'Renaissance' in the Vatican. It has all the corruption, hubris, sodomy and worldliness of the original. But none of the art.

'No big deal'? It is a monstrously 'big deal' when the pope himself aids, abets and promotes anything that effectively negates Christ's own teaching, and doing so
with calculated ambiguity does not make it any less wrong, if not blasphemous! And you cannot wish away the two years of falsehood and deception sown by AL
by simply claiming now, after all the huffing and puffing from Casa Santa Marta, that it's no big deal!

Read the rest of Allen's article here:
https://cruxnow.com/news-analysis/2018/03/07/saying-no-big-deal-amoris-may-not-hearts/

Now that the book is officially out, expect more reviews of it. [Or maybe not! There are obviously circles where to even think critically of this pope is looked on somewhat as on the magnitude of an excommunicable
sin! Marco Tosatti says enough here to tempt readers who may want to keep on hand a convenient compendium of all the anti-Catholic Bergogliades that one might otherwise lose track of, since there's a new one
almost every day. And at the rate Bergoglio is going, Lawler might well look forward to writing The Lost Shepherd, Volume 2, and so on...

On Phil Lawler's 'The lost shepherd:
How Pope Francis is misleading his flock'
A book review
Translated from

March 9, 2018

---

“Every day I pray for Pope Francis. And every day (I exaggerate, but only slightly), the pope makes another statement from which one understands that he does not approve of Catholics like me. If the Holy Father would reprove me for my sins, I would have nothing to complain about. But in his homilies at his morning Mass in Casa Santa Marta, the pope reproves me – and thousand upon thousands of other Catholic faithful – for being too attached to, and sometimes, suffering for, the truths that the Church has always taught”.

---

How many of those who are reading me now could well subscribe to these words? Very many, I believe. But it is not I who wrote them. Rather, it is the start of an excellent book, “The lost shepherd: How Pope Francis is misleading his flock”, by Phil Lawler, an American Catholic of great worth. In 1996, he founded the online Catholic news site, Catholic World News, which was the first of its kind, and its related website, Catholic Culture.org. He had been the first lay editor of Boston’s diocesan newspaper, The Pilot, has written five books, and is a contributor to the Wall street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. In short, he is anything but a ‘fringe Catholic’ or a ‘traditionalist’ [in the pejorative sense this term is often used these days].

Now he has written a book to express what many have perceived: a growing unease about the words, behavior, actions and decisions by the man at the very summit of the Church.

---

I had been one of the millions caught by the ‘Francis effect’, enthusiastic about his vision… But as time passed, the tone and even the content of the pope’s public declarations first perplexed me no end, and then created unease.

For months, in my work of reporting on the daily news from The Vatican, I did my best to provide reassurances – for my readers and even for my own self – that notwithstanding his alarming comments, Francis was not a radical who was leading the Church far from the ancient sources of her faith. But gradually, with reluctance, and sadly, I came to the conclusion that, in fact, that is who he is.”

---

Why would I write here about a book when I do not know that it would ever be translated to Italian, and therefore could interest only a limited number among the readers of Stilum Curiae? Because in reading it – and I thank the author for having let me do so, though I do not know him personally – I recognized myself in much of what he writes vis a vis the pope: About the course he has taken and the growing disillusion that has accompanied me in the past five years.

It is a disillusion that is primarily human: not so much about the pope’s politics and policies, even if much of this certainly are and continue to be highly questionable, but as to the human qualities of the person himself as has been revealed to us gradually by his gestures, his craftiness, his decisions, his choice of men around him, and his ‘silences’.

Thus, like so many other Catholics, and myself, Philip Lawler has had to admit to himself and then to others that

---

“the Roman Pontiff should be the focus of unity in the Church. Francis, unfortunately, has become the source of division. There are two reasons for this unhappy development: the pope’s autocratic style of governance, and the radical nature of the program that he has been pursuing relentlessly.

His autocratic style, which contrasts sharply with his promises of a synodal and collegial government, was never more evident than in January 2017 when he simply ignored and overrode the sovereign status of the Knights of Malta. As Sohrab Ahmari noted in the New York Times, the pope, on this point as on so many others, is on one side, whereas conservative Catholics are on the other. But a pope should not be on the side of any internal disagreement within the Church.”

---

Lawler writes – prophetically, if one thinks of the coming conference in Rome on April 7 on this very issue – that

---

“A correct understanding of the limits of papal authority would help to resolve the current crisis. The Bishop of Rome is not a solo potentate but the leader of the college of bishops”, as Lumen gentium made very clear."

---

[Obviously, Bergoglio thinks instead that the powers of the Bishop of Rome are any and all powers he as pope chooses to exercise, blithely ignoring what Vatican-I - which had decreed papal infallibility in matters of faith and morals – made very clear about the limits to such powers, as Fr Hunwicke never tires of pointing out every so often!]

Frnacis has not taught heresies, Lawler thinks, but

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“the confusion he has provoked has destabilized the entire Church. The faithful have been led to question themselves as to what they believe in, what constitutes their faith. They look to Rome seeking a guide and leader, and instead, all they find is more questions, more confusion”.

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I stop here. But I advice those who can and wish to do so, to read The Lost Shepherd. May God help us – and him – to find ourselves together, united this time.

The problem with starting out a public career in the global spotlight by exceeding all measures of popularity hitherto attributed to a pope, is that there is no other way to go but down. And when Bergoglio loses the trust of respectable and reputable Catholics like Aldo Maria Valli and Phil Lawler, or Fr. De Souza or Raymond Arroyo, for instance, who started out as great enthusiasts for Bergoglio, he's not likely to get it back soon, if at all, because he seems irretractably set on his anti-Catholic apostate course.

In contrast, when Benedict XVI became pope, he started out with an almost uniformly hostile press who had portrayed him most unkindly for more than two decades as God's rottweiler, the Panzerkardina,l and similar epithets dissing the fact that he firmly and unflinchingly fulfilled his role as defender of the faith and keeper of orthodoxy no matter how unpopular that made him in the eyes of the secular media and of the public opinion that they shaped.

But many of them warmed up to him somehow after, to their surprise, it became evident he was attracting more people to his audiences and Angelus prayers than even the great John Paul II in his peak years. Indeed, most of them reported on his Pontificate evenhandedly for the most part - that is,for as long as there was no whiff of 'scandal' they could exploit against him that would spark a flare-up of their historic animus - Regensburg, the Wielgus affair, Mons. Williamson, the 2010 campaign by the world's most powerful media to link him personally to a sex abuse episode or a cover-up for one, and finally, the media bonanza from the overblown and mostly bogus Vatileaks that they successfully parlayed into a war of attrition that played into his most unexpected decision to give up the Papacy. Which occasioned a gleeful Schadenfreude among all those who were biased against Benedict XVI to begin with, who now turned to open mockery of the stated reason for his stepping down and/or accusations of deserting his office.

One can count on the fingers of one hand the sum total of the episodes that the media exploited to 'justify' the image they had built of Joseph Ratzinger as cold, distant, unappealing and uncharismatic. Compare that to the never-ending barrage of infelicitous and unfortunate Bergogliades we have been subjected to in the past five years, and which get reported by all the media, friend and foe alike, because they really constitute news, though the spin is different depending on whether the reporting source is pro-Bergoglio or contra-Bergoglio.


Aldo Maria Valli calls his readers' attention to a Spanish priest who has been outspoken and calmly judicious about the state of 'the Church' (or what passes for 'the Church') in this pontificate..


Warnings from a Spanish priest
Translated from

March 3, 2018

Santiago Martin is a Spanish priest, born in Madrid in 1954, who founded in 1988 the movement Franciscans of Mary, which received pontifical approval from Benedict XVI in 2007. The movement, which has its own seminary, is now present in some 30 nations an has about 10,000 members.

Always very clear in his analysis of the actual state of the Church, Fr, Martin has not been afraid to speak in these past few years of the confusion and excessive polarization that prevail in the Church, and of the danger of schism.

Through the outlet Magnificat.tv, Fr. Martin noted recently that the issue of priestly ‘pedophilia’ in Chile, which has placed the pope in a difficult position, may have marked a turning point, when for the first time, the progressivist and liberal mass media were not on the side of the pope.

In this difficult context, already marked by profound divisions within the Church, Fr. Martin points out that this pope continues to pile up more issues that would ultimately widen the rifts and increase the prevailing confusion overall.

Fr. Martin cites recent statements of Cardinal Beniamino Stella, prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, who said that the coming synod on the Amazon region of Brazil could be the occasion for opening up the priesthood to viri probati, which in turn would open the door to ending mandatory celibacy for priests.

Martin says the Bergoglio Vatican has thereby opened a new battlefront to add to that already burning and controversial one related to Amoris laetitia and the access to the Eucharist that it would give remarried divorcees who have no intention of changing their adulterous life.

We are facing, says Martin, an acceleration of events that will do no good to the Church. In the present situation, ‘to press on the accelerator’ is dangerous because already “there is too much confusion, too many tensions”, and why open up new fronts of contention?

In another commentary, this time published in the Honduran newspaper La Prensa, Fr. Martin called attention to the activities of the Pontifical Academy for Life, saying it is not normal for its representatives to be openly declaring their support of artificial contraception. Nor is it normal that a group of Catholics who converted from Islam would write the pope, as they have done, to denounce that they feel they have been abandoned by the Church.

The situation is most concerning, Fr. Martin says, because on the one hand, there is a modernist current that seems to be at work in the Bergoglio Vatican on the basis of what has occurred so far in the past five years, and on the other, the Catholic world is growing more disoriented and many faithful no longer feel part of a church that has taken the side of the dominant mentality. Confusion atop confusion, tensions atop tensions, and a way out cannot be seen, because the controversial questions are multiplying rapidly. Throughout all of which concerned Catholics must remain calm and pray a lot.

The danger of schism, Fr. Martin says, is therefore not remote – it almost seems as if we are being pushed to that point. [As usual, my caveat about those who speak of schism, as well-intentioned and as absolutely reasonable as they are, is that they never define what such a schism would be like. Who is breaking from what? Faithful Catholics will certainly not break from the Church – if only because they do not think the church of Bergoglio is ‘the Church’ at all. Nor will Bergoglio and his followers break away because without the entire infrastructure and apparatus of the institutional Roman Catholic Church, they would be nothing but just another wannabe protestant denomination!]

In one of Fr. Martin’s best-known interventions (a lecture entitled "Love, truth and mercy" in May 2014, which can be read here; cibo-spir.blogspot.it/2016/03/lo-scisma-cattolico-santiago-marti... the Spanish priest says:

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“The use being made of the concept of mercy is an absolutely demagogic exploitation, and therefore, false and harmful. The concept of mercy, wrongly understood as something apart from the concept of truth – or even the concept of love – can be dangerous, tremendously dangerous. Even for the person who is supposed to benefit from such mercy.”

---

Fr. Martin continues:

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“I believe there are times in one’s life when one must have the courage to speak up. And to speak up frankly and honestly because, as we say in Spanish, ‘he who gives warning is not a traitor’. In order that certain things do not come to pass - and there are just too many possibilities – now is the time to speak up. Others are already doing so, from other aspects – theologial, patristic, dogmatic, canonical…

The New Testament is not the the only testament. The New Testament, which is the Revelation of Christ, completes an earlier Revelation [that of the Old Testament]. To forget that is to cut off the foundation of the building and causing its ruin.

God is love, but that is not the first thing he taught us. First of all, he taught us that he is All-Powerful, that he is the Lord, that he is the Judge. A loving judge, a fatherly judge, a merciful judge, but a judge. Yet we have arrived at a point where the idea of God as judge is dismissed, when it is made to seem like to be a judge is criminal.

Jesus says he is the Way, and he upholds the Decalogue as something that cannot be suppressed or supplanted. No one can do that! And therefore to dismiss morality as it is being done these days – saying that Christianity is not a moralism, by which is meant that one can be a Christian while living on the wrong edge of ethical behavior – is to reduce Christianity to sentimentalism”.

---

Recently, Fr. Martin called attention to the new appeal by Fr. Thomas Weinandy, the Franciscan theologian who wrote the pope an open letter last summer, made at a lecture in Sydney, in which he explicitly stigmatized those pastoral lines encouraged by this pope which are undermining the very foundations of the ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church’, and which specifically raise the issue of whether this church of Bergoglio is still considers the Eucharist as the source and summit of the life of the Church.

Fr Martin did not hesitate to denounce the German bishops who have now decided to admit, under certain conditions, non-Catholic spouses to Communion. “When the exception destroys the rule” is the title of his intervention which specifically opposes any pastoral work based on the logic of ‘case by case’.

Fr Martin says that following the sentimentalist concept of the Chistian faith, one ends up legitimizing every behavior by self-justification, a concept according to which “I do as I please with my life, and God is happy with that”. [Which is what Bergoglio constantly preaches, in effect: "God loves you as you are. You do not have to do anything but ask for his mercy" - but ask his mercy for what, if, in the Bergoglian universe, each one is supposed to 'discern' whether he is committing sin or not, in which therefore, sin has become a subjective concept, not one defined by God himself in the Ten Commandments and all the countless applications of God's law in both the Old and New Testament!]

“But to affirm that Mercy must be applied at the limits of Truth or against Truth, is certainly against the teachings of Christ”. To affirm that absolute objective Truth does not exist “not only negates 2000 years of Christian thought” but it is also “to regress culturally to a time before Socrates”.

As Joseph Ratzinger said in “God and the World: To be Christian in the new millennium”, in conversation with Peter Seewald,

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“No one has the courage anymore to say that what the faith teaches is the truth. It is feared that to do so would be to show intolerance to other religions or other world views. And Christians in turn are reinforced in their fear of a concept of truth that they think is too high”.

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[It is very indicative that Valli often ends up one of his anti-Bergoglio commentaries with an appropriate quotation from Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. I am very grateful to him for doing that, not just calling attention to the constant and consistent Christ-abiding wisdom of the Emeritus Pope, but also to the vast gulf that divides the sensibility and mindset of the 265th and 266th Successors of Peter.]

Very apropos, let me add to this post the latest from one of the disenchanted former Bergoglio enthusiasts (in the first full flush of the new pontificate) I mentioned earlier, Fr. Raymond de Souza:

Pope Francis’s first revolution – his clothing
by Fr Raymond de Souza

March 10, 2018

The first decisions required of a man elected in the conclave are prescribed. He must answer the question: “Do you accept?” He must choose his name. After those momentous decisions, the ceremony has its own momentum that carries the newly burdened man along.

On March 13, 2013, Pope Francis made another decision in those first few minutes. It signaled early on what sort of pope he would be. He decided he would not dress as other popes before him did. That he knew so soon and with such confidence that he would not do as his still living predecessor did, and as that long line of those before Benedict did, gave us an early indication of how Pope Francis conceived of himself as successor of St Peter. [Remember Tosatti's line in his book review above that his disillusion with Bergoglio has not been so much with his politics and policies, but with "the human qualities of the person himself as has been revealed to us gradually by his gestures, his craftiness, his decisions, his choice of men around him, and his ‘silences’." Early on, before he even appeared to the world as pope for the first time, Bergoglio's narcissism had quickly asserted itself. I have always argued that it has to be the primary explanation for everything wrong he has said and done as pope - and i his earlier life, for that matter. A fundamental character flaw that is necessarily reflected in everything he says and does.

Every pope, as every human being, has fundamental character flaws, but with the possible exception of soon-to-be Saint Paul VI's widely recognized Hamletlike equivocation on many things, I don't think any of the popes in my lifetime, from Pius XII onwards, ever allowed their human failings to get the better of them in the exercise of the Petrine ministry.]

The white papal cassock – technically a “simar” as it has the shoulder cape indicating the rank of a bishop – is basically the pope’s ordinary clothes when he is visible to others.

And not just when with others. In the 2010 interview book, Light of the World, Peter Seewald, who had spent a lot of private time with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, asked about the sartorial side of papal life: “Instead of a cassock, does he sometimes wear a sweater in his free time?” “No,” replied Pope Benedict XVI. “That is a legacy left to me by the former second secretary of Pope John Paul II, Mgr Mieczysław Mokrzycki, who told me: ‘The Pope always wore a cassock, and so must you’.”

So he did. It was indicative of Benedict’s humility that he accepted instruction on this point from John Paul’s junior secretary. Even in his free time he would conform to the office placed upon him.

When the pope is eating breakfast he wears his cassock. When he is doing something more solemn – blessing the entire world as universal pastor of the Church from the central loggia of St Peter’s, or receiving dignitaries of state in that same official capacity – he customarily dresses differently. That’s why on such occasions popes wear the mozetta – a red (or white) elbow-length cape worn over a surplice.

Pope Francis’s decision to set aside the mozetta and wear the same thing all the time – whether at breakfast at Santa Marta or solemnly blessing the world at Easter – was taken immediately. It indicated then that the Holy Father was comfortable acting independently of consultation with others, that an assertion of papal will would be made against traditional norms of deportment, and that gestures would be a key mode of papal leadership.

There are limits, of course, to how the pope might dress. It would be inconceivable to imagine the pope in a white suit, a businessman with a flair for the dramatic, à la Ricardo Montalbán in Fantasy Island. But for other senior prelates, this pontificate has marked a turn towards more worldly attire, with the business suit being the Holy Father’s preferred garment.

For example, the cardinals on the “C9” began meeting in their filettata cassocks, as was expected from any cleric in the presence of the Holy Father. I remember as a student in Rome that seminarians without their own cassocks would quickly borrow one if they were going to be presented by their bishops to the Holy Father. Now the C9 meets in business suits, where the pectoral cross can be discreetly hidden in a jacket pocket.

As the pictures from last month showed again, even curial priests and bishops on retreat with the Holy Father wear a business suit, though there are a recalcitrant few who wear their cassocks.

That a new expectation was in place was never more clear than in March 2017, when the newly elected prelate of Opus Dei, Mgr Fernando Ocáriz, was received by the Holy Father. The prelate of Opus Dei would not greet the sacristan in his chapel in anything other than a cassock, but he obediently appeared in a business suit to greet Pope Francis. He may well have had to borrow one, like seminarians once did for cassocks.

Does it matter? It is not of supreme importance, but it is important. Clothes may not make the man, but do reflect something real about him. The Catholic Church has given rather a lot of thought to clerical dress, reflecting upon what it means to be in the world but not of it.

The business suit for priests – introduced in countries where religious persecution of Catholics was common – is a shift towards a more worldly Church.

The cassock still remains the default attire for priests, according to the 2014 Directory for the Ministry and the Life of Priests, even though modifications have long been approved for most English-speaking countries. Still, in the presence of the pope it was expected. Then again, Church law also requires concelebrating priests to wear chasubles at Holy Mass if possible, a norm that is always disregarded at the Pope’s daily Mass in Santa Marta.

Clerical dress – for himself and for others – is not the most important decision Francis has made. But it was the first one.

The Bergoglio pontificate is also very much the pontificate of the slippery slope. Being permissive and careless about minor infractions eventually - sooner rather than later - ends up in condoning grievous mortal sin such as chronic unrepentant adultery as AL does, or, as the same document implies, even chronic mortal sin in persons who are active unrepentant homosexuals or otherwise sexually deviant.

The Bergoglian wrecking ball is relentlessly at work...KYRIE ELEISON, CHRISTE ELEISON, KYRIE ELEISON!

Mgr Pinto’s Texas visit:
The latest Vatican intervention in the US Church
[Or, the many ways in which the Bergoglio Vatican is pushing
AL's 'heterodoxy' on the sacraments of marriage and the Eucharist]
by Jan Bentz

March 9, 2018

A curious course on matrimony and family is taking place at the moment in the diocese of Austin, Texas. Curious because the three-day event, which began yesterday, is being led by Mgr Pio Vito Pinto, Dean of the Roman Rota – while his office back in Rome appears to have had little or no involvement in the course’s preparation.

Judging from its content, its speaker, and its somewhat low-profile nature, the course could set out to push a certain interpretation of Amoris Laetitia in the USA: one which departs from traditional Church teaching on Communion for the remarried.

The course includes talks such as:
- “The Discernment, a necessary method for this Reformation: love and crisis of marriage and family according to the Magisterium of the last two Synods,”
- “Reconciliation and the Eucharist in regard to the divorced and remarried: guidelines and orientation regarding salvation of souls,” - “The Bishop, as Master of the Eucharist and of Discernment, who sends and assists the parish priests in the search of the lost: divorced, remarried, civilly married, common life couples,” and
- “Fundamental Principles of the Reformation of Pope Francis on the canonical marriage process”.

Participation in the course is mandatory for clergy of the diocese of Austin and invites all “Bishops, Priests, Judicial Vicars (Canonists), and Permanent Deacons and lay people who collaborate with Family Life and Tribunal”.

The course seems to have been prepared by Mgr Pinto personally, since members of the Rota in Rome appear unaware that it is even happening. When contacted by the Catholic Herald, one Rota official said that in his office he had neither heard about the course nor about its preparation.

The content of the course may be guessed from Mgr Pinto’s previous contributions. He described the DUBIA, which asked Pope Francis to reaffirm Church teaching on the sacraments and the moral law, as “a very grave scandal”.

It is not the first time Mgr Pinto has acted as a sort of Vatican envoy on the interpretation of Amoris Laetitia. In August 2017 he paid a visit to Costa Rica where he held a course for cardinals, bishops and priests from Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama.

InfoCatolica reported Mgr Pinto as saying that that “pastors cannot know the conscience of the faithful and therefore ... it is up to the person himself to discern which path he should follow within the Church.” If he did say this – and it echoes some other Vatican officials’ words on AL - one wonders how it can be reconciled with the teaching of previous popes. [But that is of no concern to Bergoglians, for whom AL is the new 'gospel' and the word of Bergoglio outweighs the Word of God itself!]

For instance, John Paul II and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith condemned the idea that the divorced and remarried, if living in a sexual relationship, could receive Communion. The CDF and the Pope taught that if the remarried received Communion anyway, “pastors and confessors, given the gravity of the matter and the spiritual good of these persons as well as the common good of the Church, have the serious duty to admonish them that such a judgment of conscience openly contradicts the Church’s teaching.”

Mgr Pinto’s travels will continue: it is understood that the Archbishop of Trujillo, Mexico has invited him to give a course on marriage in July.

Although the texts of Mgr Pinto’s Texas course are not yet available, it seems probable that he will continue to support Communion for the remarried in some circumstances.

Given that the involvement of the Rota seems limited at best, it is likely that the initiative for the Texas trip comes partly from senior Vatican figures.

This suggests that some at the Vatican are trying to lead the US Church into a certain interpretation of Amoris Laetitia. Cardinal Blase Cupich, a close associate of Pope Francis [if not exactly an 'associate', he is and was meant to be Bergoglio's chief surrogate in the USA], recently helped to lead three seminars for US bishops on AL. He believes that “conscience” should ultimately determine the reception of Communion.

Cardinal Cupich’s seminars were invitation-only and closed to the media, rather as Mgr Pinto’s event has been little publicised – perhaps in order to avoid criticism of the content of the respective courses.

It is easy to see why there would be criticism. As Cardinal Willem Eijk recently warned, “The question of whether the so-called divorced and remarried can be allowed to receive sacramental absolution and therefore the Eucharist is cracking the Church apart.” If Mgr Pinto’s course fails to reaffirm the Church’s traditional doctrine, it can only lead to more such confusion and grief. [Quite an understatement! What does it say of the lord and master at the very heart of this poisonous web being reinforced about AL that Mons. Pinto, a wild-eyed and intemperate Bergoglio fanatic, is made to roam the world formally teaching anti-Catholic principles and practices? KYRIE ELEISON, CHRISTE ELEISON, KYRIE ELEISON!]

As the fifth anniversary of that unfortunate March 2013 Conclave nears, reviews of the Bergoglio pontificate are popping up everywhere. The habitually pro-Bergoglian and ultra-liberal British newspaper The Telegraph has a 'mixed' review. For all its attempts to accentuate the positive first - in sickeningly dulcet praises - the subsequent 'but...' considerations are very significant. I won't even attempt to fisk the article, but the preponderance of paragraphs that I have purpled highlights the many approving assumptions and conclusions it draws, which are typical for those who applaud Bergoglio's Church-wrecking heterodoxies and activities.

Five years after Pope Francis was elected,
how much has changed?
[When even supporters cannot give unconditional praise to a 'wrecking ball' pope
whose pro-active advocacy of all the major liberal issues hasn't quite yet wrecked the Church]
by Peter Stanford
THE TELEGRAPH
9 MARCH 2018

On his visit ‘home’ to Latin America in January, Pope Francis treated the vast crowds of Chileans and Peruvians who turned out to greet him with what have become, these past five years since his surprise election as head of the worldwide Catholic Church, the hallmarks of an eye-catching papacy. For good and for bad.

From his debut on the world stage on the evening of 13 March 2013, when he appeared as the new Pope on a balcony high above St Peter’s Square in Rome, Francis has been firing the imagination of believers and non-believers alike with his humanity,wit and warmth, and his willingness to be more outspoken than any other Pope in recent memory. He has chosen to use the moral authority of his ancient office not to lecture the world on the dangers of sex, but rather to champion the causes of migrants, refugees, the economically marginalised and the environment.

During his trip to Peru, Francis was in his usual bold, uncompromising mood, the master of the dramatic gesture. He stood alongside Amazonian tribespeople to condemn the ‘extractivism’ of multinationals who are destroying the rainforest, and was the fearless speaker of truth to power when he launched a full-frontal attack on the ‘virus’ of corruption among politicians from a stage he was sharing with the country’s embattled president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, himself currently embroiled in a financial scandal.

Francis’s words carry extra force, inside and outside the Church, because what everyone knows about him is that he practises what he preaches. There’s his refusal, for instance, to move into the gilded papal residence, living instead in a small apartment in a Vatican guest house; there’s his preference for simple suppers around a refectory table talking to any fellow guest who happens to be passing through; and his rejection of large, luxury ‘Popemobiles’ in favour of Fiat 500s to deliver him to and from airports on his many overseas tours.

But there is another side to Francis, one less often seen, but on display later during that same Latin American trip. When challenged in Chile by journalists about his controversial decision to appoint local priest Juan Barros as a bishop, despite allegations that Barros had been involved in covering up sexual abuse of minors by a fellow cleric, Francis suddenly came over all authoritarian and snapped back at them: ‘The day they bring me proof against the bishop, then I will speak. There is not a single proof against him. This is calumny! Is that clear?’

It was an extraordinary outburst and prompted the head of Francis’s own Vatican sex abuse commission to publicly rebuke his boss ever so gently for talking of ‘proof’ rather than ‘evidence’ (only the latter, of course, is required to justify an investigation). It also added fuel to the fire of abuse survivors who argue that, for all the dazzling rhetoric about wanting to make the Church a more open and equal community, underneath it all, the Pope is just as autocratic and unfeeling as his predecessors and wants to brush survivors’ suffering under the carpet.

‘When it comes to his brother priests,’ said Mary Dispenza, a former nun who has accused her parish priest of raping her when she was seven years old, ‘Francis protects them at the cost of heaping pain and shame upon victims.’

Which of these two faces of Francis is the real one – the charismatic reformer, determined to drag Catholicism into the 21st century by the force of his personality and the sincerity of his message, [obviously the image that the Telegraph, like the rest of the secular media, prefer to keep of Bergoglio, despite all the indicators that 'the emperor is really naked'], or the traditional Prince of the Church, whose first instinct is to protect the institution, even if that means riding roughshod over the feelings of victims of clergy abuse?

‘I am always being told by people I meet that, “You Catholics have a liberal Pope,”’ reflects Ann Widdecombe, the Tory former minister, unlikely reality TV star and convert to Rome. ‘And he is certainly very, very good at PR, which is no bad thing given how the Church is usually presented, but I always reply, “What exactly has he changed?”’

And it is true: Francis has sounded liberal, especially on same-sex relationships (‘Who am I to judge?’ he remarked early in his papacy), but has also seemed content over the past five years for the Catechism of the Catholic Church to continue to label homosexuality, sex before marriage, contraception and abortion as sinful. [That is a most erroneous observation, because Bergoglio has certainly shown his openness to at least 'wink' at Church doctrine on these issues (AL already condones active homosexual practice and cohabitation which is the ultimate sin of pre-marital sex), even as he is moving to institutionalize so-called pastoral changes that effectively amount to doctrinal changes while insisting disingenuously that 'doctrine is not being changed'.]

‘Perhaps in 20 years’ time it will all be different, but people no longer seem to believe that change can happen in a great leap and bound. And that’s what is making them edgy,’ says Widdecombe. ‘They don’t quite know what’s going on right now. They don’t know what to make of him.’ [If Widdecombe thinks that, then obviously the circles in which she moves do not have the certainty that Bergoglio is doing the right things, otherwise they would simply say as Bergoglio supporters do that "Oh, he is so right - why didn't anyone in the Church think like him before?"]

One answer is to judge him by the goals he set himself at the time of his election. Top of the list was reform of the Roman Curia, or civil service, which stood accused of corruption on an industrial scale. It had been the ‘Vatileaks’ scandal, an episode of Curial skulduggery involving stolen private papers and the Pope’s personal butler, that was said to have convinced Francis’s ailing predecessor, Benedict XVI, to break with 600 years of tradition that Popes must die in post and announce (in Latin) his resignation at the age of 85. [YECCCHHH! One of those spaghetti-limp reasons people bring up for Benedict's renunciation. Yet the most that the writer can say about the Vatileaks 'scandal' is that it was 'an episode of Curial skulduggery involving stolen private papers (the pope's, describing some petty machinations by those around him but none accusing him of anything) and the Pope's butler' - if there had been any genuine scandal in that skulduggery, he would have mentioned it in fingerlicking, Schadenfreude detail.]

Cue Francis, the Argentinian self-styled outsider – ‘the man from the ends of the earth’ as he described himself on the night of his election – who was going to be the one to drain the Vatican’s very own swamp. And he set to his task with apparent gusto. In his Christmas message to the Curia in 2014, he accused his own civil servants, many of them priests and nuns, of 15 ailments including ‘spiritual Alzheimer’s’, and of living ‘hypocritical double lives’. Last year, he called out among them ‘traitors of trust… corrupted by ambition and vainglory’. Reforming Rome, he complained bitterly, ‘is like cleaning the Egyptian sphinxes with a toothbrush’.

Fine words, but have they been matched by actions? ‘The reform of the Curia continues,’ says ‘Vaticanologist’ Marco Politi, who has spent 40 years observing Popes, ‘and some impressive results have been achieved. The Church’s central government has become somewhat slimmer.’ [Politi, a Bergoglio enthusiast from Day 1 if only because he was such an implacable adversary to Benedict XVI, is one of those who remain staunch to Bergoglio. BTW, how has 'the Church's central government become somewhat slimmer' with the creation of 4 new super-dicasteries, even if they do incorporate a number of former autonomous if minor agencies?]

Hardly an overwhelming endorsement, you might think, given the extent of the charges laid against the Curia. While Vatican departments have been merged, more women brought in, and those who have stood in Francis’s way unceremoniously removed – including, last year, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the German head of the all-powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – the taint of scandal has not been expunged.

Two books by Italian investigative journalists – Greed by Emiliano Fittipaldi and Vatican Inc by Gianluigi Nuzzi, both published in 2015 – revealed a level of corruption at God’s business address on earth to rival anything imagined by Dan Brown in his Vatican-based novels.

Fittipaldi, for instance, accused figures at the Vatican’s Bambino Gesù Hospital for sick children of redirecting €400,000 from its charitable foundation to pay for the lavish refurbishment of the flat of the former secretary of state under Pope Benedict, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. [An event that occurred during Francis's Pontificate, when Bergoglio kept Bertone on as Secretary of State at least 6 months, and which Bertone has sought to clarify, though inadequately. He claims he paid for much of the work himself and then refunded some of what was claimed to have been given to him by the Foundation.] And Nuzzi lifted the lid on a culture where those who live on Vatican sovereign territory (most of them clergy) make a healthy profit out of selling on tax-free petrol and luxury goods to outlets in the rest of Italy. [As in Vatileaks-1, neither of the examples mentioned constitutes a major scandal on the order of the Banco Ambrosiano-Mafia tie-up and the loss of 250 million euros that the Vatican had to reimburse to clients when the bank collapsed in the late 1980s.]

Those who defend Francis’s get-tough approach point out that charges have been made against many of those involved in such cases, including ‘Monsignor 500’ Nunzio Scarano, another senior Vatican official who allegedly only kept €500 notes in his wallet, and who in 2014 was in court for trying to illegally import £16.5 million in cash into Italy. [The charges and followthrough were made by the Italian government, not by the Vatican.]

Francis has also, his admirers continue, gone much further than ever before in trying to rein in what has long been the most scandalous element of the Vatican administration, its bank, the Institute for Religious Works (IOR). It is often mentioned as a favoured conduit for Mafia money. [For detractors of the Church, no reforms attempted and/or actually achieved by the Vatican will ever eradicate the stigma they choose to brand on the Church, whether it is that of clerical sex abuse or financial misdeeds. Thus, since the Banco Ambrosiano snafu in the late 1980s, the IOR has always been - and will always be - described as 'scandal-ridden' (shot through with scandals, as by a shotgun) -never mind if the scandal(s) have been rid of! ] In the 1980s, the Vatican was forced to pay out millions to shareholders of the failed Italian Banco Ambrosiano after the IOR was accused of complicity in the financial impropriety of Ambrosiano’s chief executive, Roberto Calvi, known as ‘God’s Banker’, who was found hanged under London’s Blackfriars Bridge.

On Francis’s instructions, a new team of financial experts was appointed to take control of the IOR, and given the Pope’s blessing to do whatever was necessary to bring the bank into line with international money-market regulations. Yet last November, the deputy director Giulio Mattietti, just two years in post and supposedly one of the ‘new brooms’, was swept out of his job and escorted from the building with no explanation. His departure came just five months after another official brought in to reform Vatican finances, auditor-general Libero Milone, resigned suddenly.

Their fate, Vatican insiders have suggested, is evidence that entrenched forces in the Curia are resisting Francis’s reform agenda. Milone himself has claimed he was forced out after uncovering possible illegal activity. ‘I couldn’t allow any longer a small group of powers to [defame] my reputation for their shady games,’ he told reporters. ‘I wanted to do good for the Church, to reform it like I was asked, but they wouldn’t let me.’

It’s a disturbing picture he paints, but perhaps the biggest blow for Francis’s anti-corruption drive has been the loss of his key ally, Cardinal George Pell. His brief had been to reorganise and open up the Vatican’s whole financial system as part of a council of nine cardinals, known as C9, appointed specifically to support Francis in tackling entrenched, reactionary and corrupt elements in the Curia. All nine, like Francis, had little experience of working in the Vatican bureaucracy but plenty of time spent in the real world. [As it turned out, Pell's efforts were sabotaged by Bergoglio's one-step-forward, two-steps-backward 'reform', as powers Pell had been previously given to do his job were gradually taken away by Bergoglio, to be handed back to former powerholders on all things financial and administrative such as the Secretariat of State and the Administation for the Patrimony of the Holy See.]

Pell had been making progress – revealing, for example, millions of euros in Vatican accounts that were unaccounted for – but last summer he was forced to take a leave of absence to defend himself against charges of child sex abuse involving multiple complainants in his native Australia. (Pell denies the allegations.) A hearing is set to take place this month in Melbourne, and many people predict he may never return to Rome even if he is cleared of wrongdoing.

‘This issue of child abuse has never really gone away, however much the Church would like it to,’ says Luke Coppen, editor of the Catholic Herald, ‘and now with the case of Bishop Barros and the charges against Cardinal Pell, it risks overshadowing whatever is left of Francis’s papacy.’ [Coppen is wrong to say that the Church would 'like' the issue of child abuse to go away - what she wants, as Benedict XVI clearly demonstrated, is for priests to stop committing these sexual sins and for bishops to stop seeking to put a lid on any cases that do arise. But this can only be done if pursued with consistency, not allowing many flagrant exceptions as Bergoglio has done.]

If reform of the Curia was the top priority for Francis, then for Catholics in the pews, the issue that has proved the greatest challenge to their faith in their Church has been its handling of child abuse by the clergy. They want more than anything to believe that Pope Francis is taking the matter as seriously as they do.

Once again, he has been saying the right things, talking up a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to abusers and those who have covered up abuse. In 2014, Francis established the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. He’d taken his time, some said, but he was applauded for appointing lay experts alongside clergy, and two members were themselves survivors of abuse by priests.

But the initiative has been slowly unravelling ever since. Of the two survivors, Peter Saunders stood aside in frustration in 2017, and Marie Collins also resigned. She cited opposition in the Curia to implementing any of the reforms the commission suggested, and the Pope’s failure to attend a single meeting during her time. It was evidence, she complained, of ‘the low priority given to this issue, despite the assurances so often given by the Pope that it has the highest priority’.

And discontent at how Francis has handled child abuse is not the only front on which he is being criticised. In 2014 and 2015, he held two synods – meetings of the world’s bishops – on the subject of family. In advance, in line with his stated vision of the Church as a community, not a monarchy dictated to by the Pope, Francis put out a questionnaire to mass-going Catholics around the world on some of the crucial issues to be covered at the synods, including the treatment of Catholics who have divorced and then remarried.

Most bishops kept the findings secret but, in those European countries that did publish the result, around 90 per cent of respondents backed dropping the current ban on such Catholics from taking communion.

Francis may have had ordinary Catholics on his side [would one consider the secular Catholics-in-name populating de-Christianized Europe as 'ordinary Catholics' or representative of them?] on his side, but not the majority of his fellow bishops, who greeted his enthusiasm for reform coolly.

When he pressed ahead nevertheless and handed over to local bishops the decision about changing the rules over the treatment of divorced Catholics who remarry, four cardinals accused him of undermining the Church’s moral teaching, and few bishops have taken up their new powers. [???]

‘No Pope in 100 years has faced such opposition amid the bishops and clergy,’ says historian Andrea Riccardi. [Riccardi has got to be fibbing - and so ahistorical for a historian! The overt opposition in word and deed to the post-Conciliar popes by 'spirit of Vatican II' cardinals, bishops, priests and theologians was far more widespread and damaging at the level of parochial life than the known opposition today to Bergoglio's heterodoxies (only a relative minority have been willing and courageous to speak up in defense of Catholic orthodoxy).

The significant difference is that whereas the post-conciliar popes were opposed for their insistence on orthodoxy (from the Greek word for 'correct thinking', it means "conforming to the Christian faith as represented in the creeds of the Church"), the opposition to Bergoglio is because of his anti-Catholic, sometimes anti-Christian, heterodoxies. And arguing for what is right and correct is always so much more forceful than insisting on error, which is all the Bergoglians can do - hence Riccardi's twisted perception.]

But if there is passive resistance from bishops, it’s hard to measure the depth of that opposition. [One would like to think there is passive resistance and much of it, and one hopes so, but there has yet to be any serious survey made on this issue.] It may be that bishops simply dislike change, or that they are so used to having Rome tell them what to do, they are waiting to see what will happen with Francis’s proposals.

The Pope’s reaction to the criticism of the four cardinals once again revealed his authoritarian streak, though this time the flash of steel delighted liberals in the pews. He may like to be seen as listening – but not to these particular rebels, or the small but well-placed constituency of traditionalist Catholics they represent. He declined to answer the cardinals’ appeal for clarification.

Will ignoring them be sufficient to see off the opposition? Well, two of the original four rebel cardinals have since died, so there may be wisdom in his strategy. But next to the honeymoon feel of those early months of Francis’s papacy – and the high expectations they generated – doubts are now widespread about how far his reforming style may translate into lasting change.

In his early days as Pope, in one of the off-the-cuff remarks that he so likes to make and which endear him to audiences everywhere, Francis told a Mexican TV interviewer that he ‘didn’t mind’ being Pope, but had ‘the sensation that my pontificate will be short. Four or five years…’ [Awww, so cute, so endearing! He's very good at making these 'impromptu' statements clearly calculated to win gullible hearts over - and there are so many!]

Did he mean it? Might he also resign from office? As ever, the world waits to see how great the difference is between his words and his actions. [Provided his successor won't be a Bergoglian, or someone even more apostate than Bergoglio, what a magnificent blessing it would be to the Church if he meant it at all! Does anyone really believe he did?]


Allowing for his fervent disapproval and dislike of Bergoglio, Mundabor often has very sensible and realistic Catholic commentary on the topic, like this one:

The Pope in an age of madness

March 7, 2018


How, it might be asked, in these disgraceful times, can the Church be true if Francis is Pope? My answer is another question: How can the Church be true and allow us to choose who is Pope?

Bad as this crisis is, one thing is sure: we cannot put an end to it with our own private decisions. Not only is this fully un-Catholic, it also leads to absurd consequences.

So, let's say that I and several thousand Mundaborists decide that Francis is an illegitimate Pope. Three weeks later, he proceeds to appoint nine Cardinals. Are they legitimate Cardinals? Obviously not. Then other seven Cardinals are appointed, and after that eleven more. In the meantime, hundreds of dioceses, including a dozen of major world capitals, have illegitimate bishops.

A Conclave follows: how can anyone who questioned Benedict’s 'sabdication, much less anyone who denied Francis; legitimacy, accept the new Pope as legitimately elected, even if the new pope were someone who could well be Pius XIII? And at this point, what happens? This Pope will elect new Cardinals, and the problem will become inextricable.

Now, if we had a formally heretical Pope the matter would be simpler: with God’s grace, the See would be declared vacant and however many Bishops and Cardinals are available to side with Christ would proceed to convocate an imperfect Council, declare the Pope self-deposed, and elect a legitimate one.

But again it would be them, not us, who do it. It would be up to them, not to us, to decide that the Pope has deposed himself. There is simply no mechanism within the Church based on which laymen decide who is Pope. If it were so, we would be all Protestants.

The reality is sad, but part of the sadness is this: that we will have to live with obscenely bad Popes for as long as the Lord decides that it is fitting for us to be punished with them. And when the Lord in His Goodness has decided that it is time to put an end to this, then he will let us know through signs that are in conformity with what the Church teaches: for example, by the SSPX declaring the Pope a formal heretic and calling for an Imperfect council, which then – by God’s grace – also happens, and leads to the Pope’s deposition.

To decide that the Pope is not legitimate and then unavoidably deny legitimacy to everything that happens later is like stabbing the Church in the heart to cure Her (admittedly, very bad) fever. It is, as I have written already, Sedevacantism on instalments. It is just not the way the Catholic Church and the Catholic mind work.

Take Francis as a penance and use this time to pray the Lord that He may, in His Goodness, pave a way out of it; a way which, as we all know as Catholics, will invariably be a Catholic one.

And here's Phil Lawler's commentary on a recent broadside by Bergoglio's tireless surrogate in the USA:

The accusations of Cardinal Cupich:
Name names, please
By Phil Lawler

March 9, 2018

In his latest column for the Chicago archdiocesan newspaper, Cardinal Blase Cupich — who styles himself as a champion of civil dialogue within the Church — lashes out at people who disagree with Pope Francis:

---

For this reason, it is not surprising that we occasionally hear voices, unfortunately often expressed in print and broadcast media claiming to be Catholic, who criticize Pope Francis for introducing topics such as discernment, dialogue, mercy, gradualness to help us understand better our Christian lives.

---

Is that the way the cardinal proposes to “accompany” people who are “at the margins” of the Church? By questioning whether they are really Catholic — and going on to speculate about whether their thoughts are motivated by fear or by a failure to believe in the Resurrection? But beyond that, I have two more questions:

Yes, there have been people (myself included) who protest when terms like “discernment” are used to camouflage an unwillingness to call a sin a sin, and a scandal a scandal. But those are complaints about the way these words are used — one might say misused. But who are these people who criticize the Pope for introducing those terms into the discussion? Name one.

And by the way, which of those terms did Pope Francis introduce? Cardinal Cupich himself mentions that Pope Benedict XVI spoke of “gradualness” — although the cardinal gives a highly tendentious rendering of the retired Pontiff’s thoughts on the subject. The words “discernment” and “dialogue” appear in the 50-year old dictionary on my desk. And I seem to recall reading something about “mercy” in the Bible.

Do I sound angry? Yes, I am angry — at the tactics of those who, while speaking in lofty terms about open dialogue and respectful debate, do their utmost to impugn the motivations and question the good faith of those who disagree with them.

Cardinal Zen says Vatican-China proposal weakens the Church
'Better no deal than a bad deal', he told Raymond Arroyo on 'The World Over'

March 8, 2018

HONG KONG, Mar 8, 2018 (CNA/EWTN News)- Vatican diplomats’ efforts to reach an agreement with the Chinese government would turn bishops into government officials who cannot adequately shepherd their flock, Cardinal Joseph Zen has said.

“Better no deal than a bad deal,” the cardinal told Raymond Arroyo, host of the EWTN news show The World Over.

The outspoken cardinal charged that in recent years the Vatican policy has left the Church in China “much weakened than before.” This harms negotiating power, since “from a weak position you cannot get anything in a negotiation,” he said March 8.

The Catholic Church in China is divided into the illegal “underground” Church, which remains faithful and in communion with Rome, and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, whose bishops are appointed by the government. Members of the underground Church are often persecuted by the Chinese government.

In Cardinal Zen’s view, the Holy See is tolerating bad behavior from the official church and the illicitly ordained bishops.

“They are arrogant, they defy the Holy See. And the Holy See keeps quiet,” he said. “And then the Holy See is always encouraging the people underground and also the good people above ground to surrender, to compromise. They are weakening our Church. It is a kind of suicide.”

Cardinal Zen is one of two Bishops emeriti of Hong Kong. Cardinal John Tong Hon, another retired bishop, has been somewhat more favorable towards proposed changes in Vatican-China relations.

An agreement under discussion would reportedly legitimize the bishops of the Catholic Patriotic Association, requiring two of the underground Church’s bishops either to retire or to step into a lower role as coadjutor archbishop of his diocese.

While Catholic backers of the proposal justify it on the grounds it is needed to help preserve the hierarchy in China, Cardinal Zen invoked the example of Central Europe under Communism. Such agreements avoid appointing bishops who systematically oppose the government but, he contended, this means choosing opportunists who obey the government.

“They are more officials of the government than the shepherds of the flock,” the cardinal said. “The people may not realize immediately, but sooner or later they see. And then how can they believe the Church any more?”

When a secret Vatican agreement with Hungary’s communist government was later revealed, the cardinal said, it showed that it was agreed that any priests who criticized the government would be denounced to the Church for discipline.

“It was a collaboration all to the advantage of the government, and very little to the Church,” he said.

In previous statements, he has faulted the Pope’s advisors, saying Kthey accept an accommodationist Ostpolitik solution from the Cold War era. He was specifically critical of Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, whom Zen says learned this way of thinking from his predecessor Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, who served in the same role in the first decade of St. John Paul II’s papacy.

Recently the seven illicit bishops sent a letter to the Vatican seeking restoration to full communion, but this should not necessarily be believed, Cardinal Zen told EWTN.

“All those bishops are in the hands of the government. How can you believe in their real repentance? “ he asked. While the Church is always ready to forgive and to absolve their excommunication, there are other problems.

“How can you recognize them to be bishops? To be shepherds of the flock? To form the people to obey, to respect, these people, how can you do that?” the cardinal asked.

Such a move would make it appear these bishops were forgiven because of government pressure, not because the Holy See believes in their sincere repentance.

“I think what is going to happen is a tragedy, a real tragedy,” he said, deeming the proposed agreement a “betrayal of the faith.”

About 60 Chinese bishops are recognized by both the Vatican and the Chinese government, while another 30 bishops are recognized only by the Catholic Church.

Pope Benedict XVI recognized many bishops ordained for the government-run church as “opportunists,” Zen said, saying this is true even of many ordained with Vatican approval.

“They know that they have to rely on the government to make a career,” he said.

Arroyo summarized details of the proposed appointment of bishops, in which the Chinese government proposes three bishops’ candidates for the Vatican’s approval. However, this is the reverse of such arrangements. Usually, the Vatican proposes three candidates from which the government may choose one.

“They say the authority of the Pope is safe because the last word still belongs to the Pope. The problem is what can be the last word?” Cardinal Zen asked.

In the absence of an agreement, the government feels pressure to compromise and pay attention to the choices of the Vatican.

“But when you give them the power in their hands, they use it fully,” the cardinal said. He questioned whether provisions for a papal veto of the government’s choice would be effective.

The Pope does not need the Chinese government to acknowledge him officially as the head of the Church, the cardinal suggested.

“They recognize the Pope! They are afraid of the Pope! But now the advisors of the Pope are giving him advice to renounce this authority,” he said.

The cardinal insisted that the Holy See has never before asked a legitimate bishop to resign his position to make way for an excommunicated bishop.

Against his detractors, who have said the cardinal has little experience of contemporary China, Cardinal Zen cited his seven years’ experience teaching in China’s official Church seminaries from 1989-1996.

“From my direct, immediate experience, I know that the Church is completely enslaved to the government,” he said, stating that he is still kept updated on the situation by discreet visitors.

Cardinal Zen said there is not a clear picture of what will happen. While the two illicit bishops who could replace legitimate bishops, have dominated discussions, there are five other illicit bishops. Among these, he charged, two are well-known to have had a wife and children for many years, but their defenders now say that there is no evidence.

While it is also claimed that 30 legitimate bishops not recognized by the Chinese government will be recognized, Cardinal Zen questioned how this process would work.

“They will be allowed to function like underground bishops?” he asked. “Surely not. They are bringing them into the cage! That’s terrible. They are going to annihilate the underground Church.”

The many good bishops in the official church are suffering and fighting, and the government must tolerate them.

“But now with this arrangement they lose every hope for a better future!” Cardinal Zen said.

The cardinal said commentators say he is pushing people to be martyrs, even though he never prays for martyrdom.

“But if God wants us to give such a witness to faith, it is a grace, and he will give us the strength,” he said.

Arroyo sought the cardinal’s opinion on Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo’s much-criticized comments that the Chinese best realize the social doctrine of the Catholic Church.

“Please leave him in peace. We don’t have to waste time to talk about that… That made everybody laugh, okay? It’s a good laugh,” Zen replied.

Just a bit of chronological context: 'INTRODUCTION TO CHRISTIANITY', which became an almost-instant theological classic, was published one year before Jorge Bergoglio was ordained a priest.

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI








One can only be aghast at the chutzpah of Cardinal Errazuriz, who represents Latin American in Bergoglio's Council of Nine cardinal advisers, for his reaction to
the low turnout and general negativity generated by the pope's visit to Chile in late January. A reaction that included even accusing sexual abuse victims of Father
Karadima - and possibly of Mons Barros as well - of seeking to profit from their 'allegations'!

This is the same cardinal who, as Archbishop of Santiago, chose two decades ago to shelve any investigation of Karadima, and who had to eat crow when in 2011,
the Vatican CDF judged Karadima guilty of the major accusations brought against him by the same accusers who have since accused Karadima-mentored papal
protege Barros not just of being complicit with Karadima but also of taking part in some of the sex crimes himself. Errazuriz has simply managed to make things
look worse for himself and to embarrass the pope further in doing so. Why Bergoglio chose him, to begin with, to represent Latin America in his advisory
council was always questionable - because his ostensible cover-up for Karadima was well-known to all.


Chilean cardinal in pope's crown council
blames Mons. Barros, summer vacation,
and lack of a spokesman for mishaps
of Bergoglio's recent visit
Errazuriz also accuses Karadima victims of trying to profit from their allegations
by Nicole Winfield

Mar 2018

The retired archbishop of Santiago is trying to deflect criticism for Pope Francis’s troubled trip to Chile in January, blaming everything from the summer weather to an “absentee” spokesman for the lower-than-expected turnout and negative press coverage during the visit.

Cardinal Javier Errazuriz, a top papal adviser, wrote an extraordinary letter to the bishops of Latin America that insists the Pope’s trip wasn’t a failure, but was “highly positive.” The National Catholic Reporter first reported the letter and its contents Friday.

Errazuriz did not take responsibility for a sex abuse scandal that shadowed Pope Francis’s visit or how the handling of allegations involving Fr Fernando Karadima affected the views of Chilean Catholics toward the church and the papacy.

Errazuriz took no responsibility for the lingering effects of a sex abuse scandal on Chilean Catholics and their views about the church and the papacy.

The former archbishop initially shelved the investigation of Fr Fernando Karadima’s abuse of young parishioners and has admitted he didn’t believe the victims. A Vatican tribunal convicted Karadima in 2011 and sentenced him to a life of penance and prayer for his sex crimes.

Independent polling firm Latinobarometro has pointed to the Karadima scandal as the leading cause of the church’s loss of credibility in Chile. The country ranks lowest among the 19 in South and Central America in esteem for the Pope.

Pope Francis’s trip was dominated by the Karadima affair and the Pope’s support for a Fr Karadima protege, Bishop Juan Barros. Some of Fr Karadima’s victims have accused Barros of having witnessed their abuse and ignored it. The criticism reached such a fever pitch that Pope Francis decided upon his return to send a Vatican investigator to Chile. [Only after much criticism even from the usually friendly secular media of his insistence that the accusations against Barros were nothing but slander. Not to mention that he did not meet with any of Karadima's victims while he was in Chile, though they requested a meeting and he did meet with other abuse victims while in Chile. Yet the AP reporter omits these relevant information whereas she went out of her way to background Errazuriz's responsibility for the Karadima fiasco in general!]

In the letter, Errazuriz accused Karadima’s victims of trying to profit from their allegations of a cover-up, calling the claims slander aimed at bolstering a civil lawsuit against the Santiago archdiocese. Victim Juan Carlos Cruz denied the charge, saying complaints about Barros long predated any litigation.

“Errazuriz is trying to confuse things and create a distraction to avoid his responsibility in all the cover-up and his poor management of the Chilean church that led to this disaster we are in now,” Cruz told The Associated Press. “This is not about any money.”

Pope Francis sparked an outcry in Chile in 2015 when he appointed Barros bishop of Osorno over the objections of some in the church hierarchy. They had proposed that Barros and two other Karadima-trained bishops resign and take a year sabbatical.

Members of Pope Francis’s sex abuse advisory commission expressed concern that if Barros didn’t “see” the abuse when it was all around him, he could not be entrusted with protecting children in Osorno.

During his trip, the pontiff enraged Chileans when he strongly defended Barros, calling the accusations against him “calumny.”

Errazuriz, in his letter, blamed some of the negative media coverage on Barros’s decision to speak with journalists and jointly celebrate “probably an excessive” number of Masses with Francis. He said the “absentee” spokesman for the Chilean bishops’ conference should have stopped both Barros and news organisations to keep the focus on the Pope.

“We needed a Navarro-Valls, able to politely stop the journalists and tell them that the Bishop of Osorno wouldn’t be giving any more interviews,” Errazuriz wrote, referring to St John Paul II’s longtime spokesman and spin master, Joaquin Navarro-Valls. [Well, where was Errazuriz all the time the pope was in Chile? Wasn't he right there with him? Why did he not take it upon himself to contain the fiasco himself? And how poorly organized was the Chile trip - with which Errazuriz as a senior adviser to the pope and former Archbishop of Santiago ought to have occupied himself - that the bishops' conference did not have a spokesman or responsible media officer to handle what everyone knew was already a very explosive situation regarding Barros?]

Errazuriz also blamed summer vacations for the low turnout, as well as the selection of venues that were far from city centers and not serviced by public transportation. [Again, did Errazuriz never bother to inform himself of the arrangements being made for the trip which surely started months ago? If he did he might have pointed out these not unimportant details to the organizers so appropriate changes could be made. Fine time to point these out after the trip!... It all goes back, really, to the man who chose Errazuriz to be one of his top advisers, the same man who also chose Cardinal Marx to represent Europe in the Council of 9. A man is judged significantly by the company he keeps. Add Errazuriz to the growing list of Bergoglio henchmen who ought to be blacklisted in the hierarchy.]

Continuous harrassments of Chinese Catholics
'would take volumes to narrate', says Cardinal Zen
An interview with the outspoken retired bishop of Hong Kong about
this crucial moment in the history of the Catholic Church in China.
by Anthony E. Clark

March 9, 2018

I would like the express my gratitude to Cardinal Zen for agreeing to answer a few questions for Catholic World Report at this crucial moment in the history of the Catholic Church in China.

Over the past several days we corresponded about pressing issues related to the current Sino-Vatican negotiations that are underway. I first met Cardinal Zen several years ago at his humble residence with the Salesians in Hong Kong, where we spent more than an hour discussing the state of China’s Church.

Since then, Catholics in China have encountered new pressures from state authorities. Their situation has become even more unpredictable, as the Holy See appears to be redirecting its strategy in China in directions that have left much of China’s Church confused and wondering if Rome is about to strike a deal with a government that has proven itself hostile to religious belief.

Time and again China’s government has employed dishonesty and manipulation to attain its ends. The communist intellectual Leon Trotsky once wrote, “Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.” In light of the apparently quickly-shifting sands of Sino-Vatican negotiations, His Eminence Cardinal Zen has offered some insightful remarks about the present status of China’s Church.

Cardinal Zen, in other recent interviews, has suggested that Pope Francis is not well-informed regarding the actual circumstances of the Church in China. And so I asked him directly: “Do you think that your recent visit with Pope Francis and the letter you gave him has influenced the current negotiations between the Holy See and Beijing?”

Cardinal Zen appeared pessimistic that his message to the Holy Father has actually been considered; he noted, “It is understandable— Pope Francis does not have very wide and strong experience with communist regimes, and all the time I am trying desperately to give him some insight.”

What is concerning most Catholics — both inside and outside of China— is how the unregistered Chinese faithful are interpreting such recent developments as unregistered (“underground”) bishops being asked by the Holy See to step down and guarantee their obedience to state-supported, and excommunicated, bishops, in order to appease China’s authorities. When asked if the “underground” Catholic community in China feels betrayed by the Vatican’s overtures to Beijing, Cardinal Zen answered simply, “Definitely.”

I told His Eminence that I recently returned from a month living in Beijing, and that I had gathered from discussions with registered clergy that the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association is interested in an agreement with the Holy See in order to facilitate a papal visit to China.

To this, he remarked, “Obviously, the people in the Patriotic Association feel happy that their illegitimate position shall be legitimized, and they surely would also welcome a possible visit by the Pope. But the visit will be manipulated by the Government and it will cause much sadness in the people of the underground community, who will not be able to see the Pope (just as what happened in Cuba).”

Given Cardinal Zen’s view that the current Holy See has adopted an adverse approach to dealing with China’s authorities, I asked if the current Vatican Ostpolitik with China is undermining the work done previously by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. More to the point, I asked if the current pontificate is contradicting the aims expressed in Benedict XVI’s 2007 letter to the Chinese Church.

“Even under Pope Benedict XVI the Roman Curia wasted his many efforts to help the Church in China,” replied Cardinal Zen. “The difference is in that while Pope Benedict XVI knew very well the situation, the people in the Vatican did not follow his directives, and now while Pope Francis does not know much about the Chinese communists and is so optimistic, the people around him are pushing him further in his optimism, and avoiding informing him about the very negative side of the present reality.”

American Catholics have recently seen photographs of Party officials destroying the crosses and bell towers of a Xinjiang church. I asked: Does it appear to you that the previous sacrifices of China’s faithful Catholics and their current struggles are being adequately acknowledged by the Holy See?

“Tearing down the crosses and demolishing churches are only the more visible episodes,” he insisted, “the continuous harassments and humiliations [endured by China’s Catholics] would take volumes to be narrated.”

In the end, one discerns that Cardinal Zen is calling for a more informed, measured, and cautious approach by Pope Francis and his advisors in the Roman Curia. Much is at stake for those in both communities of the Chinese Church. For the registered community, a Sino-Vatican agreement could mean a sense of legitimacy and Vatican endorsement, while for the unregistered community such an agreement could potentially mean estrangement, fear, and more tears.

The Russian Orthodox author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who understood communism well, once wrote: “The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism’s crimes. When they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them.”

Cardinal Zen has spent much of his life as a priest and bishop in mainland China and Hong Kong witnessing and hearing about the continued suffering of the Chinese Church since 1949, and it is clear that he is expressing his views with such adamancy today because he is attempting to insert a voice of warning into a dialogue that appears to have forgotten what communism had done, and is doing, to the Church in China. [Not to mention what it did to the Churches of Eastern Europe that were in the Communist stranglehold for decades - and the clear failure of the Vatican's Ostpolitik of accommodation based on the erroneous belief that one can negotiate about religion significantly with an officially godless ideology and the governments that enforce it.]


Mr. Clark, a professor of history who has made it his life's work to document and report on the state of the Church in China today - and tracing developments back to when the Communists took power in China in 1948 - wrote this invaluable background article to accompany the interview with Cardinal Zen.

The Catholic Church in China:
Historical context and the current situation
Chinese Catholics — 'official' and 'underground' — view themselves as part of 'one suffering Catholic Church'.
Will the Vatican’s reported deal with Beijing help or hinder those struggling to practice the faith there?
by Anthony E. Clark

March 9, 2018

Not since the Boxer Uprising in 1900 has world media given as much attention to Christians in China as it has in recent weeks. One can barely keep up with the deluge of reports and articles, not to mention numerous works of punditry and commentary, attempting to explain the Vatican’s recent negotiations with China’s government.

It brings to mind a warning from Marshall McLuhan, who once wrote: “All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.”(1) That is to say that media accounts, however necessary, are not always reliable sources of information, especially when they are laden with rumors and speculation. Only those who are in the private meetings in Rome with Pope Francis and his followers are entirely privy to what, precisely, is being discussed between the Holy See and China’s authorities.

But what is certain is that negotiations are indeed underway, and that leaders of the Catholic Church are negotiating with a government that is communist and a state that has openly professed its aim to eradicate religious faith, having time and again persecuted Christians. Anyone who believes that China’s Communist Party has changed its attitudes and behaviors toward Christianity [is just stupidly playing deaf and blind] should pay closer attention to what has transpired over the past several months.

Now is an appropriate time to provide some basic historical information about the Church in China, and to provide some remarks on the present Sino-Vatican negotiations between Beijing and the Holy See.

Allow me to preface my comments with a disclaimer: I have spent many years of my life living in China, and I deeply love and admire the culture, history, and people I have encountered there. That said, I have sat on church doorsteps in Beijing and many other places listening to story after story of how much suffering the communist party has inflicted upon China’s Christian faithful.

I once sat in a small room, which was probably wired by the state authorities, while a holy bishop whispered in my ear accounts of brutal persecution committed against Catholics in China, both during the Maoist era (1949-1976) and in recent decades.

In 2013, I wrote an essay for Catholic World Report about how communist soldiers under the command of Chairman Mao Zedong’s (1893-1976) top general, Zhu De (1886-1976), seized a Trappist monastery in 1947 near Beijing, at an area called Yangjiaping. What I did not mention in that article was that some of the very men who took the monks on a death march, leading to the the deaths of 33 holy monks, stood near Chairman Mao at the gate of Tiananmen and founded the People’s Republic of China only two years later.

Having taught Chinese history — especially the history of Christianity in China —for two decades, it has become evident to me that a simple timeline of China’s Catholic history can be helpful for readers seeking to understand the issues that continue to define China’s Church.

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A timeline of Catholicism in China

635: According to a stone monument erected around Xi’an in AD 781, the Syrian missionary Alopen was the first Christian to arrive in China in AD 635; he was a monk of the Church of the East (Nestorian). (2) These Eastern monks were later competitors with Catholics in the field of Christian evangelization.

1294: The first Catholic Church is established in China by the Italian Franciscan friar Giovanni da Montecorvino, OFM, (1247-1328). Montedorvino was China’s first Catholic bishop, who built his cathedral in 1299 in Khanbaliq, known today as Beijing.3

1368: The Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) collapses and Catholicism is forbidden in China. Thus, the Catholic Church disappears in East Asia.

1582: China’s most famous missionary, Matteo Ricci, SJ (1552-1610), inaugurates the Jesuit mission during the end of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Ricci published several popular Chinese books to promote Catholicism in China, the most famous of which was his Tianzhu shiyi, or the “True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven,” which he published in 1603.

1685: The first Chinese priest, Gregory Luo Wenzao, OP (1616-1691), is consecrated a Roman Catholic bishop in China. It was not until 1926 that other Chinese priests were consecrated bishops.

1692: Emperor Kangxi (1654-1722) publishes an edict that expresses toleration of Christianity in China. The edict stated that “all temples dedicated to the Lord of heaven, in whatever place they may be found, ought to be preserved, and that it may be permitted to all who wish to worship this God to enter these temples, offer him incense, and perform the ceremonies practiced according to ancient custom by the Christians. Therefore, let no one henceforth offer them any opposition.” (4)

1706-1723: Emperor Kangxi retracts his support of Catholicism because of the Catholic debates over whether the traditional Chinese rites may be allowed for Christians. Most Roman Catholic missionaries are expelled from China.

1898-1900: Approximately 30,000 Christians are massacred during an uprising against foreigners and Chinese converts to Christianity called the “Boxer Uprising.” The most intense area of anti-Christian persecution occurred in Shanxi province under the orders of the local governor, Yuxian (1842-1901).(5)

1926: As China’s missionary bishops would not agree to consecrate Chinese bishops, Pope Pius XI (1867-1939) invites six Chinese priests to Rome and ordains them himself in St. Peter’s Basilica. (6) Additional vicariates were then created in China that were administered by these Chinese bishops and Chinese clergy.

1949: Chairman Mao Zedong announces the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949 before a massive crowd assembled at Tiananmen. There are approximately three million Chinese Catholics and one million Protestants who are forced to accept this new regime based upon atheistic communism.

1950-1955: All foreign missionaries and non-Chinese Christian teachers are systematically exiled from China. Roman Catholic nuns and priests are forced to leave China, while many are arrested as “ideological saboteurs.”

1954: 138 Chinese Protestant leaders issue a document entitled “The Christian Manifesto,” which inaugurated the “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” (TSPM). This established the so-called “Three-Selfs” model for Chinese Christians: self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation. One of the founders of this movement was Pastor Y. T. Wu (Wu Yaozong, 1893-1979), who sought to harmonize Christianity with Mao Zedong and the Communist Party.

1955: The bishop of Shanghai, Ignatius Gong Pinmei (1901-2000), is arrested along with the bishops of Taizhou, Hankou, Guangzhou, and Baoding, and more than a thousand Catholics. They were imprisoned for long terms — Bishop Gong was imprisoned for 30 years — because of their loyalty to the pope. (7)

1957: The People’s Republic of China establishes the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA) along similar contours as the Protestant-founded TSPM. In response, Pope Pius XII (1876-1958) issued his encyclical, Ad Apostolorum Principis, on July 29, 1958, in which he condemned the activities of the CCPA and declared bishops who participated in consecrating new bishops selected by the CCPA to be excommunicated.

1966-1976: The Cultural Revolution is orchestrated by Chairman Mao Zedong, and Catholic priests, nuns, faithful, and churches are attacked by communist youth called Red Guards. Churches are gutted of their religious symbolism, seized by the government, and refurbished for secular uses. Unknown thousands of Catholics are imprisoned, executed, or sent to labor camps.

1981: China’s officials remove the requirement for Chinese Catholics to swear independence from Rome and the Holy See, though the pope is only allowed to be viewed by Chinese Catholics as a “spiritual leader” who has no administrative authority over the Chinese Church.

1982: Including the pope’s name in the Canon of Holy Mass is allowed after decades of being illegal in China. Until this year Chinese priests normally mentioned the pope’s name silently, as they offered Mass according to the 1962 missal and intoned the Canon silently while facing liturgical east.

1994: The state passes the “Regulations Concerning Places of Religious Worship,” which requires all places of worship to be registered with the government.

2000: Pope St. John Paul II (1920-2005) canonizes 120 martyrs of China, including 87 who were ethnically Chinese. The Chinese government responded by publishing virulent criticisms of the Vatican’s “interference” with Chinese affairs, and accused several saints of sexual impropriety. (8)

2014: Local Chinese party officials in several provinces order the removal of crosses from Christian churches, and some are completely demolished. The party’s explanation is that these Christian churches are “unregistered” or “unruly.”

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The Catholic Church in China: The numbers
It is impossible to assess exactly how many Catholics there are in China, since there remains a very large number of unregistered “underground” faithful; scholars estimate that unregistered Chinese Catholics account for one-third to two-thirds of the total population of Catholics actively attending Mass in the People’s Republic of China.

According to the Holy Spirit Study Center in Hong Kong, there are approximately 12 million Catholics in China, which includes both registered and unregistered faithful. In informal scholarly meetings, however, estimates range from 10 to 30 million Catholics in China.

Perhaps the most contentious issue today regarding the Church in China is the situation of its bishops; this is so because the state authorities have insisted that all priests eligible to be ordained bishops be selected by the party-run Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA), rather than the pope.
- In China today there are around seven bishops who are not in communion with the pope, and are recognized only by the CCPA.
- There are around 60 bishops who are both in full communion with the Holy Father and are recognized by the CCPA.
- And finally, there are around 30 bishops who are recognized only by the Holy See, and operate as “underground” prelates in constant danger of arrest.

I intentionally use the word “around” when providing these numbers, because precise accounts are difficult to arrive at due to the somewhat chaotic administrative structure of the Church in China. There were many bishops who were clandestinely consecrated during the Maoist era, for example, and the Holy See was unable at that time to identify how many bishops existed in China, though their secret ordinations were considered both valid and licit since they were conducted under a state of ecclesial emergency.

What this means is that the Vatican must rely on Chinese state numbers, which are unreliable, and “underground” numbers, which are dangerous to circulate, in order to assess the demographic landscape of the Chinese Church.

The “aboveground” and “underground” churches
The most common question I receive about the Church in China is, “Aren’t there two communities in China: a ‘true Church’ that exists underground and a ‘false church’ that is run by the communist party?”

This assumption has been disseminated for several decades, and it has served more to confuse than clarify the reality of one, but somewhat divided, Catholic Church in China. There is no such thing as a “state-run Catholic Church” in China; there is a state-monitored association, the CCPA, that was established to oversee how Catholics worship.

The tension in China, if there is much tension at all nowadays, between the so-called “underground” and “aboveground” Catholic communities has not been about whether one community is more or less “Catholic” than the other, but rather around the question of “selling out” to state influence over the day-to-day operations of Catholic life — especially regarding the issue of how bishops are selected and ordained.

Chinese Catholics view themselves as part of “one suffering Catholic Church” that is still working out how its two communities can come to an agreement about how to best practice the Catholic faith under a communist government.

Few non-Chinese know that priests and bishops in many — perhaps most— Roman Catholic dioceses in China collaborate in the administration and evangelization of their regions. One example will serve to illustrate how this operates. In the diocese of Guiyang, the state-recognized ordinary of the diocese was Andrew Wang Chongyi (1919-2017), who died last year as the administrator of the diocese at the age of 97. The unregistered, “underground” bishop during Wang’s service was Bishop Augustine Hu Daguo (1921-2011).

When I met these two bishops—one “aboveground” and the other “underground” — I merely had to cross the hall at the bishops’ residence; both men lived in the same building and served their respective communities in a spirit of fraternal collaboration.

In addition, it is common that the CCPA offices attached to diocesan chanceries or cathedrals are a diversion and are not used for any official Catholic business. CCPA offices are often identified with exterior signs, but those entering the front door discover that the interior space is merely a storage area. That is, the CCPA is in many places little more than a sign, and is essentially ignored by the bishop and his clergy.

Even the CCPA office at the cathedral in Kunming, administered by the excommunicated bishop Joseph Ma Yinglin, is nothing more than a sign with an empty room inside. Again, it is important to know that the “line” between the sanctioned and unsanctioned Catholic communities is often nonexistent, and that even the state-run CCPA is often no more than a façade at the officially-sanctioned cathedrals of Roman Catholic dioceses.

China’s Church under Pope Francis
After Pope Francis’s election in 2013, China’s Catholics wondered if the situation for them might edge closer to normalization. A Sino-Vatican rapprochement seemed closer than ever in 2014, when the Chinese government allowed Pope Francis to fly over Chinese airspace. Yet when Pope Francis invited China’s hardline communist leader, Xi Jinping, to visit Rome, Xi refused the invitation.

The pope’s continued attempts at reconciliation with China’s government have been met, at best, with sardonic appreciation. Xi Jinping’s policy vis-à-vis religion has been consistent and effective. During his address to the Central Conference on United Front Work in May 2015, Xi proposed the “sinicization of all religion” (中國化方向) in China. President Xi argued that the party should tighten its control over religion, which he suggests is “a dangerous political threat to party legitimacy.” (9)

China’s Catholics are now witnessing what “sinicization” — that is, conforming to Chinese characteristics — looks like for churches. A recent article published by UCAnews on March 1, featured images of cranes removing the Christian symbols from a Catholic church in Xinjiang province. Local party officials ordered workers to remove and destroy the crosses and bell towers of the church because these symbols were “incompatible with sinicization.” (10)

Pope Francis’s current maneuverings in China appear to align with the Church’s previous success at attaining ecclesial independence in Vietnam under its communist government. But China is much larger than Vietnam, and Xi Jinping has a more resolved anti-religious view than the recent officials in Vietnam. To be fair, Pope Francis admires China, and certainly hopes that his strategies will improve matters for Chinese Catholics. In a 2016 interview with Francesco Sisci, he stated:

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For me, China has always been a reference point of greatness. A great country. But more than a great country, a great culture, with inexhaustible wisdom. For me, as a boy, whenever I read anything about China, it had the capacity to inspire my admiration. (11)

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[Of course, he would say things like that. Who knows if they are true, or are merely pandering statements? I would dare anyone to look back into Bergoglio's life to see if he had ever expressed his attitude to China before he became pope!]

No one can doubt the sincerity of his sentiments towards this great culture [I'm sorry, but I do], but one wonders, as does Cardinal Joseph Zen, if the Holy See’s present negotiations in China might be imprudent and, perhaps, might engender more pain and confusion than clarity and reconciliation.

The Holy See has entered into an intricate situation in China by ordering two unsanctioned bishops to render their obedience to two bishops who are not in formal communion with the pope, and who are in fact excommunicated. Unless these bishops were indeed accepted into communion with the Holy See in secret beforehand, the Holy See has contradicted the stipulations set out by Pope Benedict XVI in his letter to the Chinese Church in 2007. In his letter, Benedict XVI insisted that:

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Concerning bishops whose consecrations took place without the pontifical mandate yet respecting the Catholic rite of episcopal ordination, the resulting problems must always be resolved in the light of the principles of Catholic doctrine. Their ordination – as I have already said – is illegitimate but valid, just as priestly ordinations conferred by them are valid, and sacraments administered by such bishops and priests are likewise valid. Therefore, the faithful, taking this into account, where the Eucharistic celebration and the other sacraments are concerned, must, within the limits of the possible, seek bishops and priests who are in communion with the pope: nevertheless, where this cannot be achieved without grave inconvenience, they may, for the sake of their spiritual good, turn also to those who are not in communion with the pope. (12)

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In other words, directing Bishops Peter Zhuang Jianjian and Joseph Guo Xijin to step down in obedience to two excommunicated bishops is to require Chinese Catholics to receive the sacraments from illicit prelates when licit ones are already serving the Catholic communities in their dioceses. This has caused both bewilderment and pain among the Chinese faithful, especially those who worship in the unregistered community. Many perceive what appears to be the Holy See’s betrayal of faithful Catholics. [And who is to say that the sacrifice of legitimate bishops to pander to the Chinese would be limited only to those two bishops? How many others may already be in line as sacrificial pawns until Bergoglio gets a signed agreement from the Chinese - for whatever that agreement might be worth? And also, "You really want us to invite you to China Well, here's what else you would have to do!" You think he won't continue to kowtow all he can to realize his ambition for yet another papal 'first'?]


I recently spoke with a bishop I deeply admire about the Vatican’s current negotiations in China, and he noted, “The Holy See must consider
long-term realities – perhaps it knows what it is doing.” Perhaps.

Perhaps I should be more prayerful than pessimistic regarding the Sino-Vatican negotiations now underway; there are many bishops and
media sites that are more optimistic than I am. But, for the first time in my life as a Catholic scholar of China, I cannot help but ask, “Quo vadis?”

Seminarians outside Burgos, Spain, 1953. Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Letter from his parish priest to
a seminarian thinking of leaving seminary
by Fr. Richard G. Cipolla

March 11, 2018

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Dear James:

I received your letter, and I must admit that it saddened me. I shall be sure to pray for you when I celebrate Mass. I am happy that you have not made a definite decision about whether to leave seminary. When you made the decision to enter Seminary from our parish I was — as you remember — deeply happy.

I read your letter several times carefully. Some of your perceived problems are a normal part of adjusting to seminary life. But one part of your letter struck me deeply, and I quote it back to you:

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I cannot be myself here in the seminary. I am always pretending to be someone else. I feel like I am playing a game with the rector and the other priests here, putting on a façade in order to please them, or so I do not get into ‘trouble’. This exhausts me especially spiritually but also physically.

I came to seminary, as you know, because for me I cannot conceive of anything else I want to do except being a priest for the rest of my life. And also as you know, at the very center of that desire is my love for the Traditional Mass. It was in your parish I discovered this treasure and it was serving that Mass for two years that deepened my understanding of the priesthood and what the Mass is all about. It is that love that I cannot show here.

I have to suppress my love for the Traditional Mass and never let it show, for the faculty would see that in a negative way and that would affect my future in the diocese and may even prevent me from being ordained. The other guys here who have the same love for the Traditional Mass have the common attitude to go with the current flow, keep your heard down, smile, never let them know what you are thinking until you are ordained. Then it is safe to come out of the liturgical closet so to speak.

Even writing that last sentence dismays me that I should say such a thing. So I ask myself: Do I want to spend three more years not being honest about who I am and what drives me? Will not this have a bad effect on me personally and if I am ordained will not this way of living, this self-denial in a deep sense, will this not continue and make my priesthood a sham?

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James, this attitude of faking who one is to “get through” seminary is a recent phenomenon, recent in the sense of after the Second Vatican Council. Or I should say recent, as after the invention of the Novus Ordo Mass, and especially after Summorum Pontificum, the magna carta of the Liturgy.

I use that term “invention” certainly not in the relatively archaic sense, such as in the phrase “the Invention of the Holy Cross” which is the older title of the feast of the “Finding of the Holy Cross’ by St. Helena. The verb “inventio” means “to find”, to “come upon” something that is already there. The English verb “to invent” means the opposite: to bring forth something entirely new. I will not bore you with the history of meanings of words like revolution whose meaning bears little link with its original meaning. We live in an age in which clear meanings of words is not part of the fabric of the world in which we live.

You should go to Arezzo to see the frescoes painted by Piero della Francesca that depict in a most amazing way the miracle of the finding of the True Cross. Only art that is based in faith can depict the truth of the Tradition. It is Catholic art and music that have been one of the most powerful ways that the Tradition has been handed down. So many young people attend the live concerts of works like the Monteverdi Vespers and the Mozart Requiem in New York because of the high aesthetic and spiritual quality of this music.

But those who are “in charge” of the Church have not a clue about the power of this music to open up secular hearts to the beauty of the Catholic faith. Instead we have pseudo-Protestant sentimental songs — not hymns — sung at most parishes at Mass. ‘Twas was not always so.

Those who are in charge of your seminary and those who teach you there, for the most part, are positivists. They believe or claim to believe — and this is a novelty in Catholic thought — that whatever happens in the history of the Catholic Church is the work of the Holy Spirit. For them to admit that the liturgical experiment after the Second Vatican Council has failed would be to shake their way of thinking about the Church and its relationship to faith.

When you combine the voluntary blindness of the positivist with an understanding of the papacy that borders on what I call pope-olotry – quite a long way from the sparse definition of infallibility defined at Vatican I — and combined with the attendant wrongheaded “pastoralism” that confuses Jesus’s Gospel mandate with soothing people and making them happy, you have in a nutshell the current situation.

The current episcopacy and seminary professors will not acknowledge that the Roman Rite was destroyed and the Novus Ordo that replaced it by fiat — a power that Paul VI did not have (cf. Benedict XVI) — is something other than the Traditional Roman Rite of Mass.

If they were more courageous they would read Bugnini’s amazingly frank description of how the Novus Ordo Mass came into being, what he calls the “reform” of the Roman Rite. If they were really interested they would also read liturgical scholars like Jungmann whose hatred of the Roman Rite was based on his own vision of what the Eucharist should be rather than what it is.

The Roman Rite is not a document that can be amended based on the results of “scholarship”, the conclusions of which change with every generation. The Roman Rite is a living organism and is of Divine origin. Not for nothing do the Orthodox call their rite of Mass “The Divine Liturgy”. The Liturgy is something there and given. It is for each of us to enter into what we have been given by the Church from the Apostolic Age through the centuries.

The original purpose of the Liturgical Movement was to educate Catholics in their understanding of and appreciation for the Mass as a part of the given-ness of what it means to be Catholic. That changed when those heading that movement decided that they would redo the liturgy in their own image.

A friend of mine complains about the term “organic development” of the Roman Rite because this has no concrete meaning. I tend to agree with him at one level. The term is used to contrast the development of the Mass through the centuries with the manufactured (literally) Novus Ordo.

Never in the history of the Church before the time after the Second Vatican Council has the Roman Rite been amended by a committee of liturgists in a particular time in the Church, an age marked by a false optimism and sentimentality.

So when Benedict XVI talked about “organic development” of the Roman Rite in contrast with the contrived reforms after Vatican II, he was searching for a phrase that would give a “picture” of development over the centuries that was largely hidden and came from many sources.

For me it is the hiddenness of the development — despite scholarly work in liturgical texts of the past — that the word “organic” is trying to convey. Whether something entered into the Rite in the fourth century, the eighth century, or the thirteenth century is not relevant to the integrity of the Rite itself.

Pope Pius XII himself famously warned against archaeologism in liturgical matters in his Encyclical Mediator Dei. The irony is that it was he who allowed Bugnini et al. to begin their dis-formation of the Roman Rite based on archaeologism and scholarly prejudice and contempt for the Roman Rite under the umbrella of pastoralism. [This is an error by Pius XII that his most fervent admirers - those who think he was the last 'genuine pope' - choose to ignore, especially when they are denouncing Bugnini and the Novus Ordo - but it happened, and liturgists like Fr Hunwicke always bewail the infelicitous - and, they think, largely uncalled for - changes that Pius XII authorized especially in the Lenten and Easter liturgies.]

I am sorry I have gone on with all of this, but part of the problem is that your generation knows nothing about what happened. In a way that is good, for when you first encountered the Traditional Roman Mass, you did so without carrying the baggage of the 60’s, 70s, and 80s, that my generation and the one below me carries.

You saw the Mass for what it is: the beauty of the worship of God in the re-presentation of the Sacrifice of Christ to his Father in which Holy Silence—the only possible answer to the Ineffable—lies at its very heart. Your discovery of the Mass is the same as that of so many of young priests today. It is true of the servers in my parish. It is true of the many young couples with kids who come to the Solemn Mass. They have discovered the pearl of great price, and it fills them with joy and hope.

So what should you do? I hope you will persevere in seminary. What you are going through is a form of suffering, and I would say it is suffering for the Church. But there has to come a time in the near future when young men in seminary and young priests in parishes will have to speak up and challenge the establishment that is holding the rickety Novus Ordo structure up.

Objective data such as the precipitous decline in regular Mass attendance after the Second Vatican Council to the present time seems to have no effect on the positivists. The lack of vocations to the priesthood and religious life (except in Traditional orders) seems not to bother them too much.

But the gentle and polite assertion on the part of a good number of seminarians that they have the right as Catholics to have the celebration of the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite on a regular basis in the seminary will have a real effect for the better.

And just as importantly, the young priests who have found the pearl of great price must gently and politely inform their pastors that they have the right to celebrate Mass ad orientem, as the rubrics of the Novus Ordo clearly envision. There is nothing in the GIRM nor in the rubrics of the Novus Ordo that demand celebration of the Mass facing the people. Mass facing the people is an innovation that has undermined the very understanding of what the Mass truly is. This challenge must be made, in charity, yes, but also with manly firmness.

In the end, all I can tell you is this. I am the most unlikely man to be a priest, for so many reasons. And yet I am. And for this I am most grateful to God. And this gives me a happiness in my heart and soul that, despite the state of the Church today, lies at the very heart of my priesthood.

The priesthood is the greatest calling for a man. Marriage and family are wonderful and “normal” and are the foundation of the reality of the Church. But the deepest imitation of Christ is to be a priest who offers the Sacrifice and himself every day on the altar for his people. That is my prayer for you. But if you should decide otherwise, my love for you will not diminish in any way.

Oremus pro invicem. (Let us pray for each other).

Your pastor and spiritual friend in Christ.

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Right,the parents of baby Alfie.

When 'a supplement of prudence'
would help against misuse
of what this pope says or writes
Translated from

March 11, 2018

Much discussion has been going on about a judgment by the High Court of Justice in London last February 20 authorizing the doctors at the Alder Hay Children's Hospital in Liverpool to allow baby Alfie Evans to die by suspending his breathing support and nourishment.

It has become controversial for Catholics because Judge Hayden, to justify his decision, cited, among other things, Pope Francis’s message sent to Mons. Vincenzo Paglia of the Pontifical Academy for Life, to be conveyed to a regional meeting of the World Medical Assocation on end-of-life issues, a meeting organized by Mons. Paglia’s academy at the Vatican last November.

Without getting into the merits of the question [euthanasia], I believe it is an opportunity to reflect on this aspect: A civilian judge cites the words of the pope to justify a decision that goes against the moral teaching of the Church. How is that possible? Was the pope’s message not in line with the magisterium of the Church?

It would seem to be, if one reads his text, in which he refers to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, to a CDF declaration on euthanasia in May 1980, and to an address on the subject by Pius XIII in 1957. So the pope’s message did reiterate some firm aspects of Catholic morality. Though one might perhaps remonstrate with a statement towards the end of the message, in which he writes: “Within democratic societies, these sensitive issues must be addressed calmly, seriously and thoughtfully, in a way open to finding, to the extent possible, agreed solutions, also on the legal level.” But let that be.

Nevertheless, the pope’s message has been used to authorize an action condemned by Catholic morality. Was this a case of abuse on the part of Judge Hayden, or did the pope’s message effectively constitute an assist for that decision?

It seems to me that objectively (without getting into intentions, which I am not capable of judging), it was an assist. Why? Because at a time when the debate on euthanasia is particularly heated in society, the pope in his message avoided addressing euthanasia per se, but instead chose to address ‘overzealous treatment’. Not that morality should not also ponder this issue [how much treatment of difficult cases is justifiably necessary and realistic, and when can such treatment be stopped with moral justification?], but at this point, I don’t think this is the question of the day. Of course, what the pope wrote about overzealous treatment was correct, but it was not relevant to the major end-of-life issue today which is euthanasia.

Some will say, “But the pope in his message does reaffirm the Church’s position on euthanasia 'which is always wrong, in that the intent of euthanasia is to end life and cause death'.” True, but it is a statement made almost en passant, in a context where he is exclusively addressing overzealous treatment and the ‘proportionality of care’. Even his reference to the Catechism bears this out. The Catechism dedicates four paragraphs to euthanasia (2276-2279), but the pope only cites #2278 which – nota bene – refers to overzealous treatment.

It seems obvious to me that such a message would have provided the English judge with a beachhead on which to make the decision he did. Indeed, I think we find here an illustration of one of the cases anticipated by the pope in Evangelii gaudium:

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There are times when the faithful, in listening to completely orthodox language, take away something alien to the authentic Gospel of Jesus Christ, because that language is alien to their own way of speaking to and understanding one another. With the holy intent of communicating the truth about God and humanity, we sometimes give them a false god or a human ideal which is not really Christian. In this way, we hold fast to a formulation while failing to convey its substance. This is the greatest danger.

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So sometimes, as the pope himself points out, it is not enough to simply reiterate correct statements, when such statements are not placed in the right context or are not made at the right time and without taking into account what the recipients of the message may effectively perceive. In which case, a ‘supplement of prudence’ would really help.

One cardinal speaks up for Alfie Evans,
but we have not heard from the pope
Translated from


After Charlie Gard, we now have the case of Alfie Evans, 22 months, afflicted with an incurable disease, for whom the High Court of London authorized a planned death by suspending his breathing support and his nourishment.

Like Charlie’s parents, Tom Evans and Kate James, both Catholics, are resisting the execution of the sentence on Alfie every way they can. A tide of prayers and appeals has been generated in their support, many of the appeals personally addressed to Pope Francis.

In fact, there are two upsetting elements in this story.
- The first is that to justify his decision, Judge Anthony Hayden cited a passage from a November 2017 letter of the Pope to Mons. Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life.
- The second is that not a word has come from the pope or any other Vatican authority to protest the instrumental use of the pope’s words to justify the death sentence for Baby Alfie.

To make maters worse, Mons. Paglia himself, when questioned by the magazine Tempi on March 9, justified Hayden’s decision in toto, even his use of the pope’s words. Moreover, Paglia also justified the recent end-of-life law passed in Italy - contrary to the disapproval expressed by the president of the Italian bishops’ conference, Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti – citing two ‘authorities’ dear to Paglia who support the new law.

One is the Executive Council of the Union of Catholic Jurists in Italy, headed by Prof. Francesco D’Agostino; and the other is the study group on bioethics of the journal of the Jesuits in Milan, led by Fr. Carlo Casalone, former Jesuit provincial superior in Italy, and Maurizio Chiodi, the moral theologian who made headlines recently for his ‘re-reading’ of Humanae vitae, which he says,
approves the use of artificial contraceptives.

On the other hand, only one voice – rather marginal, at that – has been raised in the hierarchy against the London sentence and the exploitation of the pope’s words. It is that of Cardinal Elio Sgreccia, 90, who headed the Pontifical Academy for Life from 2005-2008, and currently its only honorary member, even though he is certainly not of the same mind as the Academy which was completely overhauled by the pope, with many of its new members open supporters of abortion and/or contraception.

On March 8, Cardinal Sgreccia published on his blog an article entitled "The gift of life" written by Fr. Roberto Colombo, professor of biochemistry at the Catholic University’s Rome Faculty of Medicine and Surgery. It is a commentary opposite to that of Paglia and denounces the wrongness whereby the London judge cited the pope’s words to support his decision. [I shall not reproduce and translate it here because Colombo's argument simply cites the pope’s words against overzealous treatment, without Fr. Scalese’s observation that euthanasia was only mentioned once in passing in the entire message.]

Marco Tosatti's reaction to the latest outrage from Paglia takes a wider perspective...

Mons. Paglia, Alfie Evans, and the pope’s predilection
for close advisers who have a deplorable past
Translated from

March 11, 2018

The deplorable interview given by Mons. Vincenzo Paglia to Tempi on the Alfie Evans case struck me hard.
- Not so much for the statements he made – which were not surprising from someone who has eulogized the 'spirit of Pannella’ [Italy’s longtime Radical Party leader and proactive advocate of all things anti-Catholic from abortion on demand to homosexuality and same-sex union, who died last year].
- Not so much because the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life should be a priori suspicious when the pope’s words are used to decree someone’s death.
- Not even so much because, perhaps mistakenly, I observe a vein of superficiality about the interview (and I apologize if I am wrong), when other persons have expressed themselves with far more prudence and profundity on the subject – after all, we are talking here of a human life, aren’t we?
- Not so much because a man who may not be an expert on bioethics but is certainly well-experienced and astute as Paglia ought to have known (or did he know) that the Supreme Court is to review the verdict, and therefore, there are those who could use his words this time to decide that baby Alfie’s parents do not have the right to seek, even if in vain, something or someone who could give them some hope for their child.

No, Paglia’s words struck me forcibly because they came almost at the same time as statements made by Cardinal Errauuriz on the pope’s recent trip to Chile and on the Barros case. The cardinal wrote a letter to all the bishops of Latin America to explain that the pope’s trip to Chile was not a flop but ‘highly positive’.

He took no responsibility whatsoever for the Karadima scandal nor for that resulting from the pope’s nomination of Mons. Juan Barros as Bishop of Osorno despite protests from the Catholics of Osorno and accusations made against Barros by those who had successfully lodged accusations against Fr. Karadima. All this despite the fact that Errazuriz himself had decided to shelve the original charges against Karadima, saying he did not believe the victims. [And that he is on the pope's advisory council of 9 cardinals, and ought to have advised him on the Barros nomination and how insisting on it was really counter-productive.]

What does this have to do with Paglia, you may well ask. It’s all of a piece.
- Because Errazuriz, like Paglia, is one of the pope’s good friends and advisers.
- As is Cardinal Mahony, former Archbishop of Los Angeles who had to leave office because of the serious cover-ups he engineered for some sex-offender priests.
- As is Cardinal Danneels, former Archbishop of Brussels, who was documented on tape seeking to cover up for a Belgian bishop who was abusing his own nephew;
- or even the late Cardinal Murphy O’Connor, former Archbishop of London, who had a pending case filed by laymen with the CDF for mismanagement of abuse cases.

The point is that all these persons are advisers to this pope, and (with the exception of Paglia), were among his grand electors at the time of the Conclave, and thus close to him.

He seems to have a predilection for persons with a colorful past. Think of Mons. Ricca, now spiritual counsel for IOR; or Paglia himself in his previous office as Archbishop of Terni, where he is remembered not just for the homoerotic mural he commissioned for the Cathedral, in which he himself wearing his bishop’s hat, is depicted amid other naked men, but also for the financial mess he left behind. The list could go on, and it’s not a short one.

This Pontiff prides himself in having an excellent memory, and to have always had it. For sure, in matters of governance, persons with a past can present certain advantages – at the very least, one of owing gratitude to the pope for their new privileged status in the Church. But this does not necessarily guarantee their competence for the positions they are named to. Because blind loyalty and competence are not synonymous. On the contrary.

Imagine if Benedict XVI had even just one or two persons close to him who had the questionable character or background of those Bergoglio favors! We would never have heard the end of it. Cardinal Bertone, B16's most unfortunate appointment, may have had issues at the time - mainly doing disservice to Benedict XVI by his bad decisions on corporate matters (luckily caught in time for Benedict to reverse them) - but he was never perceived to be a 'bad' person, just not right for his job. The unfortunate episode of renovating his post-retirement digs at the Vatican with some bills paid for by the Bambino Gesu foundation came while he was Secretary of State for Bergoglio. He tried nothing like that under Benedict XVI, thank God!

Yet here we have a pope who has an entire coterie of courtisans that includes not just pseudo-intellectuals like Spadaro and Tucho Fernandez but shady characters like those mentioned by Tosatti. And everyone in the mainstream media seems to think there is nothing wrong with that, because no one points it out, much less to comment negatively on it.

I've never been comfortable with labels that end in -ist or -istic, so I generally have only a vague sense or none at all about most of the -isms from which the adjectival labels derive. I had to look up the primary and secondary meanings of 'historicism' to interpret what Aldo Maria Valli means when he refers to Bergoglio as being 'historicist'. Those meanings are 1) the theory that social and cultural phenomena are determined by history; and 2) the tendency to regard historical development as the most basic aspect of human existence - because both seem to be illustrated by the examples Valli cites about Bergoglio's 'historicism'.

When the pope is a historicist...
A reflection on Bergoglio's philosophical thoughts
Translated from

March 12, 2018

In the course of these five years of the Bergoglio pontificate, numerous observers have underscored a certain ambiguity in Pope Francis. ['A certain ambiguity' is surely quite an understatement! He is the very epitome of self-serving ambiguity!] Saying something but not really saying it, saying Yes but also No, No but also Yes, because everything, in the end, depends on the circumstances and the conditions of the subject.

It is in this sense, for example, that the pope made the statements he did at the Lutheran Church in Rome [about interfaith communion], but we could say the same, and for more reason, about Chapter 8 of Amoris laetitia on communion for remarried divorcees, where possibilitism [‘anything is possible’] holds sway through the case-by-case solution.

According to Bergoglio’s critics, his fundamental ambivalence (that which in the past I have called the logic of 'not just.. but also’) is a serious limitation because it denies the truth of eternal divine law, it jeopardizes the very idea that good and bad exist objectively, and introduces into the magisterium massive doses of relativism and subjectivism.

These are questions often faced in the discussions about Bergoglio, but the point is that, on balance after five years of his pontificate, one must take account of one fact- which is, that his ambivalence is not just the result of an inadequacy in theological and philosophical matters, but that it is something intended and deliberate in what amounts to a true and proper program of action.

Indications to this effect have become numerous by now, starting with all the times that this pope has underscored the importance of ‘generating processes’, without ever stating the goal of such processes but rather emphasizing the importance of the process itself (of generating processes). [That inherent open-endedness is also found in his very idea of dialog – in which it is the process that counts, not the substance, so no question will ever be resolved, and dialog will be forever ongoing, because it becomes an endless cycle of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, with every synthesis becoming a new thesis generating an antithesis, etc.]

It is a conscious indetermination which goes hand in hand with the attempt to soften doctrine, to make it more malleable, less rigid, and leaving it to the pastors (bishops and priests) to interpret it – the famous ‘discernment’ – on the basis of the ‘real situation’ and the conditions of every single concrete case.

Bergoglio calls it ‘evangelical realism’ to which he contrasts the ‘rigidity’ of those he calls hypocrites, Pharisees, arrogant, legalist and incapable of mercy or love. It seems the idea is completely absent in him that it is precisely having a precise and immutable law that ought to be the first and most important expression of mercy and love, because this allows the individual to orient himself according to given coordinates that will keep him from being waylaid by worldly enticements, from losing himself in sin and from victimizing himself. But that is why [in Bergoglio’s world], discernment is the center, and not the law. That is why mercy is conceived not as a restatement of an eternal truth but as understanding and accompaniment along the path set by history [which mostly has to do with 'feeling good' about oneself, and as with endless dialog, dispensinng 'mercy' makes Bergoglians puff up with their virtuousness! Which would be forgivable, if only they - especially the pope - dispensed their willingness to dialog and their mercy to everyone, not ignore the questioning of those who do not share their views, and be relentlessly merciless towards them in word and thought!]

Now that Bergoglio is entering the sixth year of his pontificate, it is possible to foresee that yet another test bed – after that of communion to remarried divorcees – is being added to the agenda of ‘generating processes’, in which local churches will be left to regulate themselves in how to apply new processes in the absence of any ‘rigid’ discipline.

I refer here to the end of mandatory celibacy for priests which will probably be ‘floated’ at the synod for the youth in October this year, and more properly launched at the coming synod on the Amazon region in October 2019, to deal with the priest shortage in a huge region that, it has been proposed, ought to be supplemented by consecrating viri probati, who could well pave the way for married priests.

Of course, decisions of this kind – as we all saw in the case of communion for remarried divorcees – are profoundly divisive, but even in this case, one must not think of its consequences for the pope. Because in fact, it is all part of a plan, as one might infer from a statement made by the pope to some of his closest collaborators: “It is not to be excluded that I shall pass into history as he who split the Catholic Church”. [Surely, that has got to rank among the most infamous things ever said by any pope who is hereby openly admitting that instead of being the symbol of unity that he ought to be for the Church, he revels instead in being the divider! Yet that statement came and went virtually ignored by all of MSM and picked up at the time by only a handful of orthodox commentators, even if it was an open admission by Bergoglio of his divisiveness. I would call this a scandal by the definition the Church gives to scandal! But how jaded has the media become that it fails to recognize a scandal of this type!]

It is A concept which links to something he has said a number of times, of preferring a church of vicissitudes to a self-referential church. [Where does he get this idee fixe of a self-referential church anyway? The only thing self-referential these days about ‘the Church’ is Bergoglio himself!]

But let us try to look deeper into the centrality attached by the pope to ‘generating processes’. To do that, one must go back to the first of the four postulates he enunciated in Evangelii gaudium, or more precisely, the second postulate according to which ‘time is greater than space’.

That he considers this postulate of primary importance can be deduced from the fact that he speaks of it, not just in EG, but also in Lumen fidei, Laudato si, and AL. What exactly does it mean? [I have always found it an absurd statement, seeing that it has been more than a century that modern minds have accepted the Einteinian postulate that the physical world and everything that takes place in it is a space-time continuum, i.e., that every event has four dimensions - the three x,y,z coordinates of space, plus time as the fourth coordinate - that one can plot every event on a continuum occupying finite space in a finite period of time. Besides, nothing happens in time that does not necessarily occupy space! Events do not take place in a spaceless void – otherwise they are not real events but imaginary.]

Bergoglio explains it in EG:

---

This principle enables us to work slowly but surely, without being obsessed with immediate results. It helps us patiently to endure difficult and adverse situations, or inevitable changes in our plans. It invites us to accept the tension between fullness and limitation, and to give a priority to time. One of the faults which we occasionally observe in sociopolitical activity is that spaces and power are preferred to time and processes. Giving priority to space means madly attempting to keep everything together in the present, trying to possess all the spaces of power and of self-assertion; it is to crystallize processes and presume to hold them back. Giving priority to time means being concerned about initiating processes rather than possessing spaces. Time governs spaces, illumines them and makes them links in a constantly expanding chain, with no possibility of return. What we need, then, is to give priority to actions which generate new processes in society and engage other persons and groups who can develop them to the point where they bear fruit in significant historical events. Without anxiety, but with clear convictions and tenacity.

---

The typical indeterminateness of Bergoglio is evident here, but the statements are also revelatory in what he says about ‘inevitable changes in our plans’, ‘the dynamism of reality’, ‘favoring action’ – we are being taught the primacy of history!

And here’s how he restates the concept in AL: “It is about generating processes rather than dominating space”. With this specification:

---

“Remembering that time is superior to space, I wish to reiterate that not all doctrinal, moral or pastoral discussions have to be resolved by interventions of the Magisterium, Of coure, in the Church, a unity of doctrine and praxis is necessary, but this does not exclude that there exist different ways of interpreting some aspects of doctrine or some consequences deriving from it. This will happen until the Spirit brings us to the complete truth (cf Jn 16:13), that is, when he introduces us perfectly into the mystery of Christ and we can see everything through his eyes. Moreover, every country or region can seek solutions that are more inculturated, attentive to traditions and to to local challenges”.

---

As you can see, Bergoglio continue to operate along the logic of ‘not just… but also’ – i.e., unity of doctrine and praxis is all very well, but so is a diversity of interpretations – as if the two could go hand in hand, even as he affirms that, in practice, one can look for the appropriate solutions within every given situation. So once again, the primacy of history.

In support of which, here is what Bergoglio said in his September 2013 interview with Fr. Antonio Spadaro for La Civilta Cattolica:

---

“God manifests himself in a historical revelation, in time. Time initiates processes, space crystallizes them. God is found in time, in ongoing processes. [But not in space??? What will the pantheists say? Seriously, does Bergoglio not believe that God is everywhere?[ There is no need to favor spaces of power over the time required for processes, no matter how long. We must begin processes rather than occupy space. God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of history. This means favoring actions which generate new dynamics. And it requires patience, waiting”.

---

[And did Spadaro have to quote this embarrassing paragraph at all? Or did he genuinely think it was a masterpiece of philosophical reflection that needed to be shared with the world? Sometimes you have to protect your boss from making a fool of himself, and one way to do that is omit quoting anything in which he does make a fool of himself!]

Every word of the above can be contested [It all sounded like gibberish to me the first time I read it, and more so now – the gibberish of someone who is trying his best to sound ‘profound’ and only ends up being absurdly nonsensical!]. Why, for instance, is the idea of space necessarily linked to power? [But time, too, is very much power - just consider every totalitarian autocrat or regime that has sought to perpetuate itself in history!] But what one must note is that once more, he attributes supreme importance to processes that take place in the course of history. If the only ‘true’ dimension of reality is the passage of time, and if becoming and acting have primacy over being, one must draw the conclusion that Bergoglio is proposing a historicist view of reality and the human experience.

At this point, the poor chronicler of news, the observer of Vatican affairs, gives up. Here, the philosophers must take over. Because how else could one define Bergoglio’s thought if not that he is a historicist? It is not by chance that he told La Civilta Cattolica, “If a person says he has encountered God with total certainty and having any uncertainty at all, then something is wrong. When one has the answers to all questions, that is the proof that God is not with him”. [AHA! But is it not this same Bergoglio who has claimed that everything he has said and done as pope has been directly ‘suggested’ if not dictated to him by the Holy Spirit![//b] Typically for him, of course, he does not seem to realize at all that the things he criticizes most in others are also his very own characteristics that make him objectionable as a person and as a pope!]

Whoever looks at reality from the historicist point of view and makes this perspective his key to interpreting reality is unable to perceive anything real but the historical course of events. But how can this be reconciled with the certainty of faith? And with eternal truths? And with dogma? And with the sacraments? And with immutable divine law?

And that is why the true question one must ask of this pope is: “Excuse me, but what do you think of metaphysics?’ After five years of this pontificate, the question is relevant – while we await other initiatives under the sign of ‘generating processes’. [He probably does not believe in metaphysics at all – studies ‘being as such’ or ‘the first causes of things’ and ‘ things that do not change’. In which perspective, I do not understand Bergoglio’s and Bergolianism’s obsession with change for the sake of change, being unable to let well enough alone - as if failing to change or to make changes were somehow completely irrational and reprehensible, while on the other hand, making changes, any change, makes them feel they are doing something!]

Imagine my stupefaction when right after translating this post by Valli yesterday - on the general theme of Bergoglio's intellectual limitations - I then came upon the Vatican news story about Benedict XVI's supposed glowing endorsement of Bergoglio's philosophical and theological formation, blah-blah-blah.

I don't take to such reports about Benedict XVI with any degree of equanimity at all, especially not at one o'clock in the morning, and I asked myself: Dear Lord, is the Vatican putting out this outrage as part of their observance of the fifth anniversary of that scourge of a conclave that gave us Bergoglio for a pope? How sick can they be to instrumentalize a 91-year-old man this way? Would Joseph Ratzinger ever commit himself to saying lies on paper? Because they have to be lies! So I said to sleep over it...

And sure enough today, Sandro Magister, Antonio Socci and Marco Tosatti promptly came forth with their reactions...

Leave it to Phil Lawler to identify the major consequence of Mons. Vigano's incredible communications fiasco - pointing beyond just the bureaucratic catastrophe self-created
by the Vatican's supposed media expert of experts and head of a new consolidated communications dicastery that was supposed to rectify the unproductive and/or counter-
productive Vatican communications efforts.

Papal continuity or discontinuity?
The Vatican PR team's terrible 'own goal' error ends up
underscoring the discontinuity between Benedict XVI and Bergoglio
By Phil Lawler

March 19, 2017

Last week the Vatican published a series of short books on the theology of Pope Francis. You probably haven’t heard much about those books. But you’ve heard quite a bit about the controversy that erupted after they were unveiled.

If the Vatican had only announced the publication of the books, the story would have passed unnoticed. Only a few weeks earlier, the same Vatican publishing house had put out The Pope Francis Lexicon, a series of essays explaining some of the terms that the Holy Father commonly uses. The book’s launch was barely noticed in the Catholic media; secular outlets ignored the story entirely.

Frankly The Pope Francis Lexicon was a better bet for public attention than the series that made its debut last week. Pope Francis has captured attention by introducing new terms, new ideas, into discussions of Vatican affairs, and an exploration of his unique use of language makes sense. He is not, on the other hand, primarily known as a theologian. (And that’s perfectly OK; the Roman Pontiff need not be a leading theological scholar.) The new books were short; their authors were not household names. This launch, too, was destined to pass quietly.

But then someone at the Vatican had a bright idea. Why not solicit a statement from Pope-emeritus Benedict — who definitely is known as a world-class theologian — praising the new books? Msgr. Dario Vigano, who heads the new Secretariat for Communications, wrote to the former Pontiff in January to solicit a comment. Benedict politely declined. Without a comment from him, the introduction of the new books was again likely to pass unnoticed.

But Msgr. Vigano was evidently not ready to give up easily. He pulled a few sentences from Benedict’s letter, in which the unfailingly courteous retired Pope praised his successor’s theological training and spoke of the “interior continuity” between the pontificates, and Vigano highlighted them in the news conference announcing the new books. Now he had a story to tell the media!

Sure enough, the headline stories generated by the news conference last Monday were not about the books being published. The spotlight was fixed on the Pope-emeritus. His letter was cited not only as an homage to Pope Francis, but also, more importantly, as an implicit rebuke to the new Pope’s conservative critics. “Pope Benedict Protects Pope Francis’ Right Flank”, read the headline in the Wall Street Journal, in a fairly typical presentation of the story line.

As Pope Francis reached the 5-year anniversary of his election, the quotes from Benedict were cited as evidence that, while some critics saw sharp differences between the teachings of Francis and those of Benedict, the retired Pope himself did not.

Then, of course, the story fell apart.
- Reporters learned, first, that Pope Benedict had actually declined to read the new volumes, and that the Vatican PR team had deliberately doctored a photocopy of his letter to camouflage that fact.
- Still later it emerged that in the full letter — which the Vatican public-relations crew had held back — Benedict had complained that one author in the new series had been bitterly critical of the teachings put forward by himself and by Pope John Paul II. He objected to the inclusion of an author who had, in the past, “virulently attacked the magisterial authority of the Pope,” specifically on questions of moral theology.

The Vatican had introduced the letter from Benedict in an effort to show continuity in papal teaching; in fact, when the dust settled, the former Pontiff’s letter pointed to the clear discontinuity.

The author who praised the theological approach of Pope Francis had decried the approach of his predecessors. To be even more specific, the point of contention was the encyclical Veritatis Splendor, by St. John Paul II, which set forth the clear moral principles that have been largely obscured by Amoris Laetitia.

This might have been a simple story, about the theology of Pope Francis. But the Vatican public-relations team wanted something more: they wanted headlines about how Pope-emeritus Benedict had endorsed the thought of his successor.

It was not the former Pope who created this story; he had marked his letter to Msgr. Vigano as “personal and confidential.”

It was the Vatican communications team, with its maladroit handling of the episode, that drew attention to the retired Pope, and eventually to the clear differences between him and Pope Francis.

['Maladroit' is a gross understatement; the better word is 'malicious'. Vigano was not just guilty of clumsiness, but of deliberate malice, no doubt with the good intention of doing something for Bergoglio's advantage, but doing so at the expense of Benedict XVI and the truth, and in the process, causing great embarrassment (if not humiliation) to the pope himself.

A pope now seen to be so 'desperate' for validation, after his first five years as pope, as to
1) require an instant 'book series' cooked up by his spinmeisters and the Vatican publishing house, to highlight his 'theology' - since there is not enough in his own published words and statements throughout his career to make up a decent volume on theology; and
2) agree that the 'book series' on his theology be written by 11 essentially 'no-name theologians', of whom two Germans (Huenemann and Werbick) have long been notorious for their dissent against the magisterium of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and therefore, of the Church - so how could they even be invoked to show continuity between Bergoglio and his predecessors? (Or to give Bergoglio the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he simply trusted blindly in his spinmeisters not to do him any disservice, and did not even bother to vet the theologians who were asked to write on his theology.)

Even spin doctors ought to heed the Hippocratic warning, "First, do no harm" - and Vigano has ended up harming everyone starting with himself and Bergoglio.

****************************************************************************************************************************************
On his Facebook page, Antonio Socci comments on another kind of discontinuity so starkly obvious in Italy these days...

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IMG]http://u.cubeupload.com/MARITER_7/LOGOSOCCIFACEBOOK.png[/IMG]
Today, Subasio and the hills around Perugia are covered in snow. It is March 20, the eve of the official day spring begins. It must be the famous 'global warming' which is the first article in the Bergoglian credo...

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****************************************************************************************************************************************
Back to Lettergate...

A PR disaster for the Vatican
The letter from Benedict has become the focus of attention.
No one now cares about the books
by Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith

Tuesday, 20 Mar 2018

What on earth are we to make of the affair that has now been dubbed “Lettergate”? I mean, of course, the letter that Pope Benedict wrote seemingly endorsing a series of works on Pope Francis’s theology, but which turned out to be no such thing.

Forgive me for not providing links, as the matter has metastasised so much that there are too many links to provide. But here are a few observations.

First of all, it is standard practice in the publishing world to solicit opinions about new books about influential people; this enables the publisher to put some glowing opinion on the cover of the new book. These pre-publication endorsements are generally regarded as worthless by those in the know, because the celebrity endorser usually has not had the time or the inclination to read the book. Nevertheless, the publishing industry still does this, in the hope that such “puffs” increase sales, though everyone knows that what really counts are the reviews that come after publication.

So, trying to get a puff from Pope Benedict is not on the surface wrong. And selective quotation is pretty usual, for let us remember that all quotation is selective. Moreover, as Pope Benedict’s letter suggests, the quote released forms part of a reply to the original request. Therefore, when Pope Benedict says it is ridiculous to think of Pope Francis having no theological formation, he is saying this because, one assumes, the original letter (as yet unreleased) asked him whether he thought that the case. In other words, Pope Benedict would not, on his own, make such a statement.

Where things have really gone wrong is in this: the letter from Benedict has become the focus of attention, and no one cares about the books. This has happened largely because Mgr Viganò has made a dreadful beginner’s error. When found out about the selective quotation, he did not come clean immediately and fess up; rather he admitted to what had been found out, and when more emerged, he had to admit to that too. This gives an impression of deception and dishonesty. He should have come clean at once, immediately and fully, rather than letting the embarrassment leak out slowly and the story dragging on for days.

Protestants used to believe that Catholic priests were liars. (Consider Charles Kingsley’s attack on Cardinal Newman.) English people in general often used to believe that Italians were untrustworthy. These old prejudices have faded with time, but Lettergate will help to revive them.

As such it represents a disaster not just for Mgr Viganò and the Vatican department for communications over which he presides, but a disaster for us all. It makes the job of every Catholic in communicating the faith that little bit harder.

The other day I was interviewed for the Sunday programme on Radio 4. One sentence of what I said made it into the final programme, but what didn’t make it was something along these lines:

Five years ago, when Pope Francis was elected, everyone agreed that the Roman Curia was not fit for purpose; and we all hoped that the age of scandals and incompetence was over. Alas, our hopes have been disappointed time and again. Lettergate is just the most recent of the many unforced errors that come out of the Vatican and that distract us and everyone else from what really matters: proclaiming the Gospel. As we approach Holy Week, we should be thinking of the Paschal Mystery. Instead we are talking about the amateurish and frankly cretinous behaviour of the Pope’s courtiers. What a terrible 'own goal'!
 
And early review of Ross Douthat's soon-to-be released book served to underscore the dishonest strategy of this pope and his associates to feign that they are not, in fact, consciously and deliberately altering the teaching of the one true Church of Christ in favor of the teaching of Bergoglio and the church he is seeking to establish in his own image and likeness...

Pope Francis's modus operandi
by Kenneth Wolfe

March 19, 2018

Five years into the Bergoglio pontificate, Rorate is (finally!) far from alone in our reporting and analysis of Pope Francis. Several books exposing the behavior and methods used by Jorge Bergoglio have been, or are in the process of being, published. Ross Douthat, the lone conservative columnist at the New York Times, has one such book in the works, which will be released next week.

Mr. Douthat had a column in the Sunday New York Times (largely an excerpt from his forthcoming book) exposing the myth that Francis would grow the Church (Mass attendance has been down under this pontificate), and examining how calling for a "truce" on hot-button issues has been part of a stealth agenda of incremental liberalization.

This paragraph is perhaps the most eloquent we have seen in a while, unmasking the tactics of Bergoglio:

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The papal plan for a truce is either ingenious or deceptive, depending on your point of view. Instead of formally changing the church’s teaching on divorce and remarriage, same-sex marriage, euthanasia — changes that are officially impossible, beyond the powers of his office — the Vatican under Francis is making a twofold move.

First, a distinction is being drawn between doctrine and pastoral practice that claims that merely pastoral change can leave doctrinal truth untouched. So a remarried Catholic might take communion without having his first union declared null, a Catholic planning assisted suicide might still receive last rites beforehand, and perhaps eventually a gay Catholic can have her same-sex union blessed — and yet supposedly none of this changes the church’s teaching that marriage is indissoluble and suicide a mortal sin and same-sex wedlock an impossibility, so long as it’s always treated as an exception rather than a rule.

---

It is a healthy thing to see large media outlets expose the deception employed by this pope, amplified by blogs and social media, even if it has taken five years. Had this sunshine been a fraction as bright in the 1960s and 70s, it is likely the Second Vatican Council and its implementation -- particularly concerning the liturgical revolution -- would not have slipped by quite so easily.

I am posting here a commentary by Mundabor that I find appropriate to describe the five years of the Bergoglio pontificate so far (we obviously share a vehement bias on Bergoglio) even if I strongly disavow him for his extremely bigoted opinions against Benedict XVI - he being among those who think that Joseph Ratzinger has never been anything but a Vatican II progressivist and therefore deserving of all calumny, not just for that but for deception and dishonesty in advocating a 'false' hermeneutic of continuity about Vatican II, and worse, for 'abandoning the Church' for purely personal and self-serving reasons. Opponents like him will forever be blind to facts as against their own dubious because predetermined and prejudiced conclusions.

Would a Vatican II progressivist ever have spoken so frankly and specifically about the widespread misdeeds committed in the name of Vatican II 20 years after the Council ended, as Cardinal Ratzinger did in that historic watershed interview with Vittorio Messori, 'Rapporto sulla Fede', back in 1984? A book that placed both his life and Messori's in danger for several months afterwards; a book that surely earned him the undying enmity of all Vatican II progressivists who did not already have it in for him; a book that caused so much internal furor in the Church that the notorious Cardinal Danneels of Holland infamously complained to the media at the start of the 1985 special synod (convened by John Paul II to assess the reception of Vatican II) that 'This synod is about a council, not about a book'!

Then there is the other obvious fact about both John Paul II's and Benedict XVI's defense of Vatican II without its widespread misinterpretations and misuse: no pope can by himself override the teachings of an ecumenical council, as Vatican-II was, and which by definition is a council of all the world's bishops led by the pope. It would take another council to do that.

But both popes certainly were very aware of all the misuse and abuse committed in the name of Vatican II, so they made it their concern to point out that the teachings of Vatican II were in continuity with what the Church has always taught - i.e., a hermeneutic of continuity - even in those documents in which some parts were deliberately left ambiguous.

Drowning in its own...(no, it's not 'tears')

MARCH 19, 2018

Five years later, there can be no doubt that Francis’s papacy is drowning in its own excrement.
- It is not only that the continued heresy has now reached the mainstream, in such a way that whatever new “innovation” Francis tries to introduce is now doomed to failure from the start. [Would that were not just wishful thinking!]
- It is not even the astonishing incompetence of the people Francis has around him – as the very recent “lettergate” abundantly shows.
- It is, finally, not necessarily the scandal of the 25 million USD (boy, this is a heck if a lot of black shoes…) Francis wanted to rob from the Papal Foundation in order to give them to a shady institution with a criminal past.

No. The best indication that Francis’s Papacy is drowning in its own excrement is the tacit admission of the fact from the Vatican press office. [Precisely what I meant when I referred to Bergoglio's seemingly desperate need for 'validation' at this oint in his pontificate.]

What kind of Pope needs external validation from other senior clergy? When has a Pope ever felt it necessary to support his reputation on the (true or assumed) integrity and prestige of other members of the Church hierarchy? Who does he think he is, the Prime Minister of TinPotLandia?

Certainly, the head of government of a small European State will draw prestige from being received at the White House, because the receiving institution is so much more prestigious and powerful than the received one. But a Pope has no earthly equivalent. If his reputation is in tatters, he is completely screwed. Not even a former or emeritus Pontiff can save him, because when a Pope is drowning the vortex is so strong that it will swallow even a pontiff emeritus!

It must be so, because Popes don’t become as impresentable as Francis is merely because they lack sense of humour, or are not photogenic, or are not good at making little children smile. They can only become so hated because they are heretics, and at that point there is no emeritus on earth that can save their papacy.

Francis is exactly there: to the point where his papacy has become a pretty vulgar joke, and the panic is clearly – if, again, tacitly – admitted by the same Vatican office that should protect his reputation.

For those, like me, who have been observing the public perception of this Pontificate as a direct indication of the harm it can cause, the latest implosions of these multiple-catastrophe pontificate are a source of great satisfaction and a moderate source of hope for the future: then the more this pontificate drowns in its own excrement, the more probable it is that the Cardinals in the next conclave, cowardly and corrupt as they all are, gather all together and shout, as loud as they can: 'NEVER AGAIN!' [That's giving the cardinals too much credit! For some reason, as brilliant [and even saintly in some cases] as many of them are individually, they can all together fall into a state of collective cretinhood, as they did at the 2013 conclave

, by the mere fact of believing unconditionally 1) what the media were saying about the state of the Church, and of the Roman Curia and Vatican finances, in general, thanks to the infinitely discreditable Vatileaks; and 2) the limited knowledge they had of Jorge Bergoglio at the time, about whom they were only aware that somehow, he was the 'runner-up' in the 2005 Conclave, and of what Bergoglio's campaign handlers sold to them about their guy's reputation. There is every likelihood of the same mistake at the next Conclave, especially if by then, more than two-thirds of the cardinal electors would have been Bergoglio appointees.]

And if Mons. Vigano thinks that this press release will help improve the Vatican's communications snafu, he is even more pathetic than one had imagined!

Bergoglio's pontificate 'by the numbers':
Vatican releases statistics of Francis’s pontificate
All of them, unfortunately, refer to the pope himself and all those activities which are normally part of a pope's duties-
but not a single one about how the Church has fared under him (e.g., more converts? more Mass attendance? more vocations?
MORE FAITH?, or just the opposite?)
by Carol Glatz
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE
March 19, 2018

ROME - In just five years as leader of the universal Church, Pope Francis has made 22 international trips, traveling 154,906 miles - the equivalent of six times around the world.

He also has declared 880 new saints, which includes the martyrdom of an estimated 800 Italian laymen killed by Ottoman soldiers in the 15th century.

Those numbers and more were released by the Vatican, detailing the many papal events, documents, travels and accomplishments of the past five years. The numbers, released March 17, cover the period from March 19, 2013 - the solemnity of St. Joseph, the day officially inaugurating the start of his pontificate - to March 19, 2018.

According to the Vatican statistics, the 81-year-old pope has:
- Created 61 new cardinals.
- Led 219 general audiences, with catechetical series that include reflections on the sacraments, the Church, the family, mercy and the Mass.
- Issued 41 major documents, including the encyclicals Lumen fidei and Laudato Si’ and the apostolic exhortations, Evangelii Gaudium and Amoris Laetitia.
- Prayed the Angelus and Regina Coeli with visitors 286 times.
- Completed 22 trips abroad, 18 pastoral visits within Italy and 16 visits to parishes in Rome - the diocese of the pope as bishop of Rome.
- Made nine other visits to churches for special events and places of worship in Rome, including the city’s synagogue and Rome’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church, Anglican church and the Ukrainian Catholic Basilica of Santa Sophia.
- Called four synods of bishops: Two on the family, this year’s synod on young people and a synod on the Amazon in 2019.
- Declared two special years: On consecrated life and the extraordinary Year of Mercy.
- Established or proclaimed seven special days, including World Day of the Poor, 24 Hours for the Lord and a day of prayer and fasting for peace in Syria, South Sudan and Congo.
- Attended or announced three World Youth Days (Brazil, Poland and Panama for 2019).

BIG BIG DEAL, RIGHT???? But was there any merit or gain for the Church herself in all that Bergoglian huffing and puffing?

'Catholic Church, quo vadis?' -
A Roman conference by and for Catholics
concerned that the Church not lose her way
through a disoriented pontificate

March 20, 2018

It is confirmed. Next April 7, the Saturday of Easter Week, a very special conference will be held in Rome. The intention of which will be to show the Catholic Church the way to go, after the uncertain journey of the first five years of the pontificate of Pope Francis.

The reckoning of this five-year period, in fact, is rather critical, to judge from the title of the conference: “Catholic Church, where are you going?”

And even more so if one looks at the subtitle: “Only a blind man can deny that in the Church there is great confusion.” This is taken from a statement of Cardinal Carlo Caffarra (1938-2017), not forgotten as an endorser, together with other cardinals, of those DUBIA submitted in 2016 to Pope Francis for the purpose of bringing clarity on the most controversial points of his magisterium, but which he has left without a response.

In a Church seen as being set adrift, the key question that the conference will confront will be precisely that of redefining the leadership roles of the “people of God,” the characteristics and limitations of the authority of the pope and the bishops, AND the forms of consultation of the faithful in matters of doctrine.

These are questions that were thoroughly explored, in his time, by a great cardinal who is often cited both by progressives and by conservatives in support of their respective theses, Blessed John Henry Newman.

And there will be other cardinals and bishops who will once again confront these questions, at the conference on April 7. Their names have not been released yet, but they are expected to include the signers of the “dubia,” and others who share their outlook.

In any case, there has already been confirmation of the contributions - with “ad hoc” video messages - of two very representative cardinals: the Chinese Joseph Zen Zekiun, bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, and the Nigerian Francis Arinze, former archbishop of Onitsha and then prefect of the congregation for divine worship, the same one that is headed today by Cardinal Robert Sarah.

There will also be a posthumous projection of a video interview with Cardinal Caffarra, on the controversial encyclical of Paul VI “Humanae Vitae.”

But there will also be presentations by lay scholars. Professor Valerio Gigliotti, a professor of history and of medieval and modern law at the university of Turin, will bring into focus the exercise of the plenitudo potestatis (full powers) of the pope in the history of the Church.

Professor Renzo Puccetti, a physician and professor of bioethics at the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute, will analyze the evolution of the bioethics taught at that institute, from its first phase with Caffarra as president to its current phase, under Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia.

The final and culminating moment of the conference will be, in any case, the reading of a declaratio, a concise profession of faith on the points of doctrine and morality that are most controversial today.

Unlike the DUBIA, the declaration will not bear any specific signature, but the participants at the conference will propose it for the whole Church and for the world, as the voice of “baptized and confirmed members of the People of God.”

Of course, this declaratio will be the polar opposite of that “Kölner Erklärung” - the declaration signed in Cologne in 1989 by German theologians now in the good graces of Francis - which concerned the principles later reaffirmed by John Paul II in the encyclical “Veritatis Splendor” of 1993, and which “attacked in a virulent manner the magisterial authority of the pope especially on questions of moral theology,” as Benedict XVI wrote in the letter to Monsignor Dario Edoardo Viganò that caused such an uproar last week.

The conference, with no admission fee, will be held on Saturday, April 7 beginning at three in the afternoon, at the conference center “The Church Village” at 94 Via di Torre Rossa, a couple of miles to the west of the basilica of Saint Peter.

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The ff item reminds me of a consolatory anecdote from a priest on the subject of my overwhelming objections to this pope. He told me about a Canadian nun who has been beatified, who often said that it is not a sin to wish for someone's death if the intention was for that someone to be saved from hell and go to heaven instead, that to wish someone a happy death was not a sin at all. Not that he was counseling me to wish for the pope's death, far from it, nor that I myself have been wishing for Bergoglio's death, because, as he enjoined and as I have been doing anyway, I continue to pray for the pope in my daily prayers and at the Te igitur at Mass, but also that in whatever way God wills, the Church should not continue to have a 'leader' who is misleading the People of God as Bergoglio is doing.

Polish priest on Francis:
‘I pray for his swift departure’ to heaven
if he rejects God’s wisdom
by Dorothy Cummings McLean


KRAKOW, Poland, March 19, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A leading priest in Poland is making headlines after saying from the pulpit that he prays Pope Francis will die if he doesn’t do the will of the Holy Spirit.

Father Edward Staniek, 77, is a patristics scholar and rector of the Major Seminary of the Archdiocese of Kraków from 1993 until 2001. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1965 by Karol Wojtyła, now known as Pope Saint John Paul II, and has authored over 40 theological or catechetical books.

In his now-famous homily, given in Kraków on February 25, Father Staniek said that he prays for Pope Francis to receive wisdom, and insisted that the pope’s authority derives solely from obedience to Jesus Christ.

“I pray for wisdom for the pope, for his heart to open to the influence of the Holy Spirit, and if he doesn’t do [His will], I pray for his swift departure to the house of the Father,” he said. “We can always ask God for a happy death for him because a happy death is a great grace.”

According to Polonia Christiana, a central theme of Staniek’s sermon was that authority in the Church and mere leadership in the Church are two different things.

“Who is the biggest authority for me? Is it Jesus?” asked the priest. He explained that authority is respect for someone reliable, someone who deserves trust for some reason, like being a specialist in a given field. However, authority is deserved only by those who are responsible.

“Respect for such an [authoritative] person results in his opinion being important. The foundation of authority is a person’s responsibility,” the theologian said.

“My God is [Himself] responsibility,” Staniek continued, “and He makes me in His image and likeness. He is Authority. And [as a priest] I have to be an authority who am myself 100% responsible for my words, thoughts and actions.”

Father Staniek warned against automatic assumptions that professional churchmen are authorities. He included the pope, the cardinals, bishops, and parish priests among those who might be powerful but not authoritative. Being able to give orders doesn’t mean that someone has true authority, Staniek explained. Meanwhile, the one-and-only authority in the church is Jesus.

“You cannot be given [real] authority,” the priest said, “you can [only] grow up into it. The only authority in the Church is Jesus. Not the pope, not the hierarchy… It’s Jesus. And the Church lives on the basis of His authority. Whoever in the Church … acts like Jesus, then this person is radiating with His authority. A high position gives power but not authority.”

The priest then gave his opinion that Pope Francis departs from Jesus by making two erroneous interpretations of Christ’s mercy. According to Staniek, Francis is wrong both 1) to order churches and dioceses to invite Muslims in and 2) to encourage people in mortal sin to receive Holy Communion.

“In the name of mercy [Francis] calls for parishes and dioceses to open the doors to Islam,” he said. “[This is] a religion that is hostile towards the Gospel and the Church. In religious wars they have killed millions.”

Alluding to the victory of the Polish king Jan Sobieski III over the Ottoman Empire, Staniek said that the Poles understood Islam better than others.

“We, the Poles … understand better than others that there is no option of having a normal dialogue with them. We can show mercy to Muslims who are starving to death. The doors of dioceses and parishes we open only for those who believe in Jesus Christ,” he said.

“The second instance of wrongly interpreting mercy is opening the doors to Holy Mass, the Holy Sacrament, for people who choose sin as their world. They can receive the Eucharist on the condition that they convert and atone for their sin. He who knows the holiness of communion prefers to kneel before the [Blessed Sacrament] and beat his breast [and say] ‘have mercy upon me a sinner’ than stretch out his hands or tongue for the Holy Bread.”

The priest said that true mercy is urging serious sinners to repentance, not admitting them to Holy Communion. “For the unholy, it is as deadly a food as it is a sacrilege,” Staniek said. “Allowing [hardened sinners] in Church to take part in the sacred is a profanation of the sacraments.”

“What is the pope’s motive? I don’t know,” he continued. “What is the point of his [controversial] statements? I don’t know this either. I know how these speeches are used by the media, who aim at destroying Jesus Christ and His Church.”

Then Staniek dropped the bombshell now being belatedly heard around the world.

“I pray for wisdom for the pope, for his heart to open to the influence of the Holy Spirit, and if he doesn’t do [His will], I pray for his swift departure to the house of the Father,” he said. “We can always ask God for a happy death for him because a happy death is a great grace.”

Alluding to the Gospel of the day, which told of the Transfiguration of the Lord, Staniek suggested that it is by no means certain that Pope Francis, though powerful, partakes in Christ’s authority.

“If the pope doesn’t listen to Jesus on Mount Tabor, he doesn’t take part in His authority. The Church of Christ is not built on power. It’s built on authority. Whosoever values power over authority is a foreign body in Christ’s Church. Let’s listen to Jesus as his Father told us to do on Mount Tabor.”

Father Staniek’s homily, entitled “Authority and not Power”, was initially published on the website of Catholic magazine Ktoś Jak Bóg?(Who is Like God?). It has been removed.

The Metropolitan Archbishop of Krakow, Marek Jędraszewski, has released a short statement saying that he felt “pain and regret” upon receiving news of Staniek’s homily and had spoken to him about it.

“I assure you that the whole Church in Krakow daily prays ardently for the intentions of the Holy Father, Francis, asking the Lord God to give him the grace he needs to fulfill the Office of Peter in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church,” the archbishop said on March 17.

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Meanwhile, there's Andrea Gagliarducci who continues to rationalize everything this pope says or does - with a few but's here and there - but in the end saying, in effect, that 'faith in Christ' is the only continuity that matters. As if Bergoglio's 'faith' were not so strangled and compromised by his insistence on preaching his own 'gospel' and setting up his own church as an improvement on Jesus and the Church he founded - which is hardly 'faith in Christ', and as hubristic and sacrilegious as any so-called Christian could be.
http://www.mondayvatican.com/vatican/pope-francis-five-years-later

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VERITATIS SPLENDOR continues
to haunt this Pontificate which
has chosen to ignore it completely
by Thomas L. Mulcahy, M.A., J.D.
CATHOLIC STRENGTH

---

“The encyclical on moral problems ‘Veritatis Splendor’ took many years to ripen and remains of unchanged relevance.”
- Pope Benedict XVI

---

The Vatican recently released a letter written by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI which was proferred as proof that the Pope Emeritus was content with the Francis Papacy. The letter didn’t even mention Veritatis Splendor, the encyclical written by Pope John Paul II, which numerous theologians have cited in support of moral theology errors in Pope Francis’s very controversial Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia.

Just today I see that a prominent theologian has written an open letter to the Bishops of the world drawing attention to serious errors in Amoris Laetitia in consideration of Veritatis Splendor.
An Open Appeal to the Catholic Bishops of the World

BUT WAIT A MINUTE!! It turns out that Pope Benedict did in fact make mention of Veritatis Splendor in his letter, but someone at the Vatican chose to cut that portion of the letter out of the official version initially released to the public. Here is the portion of the letter of Pope Benedict which was initially omitted:

---

“Only as an aside I would like to note my surprise for the fact that, figuring among the authors is also Professor Hunermann, who during my pontificate came to light for having headed anti-papal initiatives. He took part significantly in the release of the “Kolner Erklarung,” which, in relation to the encyclical “Veritatis splendor,” attacked virulently the magisterial authority of the Pope, especially on questions of Moral Theology. Also the “Europaische Theologengesellschaft,” which he founded, was thought by him initially as an organization in opposition to the papal magisterium. Then the ecclesial thinking of many theologians blocked this orientation, rendering that organization a regular meeting instrument among theologians.”

---

In light thereof – that is, in light of the full letter, one can see that Pope Benedict XVI vigorously defends the magisterial authority of Veritatis Splendor in his recent letter to the Vatican (the very thing the Vatican was hoping he would not do!). In fact, in the letter the Pope Emeritus singles out in a very unfavorable manner a theologian who attacked Veritatis Splendor, and Benedict seems to be chastising the Vatican for having sent him a small book by the theologian, a book apparently favorable to the Francis Papacy (Professor Hunermann).

Veritatis Splendor has been a thorn in the Vatican’s side ever since the beginning of the Pope Francis Papacy. As Father Raymond J. De Souza points out:

---

“The drafters of Amoris Laetitia knew that the teaching of Veritatis Splendor posed a serious challenge. That is why, astonishingly for one of the longest papal documents in history, including some 400 footnotes, there is not a single reference to Veritatis Splendor. It is the equivalent of writing an apostolic exhortation on Catholic social doctrine and never referring to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, or on biblical studies and never referring to Divino Afflante Spiritu by Venerable Pius XII.” (From Father Raymond J. De Souza’s article, “When the Splendor of Truth is Hidden”)

---

[Which, of course, is entirely consistent with Bergoglianism's denial that there can be 'absolute Truth' at all, only 'relative truth' - and which is why Bergoglio unhesitatingly chooses to 'edit' as he pleases the teachings and words of Jesus, who is TRUTH himself!]

Veritatis Splendor is like the tell-tale heart in Edgar Allan Poe’s famous short story. Although hidden away, Veritatis Splendor continues to beat louder and louder each day. It is a scary and odious noise to those in the Vatican, and it won’t go away, no matter how much they try to conceal it. The Splendor of Truth cannot be silenced. [Or dimmed in any way, much less denied, because to do so is to reject Christ himself. It is difficult for me to understand how those intent on fostering their own 'religion' while calling it and themselves Christian can ignore that Jesus said "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life".]

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And here's that open appeal to the bishops of the world, appropriately published on the Feast of St Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church (his most relevant title in this case). Not that one has high hopes of a response at all, in the Bergoglian universe where 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' is, for the episcopate and the clergy, the better part of valor...

An Open Appeal to the Catholic Bishops of the World
Only fraternal episcopal interventions can now hope to avert
what is sure otherwise to be a spiritual catastrophe for the Catholic Church.
by E. Christian Brugger

March 19, 2018

After serving five years as a Catholic campus minister in the 1980s, I decided to begin graduate studies in moral theology. This was in the heyday of proportionalism when its founding fathers still held some of the world’s most influential chairs of Catholic moral theology: Richard McCormick at the University of Notre Dame, Josef Fuchs at the Gregorian University in Rome, Louis Janssens at the University of Louvain, and Bernard Häring (emeritus) at the Alphonsianum in Rome.

In Veritatis Splendor, John Paul II had sternly warned the Catholic Church against their moral theories. The saintly pope’s overarching concern was that by appealing to complex circumstances, the activity of conscience and the notion that the moral law is merely an ideal, they end by justifying forms of behavior that have long been held to be contrary to the divine and natural laws (VS 56, 76, 103).

Then 25 years later comes what is now being called a “new paradigm” drawn from Amoris Laetitia. It proposes that on the basis of complex circumstances, the activity of conscience and the notion that the moral law is merely an ideal, some Catholics are not required to submit obediently to the objective and concrete demands of the divine and natural laws.

After extensively studying this new form of moral reasoning, and discussing it with philosophers, theologians, canonists, bishops and cardinals, I am concerned that this “new paradigm” is contrary to Catholic faith and morals; that its teaching is harmful to souls; and that its further dissemination will greatly undermine Catholic morality.

Therefore, knowing that each member of the faithful must do what he can to preserve and promote the Christian deposit of faith (CIC 212), and believing in conscience that Jesus wants me to take this step, I address this appeal to the Catholic bishops of the world — humbly, directly, truly and resolutely — believing that only the bishops can now prevent more and greater harms to the body of Christ and to her apostolic mission, which the “new paradigm” will surely cause if we continue on the present course.

I entrust this appeal and the response of the world’s bishops to the intercession of our humble father, St. Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church.

---

Dear Archbishops, Bishops and Brothers in Christ,

Some influential voices in the Church are using a “new paradigm” to justify forms of behavior long recognized as contrary to the precepts of the Divine and Natural Laws. As I recently wrote:
“The ‘new paradigm’ — although never explicitly saying it — allows priests and bishops simultaneously to affirm that they accept the Church’s moral teaching and yet to liberate ‘individual consciences’ that are not living by that teaching to continue not living by it, while approaching the Table of the Lord.”

We see this in places where Catholics living in objectively sinful unions are being freed to return to Holy Communion without a sincere resolution to amend their behavior. The “new paradigm” effectively makes permissible actions rejected by Christ and St. Paul in the New Testament and by the Church for 20 centuries. In Germany, Argentina, Malta, and elsewhere we now have “Catholic divorce and remarriage” and “Catholic adultery.”

Unless you intervene to prevent the “new paradigm” from being brought to bear upon the wider body of Catholic moral teaching, its logic will surely be applied to contraceptive acts (despite the Church’s ancient teaching reaffirmed in Gaudium et Spes and Humanae Vitae), to homosexual behavior (despite the teaching reaffirmed in Persona Humana and the Catechism of the Catholic Church), and to other traditionally rejected behaviors.

And defenders of the “new paradigm” will say: “All we’re doing is applying Church teaching with greater pastoral sensitivity by paying heightened attention to the complexity of concrete ‘circumstances’ and by according greater respect to the dignity of ‘conscience’; the settled moral doctrines themselves are not in question.”

The interventions of laypeople and faithful priests are important, but are unlikely to influence the decisions of the Pope. Only fraternal episcopal interventions can now hope to avert what is sure otherwise to be a spiritual catastrophe for the Catholic Church. For if the “new paradigm” is officially applied to contraceptive acts, all the norms of Catholic sexual morality will fall like dominos. Great evil will occur. And many souls will be lost. God, of course, will bring good out of it. But not without immeasurable loss.

Therefore, to all Catholic bishops — East and West — who believe that the “new paradigm” is and will continue to be used to justify forms of behavior traditionally judged contrary to the divine and natural laws, I respectfully ask that you consider taking action in the following four ways:
1. To privately write to the apostolic nuncio of your country and ask him respectfully to make known to the Holy Father your concerns about the “new paradigm” and especially to urge him to refrain from applying it to the teaching of Humanae Vitae.
2. To privately write to Pope Francis himself fraternally expressing these same concerns and respectfully asking him to teach unambiguously the moral truths of the Catholic faith, especially on matters pertaining to the Fifth and Sixth Precepts of the Decalogue, and to correct the pastoral errors to which some of his teachings have given rise.
3. To officially promulgate for your diocese a set of norms pastorally addressing the sensitive issues raised in Amoris Laetitia (especially Chapter 8), norms consistent with the teachings of John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Catholic moral and pastoral tradition.
4. To privately liaise with like-minded bishops and consider constructive ways to use your magisterium to carry out the episcopal duties affirmed by the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “It is this Magisterium’s task to preserve God’s people from deviations and defections and to guarantee them the objective possibility of professing the true faith without error. Thus, the pastoral duty of the Magisterium is aimed at seeing to it that the People of God abides in the truth that liberates” (890).

When you address the “new paradigm” in your correspondences, you might consider a form similar to what John Paul II used when addressing Proportionalism in Veritatis Splendor:“Such theories [in this case ‘paradigms’] are not faithful to the Church’s teaching, when they believe they can justify, as morally good, deliberate choices of kinds of behavior contrary to the commandments of the divine and natural law. These [paradigms] cannot claim to be grounded in the Catholic moral tradition” (76).
It would be easy to say: “I’ve done all I can. It is all in God’s hands. We must be content to leave it there.” Please see that you are Jesus’s hands for addressing this very grave situation.

I am willing to assist you in any way I can — with summaries of concerns, talking points, diocesan guidelines, etc. Please do not hesitate to contact me.

Very respectfully yours in Jesus,
E. Christian Brugger, D.Phil.
Moral Theologian
Jacksonville Beach, Florida
USA
ecb.assistance@gmail.com

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'Not so fast!', says the damned soul
to Hell's gatekeeper. 'Amoris laetitia says...'

March 20, 2018

...At the Messa in Latino website, a wag has posted a bit of Dantesque parody about an adulterous soul in Hell.

A soul has descended to the Inferno and goes before long-tailed Minos, who is the “sorting hat” of Hell. Minos discerns the sins of the soul and then wraps his tail about himself as many times as the number of the circle to which the soul must be consigned for eternity. There’s an image of Minos in Michaelangelo’s Last Judgment.

For you conoscitori del Poeta [connoisseurs of Dante], you will find this to be a serious stitch. I don’t have time this morning to translate it for you.

The essence is that just as Minos is about to assign the adulterous soul to its circle in Hell, the soul quotes Amoris laetitia and, channeling his inner Francis, calls Minos a “pharisee”. “Each case has to be judged individually and in my case I’m not guilty… Who are you to judge? So, see’ya later, alligator!”...

[I will attempt to translate the take-off on Dante later]

A new Bergoglio beatitude:
'Blessed are the tattooed for they belong'
Just don't exaggerate, the pope advises
by Thomas Williams
BREITBART NEWS

There is nothing wrong with tattoos, Pope Francis told a group of young people Monday, urging them to be open to cultural expressions of “belonging.”

Asked about tattoos and other expressions of modern culture by a seminarian from Ukraine, the pope said that the problem is that some people exaggerate by covering their body with tattoos, but “the problem is the exaggeration, not the tattoos.”

Yulian Vendzilovych, a seminarian at Holy Spirit Seminary in Lviv, told the pope that some people sport tattoos to express beauty, and others as a cultural symbol, but it is not easy for a young priest to judge which parts of modern culture are good and which are not.

“Don’t be afraid of tattoos,” the pope responded, noting that for many years Eritrean Christians and others have gotten tattoos of the cross on their foreheads.

“Of course, there can be exaggerations,” the pope said, remarking that people who get too many tattoos cannot give blood because of a “danger of blood poisoning.”

A tattoo “is a sign of belonging,” Francis said, and offers an opportunity to strike up a conversation with young people about what matters to them “and then you can enter into the culture of the young.”

“But do not panic,” he said. “With young people you should never be frightened, never! Because always, even behind the not-so-good things, there is something that will get us to some truth.”

Pope Francis has often weighed in on issues affecting young people and modern culture, insisting that the Church be open to where people are.

Last March, however, the pope warned youth to beware of the falsehoods behind much of social media and “reality shows,” urging them to live their own lives and to create their own histories.

The pope’s Message for World Youth Day 2017 contained a lengthy commentary on the hi-tech world in which young people are immersed, comparing the memories of their personal experiences with the computer hardware that stores large quantities of data.

“Yet our memories should not remain crammed together, like the memory of a hard drive,” Francis said. “Nor can we archive everything in some sort of virtual ‘cloud.’ We need to learn how to make past events a dynamic reality on which to reflect and to draw lessons and meaning for the present and the future.”

He was quite critical of attachments to social media and so-called reality shows, warning youth that virtual friendships and virtual reality often conceal many falsehoods and are no substitute for real interpersonal experiences.

“In the social media, we see faces of young people appearing in any number of pictures recounting more or less real events, but we don’t know how much of all this is really ‘history,’ an experience that can be communicated and endowed with purpose and meaning,” Francis said.

And yet, the pope [properly speaking, his propagandists. Do you think he ever checks what is being tweeted in his name? One of these days, one of his Twitter feeders will do a Vigano-size whopper!] has made extensive use of social media during his five-year pontificate, and a 2015 study proclaimed him to be the most influential person on Twitter for the third year in a row. ['The most influential' by virtue of the office he holds, or in terms of real influence for the good? Real influence for the good would be reflected in, at the very least, a perceptible number of lapsed Catholics or former Catholics returning to the faith and in observant Catholics (who regularly go to Sunday Mass, to begin with), but all available surveys and anecdotal accounts about these indicators go in the opposite direction. Real influence for the bad would be to encourage Catholics in sinful habits because of the false preaching that "God loves you as you are, and you do not have to change anything", as he implicitly affirms in every permissive word there is in Amoris laetitia.]

Yet in spite of his own success with social media, he remains skeptical of its real influence.

“Television is full of ‘reality shows’ which are not real stories, but only moments passed before a television camera by characters living from day to day, without a greater plan,” he said in his message to the young. “Don’t let yourselves be led astray by this false image of reality! Be the protagonists of your history; decide your own future.” [i.e., "Let your conscience tell you what to do! No one and nothing else can tell you what to do. You alone know best what is good for you."]

Vatican media chief resigns over Lettergate
Mons. Vigano has resigned from his post after he revealed
and mischaracterized a private letter from Benedict XVI
And Bergoglio 'accepts' the resignation but retains him anyway
as 'adviser' to the dicastery in a role created just for him
by Nicole Winfield


VATICAN CITY, March 21, 2018 (AP) — The head of the Vatican's communications department resigned Wednesday after he mischaracterized a private letter from retired Pope Benedict XVI, then had a photo of it digitally manipulated and sent out to the media.

A week after The Associated Press exposed the doctored photo, Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Monsignor Dario Vigano and named his deputy to run the Secretariat for Communications for now. But Francis kept Vigano on in the department in a lesser capacity, indicating that he doesn't believe the problem was all that grave. [Because someone else - the all but hapless emeritus Pope - was the victim! Wait till the same malicious misrepresentation is made of Bergoglio himself- then it would be the gravest ever of all crimes of malice!]

The so-called "Lettergate" scandal erupted last week when Vigano read aloud part of a private letter from Benedict at a book launch for a Vatican-published, 11-volume set of [little] books [booklets, more properly] about Francis's theology.

Marking Francis's fifth anniversary as pope, Vigano had held up Benedict's letter as a sign of the continuity between the two popes, to blunt critics who complain that Francis's mercy-over-morals papacy represents a theological break from Benedict's doctrine-minded, theology-heavy papacy. [You know what, Ms Winfield? If you were truly paying attention to what Benedict XVI said and wrote as pope, then you would have to agree that he was never 'heavy' in the way he articulated theology, or any subject for that matter - because from the earliest observations documented about his gift for language, praise was always consistent for how he managed to reduce complex ideas to simple yet elegant and appropriate language that could be understood by everyone across the board. He never ever tried to 'parade his erudition' by trying to sound erudite as Bergoglio often does with unfortunate effects! A truly erudite man should also be most comprehensible!]

Vigano didn't read the whole letter, and omitted the part where Benedict objected to one of the authors in the volume because he had been a longtime critic of Benedict and St. John Paul II. [Now, Ms Winfield, let's get this clear: Benedict's objection was not to the personal affront to him and the Polish saint, but the affront against the Papacy itself and the Church Magisterium, represented by what amounts to the lifework of Huenemann (and Werbick, the other professional German dissenter called to author one of the 'little books' on Bergoglian theology) You make it sound like it was just a question of personal pique on the part of Benedict XVI - who has been attacked in far more terrible ad hominem ways than the pro-forma if extremely radical dissent from Church teaching that Huenemann, Werbick, Hans Kueng and their colleagues of the Cologne Declaration have vociferously mounted all these decades.].

A press release sent out by Vigano's office only contained Benedict's words of praise for Francis and the book initiative, without mentioning that he hadn't even read the books and had no plans to.

The AP reported that the photograph of the letter that accompanied the press release had digitally blurred out the lines where Benedict began to explain that he didn't have time to read the books and wouldn't comment on them, as requested by Vigano. The photo manipulation violated basic photojournalism ethical standards that forbid such distortion, especially when it misrepresents the content of the image.

The scandal embarrassed the Vatican and led to accusations that the pope's own communications office was spreading "fake news," just weeks after Francis dedicated his annual media message to denouncing "fake news" and the intentional distortion of information. Francis has frequently chided journalists for only giving half of the story. [That's a doozy! Coming from someone who habitually only gives 'half the story' of what Jesus says because to give the other half - i.e., the 'Go and sin no more!' rigor that accompanies the Lord's mercy and forgiveness - would go against Bergoglio's own premises!]

In his resignation letter dated March 19, Vigano said he wanted to step aside so that his presence "wouldn't delay, damage or block" Francis's reform of the Vatican's communications operations.

He didn't acknowledge that he had misrepresented Benedict's letter or doctored the photo, saying only that he realized that his actions — despite his intentions — had created controversy and destabilized the communications reform.

In his own letter accepting the resignation, Francis said he was removing Vigano reluctantly and praised him for his humility and willingness to work for the good of the church. He asked Vigano to stay on in the communications secretariat in the new position of "assessor," which in Vatican offices usually amounts to the No. 3 spot.

The current No. 2, Monsignor Lucio Adrian Ruiz, will run the office until a new prefect is named.

It is rare for the Vatican press office to release such an exchange of letters, suggesting that the pope wanted to make clear that he still has faith in Vigano to help oversee the consolidation of the Vatican's vast media operations.

Francis named Vigano, an expert in film, to head the new Secretariat for Communications in 2015. The department was created to bring under one umbrella the Vatican's various media operations, to cut costs and improve efficiency. But Vigano's reforms and management style soured relations with many longtime employees.

After the AP revealed the doctored photo and another Vatican commentator, Sandro Magister, hinted that there was even more in the letter that Vigano had concealed, the communications office released the full text of Benedict's letter, which had been sent to Vigano by the retired pope as "personal" and "reserved," suggesting that it was never meant to be made public.

The previously concealed part of the letter provided the full explanation why Benedict had declined Vigano's request that he write a commentary on the books: In addition to saying he didn't have time, Benedict noted that one of the authors involved in the project, German theologian Peter Huenermann, had launched "virulent" and "anti-papist" attacks against papal teaching during Benedict's papacy. He wrote that he was surprised the Vatican had chosen the theologian to be included in the 11-volume "The Theology of Pope Francis." [What's the total number of pages in those 11 booklets - how pretentious to call them 'volumes'! - 1100? if one assumes each one had to be at least 100 printed pages long. Consider that each book of Joseph Ratzinger's OPERA OMNIA (and some have three books per volume) is at least 900 pages long. Not that the length of the work is necessarily an index of its importance, but the COLLECTED WRITINGS of Joseph Ratzinger simply anthologize the numerous articles, homilies and books he has written over decades.

You can't make an instant theologian out of someone by having 11 no-name theologians commenting on his admittedly thin 'theology', such as it is! It's a foolhardy, vainglorious and counter-productive attempt to make Jorge Bergoglio what he is not. No one expects him to be a theologian because that was not his training. It would have been far better to put out instead a documentation in photographs and testimonials of the people he benefited and worked with as the 'priest of the slums' - which is supposed to be one of his outstanding and distinguishing strengths - because the available documentation on that has been very deficient, and very thin even anecdotally.

In the parts of Benedict's letter that Vigano read during the book launch and included in the press release, Benedict confirmed that Francis has a solid theological and philosophical training [when he was merely obviously quoting back parts of Vigano's letter suggesting what the Vatican wanted Benedict to write about the 'little books'! At times like this, one can only rue the pro forma 'courtesy formulations' demanded by good manners and right conduct, instead of simply saying things as they are] and he praised the book initiative for showing the "interior continuity" between the two papacies. He wrote it was "foolish prejudice" to paint Francis as only a practical man devoid of theology and Benedict as a mere academic who knew nothing of the lives of ordinary faithful. [More polite quotebacks to Vigano from the latter's letter soliciting Benedict's 'contribution' to the Bergoglio hommage.]

But Benedict's full caveat about his refusal to comment on the volume was [DELIBERATELY] never made public in Vigano's presentation, press release or accompanying photo. That omission left the impression that the 91-year-old retired pope had read the volume and fully endorsed it, when in fact he hadn't. [One other telltale detail of Vigano's 'carefully' calculated manipulation - even Cardinal Baldisseri from the Bishops' Synod has lessons to learn from Vigano on journalistic legerdemain! - is what he read of the last line of the letter, in which Benedict explicitly wrote, "I am sure you will understand my refusal (It's even more forceful in Italian - il mio diniego), and I extend to you my cordial greeting" - but the Vatican version first released and which Vigano read at the presentation was edited to say "I am sure that you will understand, and I extend to you my cordial greeting". I can almost see Vigano preening inwardly as he read 'the letter': "Oh what a clever man I am to be able to make lemonade from the lemons I've been given!"]

As a result, Vigano's effort to show papal continuity effectively backfired. Benedict's harsh criticism of Huenermann laid bare the differences in theological approaches of the two popes, and showed the retired pope still bore something of a grudge. [Isn't that just typical of Winfield to end by attributing pettiness to Benedict XVI? If grudge there is against Huenemann (and Werbick, though unnamed in the letter), then once more it is hardly a personal grudge but a grudge in behalf of the papacy and the Magisterium of the Church.]


Five takeaways from Mons Viganò’s resignation
Although the resignation has its flaws, the fallout from Lettergate
has led, for once, to some accountability for wrongdoing at the Vatican

March 21, 2018

News today of Mons. Dario Edoardo Viganò's resignation as prefect of the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communication is remarkable in many respects.

First of all, it’s extremely rare for a senior Vatican official in modern times, and especially during this pontificate, to submit his resignation or hold himself accountable concerning a public scandal or controversy for which he is blamed.

One need only think of a few recent examples where this hasn’t happened: those responsible for the appointment of pro-abortion or pro-contraception academics to the Pontifical Academy for Life; the protocol official who gave a papal knighthood to a militant Dutch pro-abortion politician; or the Vatican priest caught having homosexual drug-fueled parties at the Holy Office (some of course might argue these are lesser offenses, others could say they’re as bad or worse). [And why has no one been punished? Because the persons responsible for these outrages all happen to be under the special patronage of His Holiness, the pope, and can therefore flaunt their privilege with impunity, "Non potes me tangere!" (You cannot touch me!)]

Mons. Viganò will therefore be congratulated for doing the honorable thing after the Lettergate fiasco, and the Holy Father, too, for accepting his resignation.

But despite the gravity of the offense — doctoring photographs and changing the meaning of a confidential letter from Benedict XVI by selectively publicizing it — this case is extraordinary for a second reason: the almost total absence of any admission of guilt or remorse. Msgr. Viganò instead places the blame on “controversies” which, he says, destabilize and could potentially block the communications reforms that he was leading and harm his co-workers. [This robs his gesture of any credibility whatsoever, makes it yet a new act of dishonesty for him, and confirms that it was nothing more than a 'show' staged by his fellow spinmeisters at Casa Santa Marta to recover some lost 'image' ground for the pope. And BTW, Vigano ought to have addressed at least one line of apology to Benedict XVI whom he so misused and abused, if only for having made public what was clearly marked as a private and confidential letter. Vigano is no better than Gianluigi Nuzzi and Paolo Gabriele who had no qualms at all about disclosing to the world the content of private and confidential documents pilfered from Benedict XVI's private files.]

A third point of interest is that the Holy Father has only ostensibly sanctioned Msgr. Vigano by accepting his resignation. In truth, he has asked him to stay on as an assessor (consulter) to the dicastery in order to help provide a “human and professional contribution” to the new prefect and to the media reform. Some therefore see this more as a “demotion” than a resignation and an inadequate and ill-befitting sanction at that, while others may see it as reasonable and appropriate given the reforms are now in their final stages.

Fourthly, the resignation highlights what many now view as an arbitrary administration of justice at the Holy See. One of Pope Francis’s first acts was to make the leaking of confidential documents to the press a punishable offense (later witnessed in the 2016 Vatileaks II trial), and yet misusing the confidential letter of the Pope Emeritus results in what Msgr. Vigano called today a “stepping back” from a previous leadership role.

In a similar way, those responsible for financial crimes and misconduct in the Vatican are supposed to face tougher sanctions after recent reforms, yet no one has so far been tried for money laundering, despite many cases coming to light, while those pushing for financial reform are thwarted.

Similarly, Vatican officials with checkered pasts are often promoted, while those who hold fast to the Church’s teaching are ostracized or sent away.

But lastly, today’s very rare resignation, while flawed and a tragedy for Msgr. Vigano, could still be a sign of hope: that glimmers of a true sense of accountability and justice may at last be coming into view, trumping the courtier mentality in the Vatican that has existed for so long. [A very kind and charitable spin by Mr. Pentin in a commendable effort to show he is fair and balanced in his reporting and commentary. But I'm much too jaded to buy it. This resignation is a one-time event - forced on the Vatican by the sheer shameful weight of the machinations that made Lettergate so outrageous even to staunch Bergoglians like Il Sismografo's Luis Badilla - that the spinmeisters at Casa Santa Marta thought up this new deceit: Let Vigano write a letter of resignation without owning up to his misdeeds - which are really egregious crimes against Truth - and let Bergoglio accept the resignation with great regret whereby he therefore asks Vigano to stay on with a new title (and probably continuing to run the show from a less-exposed position). So the Vatican gets to mollify those asking for Vigano's head while Bergoglio really gets to keep one of his pet priests to continue serving him in the prime responsibility of exalting the pope while demeaning his enemies.]

Marco Tosatti and Antonio Socci have predictably reacted to the 'fake resignation' that has capped the 'fake news' scandal that was Lettergate... But perhaps I like Aldo Maria Valli's 'reaction' best of all -
he published his Introduction to his new book on Benedict XVI (written before Lettergate and published a few days after it), in which he calls him singularly and above all else, 'the pope of Truth'.
His praise of Benedict XVI - and the reasons he cites to support his praise - constitute a distinct sunlit airy contrast to the messy web of dark deceit that has been spun by now to enormous dimensions
by the lord and master of Casa Santa Marta (with profuse apologies to the dear saint whose name is said in vain everytime anyone refers to the Bergoglio Kremlin simply as 'Santa Marta'). Here's
Tosatti first - as his was the shortest and fastest to translate of the 3 articles.

Vigano, Barros and the governing style
of the reigning pope, which comes down to
‘L’Eglise, c’est moi!’
Translated from

March 22, 2018

The Vigano scandal is in some respects worse than that surrounding Mons. Barros, the Chilean bishop promoted by the reigning pope to head the Diocese of Osorno against the winds and tides of opposition from not a few Catholics in the much devastated Church in Chile. But both illustrate the oblique governing style of this Argentine ‘successor of Peter”.

Indeed, the two letters released yesterday – Vigano’s ‘resignation’ and Bergoglio’s ‘reluctant acceptance’ of it – ought to be re-read for what they clearly say about the reign of Bergoglio. [Tosatti proceeds to publish the text of both letters.]

Neither of the two letters makes any reference, not even a veiled one, to errors of misconduct. Neither of the two letters even mentions the man who was most victimized by this squalid episode, Benedict XVI. Who, at the very least, deserved an apology.

He was asked to make a ‘dense and concise’ commentary on the work of persons, among whom were those who had always been publicly hostile to him. [But that is not the point. If it had been just their personal hostility to him as Joseph Ratzinger, he would not have had the outrage he expresses – in his characteristic understated manner – for Huenemann, were it not that the latter had made it his lifework to assault, in general, Catholic teaching on all fronts, and in particular, as preached by John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

What does it say of Bergoglio’s advisers who chose the ‘eleven faithful disciples’ who were asked to write about 11 aspects of Bergoglio’s theology, that at least three of them (2 Germans and one Italian) have long been advocating all the taboos the Church has kept through millennia – from women priests and revoking the requirement for priestly celibacy, to same-sex unions, euthanasia and other radical causes dear to Vatican-II progressivists? And surely, Bergoglio knew which men would be asked to be his theological stand-ins, probably approving them with much the same enthusiasm he has been praising the likes of Emma Bonino to high heavens!

By the very choice of such theologians, Bergoglio and his followers are in fact telling the world – since Bergoglio cannot do so directly himself without crossing over the thin technicality that would make him guilty of material heresy – that yes, this pope agrees with these ‘theologians’ in the positions they take against Church teaching, so if they ‘interpret’ Bergoglio’s theology according to their own worldview, then that certainly was a good reason to choose them as his theological surrogates.

Not that those who have eyes to see and ears to hear and minds to think have to be told this at all, but human beings are still so conditioned by hypocrisy as the line of least resistance that everyone pretends they do not know what Bergoglio has been doing to the Church and how fundamentally and irrevocably anti-Catholic he is. Which simply sustains Bergoglio as he goes about realizing the ultimate Satanic fantasy of building his own church on the wreckage he is making out of the one true Church of Christ.]

Back to Benedict [and how Vigano and the Bergoglio Vatican have treated him as nothing more than a tool to be used willynilly for false propaganda]:
- A most courteous letter of refusal from him was made public, even if he marked it ‘personal and confidential’.
- Parts of the letter were used to make him say what he did not say. - A photograph released of his letter was so obviously manipulated to hide the meat of what the letter was about.
- And the Vatican’s much ballyhooed communications chief simply lied when he announced he was reading the entire letter, when in fact he only read those that he cherrypicked to publicize as Benedict XVI’s ‘endorsement’ of Bergoglio.

But there is not a hint at all of this disastrous chain of events in Vigano’s or Bergoglio’s letter. The most ridiculous reaction – allow me this digression – comes from those who say Vigano ‘censored’ the letter to defend Benedict XVI! Defend how? Effrontery knows no limits!

One has to think that the pope was aware of the trap laid out for Benedict XVI. His response to Vigano’s letter [the more one looks at the two letters, the more one thinks both were fabricated, and by the same PR geniuses (maybe Vigano himself wrote both his letter and the pope’s response – that is why we have an exchange of fan letters) who must have thought this would put an end to Lettergate!] does not dissipate this suspicion. Indeed, filled with praises for Vigano as his ‘reply’ is, it makes it all the more plausible to think Bergoglio was in on all this.

One has to think that Vigano’s letter of ‘resignation’, with his singular willingness (strange on the part of someone who is resigning) to continue working at what he does, was written the way Bergoglio would have wanted it to be written. Both letters make this hypothesis plausible.

But if things were indeed as hunky-dory as the two letters make it appear, why then did Vigano ‘resign’? Because of the controversy that ensued? But controversy there will always be, to which one responds, if one is in the right and has nothing to excuse himself for, with clarifications and explanations. [Ummm, rather strange to ask that of a Vatican that has been singularly loath to explain or clarify anything, because calculated ambiguity is precisely what this pope wants to give him some chance of deniability.]

And if errors have been committed, one must man up and admit it. And live with the consequences.

As in the Barros case, this pope is reluctant to admit errors, whether his or those of his trusted associates. Which is not a good sign – it does not show that breadth of spirit one expects of the Successor of Peter. And it connotes a weakness of character, of psychological vulnerability.

The fake resignation following on the fake news about Benedict XVI’s letter simply bear witness to a governance to which one can hardly be sympathetic. So we come to this pope’s oblique style of management.

We have seen that if he does not like the head of an agency or institution and/or the latter is not obsequious and obsequient enough to him, the pope simply goes around him by creating a #2 man who enjoys his full confidence and would serve to keep the #1 man in check. He did this first with the Italian bishops’ conference when Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco was serving out the rest of his second five-year term as CEI president. He did this with Cardinal Sarah at the Congregation for Divine Worship, and to some extent, with Cardinal Mueller when he was still at the CDF. [And don’t be forgetting that he has kept on his own private secretary (who had been his in-house Vatican spy while Bergoglio was in Buenos Aires) in his sinecure at the Congregation for Bishops where, in effect, he looks after the interests of Bergoglio appointees just in case Cardinal Ouellet may not be 100% 'obsequious and obsequient'.

And the creation of the role of ‘counselor’ for Vigano – analogous to that created out of nothing at the APSA for Argentine Bishop Zanchetta – brings this propensity to mind. “So you want Vigano to resign? Fine, now he has resigned, but I’m keeping him in place anyway”, and probably, with more powers than ever, because he has the substantial power of direct relations with the pope without the formal responsibility which (as it has in Lettergate) can hobble him. Telling us in effect, “See how I’ve made fools of you?”

The Church is not a democracy. In the Church, the maximum exercise of true democracy is, as in other institutions, guaranteed by respect for roles and functions. There are laws, there are institutions (such as the Congregations and other offices of the Roman Curia) who, by their work, regulated by laws, guarantee a continuity and uniformity of governance in the Church and for the Church, through the course of time and different popes, and who thereby defend the rights of everyone in the Church, and of the Church herself.

No pope can say, a la Louis XIV, “L’Eglise, c’est moi”. And the personal autocratic style demonstrated in Lettergate and in other cases renders vacuous and empty any proclamations of synodality, etc, trumpeted by the coryphants at Casa Santa Marta.

One last observation: the pope’s letter to Vigano says something about the ‘fusion’ of L’Osservatore Romano. What does it mean? The end to this historical newspaper? [Who knows what Vigano had in mind for it? It appears that through all the consolidation Vigano had been making, the OR alone has continued being outside the jurisdiction of his Secretariat, remaining instead under the Secretariat of State, which, of course, is loath to lose this jurisdiction.]




THE POPE OF TRUTH
Introduction to
'Uno sguardo nella notte:
Ripensando Benedetto XVI'
Translated from

March 22, 2018

I was once asked to describe the most recent pontificates from John XXIII onwards, in one word, one for each pope. What an absurd request, you might say. I agree. Nonetheless, I accepted the challenge. And without stopping to think too much, I answered: “For John XXIII, hope. For Paul VI, suffering. For John Paul I, humility. For John Paul II, courage. And for Benedict XVI, truth.”

When I was asked this, Joseph Ratzinger was still the occupant of Peter’s Chair, so I obviously did not have to describe the [not-yet] pontificate of Jorge Bergoglio in one word. [If this were a classroom situation, I’d be wildly flailing my arms to be asked to speak out: ‘DECEIT’ would be my word. Or DISHONESTY. Or UNTRUTH. The polar opposite at any rate of TRUTH.]

Then Ultime conversazione, Benedict XVI’s post-retirement interview book with Peter Seewald, came out, in which, at a certain point, explaining how he came up with his episcopal motto, Cooperatores Veritatis, the emeritus pope says:

---

For too much time now, the argument of truth has been set aside because it has seemed too ‘big’ for man. No one dares anymore to say, “We possess the truth”, so that even we theologians have increasingly neglected the concept of truth. In the 1970s, those years of struggle, I became ever more aware that if we set truth apart, then what is the object of everything? Truth should always be in the center. It is true we cannot say, “I possess the truth” (because) it is truth that possesses us when it has touched us. And we must seek to be led by this contact.

When I was ordained a bishop, the words from the third Letter of John came to my mind, in which he says that we are all ‘co-workers for the truth”. One can indeed collaborate with Truth, since Truth is a Person. One can be committed to Truth, and seek to have it matter. I thought it was the authentic definition of a theologian’s work – that he who has been touched by Truth, who has seen His face, is now at His service, to work with Him and for Him.

---

So, notwithstanding the numerous texts in which Joseph Ratzinger before he became pope as afterwards, occupied himself with the question of Truth, I think that the reflection above is sufficient to show that coupling the name of Benedict XVI with the word truth is not just possible but mandatory.

Of course, the word truth is highly problematic. Especially in the world today, in which the notion that truth could exist, that it has a name, and that we can encounter it, seems to be held only a few pathetic self-deluders. And from this arise all the difficulties that Benedict XVI’s pontificate had to deal with. Because of this, the gentle Bavarian theologian who became pope had to confront an obstacle course laid out for him, in which every day seemed to bring a new challenge, a new opposition, a new controversy, a new attack.

But it happens that even gentle and shy persons, when put to the test, manage to unsheathe an unsuspected strength, and so it was for Papa Ratzinger. Who, without ever showing agitation, without ever overstepping any line, truly succeeded in being not just a co-worker for the truth, but a witness for the truth. And this is the reason why his many enemies have sought in every way to make things difficult for him, to discredit him, and in many ways, to humiliate him.

In the strategy that was used to wear down Benedict XVI, a central role was played by the so-called pedophilia scandal, which many saw as the ideal blunt weapon to strike at the Pope of truth. Which led to a true persecution, with Joseph Ratzinger as the sacrificial victim. A sequence of events in which we, representatives of the mass media, often behaved like professional hit men.

It is this chain of events that I shall be discussing in the following pages, in which I seek to explain the motivations for the all-out war against Benedict XVI, unveiling the modes of attack, while highlighting the tranquil strength of the Pope of truth, indomitable and refined fighter of that good fight of which the Apostle Paul speaks.

Besides my desire to render homage to the Pope of truth, this book arises from the necessity – of which I am more than convinced – to underscore the timeliness of the great proposition Benedict XVI makes to man in our time. Equally strong, I must say, is yet another desire: to be in his company somehow. Because I miss Benedict XVI.

That is a most touching tribute! I will say again that it is a commentary in itself that Valli chose to mark, as it were, the fifth anniversary of the current pontificate, by publishing a book about the retired pope, the very theme of which strikes at the rotten heart of this pontificate, in which the only 'truth' is whatever it is they tell us is 'true'.



What just blew up with Lettergate?
Not just the 'Vigano case'
but the 'Bergoglio case' as well
Translated from


The clumsy and unprecedented attempt to instrumentalize Benedict XVI – for which neither Bergoglio nor Vigano have apologized – has brought to light the radical rupture between the Argentine pope and the popes who preceded him. It has also made evident the serious crisis of legitimization faced by the incoherent pontificate of this Latin American ‘Successor of Peter’. Having lost his imperial reference points (Obama/Clinton), his pontificate is in great disorder and limping along. There are those in the Roman Curia itself who are starting to be preoccupied about the ulterior damages to the Church that is already prostrate after five years of relentless anti-Catholic bombardment. [Thank you, Mr. Socci. You validate my use of the word I think most appropriate to describe Bergoglio and what he says and does.]
In the commentary that follows, I seek to reconstitute the sensE of the events we now know as Lettergate.

***

Mons. Dario Viganò, the Vatican’s relatively new grand panjandrum for communications, has resigned because of errors he made in trying to use a letter from Benedict XVI as a propaganda tool for Bergoglio. Case resolved? On the contrary! Because from the start it was obvious that this was not just 'a case about Vigano', but above all, ‘a case about Bergoglio'.

The case against Vigano has to do with the dilettantism [I would call it AMATEURISM] whereby the whole operation was managed, with childish expedients and entire paragraphs ‘censored’ from Benedict XVI’s letter (this, in a Vatican that has been pontificating against fake news and partial information). [And who is truly the worst possible and actual pro-active purveyor of fake news and partial information than Bergoglio, with his often-fake because truncated Gospel (a word that literally means 'good news') that he, of course, attributes to Christ? Let’s not even talk about the blasphemy factor here, which magnifies his ‘sin’ exponentially! And yet all but a literal handful of commentators have called him to task at all for falsifying the Word of God in the way he habitually does - which is just one of the many appalling indicators of the three-monkeys syndrome afflicting the media, and thereby public opinion, regarding Bergoglio.]

The case against Bergoglio, much more serious, is the attempt by Bergoglio, through Vigano (who is one of the faithful executors of his will), to obtain an attention-grabbing endorsement from Benedict XVI. In short, he wanted Papa Ratzinger to publicly approve of his, Bergoglio’s ‘revolution’.

So when the emeritus Pope replied to Vigano that he would not be making any such endorsement, and that he did not have the slightest intention to read the booklets of apologia pro Bergoglio – and was moreover indignant that the Vatican should have chosen, to write one of the booklets laudatory of Pope Francis, someone who had in the past virulently attacked not just his pontificate and the preceding one of John Paul II, but Church teaching itself in general - that was a bitter pill to take for those at Casa Santa Marta.

Especially since everyone remembers that recently, Benedict XVI had written a beautiful and substantial Preface to a book by Cardinal Sarah, an endorsement that was enthusiastic.

But to Bergoglio’s emissary, Mons Vigano, Benedict XVI said NO, after the obligatory formulas of courtesy. Bergoglio ought to have acknowledged that NO and ordered Benedict’s letter, which the latter had marked ‘Personal and confidential’, filed away in a drawer.

But it was decided instead to use it for its originally intended purpose. And so, Mons. Vigano told the world that Benedict XVI had given a resounding endorsement of Pope Francis, while attacking his critics and exalting his successor’s ‘theological wisdom’ (though it is known that he reigning pope does not have a doctorate in theology). [That’s not relevant at all. One can be a theologian without ever getting a doctorate. The only thing that matters is whether the content of a person’s theology serves to illuminate and promote an aspect of Church teaching, not to dissent from it and replace it with one’s own ideas.]

Such a reckless operation (to transform a NO into an endorsement, into a YES), could not have been decided by Vigano alone. Only his superior could do that, even if it is true that Bergoglio has always defended him. Therefore in their exchange of letters yesterday, there was neither a criticism of Vigano nor an admission of error by the latter.

Mons. Viganò writes he is resigning only because “much controversy has arisen” [about Lettergate] and that he did not wish to harm Bergoglio’s reforms.

Actually, the Vatican was trying to avoid a true ‘transparency operation’ which would have required the publication as well of Vigano’s January 12 letter to Benedict XVI to solicit his endorsement. The letter would help us understand many things better, both about Francis’s involvement and about the quotebacks lifted by Benedict XVI from Vigano’s letter.

So Vigano’s ‘resignation’, true or false, will not help clear up things about this most disconcerting episode, but only so that ‘everyone please shut up already about Lettergate’.

Because surely the director of all this is Bergoglio himself. That is why in his letter, Vigano does not admit to any mistake, but says he knows he can count on Bergoglio’s esteem, “shown to me even at our latest meeting”. To which Bergoglio replies in effect: “I accept your resignation unwillingly, but only because we have been caught with our hands in the jam jar”. And then proceeds to reward him by saying he must stay and continue his work in the dicastery [for Communication], inventing for him the office of "Counsellor, in order to be able to give his human and professional support to the new prefect.”

Finally, Bergoglio confirms the reform of the Vatican media carried out by Vigano whose work he praises and even his “profound sensus Ecclesiae”. Evidently, he considers it praiseworthy that a NO from Benedict XVI was made to sound as an endorsement of this pope.

He also thinks the 11 booklets written about his theology admirable, though even a trueblue Bergoglian like Luis Badilla, on his para-Vatican website IL SISMOGRAFO, has raised questions about them.

Badilla says that Vigano and the man in charge of LEV, the Vatican publishing house - “considering the gigantic mess made over Benedict XVI’s letter, which was read and widely disseminated with omissions and cuts that are generally unacceptable according to journalistic ethics, and even more insupportable because this was done on a document from the former Bishop of Rome” - are called on to explain not just the manipulation of the letter but another question that is just as delicate.

Badilla asks “how is it possible that LEV" could have included among the theologians called to exalt Papa Bergoglio a name about whom Benedict XVI has expressed himself so strongly?

“How could it have been possible to give a platform to a theologian who founded an organization openly contradicting the papal magisterium? Joseph Ratzinger’s words on the matter are like a millstone, for which the Vatican must bear the consequences."

Of course, Bergoglio sees no negative consequences at all and has merely ignored questions like Badilla’s. Indeed, he only has words of approval and praise for Vigano and his sensus Ecclesiae, and therefore for the whole Lettergate operation.

Which blew up in their faces instead. A very strong blow for the pope from Argentina. No thanks at all to the ‘critical spirit’ of the major Italian newspapers, but rather to the search for the truth by some bloggers [whom I would call, after John the evangelist and Joseph Ratzinger, cooperatores veritatis.]

Left, Henry Sire holds up a copy of his previous book, PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES: The making, unmaking and restoration of Catholic Tradition, published in 2015.

And BTW, if anyone still doubts that the Vatican has indeed, to all intents and purposes, 'taken over' the once-independent, once- sovereign Order of Malta,
just look at what has happened to the author of THE DICTATOR POPE....

'Dictator Pope' author says his suspension
from the Order of Malta is ‘wholly illegal’
The Order suspended Sire after he was revealed as the author earlier this week

Friday, 23 Mar 2018

Henry Sire, who was this week revealed as the author of The Dictator Pope, has said that his suspension from the Order of Malta is illegal.

The Order released a statement on Wednesday announcing Sire’s suspension, describing his book as a “vile attack against the Pope”.

“Following the press articles reporting the name of the author of the book The Dictator Pope, the Grand Magistry of the Order of Malta has taken the decision to suspend Henry Sire, author of the book and member of the Order of Malta,” the Order said.

“The provisional suspension from membership has immediate effect and an investigation is being launched.”

However, Sire says that the suspension is “wholly illegal” under the Order’s own rules.

“It has been initiated by the Grand Chancellor, with the consent of the Lieutenant of the Order. The laws of the Order stipulate that such a proceeding has to be initiated by my superior, who is the Grand Commander, and he has not been involved.

“Moreover, the superior has to initiate the process without communicating with the Grand Chancellor. These requirements have been comprehensively ignored.”

Sire added: “It is also ironical that these illegalities have been committed by the Grand Chancellor, who ousted the Grand Master a year ago by protesting at the supposed illegalities of his own suspension.”

In January last year, Fra’ Matthew Festing stood down as Grand Master of the Order of Malta at the request of Pope Francis – an act unprecedented in the Order’s history. Many observers said the request was linked to Festing’s suspension of Grand Chancellor Albrecht von Boeselager for his alleged role in a condom distribution scandal.

The Dictator Pope was originally released last year on Kindle, under the pseudonym Marcantonio Colonna. Regnery Publishing, who revealed the author’s real name earlier this week, are releasing a revised and updated version next month.


Just saw this on my way out this morning:
onepeterfive.com/if-henry-sire-had-distributed-condoms-to-the-poor-hed-still-be-in-the-knights-of-malta-ri...
Steve Skojec on the Sire suspension adds a 'hatchet job' on Sire written by the Tablet's Rome correspondent Christopher Lamb, inn which he describes Sire censuringly for being a traditional Catholic who objects to Vatican II and the Novus Ordo liturgy and is supportive of the FSSPX.

Vatican cracks down
on critics of this pope
by THOMAS D. WILLIAMS

March 23, 2018

The Vatican has taken new measures to punish critics of Pope Francis in a move that seems to belie the pope’s earlier calls for greater dialogue and debate within the Church.

On Thursday, the Rome-based Sovereign Order of Malta, which reports directly to the Holy See, suspended historian Henry Sire after he was revealed to be the author of the bestselling book The Dictator Pope: The Inside Story of the Francis Papacy, a critical examination of the pontificate of Pope Francis.

Meanwhile the Vatican has hired the international law firm of Baker McKenzie to force a small Spanish website called InfoVaticana.com to close its doors, allegedly for its sometimes critical tone toward aspects of the Francis papacy. The firm recently threatened a lawsuit if Infovaticana isn’t shut down and “its internet domain transferred to the Vatican.”

The Order of Malta announced its decision Wednesday to suspend the British historian Henry Sire, a member of the order, calling his book a “vile attack” on Pope Francis.

“Following the press articles reporting the name of the author of the book ‘The Dictator Pope’, the Grand Magistry of the Order of Malta has taken the decision to suspend Henry Sire, author of the book and member of the Order of Malta. The provisional suspension from membership has immediate effect and an investigation is being launched,” it said in a statement.

In January, 2017, the Vatican took control of the Knights of Malta after ousting its Grand Master Matthew Festing for his “defiance of papal authority.” The pope asked Festing to resign following a dispute over sovereignty with the Vatican, replacing him with papal delegate Archbishop Angelo Becciu as interim leader of the order.

Under the pen name Marcantonio Colonna, Sire published The Dictator Pope electronically in November of 2017, first in Italian and then in English, after spending a four-year residence with the Knights of Malta in Rome from 2013 to 2017, during which time he conducted his research for the book. Only on Monday did Sire acknowledge that he was the author of the book.

In it, Sire portrays Francis as an authoritarian leader who does not brook opposition or criticism. Contrary to his public persona as a jovial man of the people, Sire wrote that Francis has turned out to be “a papal tyrant the like of whom has not been seen for many centuries” and under his administration, “the Vatican is systematically silencing, eliminating and replacing critics of the Pope’s views.”

“When the publicity cameras are off him, Pope Francis turns into a different figure: arrogant, dismissive of people, prodigal of bad language and notorious for furious outbursts of temper which are known to everyone from the cardinals to the chauffeurs,” he declared.

Unfortunately for the Vatican, the immediate suspension of Sire from the Order of Malta will play as a confirmation of the author’s allegations that under Francis the Holy See deals swiftly and ruthlessly to eliminate those it views as enemies.

Attacks on Infovaticana.org have seemed to follow a similar pattern. As the Associated Press (AP) reported, many commercial websites use the Vatican name, and yet the only one that has come under fire from the Holy See has been infovaticana, which would seem to confirm statements by the website’s founder, Gabriel Ariza, that the Vatican is deliberately targeting his site because of disagreement with its content. Ariza has called the Vatican’s measures a “political witchhunt.”

Vatican spokesman Greg Burke has denied these allegations, saying that the dispute with Infovaticana “is not a matter of ideology or freedom of expression, but one of officialdom.”

Other sites and outlets that have “Vatican” in their name include Vatican.com, a news portal and travel site; the Vatican Insider, a religion site with its pages published by the Italian daily La Stampa; and Inside the Vatican, a monthly magazine that publishes both print and digital editions.

None of these other sites have been asked to change their names, charged with copyright infringement, or threatened with lawsuits, which makes the case of Infovaticana.com something of an anomaly.

According to AP, some people within the church have been angered by “content opposing abortion, same-sex marriages and adoptions by gays and lesbians,” which, on the other hand, tends to square with official Catholic teaching on these matters.

Spain’s trademark office ruled last year that Infovaticana had infringed copyright by featuring the gold and white colors of the Vatican flag and the crossed keys of St. Peter in its masthead, after which the website removed these symbols.

Now the Holy See has turned its attention to the name of the website.

Ariza said that the Vatican’s law firm has rejected all efforts to reach an amicable agreement, noting that “we have already taken down previous logos and other vestiges that can relate us to the Vatican, but they just want to shut us down.”

Breitbart News has obtained a copy of one of the letters sent by Baker McKenzie, which, on behalf of the Holy See, insists that the owners of the portal “immediately transfer the domain name of www.infovaticana.com to the Secretary of State (or to whomever they designate).”

If this does not happen, the letter warns, the Vatican is prepared to exercise “all the legal actions at its disposal” to stop the use of the name and to obtain “the due indemnification for damages suffered and legal costs incurred.”

On its own website, Baker McKenzie has announced “record global revenues of $2.67 billion” for its most recent fiscal year.

This past February, Pope Francis explained his approach to dealing with opposition and criticism.

“I cannot deny that these resistances exist. I see them and I know them,” the pope said. “There are doctrinal resistances. For my mental health I do not read the websites of this so-called ‘resistance.’ I know who they are, I know the groups, but I do not read them, simply for my mental health. When there is something very serious, people inform me so that I know. It is displeasing, but we must move on.”

The pope said that his response to opposition depends on the good faith he perceives in those who are opposing him.

“When I perceive opposition, I try to dialogue, when dialogue is possible. But some resistance comes from people who believe they have the true doctrine and accuse you of being a heretic,” he said. [Jorge Mario Pinocchio's nose just grew a whole length! Why has he never tried to 'dialog' with the DUBIA cardinals? - whom many fault BTW, for being too punctilious in not accusing Bergoglio directly of heresy! He hasn't because he obviously has no arguments that will withstand their well-founded and yes, punctilious, opposition to the moral relativism of AL that makes a mockery of Christ's own teaching about marriage and adultery.]

“When I do not find spiritual goodness in these people, because of what they say or write, I simply pray for them. It pains me, but I don’t dwell on it, for the sake of my mental health.” [It's not as if his mental health hasn't already long been compromised!]

Benedict XVI, a pope impossible to falsify
Faith and reason, human ecology, natural law, ‘quaerere Deum’ and liturgy –
were the features of an inconvenient pontificate that continues to be opposed
by Stefano Fontana
Translated from

March 23, 2018

In the Vigano episode, there was much more than just Vigano. In his editorial yesterday, Riccardo Cascioli maintained that behind this episode is an attack on Benedict VXI, not just by instrumentalizing his person – already a very serious offense in itself – but by an attack on his thinking and his magisterium, in the attempt to ‘yank his chain’, so to speak, and make him say what he did not say, attributing to him positions he never took.

In which such mediatic counterfeiting would then facilitate a theological and magisterial counterfeiting of his thought, in the attempt to change the perceptions about his Magisterium and lead to false conclusions about it.

During his Pontificate, La Civilta Cattolica [now the house organ of Casa Santa Marta and its Supreme Tenant] called Benedict XVI ‘an inconvenient pope’. As Pope Emeritus, he obviously continues to be ‘inconvenient’ if, by misrepresenting him, his opponents think they are thereby ‘normalizing’ him. But how can that be done properly, seeing that his teachings are and have been prominent before the eyes and ears of everyone in all their clarity? What then are the ‘inconvenient’ aspects of Benedict XVI that the Vigano episode sought to make convenient [for the purposes of this pontificate]?

In the first place, the very impostation (i.e., presentation) of his theology and his teaching on the Truth of Chist-Logos, on the providential encounter between early Christianity and Greek thought, therefore affirming the importance of metaphysics and its ‘rebirth’ in contemporary theology as expressed in John Paul II’s seminal encyclical Fides et ratio.

Benedict XVI’s teachings exclude much of progressivist theology yesterday and today which have for a long time now abandoned metaphysics [philosophical thought that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space] in favor of the paradigm of interpretation. In short, they have replaced knowledge about being with an interpretation of existence.

Banedict XVI’s classical attention to metaphysics is very inconvenient because it also meant the recovery of the idea of Creative Wisdom, therefore, the defense of Creation in a non-ideological way, through the full assumption of natural moral law and natural rights. Which horrifies those cardinals, bishops and theologians who are indentured to ‘the signs of the times'.

On the first of the two points, Benedict XVI committed the Church to the defense of Creation not only in the reductionist version of the UN and the ‘popular’ ecological movements, but in the full sense of human and social ecology. Because man and society are fruits of Creative Wisdom, and as such, have an inherent order. Which is why life at every stage, marriage and the family must be defended at all costs.

Others do that, some might say. But it is only the Church that has the capacity to fully safeguard natural law, recognizing its autonomy, as Benedict XVI explained to the German Parliament in 2012, but at the same time, the Church is also the the first protector of Creation because only she is capable of linking Creation to the Creator, thus keeping it secure. But the theology of creation is very much passe in theological schools today, since it is considered too fixed and too metaphysical, and therefore, not at all a convenient topic of discussion.

As for natural moral law, Benedict XVI’s teachings on the subject are numerous – this being the basis for Paul VI’s teachings in Humanae Vitae, and of John Paul II’s teachings in Familiaris consortio, Evangelium vitae and Veritatis splendor.

It is difficult to propose any ‘novelties’ in moral teaching in the Church without making an issue of natural moral law and its consequent moral theology. Obviously, this, too, is a most inconvenient teaching. Especially since it leads to that most inconvenient doctrine about the Church’s non-negotiable principles taught by Benedict XVI, fiercely opposed by progressivist theology and definitively set aside in the current pontificate.

The correct impostation of the purifying relationship between reason and faith – which is doubtless one of the central arguments in Benedict XVI’s teaching – had been intended as well to overcome the many errors of the postConciliar era and to reconsider Vatican II in its authentic reality, to restitute this to the Church after many theologians had allowed it to be exploited by the world.

It re-established the right relationship between doctrine and pastoral ministry, implicitly required a reconsideration of the so-called ‘pastoral revolution’, and started to teach again that truth precedes praxis. Not to forget that the correct relationship between reason and faith is of fundamental importance so that biblical exegesis could go beyond the historico-critical method which Benedict XVI put in its right place.

Perhaps the most acute point of Benedict XVI’s ‘inconvenience’ was the publication of his motu prorpio Summorum Pontificum with which he restored the vetus ordo in the celebration of Holy Mass, considering it an extraordinary form of the one rite of the Roman Catholic Church. Cardinal Ratzinger’s many criticisms of the origin and [instant] development of the post-Vatican II liturgical reform ,and his profound theological reflections on the liturgy were, of course, well-known. With Summorum Pontificum, he wished to make liturgy once more a point of general renewal for a Church faithful to her tradition. It was indisputably the most opposed decision of his pontificate.

Benedict XVI set forth a relationship between the Church and the world that did not yield to secularism nor confuse the sacred and the profane. He worked to restore the centrality of God even in the construction of human society: [as the monks of medieval Europe showed] quaerare Deum – to seek God – was the most important thing from which all human benefits would come, and the Last Things would illumine everything that went before.

He taught clearly the impossibility of being neutral with respect to God, and that a world without God was a world against God. Thus he helped in the correct understanding of secularization and of laicity. These teachings opposed the many interpretations of Vatican II as preaching a parity between the Church and the world, and many contemporary theological currents of thought that essentially reduced the Church to the world.

Benedict XVI’s pontificate was ‘unfinished’ but it does not mean that it was not clear and coherent in combatting the gnosis within the Church herself. And certainly, it is a pontificate that is impossible to represent otherwise, without resorting to fakery.

In contrast, consider this:


A pontificate of fake
[When image is all that matters -
and who cares about truth?]
Translated from

March 23, 2018

Dear everyone – Super-Ex (ex-Movimento per la Vita, ex-Avvenire, ex-others but fortunately not ex-Catholic) has awakened from his periodic lethargy to send us this reflection which seems to me right on, a photograph of persons and facts in the Church today. Unfortunately.

---

In the beginning, he was the good shepherd. After the theologian pope, who was rather reserved and bashful, finally an affable pope able to speak to everyone, including the simplest folk. [But wait, was that not always the admiring line about Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, who for all his brilliance and erudition, could and did reduce the most complex ideas to words everyone could understand, without in any way dumbing them down?]

That was the first great fake news of this pontificate: transforming Bergoglio – a man whom everyone in his previous world had always known to be dodgy, severe and hard - into the pope of smiles.

At all costs! Journalists, artists, TV hosts, singers, dancers, clowns and dwarfs, even comedians like Roberto Benigni, were mobilized for the cause. [Self-mobilized for the most part, though, in a frenzy of instant idolatry for an image – the sentimental but foolish ‘ideal’ of someone elevated to a great and unique office who remains admirably very much like ‘one of us’ in every respect.]

And voila! The pastor pope – fabricated, totally packaged and sold. A pastor pope who, God be thanked, had no use for doctrine and boring theology! It was even sought shamelessly to find him similar to a man who was his polar opposite in everything: the true and original pope of smiles, Albino Luciani, John Paul I. Who was a pastor of great doctrine, a rigorous moralist, a man who was genuinely alien to every form of worldliness, to the point that he never had any interest whatsoever in ‘building up’ for the world a reputation of anti-worldliness.

This rhetoric of Bergoglio the pastor pope went on for years, sustained greatly by gestures, as in a cinema set. “Bergoglio does not speak with encyclicals – he speaks with gestures, embraces, his cellphone, spontaneity..” etc, with an artificious series of well-publicized ‘spontaneous’ actions: spontaneous telephone calls, spontaneous encouners, spontaneous itnerviews, open doors to everyone… Well, not to the FFI, the dubia cardinals, the Order of Malta when it was still sovereign. But to everyone else, yes.

But in time, the media over-exposure became tiresome, the cinematographic strategy started to fail, because films can only go on being ‘real’ for a time until one realizes it is all fiction. So then, enter a new PR squad [or strategy]. “Listen up, the new order is this: Bergoglio is not just the pastor pope, he is also an erudite theologian!” Which is like saying that Eugenio Scalfari is not just a journalist, he is also a profound philosopher!

But now, how to show off this new Bergoglio? How to bring people on board? It’s one thing to keep giving interviews as often as he pleases – the one genre at which Bergoglio excels, by the way [excels as in A for effort, F for content]. It’s another thing altogether to transform a 20th century Latin American Jesuit – formed by a Communist lady professor, mired in the tired, many times warmed-over commonplaces of the 1970s – into a man of doctrine. Ah, doctrine! Was it not supposed to be terrible? So terrible as to be almost evil?

No, it appears from the order of the day - even Bergoglio is ‘a man of doctrine’. Thus, one Massimo Borghesi writes a book looking back to the persons who were the teachers of Bergoglio and constructing what he calls ‘an intellectual biography’! People must know about the philosophical and theological stature of Bergoglio! What there is of it, that is.

And finally, a great idea: why not a theological book series [The Italian term for a book series is collana] – or rather, a collanina – for this pope, a pastor but also a theologian, if you didn’t already know!

But how to affirm the unaffirmable (what cannot truly be affirmed) and say the unsayable (what cannot truly be said) unless to ask the true theologian pope for a seal of approval, a confirmation, even if just a couple of lines to be amplified as necessary through the usual media strategy?

And that is how Mons. Vigano’s triply fake news was born – in the effort to construct on paper, after the pastor pope, also the doctor pope [as in Doctor of the Church]. And these two constructions in themselves, these two fake news phenomena, are the parents of everything else fake deriving from them.

But time is fair [and greater than space!, as our also-philosopher pope likes to say], and everything will gradually come to light….

---

And then there's this unexpected reaction from a Corriere della Sera editorialist, who has had nothing before but unqualified praise and admiration for Bergoglio and his pontificate...

The first open dualism between the 2 popes -
And so, the spell is broken
Francis defends Vigano who does not admit error, and now
we see a rift in the presumed ‘harmonious’ cohabitation
by Massimo Franco
Translated from

March 22, 2018

The week that was supposed to mark the apotheosis of Pope Francis’s first five years as pope ended up instead as one of the most acute crises of his pontificate. Exploding right in the heart of Casa Santa, Marta, the Vatican four-star hotel where he lives, in that very closed circle of associates who have shaped his public profile and his great popularity. [That is, of course, wrong. Bergoglio’s phenomenal popularity was established overnight, no thanks to them, but only to the image he presented to the world at his first appearance as pope – “I’m humble, simple, just one of you, and will be unlike any other pope before me!” What could be more captivating to a society that lives on its a-critical idolatry of image, the more saccharine the better!]

In just a few days, a major rift surfaced in the harmonious cohabitation that the pope and his predecessor appeared to have established between them – and precisely on the topic of doctrine, which is one of the most sensitive areas in which popes may differ. Without either Jorge Bergoglio or Joseph Ratzinger intending to, they found themselves at the center of a mess that shows the distance between them in terms of differences that had not before been public [Properly speaking, ‘not publicly discussed before’, or indeed, ‘publicly avoided’ – especially by the Emeritus Pope himself. ]

But worse than that, the hamhanded manner with which Benedict XVI’s letter of support for Francis about a small series of theological writings [Franco is doubly disingenuous here: the letter was not one of support, given the major objection Benedict had to the series; and in implying the writings were Bergoglio’s when they are in fact, commentaries on Bergoglio’s theology by 11 no-name theologians] risks crumpling up the credibility of the Vatican’s entire communications system. [By the very man chosen by Bergoglio to supposedly strengthen it and rid it of past incompetencies.]


For quite a while, it did not seem that there were ‘two popes’. Miraculously, one could say, no dualism nor differences were even hinted at. [It wasn’t necessary to hint at their abysmal differences, so obvious are they, but it was also impolitic and futile to harp on these differences publicly, because to all intents and purposes, there is only one pope – the one who lives in Casa Santa Marta. The pope who lives at Mater Ecclesiae is an ex-pope, and there is no getting around that unfortunate fact. This is a reality the world did not find hard to accept, and did so from Day 1, much as erudite commentators sought to bewail and continue to do – the supposed anomaly that the former pope is still called 'pope'.]

It was if each of them knew how important it was to project the image of a united Church, especially after Ratzinger’s traumatic resignation in February 2013, the first such papal resignation in 700 years. And although, after the past week's events, it is now no longer taken for granted, the idea of ‘continuity’ between the two pontificates was purveyed as a kind of ‘Vatican truth’ to be protected and disseminated in order to reassure the Catholic world. [What’s to reassure, if the prevailing assumption – even Franco’s – is that not just the world but ‘the Catholic world’ itself far prefers Bergoglio’s ecclesiastical upheavals to anything that went on before him???]

And even when importuned, in effect, by the most conservative Catholic circles most hostile to Bergoglio, Benedict XVI confined himself to affirming his loyalty and obedience to his successor. [Which implies he explicitly reaffirmed it, which he has not. He said it in his last address to the College of Cardinals before he left the Vatican on February 28, 2013, very likely said so directly to Bergoglio right after the latter was elected, but I do not recall he has said so again. Not that he needs to do it, because he is a man of his word.

Fortunately, he obviously does not think that ‘obedience’ also means allowing himself to be used fraudulently, as to praise, for example, or endorse in any way, a series published by the Vatican itself, in which at least three of the authors have built their careers on opposing the teaching of the Church, specifically of the last two popes, on the anti-Catholic issues most dear to the secular world.

An egregious fact which few have pursued to its logical implication: What does it say of Bergoglio that he would have consented to using such theologians in order to ‘present’ his theology to the world? It obviously means he shares their viewpoints, because he has already attended to the first item on their agenda – communion for remarried divorcees, and he has indicated abundantly that he is well on the way to attending to the others as well, namely, extending his ‘no longer sin’ absolution to homosexual practice and commonlaw cohabitation, likewise eventually allowing abortion, contaception and euthanasia in ‘selected cases and on discernment’, to fully allowing married priests and women priests.]

But this narrative of a harmonious cohabitation beyween the two popes now needs to be recalibrated. Benedict XVI wrote in his letter of the ‘foolish prejudice’ of those who attack Bergoglio’s theological preparation, and of the ‘internal continuity’, an expression so subtle as to be almost cryptic, between him and Bergoglio. [That’s easy, and others have pointed it out promptly: he had to say ‘internal continuity’ because very obviously, there is no external continuity! I daresay ‘internal continuity’ merely refers to the fact that they have both been elected pope, which is something only 264 other persons can claim.]

But the disconcerting initial omissions from Benedict XVI’s letter as a deliberate media operation, the subsequent revelation in stages of the rest of the letter – only under growing pressure from al sides – have resulted in suspicions of manipulation if not of censorship. [‘Suspicions’? Let’s not pretend here. Vigano’s manipulations were even more obvious and shameful than Cardinal Baldisseri’s during the two ‘family synods!]

The attempt to crown the praises of 11 theologians commenting on Bergoglio’s theology with the imprimatur of the #1 theologian Benedict XVI simply turned into a sad ‘own goal’ error – especially when it was also revealed that among the praisers of Bergoglio were two Germans well-known to Ratzinger as obstinate detractors of John Paul II’s ontificate and his own.

[Franco commits the facile mistake of others who have reduced Benedict XVI’s refusal to cooperate in Vigano’s scheme to his personal pique against the two detractors. I don’t think he ever once called them out for their hostility towards him, because he never did so against his detractors – he bore all such hostility as his personal cross – only choosing to answer them directly if they raised issues of Church doctrine. This time,he was obviously objecting to the fact that this pontificate would provide a platform for persons who have made a career out of their major objections to Church teaching. Not to see that is to continue with the three-monkeys syndrome about Bergoglio and his pontificate. Yet even the fact that they were asked to participate in the 'exaltamus Bergoglio' project is tacit papal approval in itself of their pet secular views!]

BTW, a comment on Franco's assertion that Benedict XVI's resignation was 'traumatic'. If someone more normal and Catholic than Bergoglio had been elected his successor, it might not have been traumatic at all. The trauma arises entirely from the cardinals' choice of Bergoglio, even if, of course, this would not have happened if Benedict had not resigned. But say Scola, or Ouellet, or Erdo, or even Scherer of Brazil, had been elected, does anyone really think any of them would have shown himself anti-Catholic from the outset as Bergoglio is, or would have sought to wreck the one true Church of Christ as Bergoglio has done?

Finally for this post, Fr. Scalese's belated commentary on Lettergate...

Institutional decorum and Lettergate
Translated from

March 23, 2018

It might seem that Lettergate has ended with the not-altogether-convincing resignation of Mons. Dario Vigano [i.e., While the episode was developing, I could only look on, half amused and half disconsolate. Now that the episode appaers to have reached its epilog, and without reviewing it all over (which many others have already done and with great competence), I would like to make a couple of marginal observations:

1. If this was an example of the great reform of the Curia begun five years ago, then give us back Ottaviani! [Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani (1890-1979) was the leader of the Curial conservatives at Vatican-II, and was subsequently the Prefect of the Holy Office after it was re-named Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith]. Jesting aside, what has happened should lead to reflection on the appropriateness of the current centralization of power in the Vatican. [For all the talk of decentralization and collegiality, it appears Bergoglio is prepared to decentralize doctrine and liturgy, but not administrative power and authority.]

That it was necessary to to have better coordination was obvious. But to think that the problems of the Curia could be solved by creating massive new dicasteries and the dissolving legitimate autonomies was, shall we say, gross naivete.[Does it not stand to reason when the pope’s chosen advisers in his work of governance and reform are all diocesan bishops who, for all the outstanding individual personalities that they may be, have been cursed with the same problems in their own diocesan curias – and if they could not manage to make things right in their own dioceses, why should they be able to manage it better for the Roman Curia that has to deal with more than 5,000 dioceses with a total personnel roster that is half that number? That was Bergoglio’s first naivete about this much-heralded advisory council, which as hunky-dory as it might have seemed on paper, was always a dubious proposition because of faulty assumptions.]

The concentration of all Vatican media resources into the hands of one person – which was Vigano – has been shown to be a rather imprudent move because now, the error of one man has ended up putting the entire system in crisis.

2. What has happened should teach us that, however much times may have changed, there are some values that should remain immutable. We live in an era where what counts appears to be image, efficiency, and success, to be achieved at any cost, without indulging in too many scruples. And in the exercise of power, recklessness, cockiness and cynicism appear to have become the rule. Personally, I have always been of the opinion that in order to govern, a bit of recklessness is indispensable, but it is important not to forget that there is a limit to recklessness, beyond which it becomes abuse and arbitrariness.

Unfortunately, one has the impression that the tendency [to operate without traditional values], now common in society, has reached into the Church, whose present ruling class, which includes young monsignors on the career ladder, seem to be walking in the footsteps of their contemporaries in public office. But it must also be said that if they are doing so, it is because they are allowed to do so.

The present pope, in this sense, has not just shown himself to be tolerant of such conduct, but often fails to give a good example himself.
- In the interview he gave to La Civilta Cattolica that was published in September 2013, he said: “I can say that I am a sly person. I know how to operate”. If to his natural cunning, one adds the ‘mental restrictions’ learned by Jesuits, one understands how it can result in behavior that is not always edifying.
- Thus, we have that stunning revelation made by Mons Bruno Forte – one the Vatican never denied – of what the pope told him on how the family synods should be handled, to wit:

---

“If we speak directly about communion for remarried divorcees, you don’t know what a mess they [opponents of his cause] can create. So let us not speak of it directly, but make sure that the premises are laid down, and let me draw my conclusions”.

---

With those premises, it is obvious that everyone thus enjoined sought to do the best they could.

Yet the lesson of Lettergate should precisely be that there is a limit to everything, a limit beyond which our contemporaries, even those wisest in the ways of the world, will rise up instinctively, and at certain point, will force the errant official to take a step back. It happened recently in Italy with the former Prime Minister Renzi; it has happened now in the Vatican with Vigano.

Perhaps it is time to rediscover certain ‘human values’, at one time so encouraged (and now ignored): correctness, seriousness, honesty, sincerity, loyalty, fidelity to one’s word, respect of others, the humility to make an apology, the willingness to pay the price personally for one’s mistake, honor, courtesy, modesty, good manners [all of which obviously Vigano failed to observe].

Many think that such virtues have become obsolete, when actually, they continue to be indispensable virtues for living with one another. Vatican-II affirms in this regard that without these values, “one cannot even be a true Christian”. (Apostolicam actuositatem, n. 4). [Obviously, one of the countless orthodoxies of Vatican II that progressivists have completely ignored.]

When Berlusconi was in power in Italy, they came up with the expression ‘institutional decorum’ – which has, of course, been shelved after his disgraceful fall from power. It is time to dust it off and re-circulate it, even in Church circles.

[Decorum simply means appropriate behavior, which, institutional or personal, is obviously not of great concern to the Supreme Tenant of Casa Santa Marta, since he himself violated one rule of papal decorum before he even made his first appearance as pope. He chose not to wear the mozzetta that other popes before him dutifully wore as the ecclesiastical symbol of the pope’s authority – and has gone on to violate more rules of decorum as he pleases. And so, he prefers to receive bishops and priests in their street clothes, and not in cassocks, as if wearing a cassock were somehow offensive.

I bet - and forgive me for being ad hominem here - that if he didn’t have the disgraceful paunch he now has, he too would eschew the cassock in favor of street clothes! Except, he might look ridiculous in a white suit – because, surely, he would not insist on black pants without the white cassock to dissimulate it. Yet he has to wear papal white to distinguish him as pope, so he would not be mistakenly looked on as just another priest or bishop in street clothes.]

P.S. Another Lettergate commentary to add:

Pope Francis’s pontificate takes
another hit with Lettergate mess
ANALYSIS by
Father Raymond J. de Souza, SJ

March 22, 2018

Not even a resignation is just a resignation. Pope Francis March 21 accepted the resignation of Msgr. Dario Viganò, the prefect of the Secretariat for Communication, after he intentionally deceived the Vatican press corps about a letter from Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

At the same time, Msgr. Vigano was appointed to the new role of “assessor” in the same department, which in Vatican parlance means the No. 3 position. It is a very fine, even Jesuitical, calibration: Msgr. Viganò’s deception made it untenable for him to continue as head of the department, but it is acceptable for a senior deputy? If the whole scandal had been the work of the deputy in the first place, would it have been okay for him to continue in that place?

Why did Pope Francis not simply let Msgr. Viganò go? Perhaps it is because what he did, while unacceptable in its deceit, was in other ways in keeping with the culture of this pontificate. In that sense, it became an unusual but fitting way to mark the Holy Father’s fifth anniversary week.

[I am disappointed Fr De Souza does not point out the most glaring omission from that one-two PR ploy of the 'resignation': the lack of any apology at all to Benedict XVI for first publicizing a letter he marked 'Private and confidential'all and for all the subsequent manipulations made thereof.]

The scandal: Neither virtue nor candor
The late Cardinal John Foley, the longtime president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, advised that there were two pillars of a good Church media strategy: first, virtue; second, where virtue fails, candor.

Cardinal Foley died in 2011, and, apparently, his memory has been entirely forgotten in his old department, for Msgr. Viganò attempted a spectacular deception and, when caught in the act, dissembled. It was a towering fiasco that shredded his personal credibility and earned him fierce denunciations from both conservatives and liberals alike.

My Register colleague Edward Pentin dubbed it “Lettergate,” and it centered on an initiative to burnish the theological bona fides of Pope Francis.

The Vatican publishing house — also under the direction of Msgr. Viganò — marked the fifth anniversary of Pope Francis’s election by putting out 11 booklets on The Theology of Pope Francis. Msgr. Viganò wrote to Benedict XVI, asking him to write a page or two for the launch of the books, in effect giving a seal of approval to Francis’s theology and orthodoxy.

Benedict declined. He wrote some kind words about the “interior continuity” of the pontificates and said it was a “stupid prejudice” to oppose Francis and Benedict, as if the former is only a simple-minded pastor and the latter an out-of-touch scholar. But then he went on to write that, for reasons of both health and other commitments, he hadn’t read the books and did not intend to do so.

The letter was gracious, but it stung. As the liberal Robert Mickens, a longtime critic of Benedict, wrote: “In plain English, he said: ‘Thanks, but no thanks. I have more pressing things to do, now and in the future, than read these little pamphlets.’”

Fake news at the Vatican
Instead of leaving the letter — marked “confidential” — aside, Msgr. Viganò sought to turn Benedict’s silken prose into a sow’s ear of crude boosterism. So the monsignor read the letter at the book launch March 12, the day before the Holy Father’s anniversary, stressing the “interior continuity” bit. He released a photo of the letter that blurred out the lines about Benedict having no time or interest in reading the little books about Francis’ theological vision.

That created a media uproar, as releasing doctored photos to create a false impression is a violation of basic journalistic ethics. Given that just a few weeks ago Pope Francis devoted his annual World Day of Communications message to inveighing against “fake news,” it was painfully embarrassing that his communications head was doing, precisely to the letter, what the Holy Father decried.

Then the unfathomable became truly scandalous, when March 17 it was revealed that another entire paragraph of the letter had been hidden, one in which Benedict makes clear that he is refusing the request to support the book launch because the series included a specific German theologian.

“Professor Hünermann, during my pontificate, had distinguished himself by leading anti-papal initiatives,” Benedict wrote, expressing his dismay. “In relation to the encyclical Veritatis Splendor, [he] virulently attacked the magisterial authority of the Pope, especially on questions of moral theology.”

Benedict wrote, with gracious understatement, of his “surprise” that he had been asked to endorse a project that included those who openly dissented from his own teaching and that of St. John Paul II.

It is understandable why Msgr. Viganò would not want that bombshell condemnation of his project to come to light. He set out to show the continuity between Benedict XVI and Francis, but Benedict’s letter pointed out that, among the favored voices under Francis, there was a significant discontinuity in doctrine.

Should Msgr. Viganò’s deception be decried as a one-off, if massive, lapse in judgment from the Vatican’s communications chief? Perhaps it was, but it captured perfectly four key aspects of the pontificate of Pope Francis.

1. Theological insecurity
It is not required — and is usually not the case — that the Roman pontiff be a skilled theologian. He has no shortage of advisors to assist him. But it is understandable that any pope following Benedict might feel inadequate in comparison.

No one pretends that Francis is Benedict’s intellectual, theological or literary equal. It is enough to compare the (unedited) transcripts of their Q&A sessions to see that they operate on entirely different planes, to say nothing of their homiletics and writing. That ought not be a cause of embarrassment — no one alive today is on the level of Ratzinger/Benedict. And it is partly the style of Pope Francis, unadorned by theological refinement, that makes him so popular, especially with the secular media and those distant from the Church.

Yet, from the beginning, there has been an odd theological insecurity about this pontificate, an insecurity that motivated Msgr. Viganò to write to Benedict in the first place. From his first Angelus address, Francis has sought to associate himself with the theological credibility of others, beginning with Cardinal Walter Kasper. On multiple occasions, he has expressed — half-jokingly, half-seriously — his reluctance to speak theologically in the presence of those more learned than he.

Most striking, Pope Francis was unsure of the orthodoxy of his 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love). After its publication, he asked Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna whether his own apostolic exhortation was orthodox and pronounced himself “comforted” when the cardinal indicated that it was.

A pope must be confident of his theological depth and orthodoxy. He need not — and wisely does not — rely simply on his own lights for this confidence, but seeks it in the many capable collaborators at his disposal, beginning with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. St. John Paul II — himself a world-class scholar — never had to ask anyone about the orthodoxy of his documents. He had ensured that they were exactly that beforehand, not least with the assistance of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

The Viganò deception was driven by a desire to show that the theology of Francis was both profound and orthodox. Hence the desire to enlist Benedict in that effort. And when he declined in stark terms to do anything more than to offer a routine assessment — “Pope Francis is a man of profound philosophical and theological formation,” something that could be said of any Jesuit of a similar age — Msgr. Viganò’s desire to shine some of Benedict’s borrowed light on Francis led him to manipulate and deceive. In that he served Pope Francis very badly.

Msgr. Viganò’s desperate spin only highlighted the very insecurity that has been present from the beginning. And it emphasizes an issue that should not be an issue, namely whether Francis is comparable as a theologian to Benedict.

2. Manipulation of Texts
The Francis pontificate has shown a certain looseness with written texts. The most notorious example was when the Holy Father clearly said in 2016 that a “great majority” of Catholic marriages were invalid. Pope Francis did not say that he was wrong, or offer another explanation for what he said. The official transcript simply replaced “a great majority” with “a portion of,” which was neither what he said nor what he meant.

That 2016 audience followed a few months after Amoris Laetitia was published. In several places, Amoris Laetitia employs footnotes that are deliberately truncated to give the impression of meaning something different from they actually mean. St. Thomas Aquinas, Vatican II and St. John Paul II are all partially quoted in a manner that arguably betrays their original meaning, a practice that fails basic academic standards, let alone what should be expected in a magisterial document.

Amoris Laetitia itself followed the two synods on the family, where senior cardinals and bishops protested that the information flow out of the synod was manipulated to give a false impression of the synod discussion. At the time, Edward Pentin chronicled that manipulation in great detail. Papal biographer George Weigel alluded to those maneuverings Wednesday, March 21.

3. Veritatis Splendor, the encyclical ignored
Despite the nearly 400 footnotes in Amoris Laetitia, nary a one can be found from Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth), the Church’s recent and most complete teaching on the moral act, the role of conscience and the call to heroic witness.

Like Msgr. Viganò just ignoring the parts of Benedict’s letter that he did not like, the principal interpreters of this pontificate simply pretend that Veritatis Splendor was never written, because it is very difficult to square the teaching of the 25-year-old encyclical with Amoris Laetitia.

That Benedict XVI would specifically refer to Veritatis Splendor in his letter to Msgr. Viganò was not accidental. By noting the inclusion of a prominent dissenter from the encyclical in celebrating the theology of Pope Francis, Benedict was clearly pointing out a trend toward setting St. John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical aside. And precisely because Msgr. Viganò knows that Veritatis Splendor is being set aside, he suppressed that portion of the letter.

4. Making a mess
Hagan lio! (“Make a mess!”) has been a hallmark phrase of Pope Francis. By that he does not mean to do things badly, but to risk bold ventures for the Gospel, even if they might be disruptive.

However, his five years have also brought a series of “messes” that have no particular evangelical value.

Hardly a fortnight goes by without some controversy or another about a secondary or tertiary matter. Presenting some flattering booklets about the Holy Father is about the easiest thing for a Vatican communications official to do. Yet it became a scandal that completely overwhelmed the Holy Father’s fifth anniversary — and his March 17 visit to the relics of Padre Pio, which was chosen to commemorate it.

A certain weariness is setting in around the Catholic world, with the cataract of unforced errors that emanate from those close to the Holy Father. [And the cataracts blinding much of the media, secular and Catholic, from acknowledging these errors and the central source of it all, Jorge Bergoglio himself.]

We saw that weariness most prominently in the comments earlier this year from Cardinal Sean O’Malley after the Holy Father’s trip to Chile. Is it no longer possible for the Vatican simply to do simple things without making a mess?

Msgr. Viganò’s resignation was (partially) accepted because of his deception. But no doubt there was frustration too that an otherwise straightforward project should have gone so horribly wrong.

Douthat’s lament: Francis “must have known
that it did not have to be this way”
Seeking to make sense of a pontificate that began with great promise but in 5 years,
deepened division, caused confusion, and 'undercut the quest for the common ground'
by Gerald J. Ruscello

March 24, 2018

Looking at the wreckage of the mainline Protestant denominations in Europe and America, the Church of England’s continuing decline, and the empty pews of lenient Catholic Germany, one has to wonder —simply as a matter of self-preservation — why would Catholic “progressives” (an imprecise but useful shorthand) persist in reforms similar to those that empirically have proven to be disastrous? What is it that drives them to seemingly overturn longstanding Church teachings when similar moves have decimated other Christian communities in the West?

Best-selling author and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, in To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism, does not exactly explain the why, but he does seek to describe how he thinks Francis and his inner circle are trying to effect changes in the fundamental self-understanding of the Church and her teachings.

Such changes would be tantamount to the most momentous revolution since the Reformation, and according to Douthat “would make Catholic Christianity open to substantial reinterpretation in every generation, and transform many of its doctrines into the equivalent of a party’s platform or a republic’s constitution – which is to say, binding for the moment but constantly open to revision based on democratic debate.”

Douthat states that now, five years after the surprise abdication of Pope Benedict XVI and the equally surprising election of Jorge Bergoglio to the papacy, “it helps to tell a story about the last fifty years of Catholic history.” And then adds: “So let’s tell three.”

Each of the three hinges on a certain understanding and interpretation of Vatican II.
- First is the “liberal” account: the surprising Council was a watershed whose reforms need to be accelerated and which represents a clear break with a “legalistic,” “pharisaical Church.”
- The second story, told by “conservatives”,asserts that Vatican II was “hijacked by those who favored a simple accommodation to the spirit of the 1960s,” but decline was arrested first by John Paul II and then by Benedict XVI, who affirmed the essential continuity of Catholic doctrine.
- Douthat, who is one of America’s most astute observers of this pontificate, proposes a third story: an uneasy truce in a time of upheaval, with neither the liberal nor conservative wings fully successful. What was needed was to transcend the old divisions in a world where the Pope was both very strong and very weak in managing a global flock of widely – some would say insurmountable – divergent understandings of the faith.

Douthat is very good at describing the strange situation in which the papacy finds itself, in a technologically connected and media-saturated world. The papacy is now marketed; “each pope is treated not just as the supreme governor of the church but its single embodiment, the Catholic answer to Gandhi or Mandela, the Beatles or the Stones.” This centralization of the papacy and its magnification is in many ways the fault of modern media, which demands simple stories defined by personalities.

However, Douthat asserts, conservative Catholics bear some of the blame by their actions, especially during the pontificate of John Paul II. But such centrality — which is distinct in ways from Petrine supremacy — sits uneasily with the bulk of Church history and tradition. Douthat might also have mentioned the loss of strong confessional states, which balanced papal power with their own strong obligations to preserve the faith.

Francis was a surprise and perhaps an opportunity.
- Coming from the “periphery,” many hoped that he was free of the ideological presuppositions of European and American clerics and old arguments focused on the West to the neglect of the wider Catholic world.
- He was a pope for the global Church and while his inveighing against ecclesial legalism may have sounded unusual in the West, where excessive legalism was not the problem, perhaps it was not the West he was addressing.
- His views on the poor and the marginalized, combined with an obvious devotion to Mary and personal piety, might have been just what the Church needed to reach out to both non-Christians as well as Catholics hurt by the sex scandals or who had drifted away from the faith.

Douthat spends some time exploring the real appeal of Francis’s message of mercy, and the very Catholic message that all of us are sinners and so must be met where we are. Francis was potentially the great mediator among the Vatican II stories to move the Church into the new age. [WHY??? The Church is sui generis and does not have to dance to anybody else's tune - it only has to keep aloft the Word of God. And of course, this view of Bergoglio is merely an academic effort by Douthat to give himself a working hypothesis that would not a priori appear biased!]][dim] At least that was the hope. [Crap! His idolators, including the media and 'the world' whose opinion the media shapes, immediately thought of him as the man who would finally carry out the progressivist idea of Vatican II as the Magna Carta for a 'new church'. As indeed he is trying to do. Just that no one thought the 'new church' they dreamed of would turn out to be very much 'the church of Bergoglio', miles ahead of Lutheranism since Luther was never pope, and this man is, so he can theoretically do with 'the Church' whatever he wants to do.]

The book argues that Francis instead quickly became a controversial figure, in part because he clearly sided with the very liberal, largely European wing of the episcopate in a way that seemed designed not only to push that agenda but to criticize and even to shame the more orthodox segments of the faithful.

His laudable condemnations of the “throwaway culture” of consumerism included an unsophisticated understanding [lack of understanding is more the case] of modern economics; and his focus on “encounter” with nonbelievers and “mercy” to those within the fold presaged doctrinal vagueness. [Does Douthat say that, or is this the reviewer's conclusion? By all accounts, Bergoglian mercy is primarily for non-Catholics, especially Muslims; and secondarily, and academically only, for Catholics who go along with him in thinking of divine mercy as completely divorced from justice and charity. On the other hand, he clearly has no mercy whatsoever for anyone who dares oppose him and his thinking, which would be those Catholics who know and love their faith well enough to defend it from the unconscionable depredations of this anti-Catholic pope.]

And he moved deliberately to quell dissent, and indeed to punish those he saw as opponents — his treatment of Cardinal Burke being the most well-known example of several that Douthat recounts. More recently, Francis’s rapprochement with the Chinese Communist State, and the doctoring of a letter from Benedict to make it seem as if the pope emeritus was strongly endorsing Francis’s theology, further make it appear as if the Pope and his advisors are not so much serving as a mediators as acting as revolutionaries. [Douthat was wrong, to begin with, in ever thinking even hypothetically of the hubristic singleminded Bergoglio as a mediator in any sense!]

Francis, however, seemed determined to revisit and even undermine some of the Church’s teachings on sexuality, morality, marriage, and the family. The chapters on the early stages of the Francis papacy, including the chaotic and confused Synod on the Family, are a masterful retelling of this sad episode.

Although not an edifying spectacle, it is worth being reminded of the conduct of some of the bishops at the synod, including the not-so-subtle racism of the German bishops toward their more traditional African brethren, the latter facing not just economic modernization and globalization but also a very real threat from Islamic incursions.

Douthat carefully analyzes the arguments for changing the Church’s position on divorce and remarriage, as indicated in Amoris Laetitia and subsequent papal remarks, though he notes that Francis never quite closes the door on any interpretation, preferring a “mess” that is open to various pastoral approaches rather than clear, consistent rules. [A necessary Bergoglian tactic of equivocation and ambiguity, lest he himself provide his critics with evidence he has committed 'material heresy'! As long as he leaves this issue 'open', so to speak, he does not technically meet the definition of heresy in Church law. An obvious fig leaf, of course, but he needs it far more than poor Honorius did who did not propose any heterodoxies, much less heresy, but merely failed to condemn a heresy promoted by some of his bishops!]

Douthat notes, in passing, the irony of a Pope not inclined to nuanced theological defenses in his teaching to the people having to rely on what are at times attenuated interpretations of the Gospels from liberal theologians that disregard the continuity of both traditions and Tradition. But he also notes another irony: conservative Catholics with concerns and criticisms of Francis who “backed the strongest possible understanding of papal authority” now faced with constantly being told to obey “the Pope, this Pope, this present Pope…” [because of course, even the devil cites Scripture when he thinks it is to his benefit].

And so the Francis era, Douthat suggests, “has made conservative overconfidence of the John Paul II era look foolish in hindsight,” even if “it hasn’t made liberal confidence look justified, or at least not yet.” [Was there ever 'conservative overconfidence' after Vatican II? Conservatism was sorely tried in the early years of Paul VI, especially with the Novus Ordo, before that pope himself acknowledged that somehow the smoke of Satan had entered the Church, probably intended as a mea culpa. It has been a defensive battle for Catholic orthodoxy since 1965, with the great disadvantage of having the media and other opinion-movers almost 100% on the side of the anti-Church elements.]

But it also indicates just how rough the waters have been in the decades following the Council, at a time when both instability and an inclination toward a cult of personality — a dubious but distinctive trait of the past century — blurred the lines between the fallible man and the infallible office. [Hardly a general assertion that can be made. The contemporary cult of papal personality only began with John Paul II - and in his case, there were few questionable instances (Assisi and the Koran kissing) of his persona overcoming the office. Benedict XVI was never the object of a personality cult because two decades of media execration before he became pope ensured he was instead a stationary target for any and all opprobrium. Which leaves us with the current Successor of Peter, for whom the media built a cult of personality overnight, and who has revelled in taking full advantage of it to advance his agenda.]

Over time, Douthat argues, “the papal message has lost any distinctively conservative element, instead offering simply liberalism in theology and left-wing politics — German theological premises, Argentine economics, and liberal-Eurocrat assumptions on borders, nations, and migration.” [Again, that is a generalization that cannot stand! None of what Douthat describes in that statement was perpetrated in any way in the magisterium of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Only in this Pontificate. How can Douthat extrapolate backwards the singular failings of this pope to make his two predecessors share in them?]

He fairly and rightly notes that Catholic liberalism is not the same as its Protestant cousin, and so need not lead to the same result as it has in the West — and in a fascinating digression on Jansenism he shows how a liberalizing wing is an important component of Catholic intellectual history.

But the tone here is one of lament, and Douthat observes that Francis acted with intentionality in creating what will prove to be a deep and long-lasting crisis, since “he must have known that it did not have to be this way.” [Surely that is something any Catholic in his right mind could see - with great fear and trembling - almost from Day 1 of Bergoglio as pope!]

And yet, knowing it did not have to be this way, the pontiff from Argentina did not step away from causing confusion and even crisis. Why? Did he always intend to pursue “a kind of revolution” or has he acted rashly and impatiently, not understanding the consequences? It’s hard, if not impossible, to know. [No, it's not. Bergoglio himself recently said, "I know that one day I will come to be known as the man who caused a split in the Church", and it seems he said so proudly. The same man who urged the youth of the world, not three months since his election, that their role was to go out and 'make a mess', i.e., question your bishops, insist on what you think is right for you. But will not himself take any questions that are unpleasant - not even from eminent cardinals - or in any way less than supportive of what he, Bergoglio, says and does.]

But Francis, Douthat sharply concludes,

---

has not just exposed conflicts; he has stoked them, encouraging sweeping ambitions among his allies and apocalyptic fears among his critics. He has not just fostered debate; he has taken sides and hurled invective in a way that has pushed friendly critics into opposition, and undercut the quest for the common ground.

---

One must be grateful that at the end of 234 pages of apparently seeking to give Bergoglio the benefit of the doubt, Douthat comes to the only conclusion he can arrive at - because it is a description of the actual state of the Church in the process of its demolition by Bergoglio.

****************************************************************************************************************************************
And make of this what you will - because it is the outcome so far of a most questionable financial request by this pope to a foundation established to help out the needy dioceses of the world...

Pope cancels audience
with Papal Foundation donors
Members had complained about a $25 million grant requested
by the Pope for a corruption-mired Roman hospital

Saturday, 24 Mar 2018

Pope Francis has called off a meeting with members the Papal Foundation, a charity that has been deeply divided over a request from Pope Francis to give a large donation to a scandal-hit hospital.

Donors objected to a personal request from the Pope to grant $25 million for a Rome hospital faced with serious allegations of money laundering and corruption. The foundation usually awards grants of no more than $200,000.

The Foundation sent half of the grant to the Holy See before complaints grew to such an extent that Foundation chairman Cardinal Donald Wuerl said he had asked the Pope to refuse the rest – a request that was granted.

[My problem is that it has been weeks since this story broke, but since then, no one has apparently tried to find out what is Bergoglio's interest in going out of his way to shill for the hospital to the tune of $25 million dollars! At least Cardinal Bertone was never accused of financial interests when he shilled for a couple of hospitals in maneuvers that Benedict XVI short-circuited before they got anywhere.

Worse, in this particular case, is Bergoglio defender Cardinal Wuerl's failure - perhaps inability - to explain to his own Board Bergoglio's reasons for misusing Board funds. If this had happened in Benedict XVI's Pontificate, nothing would have stopped the likes of John Allen from digging into the whys and wherefores and reporting a scoop. But Bergoglio is not Benedict, so the less said about this probable scandal, the better. And BTW, if neither Allen nor any other Vaticanista did any investigating based on Vatileaks-I, it was because there was never 'any there there' to investigate!

On Thursday, the cardinal sent a new letter to donors saying the Vatican had postponed a regular meeting with Pope Francis “until all of the work of the Foundation is complete and its members and Stewards have agreed upon the Foundation’s mission, structure, processes, and relationship to the Holy See.”

The letter also says the Foundation needs to “address and adequately respond to a report from a board member, which includes anonymous sources and significant misinformation with seriously misleading allegations that continue to circulate among the Stewards of the Foundation causing confusion and disharmony.”

The Foundation holds its annual board meeting in Rome, allowing members to have an audience with the Pope, a privilege granted to the charity.

“While the postponement of the papal audience out of appreciation for our work might be a disappointment, at the same time, the wisdom of such a stop is evident,” Cardinal Wuerl added in his letter.

However, LifeSiteNews quotes anonymous donors who say the cancelation is a snub.

“The cancelation of the papal audience was surely not a result of wanting to have more Board meetings, but was obviously a fear about the pope facing a bunch of angry ripped-off donors. Do we really need to pretend otherwise?” one said.

To become a lay member, or “steward” of the Papal Foundation, donors must pledge “to give $1 million over the course of no more than ten years with a minimum donation of $100,000 per year.”

The scary truth about young Europeans and the Church
New figures show the scale of the challenge
facing the bishops at this year's youth synod
by Stephen Bullivant

March 22, 2018

In his 2003 exhortation Ecclesia in Europa, Pope John Paul II addressed at length the “de-Christianisation of vast areas of the European continent”. Citing Christ’s query as to whether, upon his return, he would find faith left on earth (Luke 18:8), the Polish saint asked: “Will he find faith in our countries, in this Europe of ancient Christian tradition? This is an open question which clearly reveals the depth and the drama of one of the most serious challenges which our churches are called to face.”

Fifteen years later, this “open question” remains. In some European countries, moreover, it is one to which no glib assurances are either possible or advisable.

This week the Benedict XVI Centre [o St. Mary's University, England], in partnership with the Institut Catholique de Paris, launched another of its free-to-download research reports, “Europe’s Young Adults and Religion”. Our main hope is to help inform the synod of bishops this October, which will focus on “Young People, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment”.

The report analyses recent (2014/16) data from the highly regarded European Social Survey to explore the religious affiliation and practice in 22 European countries of 16- to 29-year-olds – the synod’s working definition of a “young adult”.

Large-scale, nationally representative surveys are, of course, decidedly blunt tools. They do not, in themselves, give a remotely full picture of something so complex and richly textured as daily Catholic life. Nevertheless, they can tell us a great deal.


The proportion of 16- to 29-year-olds identifying as Catholic in 22 countries

Most obviously, such surveys are the only reliable means of gauging the proportion of Catholics in a given population and, critically, the proportion of those who are (or are not) practising. Practising, committed Catholics are relatively easy to count and interview: after all, they congregate in set places at set times on a Sunday morning. Meanwhile, lapsed Catholics, by definition, do not gather en masse.

So, how is Catholicism doing among Europe’s young adults? It’s a mixed picture.

As is clear from the first chart, the proportion of young adults identifying as Catholics varies wildly across our sample of countries: from four out of every five in Poland to too few to appear in the sample in neighbouring Russia (yes, Twitter pedants: Kaliningrad counts). Similar extremes exist elsewhere in post-communist Europe: Lithuania and Slovenia up near the top, Estonia and the Czech Republic down at the bottom.

While none of these cases are exactly surprising, the placing of a number of Western countries ought to be. That only seven per cent of Dutch young adults identify as Catholics, in a country that once had a strong and influential Catholic community, is certainly striking.

So too are the relatively small percentages of Catholics among Belgian, French and German young adults. At the other end of the scale, note the presence of Portugal and Ireland as the only western European nations to make the top five. (Not every western European country is included in the sample. Malta and – one hopes – Vatican City would also rank high.)

Religious identity is one thing. Its having some observable effect on a person’s life is, however, quite another. Accordingly, the second chart shows the proportion of Catholic young adults who say they attend church either weekly (or more), or never, outside of special occasions such as weddings and funerals. Only 15 countries are included here, owing to sample sizes.


Frequency of church attendance among young adults identifying as Catholic

Again, it is the sheer variation that is most notable here. Europe is not all that big as continents go, but to speak of “European Catholicism” as though it were a uniform thing is evidently mistaken.

In geographical terms, the distance from Brussels to Warsaw is about a thousand miles. In pastoral and evangelistic terms, it is more like a million. A Polish Catholic twentysomething is roughly 24 times more likely to be a weekly Mass-goer than is a Belgian one. The Belgian, vice versa, is 10 times more likely never to set foot in church than is her Polish co-religionist.

Poland and Belgium are, admittedly, extreme cases. By and large, though, the majority of countries in our sample are rather closer to Belgium than to Poland. This is true even of several countries where Catholic affiliation is very high.

Measured by identity, Lithuania and Austria are among Europe’s Catholic strongholds. But measured by young adults actually turning up at Mass on a regular basis, they’re as much mission territories as swathes of the rest of the continent (our little north-west corner – where one in 10 Catholic young adults is a weekly Mass-goer – included).

Once again, though, there are signs of genuine hope. Czech young adults, for example, have a strong claim to being the world’s least religious: fully 91 per cent say they have no religion, and 70 per cent say they never attend religious services. This religiously bleak backdrop does not, however, seem to deter the country’s young Catholics, a quarter of whom attend Mass at least weekly.

When flying to Prague for a 2009 apostolic visit, Benedict XVI spoke powerfully of the importance of “creative minorities” for leavening heavily secularised cultures. He could hardly have picked a better example. Countercultural Czech Catholicism? That’s a form of Bohemianism I think we can all get behind.

In other news, Irish Catholicism might not be quite so dead as it is often portrayed. True enough, if compared with Irish young adults 30 or 40 years ago, there has undoubtedly been significant religious decline. Compared with the young adult population of pretty much any other Western country, however, Ireland is still bearing up remarkably well, all things considered. (Let’s just pray that they all turn out to #Savethe8th. It’s literally a matter of life or death.)

Let us conclude by quoting again from St John Paul II’s 2003 post-synodal apostolic exhortation on the Church in Europe: “The Church cannot shirk the responsibility of making a courageous diagnosis which will make it possible to decide on appropriate therapies.”

The methods of the social sciences are by no means – thank God – the only diagnostic tools we have. But they undoubtedly have, or ought to have, a role to play in pointing us in the right direction.

As John Paul also put it: “Church in Europe, the ‘new evangelisation’, is the task set before you!” On the current evidence, it’s going to be a big task. Where to begin? Well, learning Czech might not be the worst start…

Stephen Bullivant is professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, and a consulting editor of the Catholic Herald. He is the author of “Europe’s Young Adults and Religion”, a joint report by the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society and the Institut Catholique de Paris, which was launched in Paris on Wednesday, March 21.