THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

Versione Completa Stampa Cerca Utenti Iscriviti Condividi :

Benedetto XVI Forum » Benedetto XVI Forum » English Section » Mainly about BENEDICT XVI, plus relevant items on the Church & the Vatican

Pagine: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, [15], 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, ..., 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40

TERESA BENEDETTA

00giovedì 10 maggio 2018 11:21

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

Hitherto unpublished essay in new book
is vintage Ratzinger grand cru
even in his Emeritus years

May 9, 2018

The book will go on sale May 10, but Settimo Cielo is previewing here its most anticipated pages: a text by Joseph Ratzinger that bears the date of September 29, 2014, and has never been published until now, on the capital question of the foundation of human rights, which, he writes, are either anchored in faith in God the creator, or do not exist.

It is a text of crystalline clarity, which Ratzinger wrote in his retirement at the Vatican one and a half years after his resignation as pope, in commenting on a book - published in 2015 under the definitive title "Diritti umani e cristianesimo. La Chiesa alla prova delle modernità" (Human rights and Christianity. The Church put to the test of modernity) - by his friend Marcello Pera, a philosopher of the liberal school and a former president of the Italian senate.

In his commentary, the Emeritus Pope analyzes the irruption of human rights in the secular and Christian thought of the second half of the twentieth century, as an alternative to the totalitarian dictatorships of every kind, atheist or Islamic. And he explains why “in my preaching and my writings I have always affirmed the centrality of the questions of God.”

The reason is precisely that of guaranteeing that human rights have their foundation of truth, without which rights are multiplied but also self-destruct and man ends up negating himself.

The volume in which this composition is about to come out, together with other texts by Ratzinger on the connection between faith and politics, is published in Italy by Cantagalli: Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI, Liberare la libertà. Fede e politica nel terzo millennio, edited by Pierluca Azzaro and Carlos Granados, preface by Pope Francis, Cantagalli, Siena, 2018, pp. 208, 18 euro.

It is the second in a series of seven volumes entitled “Joseph Ratzinger - Selected Texts,” on the fundamental themes of Ratzinger’s thought as theologian, bishop, and pope, published contemporaneously in multiple languages and in various countries: in Germany by Herder, in Spain by BAC, in France by Parole et Silence, in Poland by KUL, in the United States by Ignatius Press.

Both volumes issued so far have a preface by Pope Francis.

And here is the previously unpublished text that opens the second volume of the series. The subtitle is the original, by Ratzinger himself.

IF GOD DOES NOT EXIST, HUMAN RIGHTS COLLAPSE
Elements for a discussion of the book by Marcello Pera
"The Church, human rights, and estrangement from God"
by Joseph Ratzinger

The book undoubtedly represents a great challenge for contemporary thought, and also, in particular, for the Church and theology. The discontinuity between the statements of the popes of the nineteenth century and the new vision that begins with Pacem in Terris is evident and on it there has been much discussion. It is also at the heart of the opposition of Lefèbvre and his followers against the Council. I do not feel able to give a clear answer to the issues of your book; I can only make a few notes which, in my view, could be important for further discussion.

1. Only thanks to your book has it become clear to me to what extent a new course begins with Pacem in Terris. I was aware of how powerful the effect of that encyclical on Italian politics had been: it gave the decisive impulse for the opening up of Christian Democracy to the left.

I was not aware, however, of what a new beginning this represented also in relation to the conceptual foundations of that party. And yet, as far as I remember, the issue of human rights actually acquired a place of great significance in the Magisterium and in postconciliar theology only with John Paul II.

I have the impression that, in the Saintly Pope, this was not so much the result of reflection (although this was not lacking in him) as the consequence of practical experience. Against the totalitarian claim of the Marxist state and the ideology on which it was based, he saw in the idea of human rights the concrete weapon capable of limiting the totalitarian character of the state, thus offering the room for freedom necessary not only for the thinking of the individual person, but also and above all for the faith of Christians and for the rights of the Church.

The secular image of human rights, according to the formulation given to them in 1948, evidently appeared to him as the rational force contrasting the all-encompassing presumption, ideological and practical, of the state founded on Marxism. And so, as pope, he affirmed the recognition of human rights as a force acknowledged throughout the world by universal reason against dictatorships of every kind.

This affirmation now concerned not only the atheist dictatorships, but also the states founded on the basis of a religious justification, which we find above all in the Islamic world. The fusion of politics and religion in Islam, which necessarily limits the freedom of other religions, and therefore also that of Christians, is opposed to the freedom of faith, which to a certain extent also considers the secular state as the right form of state, in which that freedom of faith which Christians demanded from the beginning finds room.

In this, John Paul II knew that he was in profound continuity with the nascent Church which was facing a state that knew religious tolerance, of course, but that affirmed an ultimate identification between state and divine authority to which Christians could not consent. The Christian faith, which proclaimed a universal religion for all men, necessarily included a fundamental limitation of the authority of the state because of the rights and duties of the individual conscience.

The idea of human rights was not formulated in this way. It was rather a question of setting man's obedience to God as a limit on obedience to the state. However, it does not seem unjustified to me to define the duty of man's obedience to God as a right with respect to the state. And in this regard it was entirely logical that John Paul II, in the Christian relativization of the state in favor of the freedom of obedience to God, should see human rights as coming before any state authority.

I believe that in this sense the pope could certainly have affirmed a profound continuity between the basic idea of human rights and the Christian tradition, even if, of course, the respective instruments, linguistic and conceptual, turn out to be very distant from each other.

2. In my opinion, in the doctrine of man as made in the image of God there is fundamentally contained what Kant affirms when he defines man as an end and not as a means. It could also be said that it contains the idea that man is a subject and not only an object of rights. This constitutive element of the idea of human rights is clearly expressed, it seems to me, in Genesis: "I will require a reckoning of the life of man from man, from everyone for his brother. He who sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God has man been made” (Gen 9:5f).

Being created in the image of God includes the fact that man's life is placed under the special protection of God, the fact that man, with respect to human laws, is the owner of a right established by God himself.

This concept acquired fundamental importance at the beginning of the modern age with the discovery of America. All the new peoples we came across were not baptized, and so the question arose whether they had rights or not. According to the dominant opinion they became genuine subjects of rights only with baptism.

The recognition that they were in the image of God by virtue of creation - and that they remained so even after original sin - meant that even before baptism they were already subjects of rights and therefore could claim respect for their humanity. It seems to me that here was a recognition of "human rights" that precede adherence to the Christian faith and any state power, whatever its specific nature may be.

If I am not mistaken, John Paul II understood his effort for human rights in continuity with the attitude that the ancient Church had toward the Roman state. In effect, the Lord's mandate to make disciples of all peoples had created a new situation in the relationship between religion and the state. Until then there had been no religion with a claim to universality. Religion was an essential part of the identity of each society. Jesus's mandate does not mean immediately demanding a change in the structure of individual societies. And yet it demands that all societies be given the possibility to welcome his message and live in accordance with it.

What follows from this in the first place is a new definition above all of the nature of religion: this is not a ritual and observance that ultimately guarantees the identity of the state. It is instead recognition (faith), and precisely recognition of the truth.

Since the spirit of man has been created for the truth, it is clear that the truth is binding, not in the sense of a positivistic ethics of duty, but rather on the basis of the nature of truth itself, which, precisely in this way, makes man free. This connection between religion and truth includes a right to freedom that can licitly be considered as being in profound continuity with the authentic core of the doctrine of human rights, as John Paul II evidently did.

3. You have rightly considered the Augustinian idea of the state and of history as fundamental, placing it as the basis of your vision of the Christian doctrine of the state. And yet the Aristotelian view may have deserved even greater consideration.

As far as I can judge, it had little importance in the tradition of the Church of the Middle Ages, all the more so after it was taken up by Marsilius of Padua in opposition to the magisterium of the Church. Afterward it was taken up more and more, beginning in the nineteenth century when the social doctrine of the Church was being developed.

One now began from a twofold order, the ordo naturalis and the ordo supernaturalis; where the ordo naturalis was considered complete in itself. It was expressly emphasized that the ordo supernaturalis was a free addition, signifying pure grace that cannot be claimed on the basis of the ordo naturalis.

With the construction of an ordo naturalis that can be grasped in a purely rational manner, an attempt was made to acquire an argumentational basis through which the Church could assert its ethical positions in political debate on the basis of pure rationality.

Correctly, in this view, there is the fact that even after original sin the order of creation, in spite of being injured, has not been completely destroyed. To assert that which is authentically human where it is not possible to affirm the claim of faith is in itself a correct position. It corresponds to the autonomy of the sphere of creation and to the essential freedom of faith. In this sense, an in-depth view is justified, indeed necessary, from the point of view of the theology of creation, of the ordo naturalis in connection with the Aristotelian doctrine of the state. But there are also dangers:

a) It is very easy to forget the reality of original sin and arrive at naive forms of optimism that do not do justice to reality.

b) If the ordo naturalis is seen as a complete totality in itself and does not need the gospel, there exists the danger that what is properly Christian may seem to be a superstructure that is ultimately superfluous, superimposed on the naturally human.

In effect I remember that once I was presented with a draft of a document in which at the end some very pious formulas were expressed, and yet throughout the whole argumentational process not only did Jesus Christ and his gospel not appear, but even God did not, and they therefore seemed superfluous.

Evidently it was believed it was possible to construct a purely rational order of nature which, however, is not strictly rational and which, on the other hand, threatens to relegate that which is properly Christian to the realm of mere sentiment. The limitation of the attempt to devise a self-contained and self-sufficient ordo naturalis emerges clearly here. Father de Lubac, in his "Surnaturel,” tried to show that Saint Thomas Aquinas himself - who was also referred to in the formulation of that attempt - did not really intend this.

c) One fundamental problem of such an attempt consists in the fact that in forgetting the doctrine of original sin there arises a naive confidence in reason that does not perceive the actual complexity of rational knowledge in the ethical field.

The drama of the dispute over natural law clearly shows that metaphysical rationality, which in this context is presupposed, is not immediately evident. It seems to me that Kelsen is ultimately right when he says that deriving a duty from being is reasonable only if Someone has placed a duty in being. To him, however, this thesis is not worthy of discussion.

It seems to me, therefore, that in the end everything rests on the concept of God. If God exists, if there is a creator, then being can also speak of him and indicate a duty to man. Otherwise, the ethos is ultimately reduced to pragmatism. This is why in my preaching and in my writings I have always affirmed the centrality of the question of God.

It seems to me that this is the point at which the vision of your book and my thought fundamentally converge. The idea of human rights ultimately retains its solidity only if it is anchored to faith in God the creator. It is from here that it receives the definition of its limitation and at the same time its justification.

4. I have the impression that in your previous book, Why We Must Call Ourselves Christians, you evaluate the great liberals’ idea of God in a way different than you do in your new work. In the latter it appears as a step toward the loss of faith in God.

On the contrary, in your first book you, in my opinion, had convincingly shown that without the idea of God European liberalism is incomprehensible and illogical. For the fathers of liberalism, God was still the foundation of their vision of the world and of man, so that, in that book, the logic of liberalism makes the confession of the God of the Christian faith necessary.

I understand that both assessments are justified: on the one hand, in liberalism the idea of God detaches itself from its biblical foundations, thus slowly losing its concrete strength; on the other, for the great liberals, God is and remains indispensable. It is possible to accentuate one or the other aspect of the process. I believe it is necessary to mention both. But the vision contained in your first book remains indispensable for me: that is to say, that liberalism, if it excludes God, loses its own foundation.

5. The idea of God includes the fundamental concept of man as a subject of law and thereby justifies and at the same time establishes the limits of the conception of human rights.

In your book you have shown in a persuasive and compelling way what happens when the concept of human rights is split from the idea of God. The multiplication of rights ultimately leads to the destruction of the idea of right and necessarily leads to the nihilistic "right" of man to negate himself: abortion, suicide, the production of man as a thing become rights of man that at the same time negate him.

Thus, in your book it emerges in a convincing manner that the idea of human rights as separated from the idea of God ultimately leads not only to the marginalization of Christianity, but also to its negation. This, which seems to me to be the true purpose of your book, is of great significance in the face of the current spiritual development of the West which is increasingly denying its Christian foundations and turning against them.

TERESA BENEDETTA

00giovedì 10 maggio 2018 13:59

The very illustration for the brochure of the Met exhibit betrays a completely secular view of what the show is about. Detail of an evening ensemble by John Galiano for Dior,
2000-2001 collection, taking off from a papal ensemble complete with miter.

All the photos I've seen so far of the 'celebrity' appearances at the opening night for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new exhibit fancifully called ‘Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination’ are appallingly atrocious - not just for the utter lack of taste in what most of them chose to wear, but in the obvious delight of those whose garments represented the ugliest, most outre spoofs of Catholic symbols one can think of despite the gold and gems, tulle and taffetta and lace, out of which the gowns were confected...

The exhibit being a project of the Met's Costume Institute, not surprisingly the bulk of it appears to be Catholic-'inspired' creations by name dress designers of the past several decades. Which, of course, tends to overshadow the actual historical pieces lent by the Vatican to curator Andrew Bolton, who made 12 trips to sell his idea and then to choose the 42 items from the Vatican Sacristy that would provide the 'actual' substantiation for his theme.

Bolton is quoted as saying: "The heart of Catholicism is a storytelling tradition, so I wanted the show to unravel a series of stories and conversations, which to me is part of the Catholic imagination. It is meant to stimulate discussion. It is not meant to resolve thousands of years of Catholicism. But it is meant to show an aspect of the Catholic faith which is all about extraordinary beauty" and goes on to quote Benedict XVI about how the way of beauty could be, for many, a starting path for religion. The artifacts Bolton chose may do that, but not, it seems, the creations that are supposedly Catholic-'inspired'.

Bolton's Vatican picks ranged from a papal tiara with 19,000 gems, of which 18,000 are believed to be diamonds, to something as simple and prosaic as a pair of red shoes that belonged to John Paul II (who is represented in the exhibit with papal garb of cape, white cassock and zucchetto, plus the shoes.) A fashion commentator said of the shoes that they "helped earn him the nickname 'the Prada Pope'", in which I think she got her popes mixed up. No one ever made a big deal out of papal red shoes until the secular press chose to use it as a mocking symbol for Benedict XVI, about whom they soon established the myth that his red shoes were custom-made by Prada, a whopper that also cleverly embodied the idea of the now-famous saying that 'the devil wears Prada'.

Left, Pius IX dalmatic, 1845-1861; right, papal red shoes that belonged to St. John Paul II [that's a Class I relic on exhibit!]

Left to right: the exhibit catalog; papal tiara of Pius IX, 1854; chasuble of Pius XI, 1926.

About a chasuble of Pius IX, which took 15 women 16 years to embroider, Bolton said, "It's better than anything you see in the Lesage atelier in Paris. It's just extraordinary. I think that one's faith, no matter what faith you adhere to, generates an extraordinary creativity. That is what I would love people to come away with. It's not always Catholic. To reflect on their own faith and whether that has impacted their own creative development and whether that generates or fuels one's creative development. I find that really fascinating — how faith has created such extraordinary works of art, whatever it is."

Anyway, here are two commentaries on the show...

Make Catholicism weird again

May 8, 2018

In 1904, during a debate in France over the anticlerical government’s takeover of church property, a young Marcel Proust wrote an essay for Le Figaro inviting readers to imagine a future in which the Catholic Church vanished completely from his country’s memory, leaving only the bones of French cathedrals as its monuments.

Then he further imagined the cultured elites of some future France rediscovering the texts and chants and rubrics of Catholic liturgy, and in a spasm of enraptured aestheticism, restoring the cathedrals and training actors to recreate the Tridentine Rite Mass.

In his vision, like devotees of Wagner making pilgrimage, “caravans of swells make their way to … Amiens, Chartres, Bourges, Laon, Rheims, Rouen, Paris,” and inside France’s Gothic churches, “they experience the feeling they once sought in Bayreuth … enjoying a work of art in the very setting that had been built for it.”

But of course the recreated Catholic liturgy and revived Catholic aesthetic would never be the real thing; the actors might know their roles, and the incense might waft thick, but attendees could “only ever be curious dilettantes; try as they might, the soul of times past does not dwell within them.”

Proust’s essay, lately translated by Catholic traditionalists, came to mind while watching the beautiful and blasphemous spectacle at the Met Gala on Monday night, where a parade of stars and fashionistas swanned about in costumes inspired by the aesthetics of Catholicism, while a wide variety of genuinely Catholic articles, from vestments to tiaras, were displayed in a Met exhibit titled “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.”

Like Proust’s “caravans of swells” attending liturgical performances, the attendees at the Met were paying a cultural homage to the aesthetic riches of the Roman Church — when, of course, they weren’t sexing them up for shock value. But the spectacle was not exactly Proust’s prophecy come to life, because unlike in his thought experiment, Catholicism today remains a living faith — weakened but hardly gone, with as complicated a relationship to its own traditions as any lapsed-Catholic museum curator or celebrity dressing up as the Maid of Orleans.

This complication is apparent in the Catholic response to the Met Gala itself, which consisted of an institutional blessing for the spectacle — not just Cardinal Timothy Dolan opening the museum exhibit, but the Sistine Chapel Choir performing for the swells and starlets in the evening — followed by an angry Catholic social-media backlash against the evening’s various impieties. When a living faith gets treated like a museum piece, it’s hard for its adherents to know whether to treat the moment as an opportunity for outreach or for outrage.

But the complexity runs much deeper, because to the extent that part of the Proustian prophecy has come true, to the extent that elements of the Catholic tradition have turned into archaic curiosities to be rediscovered by aesthetes and donned lewdly by Rihanna, the choices made by the church’s own leaders have played as much of a role as the anticlericalism of Proust’s era.

It was the church’s own leadership that decided, in the years following the Second Vatican Council, that the attachment to the church as culture had become an impediment to the mission of preaching the gospel in the modern world.

It was the leadership that embraced a different approach, in which Catholic Christianity would seek to enter more fully into modern culture, adopting its styles and habits — modernist and even brutalist church architecture, casual dress, guitar music, a general suburban and Protestant affect, etc. — in order to effectively transform it from within.

It was the leadership that decided that much of what Proust depicted as Catholicism’s cultural glory — the old Mass above all, but also a host of customs and costumes and rituals — needed to be retired in order to reach people in a more disenchanted age.

This idea was hardly absurd in theory; from Roman Empire days through missionary efforts, Christianity had often advanced through inculturation, importing a consistent religious message into varying cultural forms.

But Catholicism’s attempt to do the same with modern culture since the 1960s has largely seemed to fail. The secular culture welcomed the church’s Protestantization and demystification and even secularization, praised the bishops and theologians who pursued it, and then simply pocketed the concessions and ignored the religious ideas those concessions were supposed to advance. Meanwhile, that same secular world maintained a consistent fascination, from “The Exorcist” down to, well, the Met Gala, with all the weirder parts of Catholicism that were supposedly a stumbling block to modernity’s conversion.

This failure, and how exactly Catholics should interpret it, helps frame the debates roiling the church in the age of Pope Francis. One theory is that the evidence of the last 50 years suggests that modern culture is inherently anti-religious or anti-Catholic in some abiding way, which means the attempt to adopt its cultural forms and “accompany” its denizens will inevitably end in dissolution for the church itself.

Thus the only plausible approach for Catholicism is to offer itself, not as a chaplaincy within modern liberalism, but as a full alternative culture in its own right — one that reclaims the inheritance on display at the Met, glories in its own weirdness and supernaturalism, and spurns both accommodations and entangling alliances (including the ones that conservative Catholics have forged with libertarian-inflected right-wing political movements).

The other view is that in fact inculturation has not gone far enough, that the church may have changed its liturgy and costumes, but it’s still held back by its abstract dogmas and arid legalisms, and that one final great leap into modernity, a renewed commitment to accompaniment and understanding and adaptation, is necessary for the church to gain what it sought when it began its great demystification project 50 years ago.

As pontiff, Francis has been on both sides of these debates. The radicalism of his economic and ecological vision, often portrayed as simply liberal, actually represents a kind of left-leaning pessimism that arguably points backward to the strenuous critiques of modernity issued by 19th-century popes. [Whoa!!!! Really???]

And at times this radicalism has been matched by his willingness to join conservative members of his flock in culture war — as recently in the Alfie Evans case in England, where the pope ended up in a public conflict with the more culturally accommodating sort of Catholic over whether to defer to medical professionals and deprive a brain-damaged toddler of oxygen because his life was judged no longer worth sustaining. [I thought Bergoglio's belated me-too-ism on the Alfie Evans case was, in many ways, an attempt to make up for his, in effect, couldn't-care-less attitude in the Charlie Gard story. Maybe the next time we have a similar story, I propose he immediately declare the ailing baby and its parents Vatican citizens, board a special papal flight to wherever the ailing baby is, visit him at the hospital, then walk out back to his car with the baby in his arms and the parents following, and on to the papal plane back to Rome! Do you think that will earn him the Nobel Peace Prize from the anonymous Oslo judges, or would such a counter-cultural attack earn him their lasting disapproval and forever bar him from Nobel consideration? ]

But only at times; on many other fronts, the Francis era has been a springtime for accommodation and inculturation, and especially for the secularizing and Protestantizing German Catholicism that helped forge the original revolution of the 1960s, and whose leaders believe that only further modernization can refill their empty churches.

Under German influence, but with the pope’s implicit blessing, Catholic rules on divorce and now perhaps intercommunion may be joining the Latin Mass and meatless Fridays on the altar of sacrifices to the culture of the modern world.

Meanwhile in the case of the opulent style of Catholic fashion on display at the Met Gala, it is very clear where Francis stands. As Tara Isabella Burton points out in an astute piece for Vox, it’s the pope’s traditionalist adversaries who are more likely to don the sort of “heavenly” garb being feted and imitated at the Met — while from his own simple choice of dress to his constant digs at overdressed clerics and fancy traditionalists, the pope believes that baroque Catholicism belongs in a museum or at a costume gala, and that the church’s future lies in the simple, the casual, the austere and the plain.

For this, as for his doctrine-shaking innovations, Francis has won admiring press. But as with the last wave of Catholic revolution, there is little evidence that the modernizing project makes moderns into Catholics. (The latest Gallup data, for instance, shows American Mass attendance declining faster in the Francis era.)

Instead, the quest for accommodation seems to encourage moderns to divide their sense of what Catholicism represents in two — into an Old Church that’s frightening and fascinating in equal measure, and a New Church that’s a little more liked but much more easily ignored.

Francis and other would-be modernizers are right, and have always been right, that Catholic Christianity should not trade on fear. But a religion that claims to be divinely established cannot persuade without a lot of fascination, and far too much of that has been given up, consigned to the museum, as Western Catholicism has traced its slow decline.

Here the Met Gala should offer the faith from which it took its theme a little bit of inspiration. The path forward for the Catholic Church in the modern world is extraordinarily uncertain. But there is no plausible path that does not involve more of what was displayed and appropriated and blasphemed against in New York City Monday night, more of what once made Catholicism both great and weird, and could yet make it both again.

Mattthew Schmitz gives us a further idea of the Vatican pieces on loan to the Met for this exhibit - but I doubt that any of the pertinent facts he brings up about
each of the popes represented by the artifacts would be familiar even to most Catholic museum-goers!

A few hours before the Met Gala began, Cardinal Dolan stood opposite the Temple of Dendur and proclaimed Christ. He was there for the press preview of the new exhibit “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” He had neither planned the exhibit nor authorized it. Men in Rome had done that, sending the sacred relics of several holy popes for display in the midst of Vanity Fair. Already there were competing attractions. Cameramen mobbed Donatella Versace and Anna Wintour, while Fr. James Martin, SJ, and a woman in a black moiré biretta each attracted small crowds.

When the press conference ended, the fashionistas spilled into the galleries. Men in Thom Browne suits and women with Chanel handbags admired a bondage mask draped in rosaries and gawked at mannequins dressed in papal drag, before going to view the sacred clothes worn by the successors of St. Peter.

According to the organizers, this display of papal vestments and various tasteless, indecent, and blasphemous fashion items is meant to illustrate “the Catholic imagination.” Whenever someone uses the phrase — or its close cousin, “the sacramental imagination” — I know that I am about to hear a tedious disquisition on Flannery O’Connor, or an account of Catholic belief that muddles error and truth. In this regard, the exhibition does not disappoint.

At the press conference, a curator read from a book by Andrew Greeley: “Catholics live in an enchanted world: a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures.” And what faith do all these things express? According to Greeley, a kind of bourgie pantheism: “These Catholic paraphernalia are merely hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility that inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation.”

In the exhibition catalogue, David Tracy dilates on this idea. “It has become increasingly difficult for persons outside or even inside Catholicism to describe, much less define, what distinguishes Catholic Christianity.” Unwilling to refer to traditional ecclesiological and dogmatic claims, Tracy decides that Catholics are united by a set of clichés. They “believe (like Albert Camus) that there is more to admire in human beings than to despise.” They believe that “humanity is on the whole trustworthy.” [Well, at least, those are some benevolent cliches!]

This is a way of talking around the actual content of the faith.[Does one really expect a secular mind to talk about 'the actual content of the faith'? What would he know about it that is authentic, to begin with?]

What the sacramental imagination should mean, first of all, is actual belief in the sacraments: Marriage is indissoluble and ordained by God; Christ is present in the Eucharist and must be revered. My Catholic grandparents, who feared for my soul because I was not baptized as a child, were better exemplars of the sacramental imagination than every ex-Catholic designer combined.

The Catholic imagination only really exists where it expresses, affirms, conforms to sacramental reality and dogmatic truth. My favorite authentic expression of it appears in a letter Pope Innocent IV wrote in 1245 to Guyuk Khan, whose men had been ravaging the Catholic lands of Poland and Hungary. The pope rebuked the khan for disrupting the harmony God had established in nature:

Not only men, but also unreasoning beasts, nay even the material elements of the earth that go into the building of the universe, are as if through a natural bond united with one another, and bound together, after the example of heavenly spirits: for all these traces the Creator of the world has exhibited in all things, so that a lasting and irrefragable bond of peace surrounds all the different orders of being.

This is a beautiful vision, but as its invocation in a diplomatic document should indicate, it had profound religious and political implications. Visitors to the Met exhibit would be foolish to overlook them.

Begin with the jewel-studded clasp worn by Benedict XIII, whose sacramental imagination led him in 1725 to rule that no confession could be sacramentally effective without the intention to sin no more.

Then look at the white silk tafetta mantle that belonged to Benedict XIV, who in 1743 rebuked the Polish bishops for allowing the dissolution of marriages without due cause.

And here is a diamond-studded ring, which the Bourbon princess Marie Adélaïde Clotilede gave to Pius VI in 1775. Pius’s resistance to the French Revolution stemmed from his Catholic imagination, which saw society as a matter of carefully ordered hierarchy. He believed that social order “is like harmony, which derives from the agreement of many sounds.”

Now on to a fiddleback chasuble with flashing gold tinsel worn by Pius VII, whose Catholic imagination led him in 1821 to condemn those who “hold in contempt the Sacraments of the Church … and treat with derision the Mysteries of the Catholic Religion.”

There is a dazzling diamond clasp given to Leo XIII by Maria Cristina, queen regent of Spain. Leo’s Catholic imagination led him not only to challenge the inhumanity of the Industrial Revolution but also to condemn in 1880 “the baneful heresy obtaining among Protestants touching divorce and separation.”

Here is the aquamarine pectoral cross that Leo XIII gave to Giuseppe Sarto, who became Pius X. In 1907 Pius issued the encyclical Pascendi, which warned that “For the Modernists the Sacraments are mere symbols or signs.”

Or here is a cope of Benedict XV, that great lover of peace, whose understanding of the sacramental priesthood compelled him to rule in 1916 that “images of the Blessed Virgin Mary wearing priestly vestments are not approved.”

And here is a gold chasuble of Pius XI, stitched with scenes of crusade. His sacramental imagination obliged him in 1930 to issue Casti Connubii, which condemned “those wicked parents who seek to remain childless, and failing in this, are not ashamed to put their offspring to death.”

Catch the glint of a ring worn by Pius XII, who asked the nations to “follow our peaceful King who taught us to love not only those who are of a different nation or race, but even our enemies.”

And look at the red shoes of John Paul II, who in 1993 issued Veritatis Splendor, which affirmed “objective norms of morality valid for all people of the present and the future, as for those of the past.”

We should attend to the real Catholic imagination and not its sentimental counterfeit. The same faith that gave rise to these beautiful baubles proposed views on sexuality and social order that are contrary to the spirit of the age.

It is foolish to suppose that either the Church’s teaching or its relics are mere artefacts that now have lost their power. These beautiful copes, stoles, clasps, and rings still move men — still have the power Leo XIII acknowledged in Testem Benevolentiae when he advised priests in America to spread the faith “by the pomp and splendor of ceremonies” as well as “by setting forth that sound form of doctrine.” In the Met's carnival atmosphere, their splendor seems all the more radiant.

TERESA BENEDETTA

00giovedì 10 maggio 2018 15:36

Jonathan Pryce, a dead ringer for the pope, plays Bergoglio in the Netflix.

Bad PS about that Netflix movie that a Daily Mail story said would be about how Benedict XVI was elected pope and why he resigned.
It turns out the film may really be about the relationship between him and his successor. Ugghhh! I hate it already.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/world/europe/rome-vatican-netflix-pope.html#click=https://t.co/BL0KG0jaLU

TERESA BENEDETTA

00venerdì 11 maggio 2018 11:55

If I could, I would repeat this post, which I first made on the previous page, as many times as I can to call attention to Cardinal Eijk's courageous words to
describe what is happening in the church of Bergoglio - which in effect, is what he has caused to happen to the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church that
he was elected to lead. The Dutch cardinal's words, unfortunately, have so far has met with far less interest than the Four Cardinals' DUBIA when these were first
made known. The silence so far from the Bergoglio camp is ominous - who knows what the totalitarian tyrant in Casa Santa Marta has in mind for Cardinal Eijk? -
but the silence from the Catholic commentators who must share the cardinal's views is very disheartening.

Nevertheless, read Cardinal Eijk again and again - and weep for the Church and what Bergoglio has done to her. But take heart, too, that there is still someone
in the Church like Cardinal Eijk who sees and says things for what they are. And pray that many more like him will break their unholy silence to speak out
and denounce every chance they can the various apostasies from truth that are taking place in this pontificate and led by the pope himself.

Felicitations to Cardinal Eijk for this most unexpected intervention, in which he goes straight to the point and does not bother with pro forma courtesies
towards the pope when enunciating what he sees as a clear error on the part of the reigning pope. He gets my vote for the first badge of courage - for being as
straightforward as he is orthodox - earned by a cardinal since the start of this pontificate. He does not frame his conclusion as a DUBIUM, but as a clear
assertion that Bergoglio's shirking from making a decision on inter-communion is a form of 'apostasy' (the term I myself have always favored over 'heresy'
to characterize Bergoglio's anti-Catholic words and actions)... Will there be more like him? And what retribution might he expect from Casa Santa Marta for
his laudable parrhesia?

Pope ought to have given
clarity on inter-communion
Failure to give German bishops proper directives based on the clear doctrine
and practice of the Church, points to a drift from the truth towards apostasy
by Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk
Archbishop of Utrecht
The Netherlands

May 7, 2018

The German bishops’ conference voted by a large majority in favor of directives which entail that a Protestant married to a Catholic may receive the Eucharist after meeting a number of conditions:
- he must have carried out an examination of conscience with a priest or with another person with pastoral responsibilities;
- he must have affirmed the faith of the Catholic Church, as well as having wished to put an end to “serious spiritual distress” and to have a “desire to satisfy a longing for the Eucharist.”

Seven members of the German bishops’ conference voted against these directives and sought the opinion of some dicasteries of the Roman Curia. The consequence was that a delegation from the German bishops’ conference spoke in Rome with a delegation from the Roman Curia, including the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The response of the Holy Father, given through the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to the delegation of the German Conference, that the Conference should discuss the drafts again and try to achieve a unanimous result, if possible, is completely incomprehensible. The Church’s doctrine and practice regarding the administration of the Sacrament of the Eucharist to Protestants is perfectly clear. The Code of Canon Law says about this:
“If the danger of death is present or if, in the judgment of the diocesan bishop or conference of bishops, some other grave necessity urges it, Catholic ministers administer these same sacraments licitly also to other Christians not having full communion with the Catholic Church, who cannot approach a minister of their own community and who seek such on their own accord, provided that they manifest Catholic faith in respect to these sacraments and are properly disposed.” C.I.C./1983, can. 844 § 4 (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) no. 1400).
This therefore applies only to emergencies, especially where there is a risk of death.

Inter-communion is, in principle, only possible with Orthodox Christians, because the Eastern Churches, although not in full communion with the Catholic Church, have true sacraments and above all, by virtue of their apostolic succession, a valid priesthood and a valid Eucharist (CCC no 1400, C.I.C./1983 can. 844, § 3). Their faith in the priesthood, in the Eucharist, and also in the Sacrament of Penance is equal to that of the Catholic Church.

However, Protestants do not share faith in the priesthood and the Eucharist. Most German Protestants are Lutheran. Lutherans believe in consubstantiation, which implies the conviction that, in addition to the Body or Blood of Christ, bread and wine are also present when someone receives them. If someone receives the bread and wine without believing this, the Body and Blood of Christ are not really present. Outside this moment of receiving them, there remains only the bread and wine, and the body and blood of Christ are not present.

Obviously, the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation differs essentially from the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which implies the faith that what is received under the figures of bread and wine, even if administered to someone who does not believe in transubstantiation and even outside the moment of administration, remains the Body or Blood of Christ and that it is no longer the substances of bread and wine.

Because of these essential differences, communion should not be administered to a Protestant, even if married to a Catholic, because the Protestant does not live in full communion with the Catholic Church and, therefore, does not explicitly share faith in her Eucharist.

The differences between faith in consubstantiation and that of transubstantiation are so great that one must really demand that someone who wishes to receive Communion explicitly and formally enters into full communion with the Catholic Church (except in case of danger of death) and in this way explicitly confirms his acceptance of the faith of the Catholic Church, including the Eucharist.

A private examination of conscience with a priest or with another person with pastoral responsibilities does not give sufficient guarantees that the person involved really accepts the faith of the Church. By accepting it [the Eucharist], the person can, however, do only one thing: enter into full communion with the Catholic Church.

The draft directives of the German bishops' conference suggest there are only a few cases of Protestants, married to Catholics, who would like to receive Communion by making use of these directives. However, experience shows that in practice these numbers will generally increase. Protestants who are married to Catholics and see other Protestants married to Catholics receiving Communion will think they can do the same. And in the end even Protestants unmarried to Catholics will want to receive it. The general experience with this type of adjustment is that the criteria are quickly extended.

Now the Holy Father has informed the delegation of the German episcopal conference that it must discuss again the draft proposals for a pastoral document on, among other things, administering Communion, and try to find unanimity. Unanimity about what?

Assuming that all members of the German bishops’ conference, after having discussed them again, unanimously decide that Communion can be administered to Protestants married to a Catholic (something that will not happen), will this — while being contrary to what the Code of Canon Law and the Catechism of the Catholic Church say in this regard — become the new practice in the Catholic Church in Germany?

The practice of the Catholic Church, based on her faith, is not determined and does not change statistically when a majority of an episcopal conference votes in favor of it, not even if unanimously.

What the Code of Canon Law and the Catechism of the Catholic Church say should have been the response of the Holy Father, who is, as the Successor of Saint Peter “the perpetual and visible principle and foundation of unity of both the bishops and of the faithful” (Lumen Gentium no. 23).
- The Holy Father should have given the delegation of the German episcopal conference clear directives, based on the clear doctrine and practice of the Church.
- He should have also responded on this basis to the Lutheran woman who asked him on November 15, 2015 if she could receive Communion with her Catholic spouse, saying that this is not acceptable - instead of suggesting she could receive Communion on the basis of her being baptized, and in accordance with her conscience.

By failing to create clarity, great confusion is created among the faithful and the unity of the Church is endangered.

This is also the case with cardinals who publicly propose to bless homosexual relationships, something which is diametrically opposed to the doctrine of the Church, founded on Sacred Scripture, that marriage, according to the order of creation, exists only between a man and a woman.

Observing that the German bishops and, above all, the Successor of Peter, fail to maintain and transmit faithfully and in unity the deposit of faith contained in Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, I cannot help but think of Article 675 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
“The Church’s ultimate trial
Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth.”

+Willem Jacobus Cardinal Eijk
Archbishop of Utrecht, Netherlands
Utrecht, 5 May 2018

Not surprisingly, Aldo Maria Valli is one of the few who have reacted strongly to Cardinal Eijk's statement:

Words to shake you up
Translated from

May 10, 2018

Observing that the German bishops and, above all, the Successor of Peter, fail to maintain and transmit faithfully and in unity the deposit of faith contained in Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, I cannot help but think of Article 675 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
“The Church’s ultimate trial
Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth.”

It’s useless to ignore or hide the fact. The words of Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, archbishop of Utrecht, should shake up any faithful Catholic. His Eminence speaks openly of apostasy and not on the basis of vague considerations but of a concrete fact. The problem has to do with intercommunion between Protestants and Catholics in Germany.

[Valli goes on to quote substantially from the cardinal's statement.]

His conclusion is dramatic: [Valli goes on to repeat the paragraph with which he opened this commentary.]

The question of intercommunion may seem very technical, reserved only for specialists and far from questions that actually touch the faith. But that is not so. Because it is the Eucharist that is in question – which is the very heart of the faith. And if a cardinal ends up using such strong words, speaking openly of the risk of apostasy, it means that the situation is truly grave.

Indeed, the cardinal asks – and asks it of the entire Church - whether we are not now witnessing the great apostasy which, with persecution, the Catholic faithful must face “on earth... the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth". That any Catholic should ask this is one thing, but if the doubt is publicly expressed by a cardinal, then it assumes the magnitude that it has.

As Cardinal Eijk reminds us, already in November 2015, while visiting the Lutheran Church in Rome, the pope was unable to give a clear answer to a Lutheran woman’s question on inter-communion, using extremely confused and confusing statements which in the end meant “maybe yes, maybe no, but do what you think best”. [Which is the best definition of Bergoglian equivocation, the everything-is-OK indifference of someone totally subject to the dictatorship of relativism.]

There are so many ways to speak of apostasy at the top of the Church hierarchy, such as that of Bruno Cornacciola, the seer of the Tre Fontane visions in Rome (“The entire Church will undergo a tremendous trial in order to cleanse the carname that has infiltrated her priests… Priests and faithful will be at a dangerous turning point in the world of the damned which will use any means in its assault – false ideologies and theologies”) and that of LaSallette (“The Church will undergo a terrible crisis. She will be eclipsed. Rome will lose the faith to the point of becoming the seat of the Anti-Christ”).

Already, the day after AL was published, Cardinal Eijk denounced it in these words: “People are confused, and this is not right. The apostolic exhortation has generated doubts that need to be clarified… (because) on the matter of the possibility of access to the Eucharist by remarried divorcees, what is true in one place cannot be wrong in another”. Yet that’s what has been happening.

What has been called “the practical weakening’ of the sacraments by this pope, “carried out for pastoral reasons of ‘mercy’ and ‘welcoming’ (see Roberto Pertici’s essay on Sandro Magister’s blog [link]) is very much in progress.

But what will this lead to? What else is needed to complete "religious deception that offers men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth”?

Once again, I am truly grateful to Cardinal Eijk and all others who like me have been using the word 'apostasy' rather than 'heresy' to describe what Bergoglio is committing!

TERESA BENEDETTA

00sabato 12 maggio 2018 23:32

Church alarm is full blast - but
this pope lets it sound in vain
[But can we really consider the reaction from two cardinals and a few bishops a 'full blast alarm'?
That has been the problem all along - too few in the Church hierarchy have been willing to speak out
against Bergoglio's increasingly anti-Catholic initiatives!]

May 11, 2018

ACHTUNG! The conflict that has exploded in Germany for and against communion for Protestant spouses has exceeded the threshold of alarm about the unity of the universal Church, to judge by the warnings issued in recent days by several cardinals [two, actually, not several!] to the pope. Warnings of a severity without precedent in the five years of the Bergoglio pontificate [that started out being hailed as that of the most popular, if not the greatest, pope there ever was! A worse rush to judgment than the Nobel Peace Prize going to Obama when he was not even six months in office.]

The backstory can be found in this post from Settimo Cielo of May 2, just before the encounter between the opposing parties when they were called to Rome by the pope:
> One Cardinal, Seven Bishops, and Four New "Dubia." This Time on Intercommunion

The meeting between the German cardinals and bishops and the Vatican authorities took place on May 3 in the offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. But it concluded without any sort of decision. In the evening, a laconic statement simply revealed that “Pope Francis values the ecumenical efforts of the German bishops and asks them to find, in a spirit of ecclesial communion, a unanimous result if possible.” [A hands-off non-decision to rank among Bergoglio's worst evasions of duty, most definitely unworthy of a pope, and of someone who was elected to lead the Church - and therefore, be its symbol as well as primary agent of unity, not its main agent of disunity.]

And it is precisely this deflection - backed by the pope [???? Not just backed by the pope but 'decided' by him, insofar as a non-decision is also a decision not to decide, to begin with!] of the issue back to the German bishops to be resolved by a unanimous vote that provoked a a strong reaction from two prominent European cardinals who insist rightly that questions of faith cannot be resolved by vote and without the universal Church being involved. [As in an ecumenical council where all the bishops of the world are convoked under the de facto presidency of the reigning pope. And where supposedly 'democratic' votes are taken, which this pope early on decided to simply ignore and override when he wants to. Which is the story of the two family synods and how, despite the abundant public record of their deliberations and votes, Bergoglio simply - and autocratically - overrode the votes and statements that he disagrees with (never was the sobriquet 'the dictator pope' more appropriate!) to come up with the bastard and ultimately evil document I will henceforth simply refer to as AL, because it can not be the source of either love or joy that it invokes in its presumptuous title.]

The first of these is Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, archbishop of Utrecht. "The response of the Holy Father is completely incomprehensible," he wrote in no uncertain terms in a commentary published in the United States on the National Catholic Register and in Italy on La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana:

"The Holy Father has informed the delegation of the German episcopal conference that it must discuss again, and try to find unanimity. Unanimity about what? The practice of the Catholic Church, based on her faith, is not determined and does not change statistically when a majority of an episcopal conference votes in favor of it, not even if unanimously...

"The Holy Father should have given the delegation of the German episcopal conference clear directives, based on the clear doctrine and practice of the Church. He should have also responded on this basis to the Lutheran woman who asked him on November 15, 2015 if she could receive Communion with her Catholic spouse, saying that this is not acceptable instead of suggesting she could receive Communion on the basis of her being baptized, and in accordance with her conscience. By failing to create clarity, great confusion is created among the faithful and the unity of the Church is endangered."

Eijk is referring here to the tortuous response - yes, no, I don’t know, you figure it out [and do what you think best] - that Francis gave to that Protestant woman and that can be viewed in this video from Centro Televisivo Vaticano, in the original language with an English translation:
> "La domanda sul condividere la cena del Signore…"

And here is the dramatic conclusion that the Dutch cardinal reaches, citing an unsettling passage from the catechism:

Observing that the bishops and, above all, the Successor of Peter fail to maintain and transmit faithfully and in unity the deposit of faith contained in Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, I cannot help but think of Article 675 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: 'Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth'.”

The other cardinal who reacted immediately was Gerhard L. Müller, former CDF prefect. Commenting for the NCRegister on the outcome of the May 3 summit, Müller lamented the absence of a clear response on a question that is a “pillar of our faith, the Eucharist.” A response that it was right to expect from the pope, whose task is precisely to “affirm the faith” and to “give a very clear orientation," not "through personal opinion but according to the revealed faith."

It is not admissible - Müller continued - that an episcopal conference should vote against a doctrine that is a “basic element” of the Church. It is not possible to be “in sacramental communion without ecclesial communion," because if this principle is destroyed then too "the Catholic Church is destroyed."

"We must resist this," Müller went on to say. "I hope more bishops will raise their voices and do their duty. Every cardinal has a duty to explain, defend, promote the Catholic faith, not according to personal feelings, or the swings of public opinion, but by reading the Gospel, the Bible, Holy Scripture, the Church fathers and to know them. Also the Councils, to study the great theologians of the past, and be able to explain and defend the Catholic faith, not with sophistic arguments to please all sides, to be everyone’s darling."

Müller expressed his hope that the CDF may carry out its task as “guide of the magisterium of the pope”: a CDF task, of course, that this pope has not wished to avail of, neither under Mueller nor under his successor, the Spanish Jesuit Luis Ladaria Ferrer. [Both Bergoglio and his onetime one-man brain trust Mons. Fernandez have said informally on more than one occasion that the pope - and the Church, in general - could do very well even without the CDF. Understandably, because neither Bergoglio nor Fernandez believe in many of the essential articles of the Catholic faith, so why would they need anyone to defend and uphold it as he CDF is dutybound to do? So is the pope for that matter - to whom the CDF ought to be the instrument with which he upholds and defends Catholic orthodoxy. But Bergoglio has already made too many choices that make it clear he will change 'Church teaching' when and as he pleases. Except that such altered 'teachings' can never be considered the teaching of the Catholic Church, but of Bergoglio's own church of Bergoglio which he is fashioning in his image and likeness.]

"More clarity and courage must be encouraged," Cardinal Mueller concluded.

Then the NCRegister's excellent Vaticanista Edward Pentin, reported the comments of a source close to the two German bishops who at the Vatican summit on May 3 represented those who had appealed to the Holy See against the concession of communion for Protestant spouses: Cardinal Archbishop Rainer Woelki of Cologne and Regensburg bishop Rudolf Voderholzer.

"Official answer is that there is no answer," the source lamented in commenting on the result of the May 3 summit. “The CDF was left to act as a postman,” meaning as a mere transmitter of the non-response from Francis. Who in his turn “failed to fulfill his obligation as pope regarding a question of dogma which his office must decide" and "affirm the faith."

In the coming months, the source continued - when [AND IF!] the discussion continues in the German bishops' conference of Germany, as the pope wishes, “our job now is to strengthen" and expand the ranks of the bishops who oppose communion for Protestant spouses. "It’ll be a long fight and we’ll be dedicating ourselves to it.”

What is taking shape, in fact, is an 'ecclesiological revolution'. The real problem is not the issue itself, but the refusal of the Pope to carry out his obligation as Peter, and this could have heavy consequences. Peter is no longer the rock he is supposed to be, and as the Supreme Shepherd, he is saying to his sheep instead: "Go yourselves and look for something to eat".

And the pope? It is easy to foresee that as usual he will not react to the warnings from these cardinals. He has not responded to the five DUBIA concerning AL and communion for the divorced and remarried. He has not responded to the four DUBIA concerning communion for Protestant spouses. In the first case he has remained silent [because in his mind he believes it is closed], in the second he has said that the discussion should continue.

He has given hints of his thinking, and in both cases he is in favor of the innovation. But what matters to him is not yanking out the result right away. It is enough for him that the “process” of change be set in motion. A growing number of cardinals and bishops see in this the risk that the unity of the Church may be shattered, and on questions central to the Catholic faith. But for him, the Church must be made precisely like this: “polyhedral,” with many sides. [But he is doing away with the glue that holds those sides together - a common doctrine and a common belief - and without that, all he has are disparate pieces. And as usual, I have a problem with Bergoglio's very imperfect metaphors (which I'm sure he thinks are very clever and original) of which 'field hospital' is the worst so far. 'Polyhedron' is another - has he ever taken time to imagine what an unwieldy thing that would be? Does he see the Church as a polyhedron having more than 5000 facets to represent each diocese, and will the facets all be of equal size - whether it's the sparsely populated Amazonia or the mega-dioceses of Milan and Munich? And I don't know that such an unequal giant mega-faceted polyhedron would even be stable and able to 'stand' on its own!]

Meanwhile, in Germany, the further discussion that Pope Francis wants is already underway, on positions that are still opposed to each other:
> German Bishop: Pope Francis Has Effectively Approved of the Intercommunion Handout

[If Paul VI was the Hamlet pope for his indecisions, then Bergoglio is the Pilate pope for washing his hands off major decisions!]

TERESA BENEDETTA

00domenica 13 maggio 2018 00:35

How many people actually watch crap like this? It appears to be a YouTube video clip produced by Mons. Vigano's Secretariat for Communications, apparently
one in a daily series of video clips to document and disseminate anything and everything Bergoglio says and does... The blogging English couple at TORCH OF
THE FAITH comment on the video:

In newsvid-clip, Bergoglio targets 'rigid' Catholic youth
and misrepresents St Paul in his pre-Damascus days

May 11, 2018

A slick propaganda video [Having had to produce a few 'propaganda videos' in my time, I see nothing slick about this. Indeed, it is very amateurish in that it tries to make do with any video to illustrate the propaganda line - and alas, all the illustrations chosen are pedestrian scenes that could well have been rummaged from any out-take file, and totally inadequate and inappropriate to illustrate what they are supposed to illustrate!] has been released onto the internet, which features Francis returning again to criticisms of one of his favourite groups of, some might say, straw men; those 'rigid youths' who are supposedly blighting the Church in our day.

And so, in a week during which God has been given grave offence - real Catholics the world over have been utterly scandalized and non-Catholics bemused and even shocked, by the heaping up of sacrilegious and impure travesties at the heathenish Met Gala - Francis suggests that the most pressing need of the hour is to again target the remnant of young people who still take the Faith so seriously as to appear 'rigid' in his - might we say? - jaundiced view. ['Perverted' is the adjective I would use for Bergoglio constantly inventing all his strawmen bugaboos who are always so implausible it's a wonder he does not realize it in the process of making them up. As if lying and deception were not sinful - especially if done so blatantly and in public.]

To be perfectly honest, I sometimes think that Francis's repeated returns to this theme leave him looking a bit like those cartoon villains who, when captured at the end of each episode of Scooby Doo!, used to bemoan the fact that they would have got away with their dastardly plans if it had not been for those pesky kids!

I've mentioned before how my own experiences at Ushaw seminary, coupled with conversations with priests, seminarians and ex-seminarians from places as diverse as America, England, Germany, Holland and Ireland, as well as reading Michael S. Rose's classic book, Good Bye, Good Men - How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church, enabled me to discern that the application of the term 'rigid' was part of a sophisticated, supranational and concerted effort, made by un-Catholic [worse, they are anti-Catholic!] subversives within the Church, to label, persecute, sideline and ultimately destroy orthodox religious vocations.

I've also discussed how Francis has used 'rigid' a number of times in order to further depict traditional Catholic youths as not only being rigidly uptight, but also suffering from insecurity, neuroses, psychological instability, hypocrisy and, perhaps more ominously, 'even something else' [What could that be? Insanity?].

It seems that, in his paradigm of thought, the remnant of upright Catholic youths in the Church today appear as so many strait-jacketed Jansenists; or else as having all the harshness of a Mr. Brocklehurst or the uptightness of a Sinjin Rivers, like those two Calvinistic throwbacks in Charlotte Bronte's, Jane Eyre.

I mustsay that, out here at the peripheries, I'm not finding these 'rigid'' types at all in young Catholic circles.

In the whole Novus-Ordo culture, so far as one finds any young people these days, one more typically encounters youths who, though often sincere, have been denied decent catechetical formation, liturgical experience or solid moral teaching. In their social justice t-shirts and colourful WWJD friendship-bands, one could not justly accuse them of ridigity, but more readily feels sadness that they have been denied better fare than they are so often given.

On the other hand, in more traditionalist areas, one frequently meets pockets of young adults whose search for beauty, goodness, truth, reverence and commitment, has led them on a journey into the lush-green and life-giving pastures of traditional Catholic orthodoxy. With some exceptions, the majority of these young people do not strike me as 'rigid' either. Reverent, yes; but not rigid.

Actually, they are often just mighty glad to have discovered the wonder of truth. And there is a certain joy and humility in all of that; a certain peace, even.

We have also met young people whose growth into Catholic orthodoxy has moved them to offer themselves in active service; through things like altar-serving, singing in a Gregorian chant choir, training as care-workers for the sick, feeding the homeless and taking part in pro-life activism. None of this comes across as particularly 'rigid'.

Neither does any of it appear in Francis's latest hit-piece... excuse me... video. Perhaps the kids in his neck of the woods just aren't so cool?

His little film begins with the title, No to Rigid Hypocrisy. It features, amongst clips of actors portraying 'rigid' young types - (to be honest they don't even look that young), programmatic music and footage of Francis preaching against "rigid Christians, who live a double life. They present themselves as good and honest, but when no-one is looking they do terrible things... I think when I say this about many young persons who have fallen into the temptation to be rigid in the Church today. Some are honest and good; but we must pray that the Lord help them to grow in meekness.''

Even if, by a stretch of charitable thinking, one allows this as being somehow a well-meant pastoral warning - after all spiritual pride is a sin to which traditional Catholics are often prone - his next comment remains particularly jarring to the Catholic mind.

Let us ask Saul in a special way to help the rigid youth in the Church, since he was once rigid and honest, full of zeal, and yet mistaken. Let us also pray for rigid hypocrites who live a double life. Those to whom Jesus said, do what they say, but not what they do.

Leaving aside the fact that today most Catholics would need to avoid both what Francis and his key modernistic prelates say and do in order to follow Christ truly, one finds one's jaw simply hanging open at this request to ask Saul to intervene with the 'rigid' youth.

Saul, mind you! As the video fades to a clip of a field of daisies, this line about Saul hangs in the air like a thundery rain cloud on a summer's day.

Saul was not just an honest but rigid man, full of zeal and yet mistaken. He was a Jew, who persecuted the Church.

On the road to Damascus, and in the dramatic grace-filled events which followed, Saul was knocked from his horse by God and became Paul, St. Paul to you and me: a Catholic; an Apostle in fact; a foundational pillar of the Church; no less zealous for the Kingdom; but this time his zeal was made peaceful because it was for Christ. Paul was zealous for and by grace; and he had zeal to spread the offer of salvation to all souls who would respond.

When one thinks of all of these things discussed here today, and then reads of Cardinal Timothy Dolan sending out from the sacrilegious, $30,000 per head Met Gala for sneaked-in hot dogs, later topped off with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, one can only reflect with sorrow on Our Lord's words in Acts 9:4: "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?" [Surely one would not consider Dolan's self-indulgent hot dogs at a $30,000-a-plate dinner an act that persecutes Christ! It was his jovial presence and actual patronage of the atrocious anti-Catholic gala that was!]

Dear young people, and all who kindly come on here to read this blog. Please, do not become discouraged by these events or painful words emanating from Rome and the highest levels of the Church.

Whilst being aware of it, do not look for too long, or too deeply into the void. It is an absence of the good, of charity, of peace, of Jesus Christ.

Remain instead in the peace of Christ through silent prayer, Eucharistic Adoration, Rosary, Confession and Holy Mass.

Do not be discouraged either by your own weakness or sinfulness. God loves you and, provided you remain repentant and humble, devotedly receiving grace in the sacraments, with eyes always fixed on Him, you will be alright.

He has the message of eternal life. These difficult times are passing.

Keep close to Our Lady and Keep the Faith!

TERESA BENEDETTA

00domenica 13 maggio 2018 03:32

If you wish to understand Salvini’s Lega,
read Benedict XVI’s latest book
Full of wisdom and political reflections, the emeritus pope’s
thoughts underlie most of Salvini’s major positions
Translated from

May 12, 2018

A couple of years ago, Matteo Salvini [leader of the Lega political party which was one of the three major winners in Italy’s last elections] proudly wore a T-shirt that read ‘IL MIO PAPA E BENEDETTO XVI’ which he did as an implicit objection to Bergoglio’s migrationism.

At a political rally, Salvini recalled the teachings of Papa Ratzinger and John Paul II who said that before the right to emigrate, the right not to emigrate ought to be asserted first. And that the identity of peoples (with distinct cultures) must be defended.

But far vaster than this particular issue is the super-imposition of the Lega’s political battles with the teachings of Benedict XVI and John Paul II.

This is very apparent from the Emeritus Pope’s recently published new book, Liberare la libertà. Fede e politica nel terzo millennio (Cantagalli). One need not say that the book is very rich in reflections and food for thought that remind us of the fascination and vastness of Ratzinger’s thinking.

Thinking that becomes even more impressive if compared with the relative poverty and conformist superficiality of the limping Bergoglian foreword to the book which does not go beyond politically correct slogans dear to those who patronize hot air.

I will not even try to summarize the many marvelous pages of Benedict XVI that go from Kant to Solzhenitzyn, from the primacy of conscience to Sakharov, from Sartre to Popper, from meditating on Bach’s Passion music to write about "The Good Friday of the 20th century”, to the concept of the state by the early Christians, from Gruenewald’s Crucifix (in the famous Isenheim Altar) to Marx and Lenin.

Everyone can delight in these Ratzingerian pages which are luminous and vast like a beautiful valley in the Tuscan countryside.

Instead, I would like here to consider this book as if it were a true and proper intervention on politics today, especially in Italy, and to single out the themes and thoughts that – although they represent powerful suggestions to every reader – constitute for Matteo Salvini and his Lega an authoritative contribution to some of their major causes.

Above all, the Muslim question. This volume does not include the legendary Regensburg lecture (it is found in another volume of the series), but Benedict XVI has a precious dialog with Marcello Pera in which he defines human rights as “a force recognized by universal reason in all the world against dictatorships of any kind”. If in the 20th century, this statement referred only to the atheist totalitarian systems of the past century, today, the pope says, the issue concerns above all “the states founded on the basis of a religious justification, such as we find most of all in the Islamic world”.

This entire volume of some of Benedict XVI’s collected writings on faith and politics – like the Regensburg lecture – is an apologia for reason and for authentic secularity born out of Christianity (in opposition to the divinization of imperial power in the ancient world).

Another theme that enriches the political persperctive of Salvini and his party is Benedict XVI’s continuous opposition to the European Union whose technocracy has been seeking to impose a positivist ‘one thought’ on the continent, and he sees in this the suicide of Europe.

Because, the pope recalls, “the cultural patrimony of Europe” is much vaster, and because, historically, it was precisely “on the basis of Christian conviction about a Creator God that the ideas of human rights, the equality of all men before the law, acknowledgment of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person, and awareness of man’s self-responsibility for his own actions, developed. These acknowledgements of reason constitute our cultural memory. To ignore them or to consider them as mere things of the past would be to amputate our culture… The culture of Europe was born from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – the encounter between Israel’s faith in God, the philosophical reasoning of the Greeks and the juridical thought of Rome. This threefold encounter make up the innermost identity of Europe”.

This gives rise to our responsibility to fight “for the inviolable dignity of man”. The threefold encounter “established the criteria for the law, and in this historical moment, it is our task to defend it”.

But beyond countering the ideological myth of a relativist Europe according to the Treaty of Maastricht [the 1992 Treaty on European Union signed in Maastrcht to further the integration of Europe. Along with the 1957 Treaty of Rome (Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union), it forms the constitutional basis of the European Union], Benedict XVI also demolishes the other great divinity of our time: the markets. A divinity that has been hossanized and adored, to which States and peoples have been sacrificed.

Against the religion of global marketing, the book re-proposes Benedict’s World Day of Peace message on January 1, 2013, in which, with the growing rampancy of the global economic crisis, he proposes ‘a new economic model’ in which ‘the maximization of profits’ gives way to the primacy of the common good.

He therefore asks of States to take back the initiative in the economic sector with “policies of industrial and agricultural development”(thereby harking back to Keynes, but Keynesian economics has been made impossible because of the single European currency). [I really do not understand what that means, without having to look up Keynesian economics!], and calls for the “fundamental and indispensable ethical structuring of monetary, financial and commercial ethics in ways that will not cause damage to the poorest people”.

Which means that States and people must reassert their primacy over the markets. Which is today a revolutionary thought. But Benedict XVI is so anti-conformist and therefore indigestible to the global powers-that-be that in his last interview book “Last Conversations” with Peter Seewald, he allowed himself an elegant putdown of Obama and a significant appreciation for Putin:

“With Putin, our conversation was in German, which he speaks perfectly. We did not talk about profound matters, but I believe that he – as a man of power – has realized the need for faith.He is a realist. He sees that Russia suffers from the destruction of morals. As a patriot, and as someone who wants to bring Russia back to a role of great power, he understands that the destruction of Christianity would threaten Russia’s own destruction. He realizes that man needs God, and he certainly seems to have been intimately touched by this. Even recently, when he presented Pope Francis with an icon, he first made the sign of the Cross and kissed it”.

One can say that, together with the Italian Constitution and the Gospel, at his next political rally, Salvini can well hold up Benedict XVI’s book to shore up his positions. A book of great political reflection.

And here is one of the lectures given at the formal presentation of the book last Friday in Rome. I must, however, precede my translation with a disclaimer:

I have this very bad habit of proceeding to translate a piece which I believe worth sharing after only cursory reading of it and then realizing as I go forward that it is not what I thought it was supposed to be. This is the unfortunate case with this essay -that I hastened to start translating because it was the first and only material I could find about the May 11 presentation of the new book on Benedict XVI’s writings on faith and politics.

It was with shock and disillusion that I realized the major fault with this essay by Mons. Crepaldi who, as director of the Cardinal Van Thuanh International Observatory on the Social Doctrine of the Church, has made many significant contributions to a discussion of that doctrine. He has written this essay on a patently false and obviously forced premise – that the book represents a convergence of three popes. The cursory foreword ‘signed’ by Pope Francis, with its generic and commonplace statements, probably not even read by him, does not in any way make him a participant in the content of the book.

And while I originally thought that the extravagant but unwarranted idea of convergence that Crepaldi mentions in his opening paragraph was merely a courteous grace note toward the reigning pope (although in striking contrast, he only makes one reference to John Paul II in the essay and does not then attribute anything else in the book to him), he then aggravates his pandering with the rather preposterous claim towards the end that Bergoglio, like Ratzinger and Wontyla, has been a passionate admirer of St. Augustine and Cardinal Newman! I find this to be a statement that is not just unnecessarily pandering to Bergoglio but plain and simply unnecessary in any context because it is not true. Nothing in the past five years or in Bergoglio’s previous life has ever indicated his love and admiration for Augustine or Newman! Why a serious and intelligent man like Mons. Crepaldi found it necessary to make such a statement is beyond me!

He could have omitted any of the statements about Bergoglio in the following essay without detracting in any way from what he has to say about politics, morality and faith. But he had to bring up Bergoglio's name whenever he could because of his ridiculous premise of considering the book as a 'convergence of three popes'.

'Freedom itself needs to be set free'
A presentation of a new book with
the political writings of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI
by Mons. Giampaolo Crepaldi
Archbishop of Trieste
Rome, May 11 2018
Translated from
The official site of the Diocese of Trieste

In the book that I have the honor to present today, three popes come together which makes it truly singular and of great interest. It contains some selected tests of the theologian Joseph Ratzinger, along with some his teachings during his Pontificate. There is a Preface by Pope Francis. And there are the frequent references to St. John Paul II.

Indeed, the book title 'Liberare la liberta’ comes from Pragrapgh 86 of Veritatis splendor and expresses the sense and the intentions of that entire encyclical on morality. This ‘convergence’ is, as I said, of great interest because it indicates continuity at the same time as it does novelty – a novelty in continuity, one might say – in the teachings of the Church on the relationship between faith and politics.

Politics, morality and faith – these are the three terms that frame the contents of the book and which, one must recognize, are also the framework for the entire social doctrine of the Church.

Politics needs morality. It is not directly morality because it has its own legitimate autonomy in its criteria and methods. But it cannot do without morality, as ordinary citizens demonstrate, who are often very rigorous in judging politics precisely from the ethical point of view, and as politicians themselves demonstrate, who always feel compelled to justify the choices they make according to the criteria of goodness and justice.

There is no politician who does not present as ‘good’ and ‘just’ any action which he means to undertake or has undertaken. Even to achieve goals that are material in order – for example, of an economic or productive character – politicians always invoke a justification based on the common good. Of course, they have different views about the common good, but this does not keep politicians, above all, from invoking it as justification for their choices. Which demonstrates that politics, although autonomous, is not self-established. It seeks its ultimate legitimacy not in the results it achieves, nor from electoral mandate, but in the common good, that, is the good of all and of everyone, which politicians are called on to realize.

Today we live in a context of ethical pluralism. But we all acknowledge some basic moral principles that are also present in the Constitution of the Italian Republic. It is an ‘uneasy’ pluralism, which, on the one hand, demands freedom, but at the same time, feels an attraction for the truth. It is not accidental that political discussion often touches on issues with great ethical significance, not just for individual morality but for public morality. Is this not a sign of ‘uneasy’ pluralism? A pluralism that demonstrates, despite the conflict of interpretations and assessments, that politics is never sufficient by itself and that politicians are in position for something other than politics. It is this – the fact of being of service to others – that ultimately gives politics its dignity.

It is at this point that faith comes into play, because it opens to politics as well as to morality windows that the latter would be unable to open by themselves. In human life, everyone needs to be rescued from inherent involution. If politics absolutizes itself, it becomes transformed into technology or ideology. If morality absolutizes itself, it becomes a series of legalistic prohibitions. But the breath of Christian faith can help one and the other – not by appropriating them, but, leaving each in its legitimate autonomy, it offers an ultimate goal, impelling an awareness of higher and vaster things, echoing a call from beyond and towards the beyond. Whereby no damage is done to politics or to morality, which are not negated but confirmed, and we might say, made to breathe better.

I have dwelt on these three aspects – politics, morality and the Chrisitna faith - because their relationship of reciprocal purification represents one of the most interesting points in the teachings of Benedict XVI that we find in this book and confirmed by Pope Francis. Indeed, it is not only faith that purifies politics and morality, but also vice-versa.

In his famous 2004 debate with German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, Cardinal Ratzinger noted that political nihilism needs the purification of faith just as terrorist fundamentalism needs the purification of reason. There is a circularity in faith and reason. The political life of the people’s representatives, the choices made by legislators elected by popular will to represent them, does not exempt them from problems of conscience because indeed these become even more central.

In the work we are presenting today, we also find St. Augustine and Cardinal Newman, authors much loved by all three of the popes involved in this publication. The two great thinkers, as we know, studied the human conscience profoundly, offering significant and hard-to-match food for thought even for politicians.

Conscience is the last tribunal for our actions but not the only one. Benedict XVI has taught us that conscience needs an authority that activates its anamnesis – the most profound recovery of an iondividual’s own history and his motivations. The ultimate authority is needed because it induces the process of continuous self-verification by conscience. That is why the Church has an ecclesiastical authority, and why politics and society have a higher authority which is the truth.

Benedict XVI explains that when conscience, even that of the politician, looks into itself and allows anamnesis, then it finds the truth which resides within each human being, the truth that unifies where mere opinion divides. Politics is activity and sometimes activism, but at the same time, it needs this interior examination of conscience because truth is recognized by the intellect as well as by the heart.

Pope Francis, in his foreword, cites many of these truths which even for politicians should remain truths: respect for life, safeguarding the family, searching justice for all. Individual conscience is able to see these, and even when, in political action, it is subject to jolts and tugs, the politician must realize that he is acting not just with his intellect but with his heart.

In his foreword, the pope insists on the importance of an outlook of love. In the end, one has to recognize the dignity of the human person, the value of family, of human life, the education of the young according to what is good, are acts of love, love for the truth that precedes Parliaments and Constitutions.

There is something that precedes politics, as I have said before, and if a politician takes this into account it does not mean it diminishes him; rather, it acknowledges his own personal honor and his true dignity. In his famous speech to the German Bundestag in 2011, Benedict XVI said that the best virtue for a politician is that which Solomon asked of God: the wisdom of knowing how to lead men for good, because politics is not the administration of things but the governance of men.

The book we are presenting also contains a previously unpublished text by Benedict XVI on the subject of human rights and their foundation, warning of the danger that the proliferation of human ‘rights’ carries in itself the destruction of the concept of law – a process which I believe is very evident in our day. Human rights belong to man as a subject of the law, but their legitimacy presupposes duties that derive from the natural order of things. But in many cases, new ‘rights’ are being absolutized and therefore infinitely multiplied and multipliable. Why does this happen?

The main answer given by Benedict XVI in his new essay is that the natural order cannot maintain itself as such and thereby achieve its natural ends, without a supernatural order. Without refernce to the Creator, the natural order is weakened and little by little becomes lost to view. It is something Pope Francis confirms in his foreword.

Benedict XVI establishes the public role of the Catholic faith which completely honors the natural exigencies of individuals and society since it is a ‘religion with a human face’, and he calls on politicians to acknowledge this role. It is really a demand – an exigent one – for religious freedom.

The book we are presenting is dense in content and must be read as such, but it is also a harbinger of hope and must be appreciated as such. In our present difficulties,[ which are probably not different from those in other times [???? Really???Does this tell us Crepaldi is a witness compromised to the Bergoglian regime?], but more present and vivid to us, politics can still be a source of hope.

It may seem temerary to say so, but faith is able to instill ‘Christian realism’ even in political life. It consists in not closing our eyes to reality, even in its rawest forms, and not to neglect pursing all the means that are concretely in our possession to resolve problems and find just solutions. But it also consists in never ceasing to trust in the help of God who is the lord of history.

Christianity is a religion of hope, as Benedict XVI illustrated very well in his encyclical Spe salvi. Hope is a theological virtue, but that does not mean it cannot extend to circles we may consider profane or secular. Political life needs prerequisites it cannot give itself. One of this is hope, which has helped so many brave politicians to make decisions against their own personal interests and compelled to make important sacrifices in order to be faithful to the good of the country and its people. And this is true not just for politicians who are believers but even for some who choose expressly not to express any religious faith (even if only the Lord knows what is in their hearts).

Hope is a Christian value and a human value. A human value that Christ elevated into a divine virtue. Religious faith gives social life many aids – and one of this is hope. The book we are presenting contains a comforting and encouraging message of hope for everyone. For this, we thank Benedict XVI.

TERESA BENEDETTA

00lunedì 14 maggio 2018 07:46

We American Catholics are now in the post-Easter Season of the Bollixed Holy Days.

One of them is the feast of Jesus’s Ascension into Heaven, which, according to the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles, took place after He had spent “forty days” with His disciples following His resurrection from the dead, “being seen … and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.”

In longstanding Christian tradition, those forty days have meant, in both the Eastern and Western Christian churches, that the Feast of the Ascension is to be celebrated on the Thursday of the sixth week after Easter. So it has been in the Christian world since at least the late fourth century. Hence “Ascension Thursday,” the unofficial name for the day in English-speaking countries. And in the worldwide Latin church, Ascension Thursday is a “holy day of obligation,” meaning that Catholics must attend Mass on the day or risk grave sin.

Except that, well, they don’t really have to anymore in most Catholic dioceses in America. In 1991, the U.S. Catholic bishops, following the lead of Catholic bishops in other Protestant-majority countries where the holy days have little if any official government recognition, voted to release American Catholics from having to observe virtually any holy days of obligation whatsoever. (There are six such days in the U.S. Catholic Church, all representing major Catholic and universal Christian feast days.)

The idea was that, since Mass attendance on those days was already relatively poor among America’s fast-secularizing Catholics, it might be best to kind of forget about obliging Mass attendance at all. As a Los Angeles Times report at the time put it, “Church officials in favor of a change contend that pressures of modern life have made it increasingly hard for people to keep up with religious obligations during the week.” Ah, the pressures of modern life.

So out of the six existing holy days of obligation, the bishops made weekday Mass attendance absolutely mandatory on only two: Christmas (whew!) and December 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary (since Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception is the official Catholic saint-patroness of the United States). As for most of the rest of the holy days, if they happen to fall on a Saturday or a Monday, Mass attendance would be no longer be required, because, after all, it would be too cruel to force people to go to Mass two days in a row.

And as for Ascension Thursday, local bishops would have the option of turning it into “Ascension Thursday Sunday,” so to speak, by moving it to the Sunday immediately following the date of its traditional observance. That would presumably serve the purpose of at least getting a few more Catholics into church for this ancient festal celebration, since they’re required to attend Mass on Sunday anyway. And most U.S. bishops went for the change. Only in a handful of U.S. dioceses, mostly in the Northeast, does Ascension Day still fall on its proper Thursday.

The American bishops — as well as others, mostly in the English-speaking world — had a precedent for this. Starting in the late 1960s, the Feast of the Epiphany, celebrating the Magi’s visit to the infant Jesus—traditionally January 6, “Twelfth Night,” in the Western church—was moved to the Sunday immediately following New Year’s Day. This has meant that the season of Christmastide itself, which traditionally speaking isn’t supposed to end until the eleven pipers pipe and the twelve drummers drum, has regularly been terminated in parish churches as early as January 2.

Further gumming up the works is the fact that many Spanish-speaking Catholics in the United States haven’t bought into the bishops’ switch to Sunday and continue to celebrate El Día de los Tres Reyes—a much more important feast for them than for Anglophones—on whatever day of the week January 6 happens to fall.

Postponing Ascension Day — giving Jesus three extra days on earth before being “taken up” until a “cloud received Him” — means compressing the time between the Ascension and Pentecost (the ancient Jewish Feast of Weeks marking the seventh sabbath after Passover and always celebrated by Christians on a Sunday) from ten days to a mere seven. You might say that God now has to send down the Holy Spirit to the Church (the event that the Christian feast of Pentecost commemorates) by express instead of standard delivery.

Not only does this change maul the Scriptures (the Acts of the Apostles is very clear about the time period between Ascension Day and Pentecost), but the once-widespread Catholic custom of a nine-day novena between the two feast days — with the Easter candle in the sanctuary extinguished on the intervening Sunday as a symbol of Christ’s absence — is now just a memory in most U.S. dioceses. [I am happy to report that at Holy Innocents in Manhattan, the Novena to the Holy Spirit is alive and flourishing, and prayed after Mass with the priest leading.]

And in a further flattening of the post-Easter liturgical calendar, the American bishops (along with bishops in many other Western countries) moved the uniquely Catholic feast of Corpus Christi, which since the Middle Ages has been celebrated on the Thursday ten days after Pentecost. Again, the bishops decided that going to Mass or viewing a procession on a weekday was too much to ask of American Catholics, so Corpus Christi was shuffled off to Sunday as well.

So now we’re left with a blurry procession of late-spring Sundays: Ascension Sunday, Pentecost Sunday, Trinity Sunday (a week after Pentecost), and Corpus Christi Sunday. Many Catholics probably have trouble figuring out which one is which.

As for the bishops’ goal of encouraging Mass attendance on major feasts by moving around their days of observance, quite the opposite has happened instead. Fewer Catholics than ever go to church on Sundays these days, even though such convenient scheduling arrangements as evening and vigil Masses have made it easier than ever in history for them to fulfill their weekly worship obligations.

A Gallup poll released in April 2018 showed that Sunday Mass attendance, which had stabilized at around 45 percent about a decade ago, has recently resumed a precipitous post-Vatican II decline, down to 39 percent in 2017 from its height of 75 percent during the 1950s.

And as the rules about holy-day worship have relaxed, the complaints from Catholics obliged to abide by the few restrictions left have grown. In December 2017, when Christmas fell on a Monday, many Catholics were disappointed to learn that the bishops wouldn’t let them pull a “two-fer” via a Mass on Sunday, December 24, that would cover both days.

It has finally dawned on some people that when you ease up on practices that cement a distinctive Catholic identity, such as celebrating religious feasts on weekdays, people forget that they have any Catholic identity at all. Or that faiths that make demands upon their adherents are more successful in attracting and retaining adherents than those that don’t. (See mainline Protestantism for a textbook example.)

In September 2017, the bishops of England and Wales, who had, like the U.S. bishops, transferred Ascension Day and Epiphany to adjacent Sundays, voted to move them back to their original days. (Corpus Christi will remain on a Sunday in England, at least for the time being.) Perhaps the U.S. bishops will similarly realize that Catholics might cope better with the pressures of modern life if their church stood more distinctly and powerfully for something that transcends modern life.

Can you imagine Islam ever 'relaxing' the rule of praying five times a day, wherever you are - kneeling on a prayer rug and facing Mecca, nor the rules of fasting during the month of Ramadan, these being two of the basic impositions of Islam on its faithful? If the Muslims can be so disciplined in their observance of their basic religious duties, what makes Christians think our religious duties ought to be adjusted for our convenience?

Nor do I think that many Muslims miss out going to Friday mosque prayers when they are supposed to, if only because of peer pressure in a community where everyone knows what its members are doing.

TERESA BENEDETTA

00lunedì 14 maggio 2018 09:51

Corriere della Sera published the text of Mons. Gaenswein's intervention at the book presentation last Friday.]

The pope emeritus and his outlook
on the West and on Europe
by Archbishop Georg Gaenswein
Translated from

May 12, 2018

Before he became Pope, Joseph Ratzinger thought of himself as a German, but perhaps even more, as a Bavarian. Yet because of his family origins, as a child, he always looked towards Salzburg in Austria, having before his eyes the culture of the House of Hapsburg, especially because his maternal grandmother came from the South Tyrol (which is now part of Italy).

Crossing frontiers has characterized his life, with the constnat background of Catholicity’s infinite horizon. Therefore, from childhood, his political homeland was represented not by frontiers but by the West in its entirety, even in the days when the furies unleashed by totalitarianism risked precipitating our continent into the abyss.

So it was not surprising that early on, Europe became the political passion of the young scholar Joseph Ratzinger. Nor that the young Ratzinger was fascinated by Konrad Adenauer and by the poltiical resolve with which Germany’s first postwar Chancellor resisted all the flatteries and promises offered by the Soviet Union after the ‘break in civilization’ that German experienced under National Socialism, to anchor the new Federal Republic of Germany to the system of values inherent in Judaeo-Christian history and that of the Latin West.

Uniquely in this this history – as Joseph Ratzinger recognized early on – the God of Jacob was recognized not as a God who rages but above all, a God who loves his creatures, who does not force man to do as he should but to win him over. Only in such a cultural space could the unmatchable ‘Cbristian freedom’ have been discovered, developed and defended - a freedom spoken about 1500 years ago by St Columban who was inspired in his missionary work by the knowledge that «Si tollis libertatem, tollis dignitatem» - If you take away freedom, you take away dignity. Words that adorn the Chapel of St. Columban in the subterranean space of St. Peter’s Basilica, and the motto that guided that great 6th century Irish missionary.

In the Vatican grottoes under the papal altar, the Confessio that Bernini built over the tomb of the Prince of Apostles, the words of Columban have come to be an integral part of the foundations of the papacy itself.

It was the spirit in which the pilgrim Irish monks of the 6th century Christianized Western Europe, almost re-founding it in the midst of much internal migrations. A spirit that was persuasive to the young Joseph Ratzinger. And that is why the beautiful title of the book we are presenting today could almost be considered as a cantus firmus [a fixed song] in the life of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI.

The pope who came from Germany matured as a man, thinker and professor in the postwar ‘Catholic epoch: a time when Erich Przywara, mentor of Josef Pieper, conceived his book "The idea of Europe” and when Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman and Alcide de Gasperi took the risk of undertaking to re-found Europe from its ruins, recovering the legacy of the Carolingian West. It was at this time that the young homo historicus Joseph Ratzinger, who was extremely educated and cultured early on, became a homo politicus.

His most political idea even then coincided with the theological concept that was most important to the young priest: the truth, which much later he would use in the motto for his archbishop’s coat of arms, expressing his desire to win over co-workers for the truth.

“If we detach ourselves from the concept of truth, we detach ourselves from the foundation”, he told Pere Seewald in February 2000 while they were staying in Montecassino, mother house of the Benedictine monasteries. He continued:

“One of the most significant sayings of Jesus was about fire and peace ["I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!... Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division” (Lk 12:49,51); In Matthew, his words are “I have come to bring not peace but the sword”] and it shows us today the conflict inherent in authentic peace – when truth is worth suffering and even conflict. It shows that one cannot accept lies for the sake of ‘living in peace’. No one has the courage these days to say that what the faith tells us is the truth”.

To seek the truth and fight for it thus became the thread running through the life of Joseph Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI. Because, of this he is convinced: it is a truth we cannot ‘have or possess’ but merely approach. Indeed, for the faith of Christians and according to their understanding of the truth, Truth is a person – in Jesus Christ, in whom God has shown us his face.

Because of this conviction, Ratzinger the theologian became an interlocutor particularly respected by Jurgen Habermas, the great German philosopher who has declared himself ‘devoid of religious ears’, but who agreed with Ratzinger that the Judaeo-Christian model of man created in the image and likeness of God determined the essential nucleus of Europe. From this ‘theologically founded secularity’ which Josef Piper said characterized the Western world, later the constitutionalist Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde drew the conclusion that «The secularized liberal state lives on assumptions that it is unable to guarantee”.

Believer and non-believer can come together ‘in doubt’ that each one has, in his own way, Ratzinger wrote 50 years ago in his Introduction to Christianity. Yet in the cultural space of Europe, believer and non-believer can come together not just in doubt but also in truth, as the Habermas-Ratzinger dialog contained in this book demonstrates.

Because of this, Pope Benedict XVI wished to highlight the frontier of this unique cultural space with respect to all other
cultures as he did intrepidly on September 12, 2006, in his famous Regensburg Lecture. He showed how the decisive affirmation in the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologue‘s argument against conversion by force was that which, arising precisely from the Christian concept of God, “not to act according to reason, not to act with Logos, is contrary to the nature of God”. And he concluded by saying that “It is to this great logos, to this vastness of reason, that we invite our interlocutors to a dialog of cultures”.

When, in his Preface to this book, Pope Francis underscores that these texts, together with his predecessor’s Opera omnia, “can help us to understand our present and to find a solid orientation for the future”, what came almost spontaneously to my mind were the incisive words Benedict XVI said in defense of natural law when he addressed the Parliament of the German Federal Republic on September 22, 2011 at the Reichstag in Berlin. Words with which I wish to conclude my brief intervention today:

“ ‘Without justice – what else is the State but a great band of robbers?’, as Saint Augustine once said”, Benedict XVI told the German legislators, speaking as as the teacher and professor he always has been.

Benedict VI We Germans know from our own experience that these words are no empty spectre. We have seen how power became divorced from right, how power opposed right and crushed it, so that the State became an instrument for destroying right – a highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the abyss.

To serve right and to fight against the dominion of wrong is and remains the fundamental task of the politician. At a moment in history when man has acquired previously inconceivable power, this task takes on a particular urgency. Man can destroy the world. He can manipulate himself. He can, so to speak, make human beings and he can deny them their humanity. How do we recognize what is right? How can we discern between good and evil, between what is truly right and what may appear right?

Even now, Solomon’s request remains the decisive issue facing politicians and politics today.

The request of the wise King Solomon to the God of Jacob – “Give your servant, therefore, a listening heart to judge your people and to distinguish between good and evil” (1 Kings 3,9) – remains operative for the tasks and the challenges that politicians are called on today to confront, because that ‘historic moment’ that the emeritus pope spoke about in Berlin six years ago, is running its course and not yet concluded.

I thank you for your attention.

Andrea Gagliarducci focuses on the hitherto unpublished letter of the Emeritus Pope that is a highlight of the new book, in which he commented on a 2014 book by his friend and onetime co-author Marcello Pera, the mathematician-philosopher who became President of the Italian Senate and is now senator-for-life, perhaps the most famous of Benedict XVI's 'devout atheist' admirers, Italian intellectuals who recognized in the German theologian a superior intellect that was recognized by many at the time as arguably the best and brightest mind in public life in our time (and remains so, for no new light has emerged to match him, much less, to eclipse him).

Benedict XVI’s hitherto unpublished essay:
God is key to understanding human rights
The final question, for Benedict XVI, is always God.
Can a state be built without God? And how much
can the state involve itself in the lives of its citizens?
by Andrea Gagliarducci

Vatican City, May 14, 2018 (CNA) - The Ratiznger Schuelerkreis, the circle of Joseph Ratzinger's former doctoral students who have met annually since 1977, will gather this year to discuss the theme “Church and State, Church and Society.” Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI selected the topic, as he does for the group every year.

This topic is intimately connected to the content of a recently published book, and above all to a letter – previously unpublished – contained in that book.

The book is Liberare la libertà. Fede e Politica nel Terzo Millennio (Liberating freedom: Faith and politics in the Third Millennium), curated by professors Pierluca Azzaro and Carlos Granados, as the second of a series of 7 books of Joseph Ratzinger’s selected texts addressing the main themes of the pontificate. (An English-language edition of the book will be published later this year by Ignatius Press.)

Including excerpts from the second book of his JESUS OF NAZARETH TRILOGY, a dialogue Benedict XVI had with the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas in 2004, his address to the UK's political and intellectual elite in 2010, and his address to the German Bundestag in September 2011, the book provides a wide overview of Joseph Ratzinger’s political thought.

The final question, for Benedict XVI, is always God. Can a state be built without God? And how much can the state involve itself in the lives of its citizens?

The text, rather than being philosophical, is quite pragmatic. It deals with universal rights like the right to freedom of conscience, along with more general reflections on the idea of personal freedom.

The unpublished letter from Benedict XVI contained in the book provides a response to those questions, since it reaffirms “the centrality of the question of God.”

The letter was a response to a 2014 book by Italian philosopher and politician Marcello Pera, entitled Diritti umani e cristianesimo. La Chiesa alla prova della modernità (Human Rights and Christianity: The Church put to the test by modernity”).

Benedict XVI’s letter makes immediately clear its point: despite the fact that Pope St. John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris was significant for the use of human rights language in magisterial texts, “the issue of human rights has practically acquired a place of great importance in the post-conciliar Magisterium and theology only with John Paul II”,]] Benedict XVI writes.

He notes that John Paul II’s emphasis on human rights was “the consequence of practical existence,” because “in the idea of human rights is the concrete weapon capable of limiting the totalitarian character of the state,” offering room “for the freedom necessary not only for thinking of the individual person, but also, and above all, for the faith of Christian and for the rights of the Church.”

In John Paul II's view, human rights constituted “the rational force” that could countervail “the all-encompassing presumption, ideological and practical, of the state founded on Marxism” , and that an understanding of human rights could limit any absolutist claim by the state, even those founded on the basis of a religious justification (as most of the Islamic states are). Benedict wrote that this understanding was part of the contribution of John Paul II.

Christians have always demanded freedom of faith, in its early centuries, from a state – the Roman state – that “knew religious tolerance, but that affirmed an ultimate identification between state and divine authority to which Christians could not consent,” the pope emeritus wrote.

This is how the question of God erupts into history. Christian faith, Benedict XVI noted, “necessarily included a fundamental limitation to the authority of the state, because of the rights and duties of the individual conscience”.

Although the idea of human rights “was not formulated this way,” it is not unjustified to Benedict XVI “to define the duty of man’s obedience to God as a right, with respect to the state,” and so it is logical that St. John Paul II’s “should see human rights as preceding any state authority.”

Benedict XVI further said that man, made in the image of God, is a subject and not only an object of rights. Both of these statements are consistent with the philosopher Immanuel Kant description of man as an end and not as a means.

Kant is not invoked by chance, since he is the philosopher who inspired ideas central to the Enlightenment. Most of contemporary secular thought is rooted in Kant’s thought, but Benedict XVI’s letter showed that even Kant is to some extent in debt to Christian philosophy. [I have always been in awe of Joseph Ratzinger's ample command of the history of ideas, and the clear linearity with which he presents it all - of which the encyclical Spe salvi is perhaps the prime example.]

From a historical perspective, the notion of human rights was born out of Christianity, Benedict argued.

The discovery of America led to a question: As the people of the New World were not baptized, did they have rights or not? Ultimately, that they were made in image of God was understood as the basis from which they derived rights. It became clear that as children of God, unbaptized people “were already subjects of rights and therefore could claim respect for their humanity,” Benedict XVI noted.

Speaking of that conclusion, Benedict wrote that: “It seems to me that ‘human rights’ have been recognized here, which precede the acceptance of the Christian faith and of any state power whatsoever.”

In addition, Benedict XVI explained, the first Christians had a particular attitude toward the Roman state. Because they were the first to believe in a universal religion, unbounded by national or ethnic identity, Christianity "redefined the essence of religion".

Christ's great commission "Go and make disciples of all nations", Benedict writes, “does not mean immediately demanding a change in the structure of individual societies,” but it rather demands “that all societies be given the possibility to welcome his message and live in accordance with it.”

Benedict XVI wrote that religion is not a “ritual and observance that ultimately guarantees the identity of the state,” but it is instead and precisely "recognition of the truth,” since the spirit of man “has been created for the truth.”

The pope emeritus underscored that “this connection between religion and truth includes a right to freedom that can licitly be considered as being in profound continuity with the authentic core of the doctrine of human rights, as John Paul II evidently did.”

Benedict XVI also warned of the danger in any vision that sees the “natural order” of society as “a complete totality in itself and does not need the Gospel.”

For all of those reasons, Benedict XVI said that “everything rests on the concept of God,” because “someone who speaks to his creatures and shows human beings what he wants of them."

Hence, Benedict's conclusion that “the idea of human rights ultimately retains its solidity only if it is anchored to faith in God the creator, from whom it receives the definition of its limitation and at the same time its justification.”

“The concept of God,” Benedict XVI noted “includes the fundamental concept of man as a subject of law, and thereby justifies and at the same time establishes the limits of the conception of human rights.”

In the end, the question of God is strictly connected with the issue of truth.

Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, Prefect of the Pontifical Household and Benedict XVI’s personal secretary, noted May 11 that Benedict XVI’s political approach “coincides with the most important theological notion to him already as young priest: the truth.”

“Seeking truth, and struggling for it, has been the red thread in the life of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. He is convinced of this: that truth cannot be possessed; one can only approach truth, since, according to the faith of Christians and in accordance with our understanding of truth, the truth has become a person in Jesus Christ, in which God has shown his face.”

God becomes, therefore, central to every political question, even when God is denied.

In the book’s foreword, Pope Francis wrote that a state would be “false and anti-Christian” if it understood itself to be “the ‘whole’ of human hopes and possibilities.” Such a totalitarian and tyrannic lie, he wrote becomes “demonic and tyrannic.”

Pope Francis elaborated: “On this basis, along side St. John Paul II, Ratzinger elaborates and propose a Christian vision of human rights able to question, on both practical and theoretical levels, the totalitarian claim of the Marxist state and of the atheistic theology on which it was founded.”

In the end, there cannot be any state without God, because no institution can hold without truth: this is the lesson of Benedict XVI’s political vision.

TERESA BENEDETTA

00mercoledì 16 maggio 2018 03:11

The hearse carrying little Alfie to the cemetery was decorated with flowers reading OUR HERO; right, a poignant photo of a spent dad dozing next to his angel son. What I have found most touching through all of this is how, in all the photos we have seen,
despite the fact that he was being killed deliberately, in effect, the little boy's face never lost its expression of sweet innocence. An account here by the young reporter that Bussola sent to cover the story from Alfie's bedside, as it were...

Alfie, goodbye, but with a promise:
We shall not let your light go dim
Emotional last rites for Alfie at Liverpool cathedral
His mourners hail him as a national hero, and
hundreds line the streets to the cemetery
by Benedetta Frigerio
Translated from

LIVERPOOL, May 15, 2018 – It is dark and circular, with lights in neon colors. Outside, there is splendid sunshine. Not a cloud in the sky, which is rare in Liverpool according to those who live there. But Christ the King Cathedral was built in such a way that not a ray of sun enters it, and artificial light is preferred.

One chapel, however, has a window with yellow and white glass, which, inundated with light from the outside, makes the surrounding darkness appear darker, even as it sparks hope in the hearts of those present.

It was in this chapel that the funeral Mas was held for Alfie James Evans, celebrated by a canon of the cathedral in the presence of 130 invited guests, most in tears but witnesses of great dignity, among them, the Italian consul to Liverpool.

Alfie’s father, Thomas, who carried the tiny coffin with other men of the family, was in tears, biting his lips to keep from weeping. His father beside him, as he has been at every difficult moment in the ordeal of the past many months, kept a comforting hand on his son’s shoulder.

Sorrow assails those present, evil appears to have triumphed, as it seems that so many efforts and prayers failed to defeat the monster of all those democratic semblances that serve to wrest life away from those whom Jesus favored – the innocents.

In the Gospel reading that was chosen, the Lord says “let the little children come to me because theirs is the Kingdom of heaven”. A kingdom that Alfie has brought down to a place where darkness has reigned for years under the tranquil appearance of of efficiency and progress which has shown itself to be no less pitiless as the Nazi extermination programs.

That monster brings on great fear since Alfie’s light has shown it to us in its most terrifying features. I have seen it face to face and it is truly fearsome. But the light will stay even if everyone has tried to suffocate it in the name of self-preservation. Alfie’s Mom and Dad know it, drawn even closer together in profound sorrow. They know this and say that Alfie’s mission has just begun and they know that they, too, have a mission now.

That is why despite the immense blow from the injustices they have suffered from a State that kills its most needful children with arrogant ferocity, Alfie’s family is not in despair. Numerous and united, they remain solidly compact. And they are able to smile, to hug and to talk as they have done these many months to all those who fought the good fight alongside little Alfie.

It is a fight that continues. That they wish to carry on, to the point that despite the silence (and pro forma words of condolence) of the Church in England that took the side of the powers-that-be in this case, Alfie’s family read out letters written to them by common citizens who followed Alfie’s ordeal, one of them saying, “Alfie, you have united us in our support of you – you are a national hero”.

At the reception that followed the funeral, the centerpiece was Alfie’s name in lights, with his photograph and dozens of blue, white and purple balloons that were the symbols of Alfie’s Army. The atmosphere was one of sorrow ready to accept love. And therefore, fertile.

Along the route that led to the cemetery where little Alfie was buried, hundreds lined up, many leaving flowers, as if to say: We shall not be going away, because after many years of lethargy, Alfie has just awakened so many consciences who do not intend to go back to sleep.

So that now it would be a crime to extinguish Alfie’s light, to deceive ourselves that the darknes is really not all that dark. We shall follow Alfie’s cause going forward.

And here is Frigerio's account of the last days of Alfie and all the suspicious happenings at the infamous Alder Hey Hospital:

This is how they killed Alfie
We do not know how long Alfie would have lived if he had been treated and taken care of properly.
We do not know if additional tests would have resulted in a diagnosis and led to a cure... What is certain,
however, is that we cannot say the child died only because his life support was removed.
by Benedetta Frigerio
Translated from

LIVERPOOL, May 1, 2018 - Without doubt, the greatest scandal, taking into account everything that happened to little Alfie Evans during his confinement at Alder Hey hospital, is that he was intubated and ventilated for 15 months and was denied a tracheostomy, because only one month from his admission (December 2016), the doctors decided that he should die without even attempting to reach a diagnosis. In fact, even if the newspapers wrote that Alfie was suffering from a mitochondrial disease, there is not a shred of medical evidence to prove it.

It is certainly disconcerting that Alfie's ventilation tubes were first replaced over 5 months after they were first ustalled, and that therefore they were found full of mold, as his father demonstrated with a pile of photos (some published by the Bussola) proving the numerous negligences at the hospital in Liverpool. [Standard of care in the use of breathing tubes is that they are replaced at least every day because otherwise, they are a perfect incubator for germs and other organisms!]

Mariella Enoc, president of Bambin Gesù, who was prevented from entering Alfie's room in the English hospital, was deeply affected when she saw them. But even so, Alfie is dead not just because of this.

Alfie was subjected to terrible treatment after his ventilation was removed. As his lungs were used to being dilated mechanically, the doctors ought to have 'weaned him off gradually so as not to provoke his immediate death. But this did not happen, and he contracted a lung infection soon after the life support machine was switched off.

This is why, as Thomas was told by an Italian doctor he was in touch with, Alfie would have needed immediate antibiotic therapy, but he was denied such treatment. Incredibly, despite this, he breathed unaided for hours, even if the doctors even denied him an oxygen mask necessary to aid his now autonomous breathing.

Therefore, on the evening of Monday 23 April, after ventilation was removed at 21:15 GMT, Thomas launched an appeal asking for someone to bring oxygen to the hospital, but the police barrier at the entrance prevented any possible help from the outside. At that point, after receiving a desperate phone call from Thomas, one of the family lawyers, Pavel Stroilov, rushed to Alder Hey Hospital.

As Stroilov entered, six other people tried to follow him, and the one holding the oxygen mask in her hand was prevented from entering. She reacted with the brilliant idea of throwing the mask over the line of policemen's heads to the lawyer now on the other side, allowing him to take it up to Alfie's parents.

At that point the child, who had already been fighting like a lion, thereby proving the hospital lawyer Michael Mylonas wrong, (during the hearings he had assured Judge Hayden that Alfie's death would be immediate after the ventilator was removed), was at last helped to breathe.

But, once again, the doctors tried to deprive the child of the mask, with the excuse that it was not Alder Hey hospital equipment. Twice they gave orders to detach it, until Thomas pointed out that the death protocol approved by Judge Hayden spoke neither of oxygen deprivation nor of suspending nutrition. On the same grounds,Thomas forced them to feed his young son deprived of nutrition for a good 36 hours.

Yes, Alfie was left unfed for 36 hours, a very long time for such a small child, whose heart had already sustained a huge strain after his ventilation was violently removed without weaning.

Moreover, when the nutrition was at last supplied, it was kept at minimal levels. Still Alfie continued to live four more days defended by his parents from the doctors' threats, opening his eyes from time to time and reacting.

Then, in exchange for press silence, the hospital promised Thomas more oxygen and more life support. Two hours before the child died, his oxygen saturation was about 98 and Alfie's heartbeats approximately 160 - stable to the point that Thomas was convinced he would be allowed to take his son home soon (as the hospital administration had told him on Friday afternoon).

At that point, while Thomas had left the room for a moment, leaving mamma Kate drowsing and another family member in the room, a nurse entered and explained that she was going to give Alfie four drugs (no one knows what drugs) to treat him. No more than 30 minutes later, his oxygen saturation level dropped to 15. Two hours later, Alfie was dead.

We do not know how long Alfie would have lived if he had been treated and taken care of properly, we do not know if additional tests would have resulted in a diagnosis and led to a cure, we do not even know if Alfie was reduced to this state during his confinement in a hospital whose past reputation is nothing short of monstrous, and where many reports make the hypothesis at least plausible if not proven. What is certain, however, is that we cannot say that the child died only because his life support was removed.

The well-known geneticist and scientific director of the Bambin Gesù Hospital, Bruno Dalla Dallapiccola, had earlier said, "Little Alfie will not be able to last long without being fed by Intravenous Drip. Without nutrition, in fact, survival can vary from a few hours to a few days. Of course, the duration of survival depends on the patient's initial condition", although in the case of Alfie "we can not say with certainty". In any case, Dallapiccola concluded, "regardless of whether the baby continues to breathe independently, the lack of nutrition intake will represent an emergency".

Angelo Selicorni, another Italian geneticist physician said two days after the ventilation was removed, observed that "Detached from the machines the child has resisted for hours without any intention of dying... (which) raises some doubts about how 'terminal' his state really was".

Alfie, already weakened and subjected to violent treatment, was deprived of the antibiotics needed to treat his lung infection and then of food and oxygen for too many hours. Those who want to avoid taking a stand find shelter behind the mantra of a "too complicated case" whose boundaries would be too difficult to establish.

But perhaps what is lacking is the courage to face the facts and say clearly that this is a case of blatant euthanasia? It is clear that since the doctors considered Alfie's life was "futile", then they believed that the effort and cost involved in keeping him alive were not worth bearing, so that automatically, their medical approach could only be to eliminate him.

As Selicorni wrote: "If I consider Alfie's changing fortunes as worthless, that his is a useless, meaningless human life, I cannot help but think that the sooner I put an end to it, the better it is".

Sounds like fantasy? In 2012, controversy arose due to complaints filed by patients involved in the Liverpool Care Pathway LCP), the end-of-life treatment program then in force in Britain.

A nurse from Alder Hey, Bernadette Loyd, exasperated by seeing similar cases, had written to the Minister of Health denouncing the ways in which children and babies die.

"Dying of thirst is terrible, and it is inconceivable that children should die like that. Their parents stand at a crossroads and feel almost forced to choose this path because the doctors say their children have only a few days to live. But it is very difficult to predict death, and I have also seen a few children come back to life after the LCP had been started and then stopped... I have also seen children die terribly of thirst because hydration is suspended until they die. I saw a 14-year-old boy with cancer die with his tongue stuck to his palate when the doctors refused to hydrate him. His death was experienced with anguish by him and us nurses. This is euthanasia being introduced through the front door."

The National Health System responded to Loyd without addressing the matter: "Care for the end of life must meet the highest professional criteria and we must know how to stand next to the child's parents during the decision-making process".[Thus, they offer noble-sounding platitudes intended to cover up their implacable murderous resolve!]

[The Liverpool Care Pathway - which meant fluids and treatment could be withdrawn, and sedation given to the dying - was officially phased out last year, by government order. It followed concern that under the protocols, thirsty patients had been denied water and left desperately sucking at sponges. But a leading UK doctor claims that the new NHS guidelines on “end of life” care are worse than the LCP and could push more patients to an early grave. Dr Philip Pullicino warns that the new guidelines would encourage hospital staff to guess who was dying, in the absence of any clear evidence, and to take steps which could hasten patients’ death.]

This is what Alfie's martyrdom has achieved, apart from converting many hearts: it has forced us to unite against a monster, to look at the brutality of a eugenics system disguised as democracy. A system with unlimited power over the person is considered a civil religion by English politics and by the judiciary. It is a power that crushes so many fragile lives and spreads a utilitarian mentality that we must start to fight against if we don't want to end up in the same way.

But who knows, maybe Alfie's story will reveal much more than this, because many of us still have an unanswered question: what could justify the hospital's furious determination and fear at the idea of this child being transferred elsewhere? What was Alder Hey Hospital so terrified of?

[Elsewhere, earlier stories had come out about euthanasic practices that have apparently been common at that hospital. Hitler must be so proud in hell that his evil has resurfaced and become commonplace in the nation that led the victorious Allied coalition that brought down his Thousand-Year Reich after only 12 years.]

Hundreds of tearful supporters line
the streets to say goodbye to Alfie
by Steven Ertelt

Hundreds of tearful supporters of Alfie Evans and his family lined the streets of Liverpool today to say goodbye and pay their respects before his funeral.. They are supporting the little boy and his parents who battled with British courts and doctors to protect his life, although Alder Hey Children’s Hospital eventually won its legal battle to be able to revoke his life support without their permission.

Amazingly, despite all of the international hoopla, attention, and controversy surrounding Alfie’s death, there will be no investigation it appears. No autopsy was done.

Hundreds of devastated supporters of the little boy and his family brought toys, cards, and flowers and left them outside a local park to pay tribute to Alfie and his legacy. They tied large purple and blue bows to the gates of the funeral home where Alfie would be laid to rest.

Local residents clapped and cheered as the cars carrying Alfie’s body and his family drove by on their way to the funeral Park.

Here is more from a local British media report: [[quotwe]
Mourners who gathered outside Goodison Park for his funeral procession brought with them purple and blue ribbons and balloons – representing the colours adopted by Alfie’s Army, the nearly million-strong group formed to support Alfie’s family in their battle to save his life.

Tearful supporters, many of whom waited nearly two hours for the cortege, threw flowers and applauded as Alfie’s hearse passed the home of his father’s favourite football club after a private funeral.

Some clutched single roses dyed blue and purple, each with a handwritten message attached, and wore t-shirts proclaiming Alfie had “brought the world together”.

Many were familiar faces from their long vigil outside Alder Hey Children’s Hospital , where they had called for Alfie’s life support to continue before his death on April 28. But some said they had simply followed Alfie’s story and wanted to show their support for his parents Kate and Tom. Others, too, had more personal reasons for attending.

One woman from Anfield , who asked not to be named, told how she had experienced the loss of two children and felt she needed to pay her respects.

She said: “I know what it’s like to lose a child. I lost two, it was in a house fire. One of my children was 23 months old and one was six. Alfie fought and fought. I followed it on Facebook and we all went through that journey of supporting the family. I know how much it will mean to his family to see people here today.”

The funeral comes after news that the British government appears to be investigating the Christian organization that helped them — in what could be a political retribution for helping Alfie’s parents protect their son.

As LifeNews reported previously, Justice Hayden came under fire for comments he made about a Christian legal group whose attorneys helped represent Alfie’s family. In the courtroom he slammed the group calling one law student who was assisting the family “deluded and fanatical.”

The group responded, saying “We reject the prejudicial and inflammatory comments made by Mr Justice Hayden.”

Meanwhile, as LifeNews reported, British prime minister Theresa May defended the hospital. She argued that medical experts ought to be the ones to make decisions in such cases as opposed to parents and family.

But Terri Schiavo’s brother Bobby Schindler disagrees and told LifeNews that courts should never have prevented Afie’s parents from caring for their son, who ultimately died on Saturday less than a week after doctors yanked his life support without their consent.

The head of the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network told LifeNews: “Like Tom and Kate Evans, I know how terrible it is to be powerless to care for a loved one, but I cannot imagine the unique tragedy of being prevented from caring for a child in the way that the United Kingdom and European Courts barred them from exercising what so many recognize as their basic parental rights to provide care.”

“We will honor Alfie’s memory,” concluded Schindler, “and we will do whatever we can to affirm the value of every life, regardless of condition and the right of every parent to care for their children in a life-affirming way.”

Carol Tobias, the president of the National Right to Life Committee, told LifeNews that people need to be very clear about what happened with Alfie. She says he was “sentenced to death” by courts and doctors. She says what happened to Alfie and his parents needs to never happen to get to any other child or patient.

The pro-life leader placed the blame for his death squarely on judges and hospital officials who claimed Alfie was too far gone to save.

“Let’s be clear: Alfie Evans was sentenced to death by Britain’s National Health System and the High Court. Their intransigent commitment to the country’s faulty single-payer health system led them to conclude it was better for Alfie to die than leave the country and receive potentially life-saving treatment elsewhere,” Tobias said.

Alfie Evans ended up dying very early on a Saturday morning after the children’s hospital that was supposed to provide him with appropriate medical care and treatment disconnected his life support without his parents’ permission.

That action came after a long and extensive legal battle between Alfie’s parents and Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, with the British court system agreeing with doctors by saying that Alfie was supposedly too far gone for additional care and treatment or experimental medical treatment to possibly help his neurological condition.

Alfie supposedly suffered from a degenerative neurological condition and administrators at Alder Hey, which is a National Health System Foundation Trust, sought, and received, approval from the High Court to discontinue treatment in direct opposition to the wishes of Alfie’s parents. The High Court’s decision was met with outcry around the world, and was condemned by world leaders including European Parliament President Antonio Tajani, Polish president Andrezej Duda, and Pope Francis.

Bambino Gesu hospital in Rome offered to treat Alfie and he was granted Italian citizenship to expedite his transport to Italy. However, the High Court prohibited Evans and James from removing their son from Alder Hey.

Alfie’s father Tom Evans spent the last 10 minutes of the 23-month-old little boys life desperately trying to revive him with mouth to mouth.

Meanwhile, Alfie’s mother Kate has posted a poem remembering Alfie that has already been shared thousands of times on Facebook.

In posts on Facebook, Alfie’s mother and father confirmed his passing.

“Our baby boy grew his wings tonight at 2:30 am. We are heart broken. Thank you everyone for all your support,” she wrote.

“My gladiator lay down his shield and gained his wings at 02:30 absolutely heartbroken,” the boy’s father Tom Evans wrote on Facebook.

Family friend Laura McKenzie said: “Tom and Kate really appreciate everyone coming and showing their love.

“The whole world showed how much Alfie was loved and we’ll never, ever, ever forget him or his name. No one will.”

After his death, family and supporters of Alfie Evans celebrated his life in pictures and hundreds of tearful supporters of Alfie Evans and his family gathered at a park near Alder Hey Children’s Hospital to release balloons to honor the little boy after his death. And Pope Francis expressed the kind of sentiments that people around the world are expressing. He talked about his sadness and he talked about Alfie being embraced by the Lord in heaven.

“I am deeply moved by the death of little Alfie. Today I pray especially for his parents, as God the Father receives him in his tender embrace,” the pope tweeted on Saturday.

The legal battle sparked anger nationwide in England but also internationally as people stood up for Alfie’s parents and strongly opposed courts and hospitals making life and death decisions for patients over their families objections.

There is concern that the hospital contributed to his death.

As LifeNews reported, after removing his life support without permission, officials at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital waited 28 hours before finally feeding the 23-month old boy, who was fighting a rare neurological condition. Alfie’s Father Tom Evans confirmed at the time that his son was finally being fed but he condemned hospital officials for waiting so long to finally get him the nutrition he needs.

“They only started feeding him at one ‘o’clock yesterday. It’s disgusting how he’s being treated,” Evans said. “Not even an animal would be treated like this. He’s proving them wrong. It’s time to give him some grace and dignity and let him go home or to Italy.”

The other day, Alfie’s parents changed course and decided to end their battle.

Alfie Evans’ father Tom Evans called for supporters of Alfie and his family to “stand down” so they can begin “building a bridge” with Alder Hey Children’s Hospital and its staff. The statement from Alfie’s father was surprising given the animosity that had developed between the Evans family and the hospital. Hospital officials have spent months in court preventing Alfie’s family from taking him to a hospital in Italy or even taking him home.

Hospital officials even went as far as misleading courts by saying that they never said Alfie would die quickly after his life support was removed — even though they initially said Alfie would die within minutes after yanking his life support over his parents’ objections.

But perhaps seeing that there was little opportunity left to fight for Alfie’s rights and their right to take him abroad or take him home or sensing a need to appease the hospital to bring him home, Tom Evans struck a conciliatory tone.

Alfie’s parents had hoped to take the little boy to Italy in order to potentially get experimental treatment that could help his rare degenerative neurological condition but courts repeatedly denied that. Justice Hayden ruled that Alfie’s family would not be able to fly him to Italy for treatment and appeared to say that this was the final decision related to his case. He said flying Alfie to Italy could harm his health because, as court testimony indicated, the flight could trigger possible “continuous seizures due to stimulations” of the flight.

A British doctors group, The Medical Ethics Alliance, expressed its horror over the treatment of Alfie Evans that it called a “medical tyranny.”

And Italy’s Healthcare Chief has slammed the decisions by UK courts to treat Alfie the way that they had. The President of the Italian National Institute of Health lambasted the UK High Court’s decision yesterday on Alfie Evans’ that resulted it the children’s hospital being allowed to remove life support over Alfie’s parents’ objections.

Members of Parliament are leading a new campaign for a law to prevent the tragic situation happening to Alfie Evans and his parents from happening to any other family. The new campaign calls on MPs to debate the matter in the House of Commons – with potential plans for “Alfie’s Law.”

Alfie Evans is not the first little boy to be held hostage by the court system and the healthcare system. There have been many other cases where courts and doctors have made the life or death decisions for a patient over the objections of their family.

One of those cases involved a little boy named Charlie Gard. In essentially the exact same circumstance, the British courts decided that his parents did not have the right to make the decision whether his life support was disconnected and a hospital yanked his life support without their consent. Charlie ultimately died not long after that happened. Chris Gard and Connie Yates’ little boy passed away just before 1st birthday in July 2017.

TERESA BENEDETTA

00sabato 19 maggio 2018 10:52

Fr. Scalese has written a comprehensive assessment of the Bergoglio pontificate after five years, with some speculation about the future of the Church, given
Bergoglio’s relentless wreckovation. This article was first published in the French magazine Catholica (No. 139, Spring 2018, pp 39-48), edited by Bernard Dumont
(www.catholica.fr). Fr. Scalese has now published the Italian original on his blog post.

A reckoning of the past five years
and possible future scenarios
Translated from

May 17, 2018

March 13, 2018 marked the fifth anniversary of the election of Jorge Mariio Bergoglio as pope. Perhaps the time has come to draw up the balance sheet for his first five years as pope and try to predict, on the basis of the present situation, possible future scenarios for the Church.

This pontificate opened under the banner of a rupture with the past. The very choice of the papal name Francis (never used by the popes but widely fancied by some sectors of the Church; his refusal of traditional papal emblems [such as the ceremonial mozzetta and stole symbolizing the pope’s authority, and of course, of the red ‘shoes of the fisherman’], his almost exclusive use of the title Bishop of Rome to describe himself – everything indicated this would be a pontificate different from any that had gone before.

One had the impression that the cardinal electors, shaken by the sudden and virtually unprecedented end of Benedict XVI’s pontificate and desirous of launching a new image of a church that had been seriously compromised by scandals [I am surprised and greatly disappointed that Fr Scalese parrots this line, which is simply untrue! What major scandals ‘seriously compromised’ the Church during Benedict’s Pontificate? Certainly not one of its own making, because the biggest opprobrium sought to be imposed on Benedict by his all-powerful enemies of in the media and in global politics was a rehash of the clerical sex abuse scandals - as if, since 2002, Benedict XVI/Joseph Ratzinger had not almost singlehandedly carried forward the Church’s formal battle to end the scourge. Besides, all the major sex abuse scandals that emerged in 2009-2010 (including those involving German Jesuit schools, Benedictine monasteries and the Regensburg Boys Choir) all dated back to the 20th century, i.e., none of them `from after 2002 when the CDF was given the authority to deal with clerical sex abuses that the local bishops had failed to act upon.] and that by electing Bergoglio, they wished to give a signal that something was changing in the Church. [Yes, but changing in what sense? Just change for the sake of change? For the better or for the worse? The feckless shortsightedness of the cardinal electors is quite breathtaking in its stupidity.]

In the cardinals’ minds there was surely the perceived urgency to reform the Roman Curia, and they probably gave this mandate to the new pope [who has acknowledged it himself on more than one occasion! But how is it that the cardinals – many of whom represent ‘the best and the brightest’ not just in the Church but among their secular peers in their respective generations – could have been so hoodwinked by the tendentiously false over-reporting on Vatileaks as to have the media predispose them to overlook the crisis of faith as the Church’s main problem in favor of a bureaucratic concern that normally preoccupies ordinary political leaders?]

And therefore, within a month of his election, the new pope, “acting on a suggestion that emerged during the General Congregatiosn that preceded the Concalve of 2013, named a group of cardinals to advise him on governance of the universal Church and to study how to change the Apostolic Constitution by John Paul II, Pastor bonus, on the function and regulation of the Roman Curia. (1)

The new Council of Cardinals (initially, the C8 because it had eight members, it became the C9 after Bergoglio also named his new Secretary of State Pietro Parolin to be part of the Council), has met dozens of times in the past five years. With what results?

According to the council’s coordinator, Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, back in 2013, the full reform was to be ready by 2015. It is now 2018 but we have seen very few changes. The economic offices at the Vatican have multiplied – even if, everything seems to have remained as it was before this ‘reform’ (2) – and some mega-dicasteries were formed (for communications; for the laity, family and life; and for integral human development). Which is, of course, not what one had expected.

How then are we to explain the reform flop? Especially when one keeps in mind this pope’s statements that structural reforms would not be made the priority. In the interview he gave to Fr. Antonio Spadaro early in his pontifiicate, Bergoglio said: “Organizational and structural reforms are secondary… The first reform should be in attitude”. (3)

To such lack of conviction, one must add the pope’s own character inadequacy, as he himself was the first to admit quite matter-of-factly: “The reform of the Curia is something that was asked by almost all the cardianls at the congregations before the conclave. Even I did. But I cannot carry out such reform – it is a question of management – I am very disorganized, and I have never been good at this [management]. But the cardinals in the council will carry it through”.(4)

So it seems that the pope put his trust above all in his advisers. But it is legitimate to question the competence of those he chose - lacking first of all not just any experience in the Roman Curia, but also the most elementary common sense [just think of Cardinal Maradiaga’s proposal to consolidate the three Vatican tribunals (the Major Penitentiary [having to do with confession], the Rota [having to do mostly with the annulment of marriages]; and the Apostolic Segnatura [the Church’s Supreme Court for adjudicating all questions on canon law].

Seeing the lack of commitment and the disappointing results of the Curial reform efforts, one suspects that the principal objective of the group that had pro-actively promoted Bergoglio’s candidacy was to finally advance their old progressivist agenda which had not been taken up by Vatican-II nor by the Church after Vatican II, especially on certain key points: decentralization from Rome and more powers for episcopal conferences, questioning priestly celibacy, a female diaconate (and eventually priesthood), contraception, etc. (5)

Many of the decisions thathave been taken during this pontificate go towards that agenda:
- The apostolic constitution Magnum principium for liturgical decentralization
- The special synod on the Amazonia region which will take up the question of consecrating viri probati as priests
- The formation of a commission to study the eventual conferment of the diaconate on women
- A study group reviewing Humanae vitae (with a view to relaxing the Church ban on artificial means of birth control)
- And particularly significant in this context, the anomalous and contrived procedures followed in order to relax sacramental discipline for remarried divorcees: Extraordinary consistory of cardinals (February 2014), Extraordinary Synodal Assembly (October 2014), the issuance of two motu proprio to expedite and simplify the process of marriage nullification (August 2015), Ordinary Synodal Assembly to complete the work of the 2014 synodal assembly (October 20215), and the publication of the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia ( March 2016).

‘Paradigm shift’
The above interventions wre presented in general as an expression of the ‘pastoral conversiom’ desired by this pope in his programmatic exhortation Evangelii gaudium. (6) By itself, simple ‘pastoral conversion’ ought not to undermine doctrine (and there has been no lack of reassurances that this is the case) but is only concerned about getting closer to the faithful). Cardinal Kasper, however, [point man for Bergoglio on the question of sacramental leniency] has spoken on several occasions of a true and proper ‘paradigm shift’ (7):

“A paradigm shift does not change doctrine but places it in a wider context. Thus AL does not change an iota of Church doctrine; and yet it changes everything. The paradigm shift consists in this, that AL marks the passage from a ‘morality of law’ to Thomas Aquinas’s ‘morality of virtue’”.

Cardinal Kasper thus seems to delimit the weight of the paradigm shift. But n truth, as I noted elsewhere (8), it represents a true and proper revolution. “Whereas till now, in order to orient the behavior of the faithful, the Church has limited herself to presenting abstract doctrine (moral law), according to which each individual ought to apply his own conscience to the application of such general moral norms to a concrete situation - now the Church will no longer leave men alone to decide but will accompany, discern and integrate such undertaking… And while earlier, it was doctrine that guided moral life, now this task becomes entrusted to ‘discernment’… It serves nothing to state that the doctrine is not changed, when it no longer serves to guide our actions. The ‘paradignm shift’ simply makes it totally irrelevant”. (9)

Doctrinal development
At a certain point, however, it became obvious that it was not possible to keep saying that doctrine was not being changed, so it was amended to say that it is man’s attitude that should change. But it is not possible to separate theory and praxis: in the Church, pastoral practice has always been an expression of her doctrine – there is a reciprocal correspondence between the two – if one changes, it inevitably ends up changing the other.

That is the reason why for some time now, there has been talk in this pontificate of ‘re-reading’ traditional doctrine in the light of more recent developments. Indeed, the pope indicated this himself in his September 2013 interview with La Civilta Cattolica. Taking off from St. Vincent of Lerins’s famous statement on the development of doctrine (10), the pope concluded:

“St Vincent of Lerins compares man’s biological development and the transmission of the deposit of faith from one generation to another, in which [the deposit] grows and consolidates with the passage of time. Because man’s understanding changes with time, and so, his own conscience becomes more profound. Consider that in the past, slavery or the death penalty, for instance, were allowed without question. [But these are matters of civil law, not of individual conscience, which may or may not disapprove of such practices.] Therefore, one also grows in his understanding of the truth… The Church has some secondary norms and precepts which were effective in the past but have now lost value or significance… The idea of doctrine as a monolith to be defended absolutely [without admitting nuances] is wrong”. (11)

But above all, one noted this pope’s great insistence on the need to ‘actualize’ doctrine, in his address on the 25th anniversary of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (12). I wrote at the time of a true and proper ‘turning point’ in this pontificate.(13) In that address, the pope, taking his cue from the apostolic constitution Fidei depositum with which Pope John Paul II approved the new Catechism in 1992, said this: “it is not enough… to find a new language with which to express the faith we have always had. It is necessary and urgent that, in the face of new challenges and perspectives opening up for mankind, the Church may be able to express the newness of the Gospel of Christ, that found in the Word of God but which have not yet come to light”.

Therefore, it is not just about language (as John XXIII said in his address to open Vatican II), but of making explicit the contents contained within the Gospel but which have not yet emerged fully. In his address, the pope dwelt further on the death penalty that he had touched upon in his Civilta interview, to show that there can be an evolution of doctrine that one ought to take into account even in an eventual – and apparently intended – revision of the Catechism. As I said in an earlier commentary, the reference to the death penalty seems to be an obvious pretext to hide the intention to ‘update’ the Catechism on other controversial issues (like contraception, homosexuality, etc).

Reaction to the reform
In contrast to Benedict XVI’s pontificate, this one has enjoyed the approval of the media from its very beginning. But besides the media attitude, which remains ‘relative’ whether it is positive or negative, there are obviously many within the Church, among priests and bishops, as among the faithful, who support this pope’s reforms to a greater or lesser degree. But there has been no lack of opposition.

It seems that in the Roman Curia itself, there is much dissent, even if these appear to be provoked more by this pope’s unscrupulous style of governing rather than for reasons of doctrine or how the ‘reforms’ are going.

The 'resistance'
More open is the resistance to this pope’s agenda by the rest of the Church, which, beyond merely protesting Bergoglio’s autocratic style, arise mainly from the doctrinal novelties he has introduced in the past five years. There has always been dissidence in the Church, of course. To keep only to recent examples, one can think of the open opposition, even by entire bishops’ conferences, to Paul VI, especially after the publication of Humanae vitae; of the opposition to John Paul II, far more dissembled and subdued because of his popularity; not to mention the brazenly prejudiced opposition to anything Benedict XVI write or did, an opposition that seemed to be an orchestrated media conspiracy against him.

At present, the dissidence appears more spontaneous, expressed mostly on the Internet, and coming principally from laymen. It is clear that the clergy – especially the bishops for obvious reasons - are not going out of their way to rock the ecclesial boat. I think the most striking protest there has been in these years is the Theological Criticism of AL sent in July 2016 by 45 theologians to the cardinals (14), and the Correctio filialis de haeresibus propagatis, addressed directly to the Pontiff in August 2015. (15)

Pope Francis is perfectly aware of this resistance to his magisterium. In his meeting with fellow Jesuits in Santiago, Chile, on January 16, 2018, he said in this regard:

“When I take note that there is true resistance, of course I do not like it… And I dislike it even more when people engage in a campaign of resistance. I cannot deny the existence of such resistances. I see them and I acknowledge them. There are the doctrinal resistances that you know better than me. For my mental health, I do not read the Internet sites of this so-called ‘resistance’. I know who they are, I know their groups [??? Is he saying that the ‘Resistance fighters’ are organized in any way? Other than the core groups that initiated both the Theological Criticism and the Correctio filialis who necessarily had to get together for the specific purpose of framing their protest formally. But it is not as if they have followed through on their formal protest with the activities of an organized movement. In the same way, the most active and outspoken anti-Bergoglio bloggers, for instance, have certainly not organized themselves in any way, and the merit of their protests is that they all arise individually, from different persons, but they converge in their conclusions about what is objectionable in this pontificate, and above all, in the magisterium of Bergoglio.] But I do not read them, simply to keep my mental health. If there is something out there that is very serious, I am informed about it so at least I know… It is no pleasure a t all, but we have to move forward… Whenever I perceive resistance, I seek to dialog if dialog is possible [You certainly have not made it possible for the DUBIA cardinals, of whom now there are only two left for you to dialog with, if you really wished to. But what’s to dialog about when on the specific dubia, there will never be a meeting of minds, and because you are in estoppel from answering them: if you answer the dubia truthfully, the entire AL house of cards just falls down, and you would certainly ‘lose face’ in a major way... But if you answer them honestly – according to how you have tendentiously pointed all your arguments about sacramental leniency for remarried divorcees (and eventually, other categories of people living in chronic mortal sin) – then you would be writing your own charge sheet for being in material heresy, and surely you do not want that. Nor can you afford such a damning admission which would expose your deception and lies in this whole matter!] But some resistances come from persons who believe they possess the true doctrine and accuse me of being heretical. If I do not find any spiritual goodness in such persons for what they say and write about me, I simply pray for them. I do not like it, but I do not dwell on my dislikes for my own mental hygiene”. (16)

The divisions
The situation that has been created has provoked profound divisions within the Church, between those who defend the Bergoglian novelties with swords drawn, and those who prefer a more moderate approach that does not radically part with Tradition.

The most concerning divisions are among the bishops, and these were manifested right after the publication of AL: some bishops’ conferences, national or regional, have chosen to interpret AL in the most open-ended way possible where others choose a more restricted interpretation. Obviously, such divisions create confusion among both the clergy and the faithful. People have begun to talk of schism.

And Bergoglio seems fully aware of the risk of fracturing the Church. The Vatican correspondent of Der Spiegel reported in 2016 a confidence that the pope had made to some of his collaborators: “I do not rule out that I will pass into history as he who divided the Catholic Church”.(17) [
!] (17)

PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE
The irreversibility of the Bergoglian reforms
Mons. Víctor Manuel Fernández spoke about this in an interview with Corriere della Sera in 2012 (18):

“The pope...knows that there are some who hope that with the next pope, everything will go back to how it was… You should know that he is aiming for irreversible reforms… There can be no turning back… The majority of the People of God… will not easily accept turning back on certain things”.

That this has been Bergoglio’s intention all along was later confirmed by Enzo Bianchi in a lecture he gave in Cagliari in May 2017 (19):

One day, the pope was asked privately,”But Holiness, are you going to carry out all the reforms you are announcing?” His answer: “I do not pretend: I want processes to be started, and that there will be no turning back whatever part of the way we walk along together”.

More recently, Edward Pentin revealed that members of the German episcopate had been pressuring the pope to accelerate his reforms, telling him “they are concerned that his reforms should not revoked by a future pope, and therefore, they wish that as much as possible, these reforms should be ‘set in stone’, perhaps through an apostolic constitution”. (20).

It is surprising that those who have always theorized on the fluidity of reality and looked suspiciously upon doctrine for being firm as a rock, are now requesting that the reforms they favor be ‘set in stone’. But this is an attitude typical of any revolution: once it has subverted and replaced the old structures, it will no longer allow any further transformations. (21)

Questions
At this point, we can pose some questions about the future:
- Will the intention to make the Bergoglian reforms ‘irreversible’ succeed?
- Will his successors continue along the path he has taken or will they prefer to go back to ‘the pathways of old’ (Jer 6,16)?
- If they choose the latter, will they be able to carry it out without problems?
- Would not the present reforms constitute an obstacle to realizing their intentions?
It is not easy to answer these questions, not just because not one of us is a prophet, but because it is difficult to predict how thing swill develop.

First of all, we need to see how long this pontificate will last. I know that it is not considered good taste to ask this question while a pope is still alive; but since Bergoglio himself has spoken of it on more than one occasion, I feel authorized to bring it up.

He has expressed his ‘feeling’ that his pontificate would be short (3-4 years). But five years have passed, and nothing indicates an imminent end to his pontificate. So we must ask – will he succeed in carrying out all the reforms he has in the works? Also hard to tell. But it is a fact that whatever changes he has made so far are certainly not minor, much less secondary in importance.

And who will succeed him? I don’t mean an individual identity, but that successor’s orientation. Will he be a Bergoglian who will proceed with his agenda, or a Bergoglio opponent who will seek to abrogate his [most anti-Catholic] reforms? But this too is hard to answer.

It is true that every pope, through the cardinals he names, seeks to form the electoral body who will choose his successor. But the result is never certain (Look what happened at the last Conclave!) [That is true! No one has ever taken the initiative to confront and analyze the fact that most of the cardinals named by Benedict XVI obviously ended up voting for his antithesis Bergoglio for some perverse reason I cannot fathom and could not in any way justify!]

If the next conclave should elect an anti-Bergoglio, would it be possible for him to abrogate Bergoglio’s reforms? Theoretically, yes, because no one can delimit his authority to do that. But in fact he will have his hands tied, and in any case, he would pay a heavy price for any attempt at ‘counter-reform’, even if only in terms of popularity.

Let us take an example: If Bergoglio succeeds at the decentralization he announced in Evangelii gaudium (No. 16) in favor of the national and regional bishops’ conferences, it will be very difficult to proceed to a re-centralization which would inevitably end up alienating the bishops’ conferences.

In any case, I think that adopting worldly logic and practice such as the spoils system in an alternation between ‘progrssivist’ and ‘conservative’ popes constitutes a grave vulnus to the Church. The Church lives through continuity, not through internal ideological division, and in the Church, ‘to reform’ does not mean introducing ephemeral and reversible novelties but to bring her back to her primitive splendor. [Clearly not the view of no-turning-back-ever Bergoglio!]

Finally, one must consider the evolution of the world in which the Church finds herself. Because not just the Church is in crisis, but perhaps in an even worse crisis is the world that surrounds her. The time we are living today has such an air of ‘the end of empire’ – and a collapse of Western civilization cannot be ruled out. It is clear that in such a prospect, a Church that is completely conformed to the world, as this pontificate has been seeking to do, will be destined to succumb along with the world.

And that is why it is important for a ‘remnant’ to remain loyal to the Tradition of the Church and to conserve Catholic doctrine intact, a remnant ready to intervene when the collapse occurs to play the role that the Church played when the Roman empire crumbled: which is to ‘ferry’ mankind towards from the world towards a new order.

The Church was the seed of medieval civilization, and this was possible thanks to the patrimony she had accumulated in the first centuries of her existence. It seems to me that St. Augustibne;s figure is emblematic here: he witnessed the disintegration of the Roman world of which he was a part, and he died with the Vandals at the gates of his city. What would he have felt witnessing that world which was crumbling? Yet his thought and his works constituted the basis for its rebirth.

I think that the same thing could happen in our time: The doctrinal patrimony that the Church has acquired over the centuries (even in recent years – think of the Social Doctrine of the Church, the teachings of Vatican II, and the magisterium of the most recent popes [before Bergoglio]) must not be lost because it would be the basis for reconstruction. That patrimony constitutes the ‘seed’ which now, in the tsunami that threatens it, we are called on to rescue, because once the river goes back to its original channel, that seed can be sown and made fruitful again.

NOTES
1. Communique of the Scretariat of State, April 30, 2013
2. See the recent note by Sandro Magister: “Storie di curia. La rivincita del cardinale segretario di Stato” (Curial stories: the comeback of the Cardinal Secretary of State): Settimo Cielo, Jan 14, 2018.
3. La Civiltà Cattolica, 164 (2013), III (n. 3918, Sept 19, 2013), p. 462.
4. The account of the meeting, which was private, was published by the site Reflexion y liberacion, provoking an immediate reaction from the president of the CLAR (Central Leadership of American Religious). An Italian translation of the account was published on the Una Vox site.
5. In this regard, see the third 'dream' of Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini in his interevention atthe Synodal Assembly on Europe , Oct. 7, 1999).
6. Above all, read the first chapter: 'The missionary transformation of the Church" (Nos. 19-49).
7. He did this in his lecture to the Extraordinary Consistory on the family on February 14, 2014, and subsequently, in an article on AL for
Stimmen der Zeit, n. 11/2016, pp. 723-732. The term was recently reprised by Cardinl Pietro Parolin in an interview with Vatican News on Jan. 11, 2018 and by Cardinal Balse Cupichin the lecture he gave on Feb. 9, 2018 at the Von Hügel Institute of Saint Edmund College in Cambridge.
8. “The pastoral revolution": Antiquo robore, Mar 28, 2016; "The paradigm shift": loc. cit., Nov. 29, 2016.
9. Ibid. The revolutionary importance of the 'paradigm shift' is now confirmed by Cardinal Cupich: "The principal objective of the [Bergpglio] doctrine on matrimony is accompaniment, not the pursuit of an abstract ideal that is isolated from reality. This represents an important change in our pastoral approach, a change that is, to say the least, revolutionary".
10. "Even the dogma of the Christian religion must follow these laws. To progress and consolidate through the years, developing in time, becoming mor profound with age" (Commonitorium primum, c. 23).
11. La Civiltà Cattolica, cit., pp. 475-476.
12. Oct. 11, 2017.
13. “Phase B?”: Antiquo robore, Oct. 31, 2017. 1 ottobre 2017.
14. "It cannot be ruled out that it was precisely this critique that led to the five DUBIA which Cardinals Brandmüller, Burke, Caffarra and Meisner addressed to the pope on Sept. 19, 2016.
15. Here.
16. La Civiltà Cattolica, 109 (2018), I (n. 4024, Feb 17, 2018), pp. 315-316.
17. Der Spiegel, Dec 23, 2016.
18. Corriere della sera, May 10, 2015. See my comment: Antiquo robore, Sept 22, 2017.
19. Lecture on the apostolix exhortation Amoris laetitia, Caglari, May 23, 2017. And my comment: Antiquo robore, May 29 , 2017.
20. National Catholic Register, Sept 19, 2017.
21. The concern to stabilize his reforms could also explain the recent motu proprio Imparare a congedarsi (learn to leave when you should) on Feb 12, 2018, which marked, in my opinion, a most disturbing return to a style of governance characterized no longer by the certainty of law but by [the pope's] discretion.