THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

Not having access to Mons. Umbers's actual meme, I have 're-created' it according to Valli's description.

The LeBron James meme
applied to the Church today
Translated from

June 15, 2018

LeBron James in centerfield, his arms held out, addresses teammate J.R. Smith with a look that says: “But how could you not understand what I intended you to do with the ball?” Smith stands rooted, as though he really had not understood what had happened in the last few seconds. But in basketball, everything is at great speed, and if you don’t catch signals on the fly, you’ll be very sorry indeed.

The image, which has become an epic global meme, comes from Game 1 of the Cleveland Cavaliers vs Golden State Warriors for the NBA championship this year, which the Warriors won 4-0 for their second consecutive title, their third in four years and the sixth in their history. A clearcut superiority that seemed to have steamrollered the Cavaliers.

In the past four years, the two teams have played each other for the championship but it was the first time that the Warriors won so clearly. Lebron James for the Cavaliers was as strong as ever, seemingly a basketball machine, but his strength alone could not suffice. He did not team support, and the image we described is somehow a sign of that failure.

But why, you ask, would I concern myself about the NBA championship? Good question. It’s because the image has become a meme used by thousands of persons by now, among them Mons. Richard Umbers, Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney, who has a true passion for using the social networks, especially Twitter and memes, which he prefers to use because, he says, these are what we now have at our disposition to evangelize with, and if Jesus lived in our time, he would have used every available means of communication made possible by technology.

The New Zealand-born Umbers, 47 (a 'boy bishop' by Church standards), originating from new Zealand, is an Opus Dei priest with a marked sense of humor. Which is why he likes to use memes. Seeing the Lebron James image, he immediately thought of it in ecclesial terms. So he labelled the upset James “LAITY”, and Smith “Bishops not speaking out on moral issues”.

Visual memes are meant primarily to amuse. By putting together an image with words from an altogether different context, one re-interprets the image to express a striking and amusing message.

Mons. Umbers manages to do this successfully, in which LeBron representing the Catholic faithful asks of the Catholic bishops, represented by Smith: “What don’t you understand? Why don’t you speak out on moral issues? Why don’t you do anything? What are you thinking of? Don’t you realize the situation in the Church today?” And the bishops simply stand there, dazed, seemingly so disoriented they don’t know which way to turn!

Certainly makes you smile, but also to want to cry! And to reflect on the role to which the faithful are called on today, in the face of a Church hierarchy that so often appear confused and bent on concerning themselves with things they really have no business getting into, whereas they are timid, or worse, delinquent in failing to speak out at all on the things that should concern them such as life, death, truth, good and evil, divine law and the eternal destiny of the soul. [Awww, such abstractions, compared with eliminating hunger and poverty, welcoming migrants to our homes and hearts, fighting climate change and capitalism, recognizing Islam as a religion of peace that would never ever countenance violence…]

The commentaries all said that LeBron James again stood out like a giant in these play-offs and got a standing ovation when he left the court after the final defeat. But basketball is a team game, and without teamwork, it is very difficult even for a superb and exceptional player, to guarantee victory all by himself. In this case, the Warriors’ teamwork simply outclassed the Cavaliers.

So thanks to this – and Mons. Umbers’s sense of humor – we have been given a message to reflect on. To provoke a smile can be a very useful weapon these days for proposing very serious questions without appearing belligerent. And if, like me, you like basketball, all the better!

My meme would have the Smith figure represent Bergoglio, with the laity asking him in despair: "What the hell are you doing to the Church and our faith? Don't just stand there blathering and self-indulgent! Repent now and be the pope you are supposed to be!"

Surprise article at Commonweal
about attending a traditional Mass

June 16, 2018

There was a surprise at Commonweal, which generally leans left and against Tradition. It is about a week old, but I missed it: I don’t read Commonweal unless I can’t avoid it.

It starts out with an off-putting reference to the disastrous film Silence by Shusaku Endo, but it improves. The writer juxtaposes it with the silence of the traditional Roman Rite. Here are excerpts:

---

Silent grace:
Finding peace in the Latin Mass
By Michael Wright

...There was never silence or stillness at Mass for me growing up. I was, and am, afflicted with attention deficit disorder. For a long time, my family worshipped in the gym of the local Catholic school, crammed into folding chairs, kneeling, standing, and watching Father Joe turn purple during a homily on compassion.

For me, Mass was a test of endurance. I could never find the peace the nuns told us about in CCD. Although I’d learned what each part of the Mass meant, I couldn’t linger on what was happening in front of me. I raced ahead in the missalette, willing the priest to speak as fast as I read. My restlessness never left enough room for grace to find its way in.

...Then, three or four years ago, on a whim, I attended Latin Mass at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Austin, Texas. Just a block from the State Capitol, St. Mary’s is modest, with bare wood pews and a sanctuary set back from the congregation. I paged through a blue book that had Latin text on one page and English text on the facing page, with stage directions and illustrations in the margins.

Despite Catholic school and all that CCD, I didn’t realize until then that the Novus Ordo is not a straight translation to the vernacular [of the traditional Mass]. The Latin readings confused me; I couldn’t tell, for example, just when the Trans-substantiation was occurring. [But can't you recognize the Consecration????] But I knew without looking at the translation when we were saying “Lamb of God” and the Lord’s Prayer.

I watched these strange ways of doing familiar things. The priest faced away from us. We knelt to take communion on the tongue. All the altar servers were male. I bowed at the priest during the recessional, incense still in my nostrils. Then I did something I’d never done after Mass. I sat in a pew, and I felt it: peace.

---

He goes on to talk about his life, the older Mass, and even critiques a little the likes of that mass constructor of straw-men of Mass destruction, Massimo “Beans” Faggioli.

And then…

---

...But the Latin Mass has a place for me. I don’t think it’s the future of the church, even though [!] I’ve noticed the pews are filled with fellow Gen X-ers and their children. (My nine-year-old daughter has been to more Latin Masses than English.)

The English Mass is too easy; the unfamiliarity of the Latin Mass requires me to quiet my mind, to focus, to attend to my faith in a way that Mass in English does not.

It isn’t a refuge from a changing world, but a base from which to engage it. My faith is not certain, and my doubt leads to questions. The Latin Mass welcomes me into the silence that allows me to seek the answers.

---

Interesting, no? I applaud his honesty.

His observation that “the English Mass is too easy” hits several nails on the head all at once. Frankly, in no way do people benefit from futile attempts to make what is really hard - Mystery - easy, even simplistic.

The author observes that the people who attend “the Latin Mass” where he goes, “seem to be a community with a community” and that they want a parish of their own.

I often write about the importance of being involved in the whole life of the parish where the TLM is celebrated. On the other hand… I fully understand that people who have what Pope St. John Paul called “legitimate aspirations” should want a parish where they can have the whole package, where they have consistency without being made to feel like second class citizens.

It is understandable that they would want to have a parish where the Mass they desire, quite rightly, to attend isn’t relegated to the edges of Sundays. They would prefer to have all the sacraments according to the older rites, including, for example, absolution in the confessional. They would like to have traditional devotions that don’t have to be rediscovered piecemeal.

At times I have written (i.e., whined a little) about those who prefer the older forms and who disappear between Sundays.

On the other hand, even factoring in the fact that people are busy, and sometimes live at quite a distance from the church where they have the older Mass, I am also cognizant of the legitimate aspirations that they have and also suffer with.

Moving on, the writer observes that the pews are filled with young families. I observe that recent research suggests that there will be traumatic consequences for church attendance in the next few years because the majority of young people don’t identify with any religion. Moreover, large numbers of priests will exit active ministry one way or another.

On the other hand, traditional groups of priests are growing and young people are filling pews at traditional Masses. Where tradition is tried, it seems to work.

The future?

New Catholic at Rorate caeli comments on the article:

The Traditional Mass:
Not about ideology -
It's about Truth and Beauty

June 16, 2018

Commonweal is a journal known, at least since the last Council, for its extreme liberal positions.

So it was not without considerable surprise that this past week the journal published a text favorable to the Latin Mass: it is a personal account of the author's discovery of the Latin Mass.

As many modern Catholics, the author assumed that the New Mass of Paul VI was merely a translation of the old rite -- and, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The New Mass is a completely new concoction, completely unrelated to the Tradition of the Church. What was created, under the guise of introducing the vernacular, was a messy product of the 1960s, the disgraceful decade of cultural revolution.

The Commonweal piece is particularly important to us because it shows it is possible to have a different sensibility to certain themes of Catholic social doctrine and still appreciate the Mass that was the same Mass and the only known Mass to all the great Catholic social reformers [and thinkers and saints] of the Latin Church.

The Traditional Mass really is not about a particular kind of political preference, but it is all about love for the most sacred thing on Earth: the Blessed Sacrament.

The Traditional Latin Mass is the birthright of each and every Catholic. To each one who discovers or rediscovers it, regardless of their political leanings, we say: Welcome Home!



Corpus Christi procession at Covent Garden, 2018.

Popular devotions are back
As a new generation of priests revive beauty
in the liturgy, is the Church undergoing a restoration?
by Tim Stanley

June 16, 2018

I attended the recent Mass for the new shrine at Corpus Christi, Covent Garden, and it was a testament to the glory of the service that I didn’t fall asleep once. I like my Masses Latin, low and short. This lasted two-and-a-half hours. But it was spellbinding, with superb music and a witty sermon by Cardinal Nichols.

About three-quarters of the way through, we processed around Covent Garden with the Blessed Sacrament. I personally didn’t see any onlookers kneel (I’m told one or two did), but then I didn’t see any men selling apples and pears either. Covent Garden used to be a real market where you could weigh and squeeze fresh fruit. Today it’s a tourist shopping centre.

The Catholic Church is breathing life back into Old England, and Corpus Christi Church is an obvious place to start. First opened in 1874, it was built in reparation for sins committed against the Blessed Sacrament during the Reformation. Sadly, it fell into decline and disrepair.

The truth is that the English Church has been through two iconoclastic periods: the 16th-century Protestant one and the liberal revolution of the Seventies, which did just as much to strip our altars and degrade our churches. The latter reforms were sadder because the Catholics inflicted them on themselves. There was no glorious martyrdom this time around. Just self-harm.

Today, however, a new spirit is stirring. Popular devotions are back; confessions are on the up; and a new generation of priests is reviving beauty and the Old Rite. It’s a restoration. In 10 years’ time, the Corpus Christi procession will be a feature of many local churches – and the English unbelievers will watch and think, “Ooooh, that looks interesting. How do I join in?” That’s the way you convert. With magnificence. [A naive and simplistic statement, I think. It's not the magnificence of the rite that counts - it's the beauty it conveys, the via pulchritudina to faith. Liturgy can be simple but beautiful; it does not have to be magnificent. But if it is, too, then it is truly glorious and a real foretaste of the heavenly liturgy... Also, it's great to indulge in wishful thinking as Mr. Stanley does, speaking of a 'restoration', but can the efforts of a heroic few in the new generations prevail over the line of least resistance that is the default position of most people in the face of the overt, persistent anti-Catholic pressure brought to bear by Bergoglio and his minions?]

After soon-to-be-saint Oscar Romero, Bergoglio appears to be on course to make saints of more social-activist priests - it seems by short-circuiting them to beatification by declaring them martyrs...

A new vileness from Bergoglio:
The beatification of Argentine bishop Angelelli
Liberation Theology pioneer also declared a martyr
though he died in a provenly genuine car accident
by Daniel Omar Gonzáles Céspedes
Translated from ADELANTE LA FE by

June 14, 2018

There's a new vileness from Pope Francis to pierce our souls, and especially the souls of his fellow Argentines: his decree to beatify Monsignor Enrique Angelelli as a martyr. I feel called upon to comment now, even knowing that better pens than I will be doing so later.

The first thing we have to point out is that Angelelli isn’t a martyr. To be a martyr means to give your life for Christ. You die because of your faith – that is to say, you are killed by a person or persons acting “in hatred of the faith.” Saint Thomas Aquinas explains this well when he writes of hatred pro fide credenda and pro fide agenda.

Neither of these applies to the late bishop of La Rioja (a state in Argentina). He didn’t die defending the Catholic faith, nor did he die at the hands of the dictatorship that at that time ruled the country. He died in a car accident.

There are witnesses: Raúl Alberto Nacuzi, who was present at the moment of the accident because he was doing maintenance on an electrical high-tension pole, and Carlos Alberto Arzola, who was one of the first to arrive on the scene. There are Primitivo Reynoso and Aber Fabio Luna, who were working close by. And the mechanic who advised Angelelli's chauffeur who drove the small truck not to use it because its tires were in bad shape. This was confirmed by a mechanical expert and by a forensic doctor.

Moreover, on April 20, 1999, the Appellate Court of the State of Cordoba declared it was impossible to prove that the cause of the accident was anything other than the mechanical malfunction of the car, even though there were allegations that the accident was provoked on purpose.

Who was Angelelli? He was among the radicalized religious who brought Marxism to the Catholic Church in Argentina. He supported the Third-World Liberation Theology starting in 1957 when he linked to the PAX movement.

In La Rioja, he was well known as Bishop Satanelli (as opposed to Angelelli). His maneuvers and those of his fellow ideological travellers were exposed by the magazine Cabildo, then representing Catholic nationalism in Argentina. And let us not forget Carlos Sacheri, who exposed the threat posed by Angelelli and his cohort in his book The Clandestine Church, an act that cost him his life. [Sacheri (1933-1974) was a philosoper and Thomist scholar who was shot and killed by a communist guerrilla commando as he left church with his family in December 1974. His book, published in 1971, was a denunciation of modernism and of liberation theology from a traditionalist viewpoint.]

Sacheri really is a martyr, but Francis and his minions…mutis canes Dei.

The pope and his apostate acolytes know fully well the Marxist plan to infiltrate the Church. Neither Angelelli nor his priests worked for the poor; they took advantage of them because they were uneducated and considered them the perfect Petri dish to start a revolution. Their preaching sowed hate, violence, terror, and death. They poisoned with rancor and hatred the hearts of many to the point of transforming them into murderers. They fought to change the Church to become anthropocentric, temporal, naturalist, materialist, and secular – in short, to make the Catholic Church bend to serve Marxism.

Francis, Francis! You have provoked a new scandal in your zeal to scatter the flock.

Sometimes, depending on his audience,
Bergoglio remembers to be 'Catholic'

Meeting with members of Italy's national Forum of Family Associations on June 16, Pope Francis underscored that there is only one family recognized by God, that which comes from the union of a man and a woman - "there are no other family forms" - and that "selective abortion is like Nazism in white gloves".

There is a terrible translation of the original Italian article in the Huffington Post
https://www.huffingtonpost.it/2018/06/16/papa-francesco-la-famiglia-e-solo-uomo-donna_a_23460514/?ncid=tweetlnkithpmg00000001
some parts of which may raise eyebrows, but as Antonio Socci points out, there has only been embarrassed silence from the Left to the Pope's words on the family, considering that last week, new Family Minister Lorenzo Fontana unleashed vehement attacks from the left and the LGBT groups they support when he made similar statements. (At least, he didn't say that "Even if the man and woman are not believers, as long as they love each other and unite in matrimony, then they are in the image and likeness of God. That is why marriage is such a great sacrament". Ooops!Would non-believers have a sacramental marriage, to begin with? And a human being need not get married to be 'in the image and likeness of God' - we are all created that way.)

So why didn't he say any of this but simply kept silent during the great French debate on 'marriage for everyone' and after the corresponding law was passed in 2014, nor on the occasion of the 2016 Irish referendum that recognized same-sex 'marriage', nor when the Cirinna law which did so in Italy was debated and passed that same year?

I do not doubt Bergoglio opposes abortion on demand but he is careful not to say this too often and only to selected groups because he wants to have his cake and eat it too (oppose abortion but not trumpet his views in larger forums so as not to provoke the disaffection of the secular world he so loves to woo).

As for God making every human being in his image and likeness, how does he square that with his never-denied statement to Juan Carlos Cruz that God made him the way he is - though there is nothing in Genesis that says God made humans other than man and woman, and the Old Testament is rife with God's punishment of sexual deviants (or is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah one that won't be found in the Bible of the church of Bergoglio)?

It's not that there is any joy at all - all right, occasionally, a tad of Schadenfreude when the matter does not have to do with faith, morals and liturgy - in piling up
the negatives against Bergoglio. It is that he piles them up all by himself, and one is dutybound to report them as they come to light. Consider this latest wrinkle
in Bergoglio's already messy mishandling of the clerical sex abuse crisis riddling the Church in Chile...

The Jesuit whose advice
the pope heeded on Barros

June 18, 2018

The first head to roll, in the work of rebuilding the Catholic hierarchy of Chile set in motion by Pope Francis, has been the most predictable: that of Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid, who finally resigned and whose resignation was promptly accepted [More than three years since his much-protested appointment by the pope in early 2015, an appointment staunchly defended by the pope until he received the report of Mons. Charles Scicluna whom he sent to Chile to investigate the charges against Barros and other cases of clerical sex abuse that have been improperly dealt with by the Chilean bishops].

But there is something that does not add up in this operation and in its back story. The photo above is a clue to this. It was taken at the cathedral of Osorno on March 21, 2015, the day of the turbulent entrance into the diocese of Bishop Barros, who had been the target of serious accusations of unfitness for the office but strenuously defended by the pope. Next to him, in liturgical vestments and with the act of appointment in his hand while the protest raged around Barros is a Spanish Jesuit, Germán Arana, a friend and spiritual guide of Barros, but above all one of the most intimate confidants of Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

When, in mid-May this year, the pope convened all the Chilean bishops in Rome for three days of “discernment” on their general failure to deal with clerical sex abuses in their dioceses, Barros came too, but from Madrid, and together with none other than the Jesuit Arana.

Who, it turns out, had played a decisive role three or four years before, in the appointment of Barros as bishop of Osorno, according to a report last May on the para-Vatican website “Il Sismografo” by its founder and director, Luis Badilla, a Chilean vaticanista who lives in Rome and a former journalist for Vatican Radio. Arana’s role was first leaked by the Spanish blogsite "Infovaticana".

Until a couple of months ago, Arana’s role was entirely unknown not only to the general public but even to specialists on Vatican affairs. Even when Francis, last April, confessed that he had “made serious errors in the assessment and perception of the situation, in particular through the lack of reliable and balanced information”, Arana’s name never came up as one of those who had led the pope on about Barros.

Instead, the main culprits named for having led Francis to promote Barros to the diocese of Osorno and then to defend his innocence against any and all charges, were and continue to be Cardinals Francisco Javier Errázuriz Ossa and Ricardo Ezzati Andrello, previous and present archbishop of Santiago, as well as the apostolic nuncio in Chile, Ivo Scapolo. [Errazuriz is, of course, on the pope’s 9-man advisory council of cardinals, and did not attend the May convocation at the Vatican, nor did he sign the letter sent by the Chilean bishops offering their resignation en masse to the pope. At the time Bergoglio chose him to represent Latin America on his advisory council, it was certainly well-known how he had for years ignored complaints and accusations against Karadima, cavalierly dismissing the accusers and their allegations. It was Errazuriz's deliberate brush-off of the Karadima accusations when he was Archbishop of Santiago that led to the case being forwarded to the CDF for action. Errazuriz was perhaps the first illustration that for Bergoglio, the catchphrase 'zero tolerance' on clerical sex abuse is just that, a slogan he has no intention of following when his personal preferences come into play.]

But if one looks back at winter 2014-2015, when Barros’s appointment was made, there is a letter from Pope Francis that contradicts this reconstruction. The letter - brought to light by Nicole Winfield of the Associated Press in January of this year, on the eve of the pope’s visit to Chile – is dated January 31, 2015, at which time, Barros’s appointment as bishop of Osorno was already official, having been announced by the Holy See on January 10. Whereupon, the permanent council of the episcopal conference of Chile wrote the pope, asking him to revoke the appointment “in extremis”. The Jan. 31, 2015 letter is the pope’s reply to the bishops, rejecting their request outright.

In the letter, Francis relates that at the end of 2014, even the nuncio in Chile had urged Barros to decline the appointment and instead withdraw from the scene for a yearlong ‘sabbatical’. He proposed the same sabbatical to the two other Chilean bishops who had been proteges of Karadima.

And Bergoglio reveals Barros did write him offering to withdraw from the fray, but the pope explains he rejected Barros’s offer because of what he claimed to be a ‘flaw’ in Barros’s letter – namely, that he mentioned the names of the two other bishops linked to Karadima, names that were supposed to remain secret.

[This was the glaring hokum in the pope’s letter for two obvious reasons: 1) How could a resignation letter be flawed by the inclusion of other bishops’ names from information that the nuncio gave him? (AP would have ridiculed Benedict XVI to hell and back if he had ever said anything so absurd, but Winfield simply glosses it over and gives Bergoglio a pass!) and 2) why were those names ‘supposed to remain secret' when, given the huge interest and knowledge in Chile of Karadima’s case for over two decades now, and which priests (who eventually became bishops) were among his known associates, the names of the two other bishops were probably known to everybody else who followed the case. Certainly, known to Barros himself because they may have been his contemporaries in Karadima’s circle.

Very simply, Barros did give the pope the opportunity to get out of his quandary early enough, but no! Jorge Bergoglio was not going to change his mind about Barros once it was set, because to accept Barros’s withdrawal would be seen as an admission of error on his part! And he would persist in his obstinacy about keeping Barros – turning belligerent even to questioning media – for the next three years.

Besides, how could Bergoglio have acted so sanctimoniously during his meeting with the Chilean bishops in May when they did promptly ask him to revoke Barros’s appointment the moment it was announced by the Holy See? (Yeah, yeah, he told them he was also to blame for the mess - "See how humble I am!" - but did he ever verbalize to them “I should not have dismissed the letter you sent me in January 2015!”?)

Of course, some of the bishops may have questionable records themselves on sex abuse, but it is surely very uncommon that a bishops’ conference would intervene directly with the pope on an episcopal appointment! When many bishops and clergy of Austria protested Benedict XVI’s appointment of an auxiliary bishop in Linz back in 2010 – because the new bishop was known for his staunch orthodoxy - they did so in the media, and raised such a hornet’s storm that Mons Wagner, the appointee himself, informed Benedict XVI he wished his nomination withdrawn. Barros, alas, had no such scruples, apparently, because once the pope told him to stay put, he did.]

Apart from the flimsiness of this justification given by Francis for what he did, it emerges in glaring fashion from the pope’s own letter it that neither the nuncio nor the permanent council of the Chilean hierarchy - meaning its highest representatives, beginning with the Archbishop of Santiago - had championed the promotion of Barros as bishop of Osorno. On the contrary, they went about opposing it, both before and after its official publication, evidently maintaining that the accusations against him were credible.

But there is more in that letter from Francis of January 31, 2015. The pope writes that at the time of the letter, Barros was doing “a month of spiritual exercises in Spain.” Now we know where and with whom: in Madrid, and under the guidance of the Jesuit Arana, a former professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and since 2011, the rector of the Spanish seminary of Comillas. Il Sismografo tells us he has a reputation as “an exceptional former of priests and a great guide in the spiritual exercises.”

In the last months of 2014 - in the interval between his previous position as military ordinary of Chile and his upcoming one as bishop of Osorno - Barros had spent time in Madrid with Fr. Arana. And it is thought to have been precisely this latter who convinced Bergoglio of the soundness of his appointment. Badilla, in “Il Sismografo,” sees a reference to the decisive advice of Arana in Francis’s words during the return flight from Chile, on January 21, 2018, in strenuous defense of Barros’s innocence, before the about-face a few weeks later under the weight of crushing evidence: “Now, the case of Bishop Barros. It is a case where I called for an examination, an investigation, which was thorough. Really, there is no evidence of guilt, nor does it appear that there will be any.” [It makes it look even worse for Bergoglio that obviously he never really ordered a formal or other sort of official investigation at all, but simply relied on the word of Arana.

In the same way, and almost with the very same words, he claimed he had Mons. Battista Ricca investigated before he named him ‘spiritual adviser’ (officially, the chaplain) of IOR, despite official police records in Paraguay of the latter’s involvement in at least one public scandal (he was trapped in an elevator with a teenage male prostitute). Too bad the media did not even bother to check Ricca's record at all, and to this day, Sandro Magister remains the only Vaticanista who thought it necessary to look into his past. Because even if one assumes Ricca had given up his homosexual lifestyle and his live-in Swiss lover from the time he was busted in Paraguay, it was still not wise at all for the pope, any pope, to name someone with Ricca’s record as the ranking prelate at IOR (who is there as Bergoglio’s eyes and ears), as if the IOR did not already have more than its share of ethical problems!

And BTW, lest you forget...we have not been told at all what Scicluna found out about Barros that forced Bergoglio to reverse himself after more than three years of obstinately insisting, "I know best and don't you dare say my appointment of Barros was wrong in any way!"]

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Fr. Arana should have decided to walk beside Barros during his highly contested entrance into the diocese of Osorno, nor that he should have been close to him in the following years, until his arrival in Rome a month ago and his subsequent inevitable removal.

One uncertainty remains. What will Francis do about this improvident Jesuit adviser of his? Will he keep him in the circle of his most intimate and most trusted confidants? Remember the recent case of Mons. Dario Vigano [who was simply given a new title but presumably still calls the shots at the mega-Secretariat for Communications despite his unforgivable yet incredibly hamhanded Bergoglio-serving manipulation of a private letter sent to him by Benedict XVI]. The circle of Bergoglio stalwarts is a serious weak point of Francis’s pontificate. [Quite an understatement, that! After all, a man is known by the company he keeps, birds of a feather flock together, and ‘tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are”!]

With one extra complication. In the ten pages that Francis conveyed to the Chilean bishops in mid-May as an outline for “discernment,” he scolded those bishops and superiors who entrust “to priests suspected of active homosexuality” seminaries and novitiates, with their associated recruitment. He addressed a similar rebuke a few days later - behind closed doors - to the Italian bishops meeting in Rome for their plenary assembly.

“We are full of homosexuals,” he lamented. But then why does Francis not “discern” in the circle of the ecclesiastics closest to him? [I bet he discerns all right - no, he knows for sure - and I am not saying that the likes of Mons. Paglia and James Martin, for example, are homosexuals, but that, despite their unremitting high-profile advocacy of homosexualism and its LGBTQ variants, he rewards them with key positions in his Curia, which is certainly his way of telling the whole community of sexual deviants among Catholics that he sees no problem at all with their lifestyle. As he said in even more specific and reassuring words to Juan Carlos Cruz.]

As a side note to this story it must be pointed out that among the numerous cases of sexual abuse committed by members of the Chilean clergy that have come to light in recent years, one has received very little coverage outside of Chile but is no less serious. And it too involves the Society of Jesus. It was reported in detail by Edward Pentin in the National Catholic Register:
> The Ignored Chilean Abuse Case. At a Jesuit High School

The epicenter of this other story is the Colegio San Ignacio in Santiago, run by Jesuits and with a decidedly progressive profile, the opposite of the nearby conservative parish of El Bosque, long led by that Fernando Karadima who is today the emblem of clerical sex abuse in Chile, after his conviction in 2011 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. For years he was an extremely popular educator and guide, for better or for worse, of numerous young people and priests, some of whom, including Barros, went on to become bishops.

The culprit in this case is the Jesuit Jaime Guzmán Astaburuaga, who committed his misdeeds in the eighties and nineties, sexually abusing numerous young people between the ages of 12 and 17. The Chilean province of the Society of Jesus became aware of this abuse in 2010. And in 2012 it convicted him. But it was only in January of this year that the provincial of the Chilean Jesuits, Cristián del Campo, made Fr. Guzmán’s conviction public. Prompting the reaction of sixty alumni of the Colegio, who in an open letter said the five-year silence over the conviction has aggravated the victims’ suffering and compromised the necessary work of restoration and prevention.

[One of these days, I will not be surprised if someone comes out with a story of untold and yet to be uncovered stories of clerical sex abuse in Argentina.]

A most interesting and informative sidebar to the Karadima story:


Karadima's brother meets the pope-
says Barros and his fellow priests
covered up for the abuser
Also calls on the abuser to ask forgiveness
in public from his victims for the harm he did them
by Junno Arocho Esteves

June 18, 2018

The brother of Chilean Fr Fernando Karadima was among the group of priests and laypeople who met Pope Francis on June 2. Oscar Karadima revealed that he spoke to the Pope about the suffering his family endured following the revelation that his brother was found guilty of sexual abuse.

“I spoke to him about Fernando; I told him what Fernando was like with his family, with us: He was an arrogant man, authoritarian, a man we were afraid of and that even my mother was afraid of him,” Oscar Karadima said.

Recalling his conversation with the Pope, Oscar Karadima said his family members “were also victims of abuse of power and of conscience” by his brother. Their family name, he added, was tarnished due to the scandals.

“We are the only Karadima family in Chile. I’ve read on social media, ‘The Karadima family are a family of degenerates, a family guilty of covering up, a family of paedophiles,'” he said.

Known as an influential and charismatic priest, Fr Fernando Karadima drew hundreds of young men to the priesthood, and four of his proteges went on to become bishops, including retired Bishop Juan Barros of Osorno.

Speaking to Chilean newspaper La Tercera, Oscar Karadima also called on his brother to ask forgiveness for the hurt inflicted on those he sexually abused.

“I would ask him to be humble. Fernando, ask for forgiveness. Not in silence to God or in your prayers. Do it publicly, that people hear that you ask forgiveness for the harm you have done to victims and to everyone,” Oscar said.

“Fernando,” he continued, “you are a man who is going to die. How can you die in this way, as a proud person who doesn’t ask forgiveness? I ask you in the name of God and the most holy virgin who you always said you loved so much. I ask you in the name of my father, my mother, my two dead sisters.”

After accusations of sexual abuse came to light in 2010, the Vatican investigated Fr Karadima and sentenced him to a life of prayer and penance after he was found guilty of sexual abuse.

Oscar Karadima said he also wanted to inform the Pope of the four bishops who formed part of Fr Karadima’s inner circle and that “they were witnesses and covered up abuses.”

“The Pope stopped me and said, ‘Speak to me about Barros.’ I told him, ‘Your Holiness, Bishop Barros lied. He was my brother’s friend and, in a certain way, you can say he belonged to his ‘iron circle,'” Oscar Karadima recalled. The Pope had accepted Bishop Barros’s resignation on June 11. Abuse survivors have alleged that when Bishop Barros was still a priest, he witnessed their abuse by his mentor.

“Everyone knew that they were made bishops because my brother Fernando was able to make it so, through his friendship or closeness with (Cardinal) Angelo Sodano,” he added.

Cardinal Sodano, Dean of the College of Cardinals, served as apostolic nuncio to Chile from 1978-1988 and as Vatican Secretary of State from 1991-2006.

Oscar Karadima recalled tearing up as he recounted his and his family’s pain and that Pope Francis touched his hand and encouraged him.

After listening to him, he added, the Pope grabbed a piece of paper and wrote a message for the Karadima family.

“To the family of Oscar Karadima, with my blessing and my sorrow for so much suffering that you bear. In the name of Fernando, silent and incapable of realising (his mistakes), I ask your forgiveness,” the Pope wrote.

Karadima said he was moved by the Pope’s gesture and said it was the first time someone from the Catholic Church recognised his family’s pain.

“Neither (Cardinal Riccardo) Ezzati, nor (Cardinal Francisco Javier) Errazuriz, nor anyone acknowledged our pain. That is why what I also ask for – because no one has said it – is justice for my family. The Pope was the only one who had words of affection and consolation toward them,” Oscar Karadima said.

Pope Francis has made seeking forgiveness and promoting reconciliation a priority in the fallout of the sexual abuse crisis that has rocked the Chilean church.

Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, president of a board of review handling abuse cases within the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Fr Jordi Bertomeu Farnos, an official of the doctrinal congregation, concluded their June 14-17 visit to the diocese of Osorno with a Mass at the Cathedral of St Matthew.

During the Mass, Archbishop Scicluna, Fr Bertomeu and Auxiliary Bishop Jorge Concha Cayuqueo of Santiago, apostolic administrator for the Diocese of Osorno, kneeled before the congregation and asked forgiveness.

“Pope Francis has entrusted me to ask forgiveness for each one of the faithful of the Diocese of Osorno and all the citizens of this territory for having wounded you and profoundly offending you,” Archbishop Scicluna said.

Addressing journalists after the Mass, the archbishop thanked the people of Osorno for welcoming him and said the visit was only the beginning of the journey toward reconciliation.

True reconciliation, he said, isn’t achieved with a mission of a few days, but is rather a gift from God that must be accompanied by long process that requires patience, generosity and humility.


And new developments on the over-eighty Bolivian bishop whom Bergoglio has named a cardinal. I don't think any other cardinal-designate has ever faced the accusation Mons. Ticona faces on the matter of a double life (witnesses attesting to his concubinage with a woman from his hometown). Who is the Nuncio to Bolivia and did he fail to do due diligence on backgrounding Ticona as is his duty to the pope and to the Church when a man is being considered for a cardinal's hat? Or did he in fact do his duty but whatever findings he may have forwarded to Rome were overridden by the pope because Ticona is a buddy of Bergoglio pet Evo Morales, president of Bolivia?

The Pope’s Ticona problem:
Bolivian bishops now distance themselves
from Bergoglio's cardinal-designate
by Maike Hickson

June 18, 2018

A new scandal is continuing to develop for Pope Francis, regarding one of the men he plans to make a cardinal at the 29 June consistory. The Bolivian bishops’ conference has just distanced itself from one of their own, Bishop Toribio Ticona Porco, whom he announced as a cardinal-designate last month. The Bolivian bishops now say that Ticona does not speak in their name.

The background for this unusual episcopal move is that Ticona is a friend of the controversial Socialist Bolivian President Evo Morales, who appears to be seeking re-election to a fourth term in violation of Bolivian Constitutional law – a move the Bolivian bishops’ conference opposes.

Ticona came under fire earlier after allegations surfaced that he has been living in concubinage with a woman with whom he has two children, and that he sold land from the Bishopric of Potosí to her in 2014.

On the matter of the growing episcopal conflict in Bolivia, the German bishops’ news website Katholisch.de published a report on 16 June. The news agency ACI Prensa also published an article on the matter on 13 June.

According to these reports, the conflict began after Cardinal-elect Toribio Ticona Porco (81), the retired Bolivian bishop of Corocoro, gave an interview on 6 June in which he made some encouraging comments about Evo Morales, saying that he hopes the Church hierarchy of Bolivia would work together with him on certain grounds.

Morales had tried in 2016, with the help of a referendum, to receive permission from the Bolivians to be re-elected as President in 2019, but the people rejected his idea. However, Morales has recently indicated that he might nevertheless try to get re-elected for a fourth time.

Cardinal-elect Ticona commented in the 6 June interview on this conflict situation with regard to Morales, saying that he would prefer not to comment on whether or not Morales should be re-elected because “we are friends.” With regard to the 2016 referendum which rejected Morales’s re-election, Ticona abstained from commenting, but he said that Morales and the Bolivian bishops should “mutually respect one another.”

“In matters that unite us, we can work together,” he added. These words would appear to be an episcopal endorsement of President Morales. Since Ticona is soon to be a cardinal, some media have presented the statement as the opinion of 'the highest Church authority in Bolivia', thus undercutting the official resistance against Morales coming from the Bolivian bishops’ conference.

Since the Bolivian bishops’ conference had already rejected Morales’s attempt at reelection in violation of the law, they responded to Ticona's statements in the June 6 interview. In a statement on June 13, they refer to “misinterpretations of some statements of the cardinal” which “have been able to create confusion in the public.” The bishops direct the public to the different media statements and pastoral letters that they have previously published. “We reject any attempt to divide or manipulate the Catholic Church [in Bolivia],” they add.

Moreover, the Bolivian bishops also make it clear that the “legitimately elected authorities” of the bishops’ conference – i.e., its President, Vice-President, Secretary General and Permanent Episcopal Council – are “the official voice of the Catholic Church in Bolivia.” Even if Ticona, as a member of the Bolivian bishops’ conference, has the “right to speak, as a bishop emeritus, in accordance with the bishops’ conference’s own statutes.”

As Katholisch.de reports, Evo Morales himself has now also intervened in this matter. While in Russia for the World Cup, he put wrote on Twitter: “My respect, affection, and admiration for my brother Toribio Ticona, Cardinal of Bolivia. Strength! The bishops and Catholics of the base [from the “base communities”], who defend the poor and who work with you, are with you.”

At the end of May, Morales congratulated Ticona upon his appointment to the cardinalate; the President even announced that he would accompany Ticona to Rome for the ceremony. “He congratulated me and declared that, finally, someone has appointed an indigenous cardinal,” Ticona said.

The bishop and Morales had earlier worked politically together and they even even marched together in manifestations. Ticona himself also recently referred to his origins from an indigenous farming family, claiming that this might be the reason that he is now being criticized.

President Morales, who also stems from an indigenous background, is a revolutionary Socialist politician who in 2015 [in]famously gifted Pope Francis during his papal visit to Bolivia with a hammer-and-sickle crucifix. The symbolism didn't bother the pope at all.

In 2017, Morales caused much controversy when he set out to ban evangelization (or “proselytization”), something which he later quite ambiguously withdrew. His planned law would have imposed up to 12 years imprisonment if a person tries to convince another person to join a religious organization.

It is noteworthy that Pope Francis and President Morales met each other in person at least five times since 2013.

As OnePeterFive reported recently, Bishop Ticona came under pressure shortly after his nomination for a red hat was announced, when the Spanish-language website Adelante la Fe revealed allegations that the bishop also has a “wife” and children. Though he immediately denied the reports, Adelante la Fe, as well as as other websites such as LifeSiteNews, confirmed the truthfulness of that initial report.

In a new report dated today, 18 June, Miguel Ángel Yáñez of Adelante la Fe has revealed additional information regarding the testimony of “direct witnesses” who knew Ticona and his female companion — named only as “Leonor RG”. The Bolivian newspaper Página siete has now also published an investigative report into the matter, saying that the cardinal designate had sold church-owned land to the aforementioned “Leonor RG”, who “in public… presented herself as the ‘wife’ of the cardinal.” [Yanez's article really ought to be read in full. The only online translation is in Googlespeak but it gives you an idea:
ttps://adelantelafe.com/nuevos-datos-sobre-el-escandalo-del-cardenal-ticona/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter]
Hickson missed quite a number of important points in her excerpting.]

Yáñez also alleges in his new report that Ticona has been using his name in differing combinations for different purposes. While he shows up in the initial decree of convocation of the consistory as “HE Mons. Toribio Ticona Porco”, his official identification card lists him as “Toribio Porco Ticona”. [It makes a difference as to whether he should be properly called Mons. (soon-to-be-Cardinal) Ticona as he has chosen to be called, or Mons. Porco, according to his legal ID. In the Hispanic world, a person uses both parents' family names with the father's family name ahead. So if Papa was Senor Porco not Senor Ticona, our soon-to-be-cardinal is really Cardinal-elect Porco, rather 'un-euphonic', and one can understand why he has turned around the family names, without suspecting him of wanting to 'hide things' as implied below! The word 'porco' does not exist in Spanish but it does in Italian where its primary meaning is pig or swine.]

“How important is this?” asks Yáñez. “So much, and it is another element [that is] more indicative in all [that has been] exposed. We have consulted with various legal sources in Bolivia, and all confirm that this practice is not only not common in the country, but is highly irregular and characteristic of people who want to hide things and play with confusion.”

Yáñez includes, in his report, highlights taken from the testimonies of various people — including a priest and others from the town of Oruro, where Ticona is said to have lived with his “wife” — making allegations based on first hand knowledge. Among these is the observation of a neighbor of the “couple” (Ticona and Leonor RG), who claims that having been in the house shared by the two, he saw a photo "where the man everyone knew as Leonor's ‘husband’ appeared…dressed as a bishop with John Paul II.”

Ticona is one of fourteen prelates who will receive the red hat from Pope Francis on 29 June. The next two weeks will show how Pope Francis will try to deal with this grave public estrangement between Cardinal-elect Ticona and the entire Bolivian bishops’ conference, as well as the potential scandal of his alleged double life — a scandal which has, as yet, not been denied by the Vatican even though it has prompted a “discreet” investigation by the Apostolic Nunciature in Bolivia.

This awkward situation at the coming Consistory reminds us of the Consistory of 2017 where one of the Cardinals-elect, Archbishop Jean Zerbo, of Bamako (Mali) was accused of embezzlement of funds, and this was reliably reported only a few weeks before his installment as a cardinal.

According to a Catholic Herold report, there had also been been speculations “that Francis might not make Archbishop Zerbo a cardinal following reports that he and two other Mali bishops had opened Swiss bank accounts totalling 12 million euros ($13.5 million).” Archbishop Zerbo did, in the end, attend that consistory, and Pope Francis nonetheless made him a cardinal.

“After the French Le Monde broke the news, Pope Francis did not show any signs of rethinking his nomination of Cardinal Monsignor Jean Zerbo,” says a report of Vatican Insider.

Thus, this Pope appears to be somewhat indifferent toward such serious accusations against his Cardinals, as can also be seen in the fact that he still keeps both Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga and Cardinal Francisco Errázuriz in his Council of Nine Cardinals, despite grave allegations of misconduct against both men. Indeed, he just met them again, from 11-13 June in Rome, for their Council meetings.

Time will tell if the pattern of special treatment for prelates favored by Pope Francis will repeat itself at the June 2018 consistory.

How many more such stories will emerge of persons favored and rewarded by Bergoglio despite serious questions raised about their character? And why do the media in general keep giving him a pass despite mounting evidence of a fundamental character flaw that is the moral equivalent of bishops covering up for criminally sinful priests? But worse in his case because he is supposed to be the pope, whose double standard in the way he appears to condone evil - or even just the appearance of evil - in persons of his choice makes a mockery of his title of address "Holy Father" or "His Holiness"!

Wearing the white garments of the pope does not entitle anyone to lying, not even to 'white lies', but this pope cheerfully seeks to get away with open-faced lies...How long will he get away with it?

And Bergoglio tells the bald-faced lie
that he only read of the DUBIA in the newspapers
[Is it just senile forgetfulness, or willful denial of something so thoroughly
and repeatedly reported in the media all these past 639 days and counting?]
by Maike Hickson
June 20, 2018

Today, on 20 June, Reuters published a new interview with Pope Francis. Although the interview is making headlines because of the Pope’s criticism of President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, it also contains another controversial assertion: the pope surprisingly now claims that he only heard about the Dubia (concerning his document Amoris Laetitia) “from the newspapers”

Reuters reported:

---

The pope also commented on internal criticism of his papacy by conservatives, led by American Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke.

In 2016, Burke and three other cardinals issued a rare public challenge to Francis over some of his teachings in a major document on the family, accusing him of sowing disorientation and confusion on important moral issues.

Francis said he had heard about the cardinals’ letter criticizing him “from the newspapers … a way of doing things that is, let’s say, not ecclesial, but we all make mistakes”.

He borrowed the analogy of a late Italian cardinal who likened the Church to a flowing river, with room for different views. “We have to be respectful and tolerant, and if someone is in the river, let’s move forward,” he said.

He thus implies that the Dubia cardinals did not follow the correct ecclesial procedures and violated the law of courtesy toward the pope by making their text public without first sending it to him privately.

---

We also contacted Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, one of the four Dubia cardinals, asking him for comment. The cardinal responded in writing and said the following:

---

The Dubia were first published after – I think it was two months – after the Pope did not even confirm their reception. It is very clear that we wrote directly to the Pope and at the same time to the Congregation for the Faith. What is unclear here?

---

Vatican journalist Edward Pentin tweeted earlier today, also contesting the pope’s account, saying “he received the dubia two months before the cardinals went public and instructed [Cardinal] Mueller not to respond. Memory lapse perhaps.” Pentin was referring to Cardinal Gerhard Müller – then-Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) - who was copy-furnished by the four cardinals with their DUBIA letter to the pope.

OnePeterFive has reached out to Cardinal Müller's secretary, asking him for a comment on this new papal claim, but has not received a response as of this writing.

Let us recapitulate the events leading up to the publication of the Dubia in 2016:

First, on 19 September 2016, the four Dubia cardinals (together with two prelates who preferred to remain unknown and in the background) wrote a letter to Pope Francis which contained the five Dubia – questions of doubt – concerning his Post-Synodal Exhortation Amoris Laetitia. They waited for two months and did not receive any official response to their letter – neither from Pope Francis nor from the CDF, to whom they had also sent a copy.

Then, on 14 November 2016, the four Dubia cardinals – Carlo Caffarra, Raymond Burke, Walter Brandmüller, and Joachim Meisner – made their letter to Pope Francis public, hoping thereby to foster a discourse about the matter of Amoris Laetitia. As Pentin had then reported:

---

As the Pope decided not to respond to the dubia, the four signatories said they read “his sovereign decision as an invitation to continue the reflection and the discussion, calmly and with respect,” and therefore have decided to inform “the entire people of God about our initiative and offering all of the documentation.”

---

In December of 2016, Cardinal Müller said in an interview that since the CDF [can only] speak “with the authority of the pope”, it therefore could not “participate in the controversial dispute.” As Deacon Nick Donnelly commented at EWTN in response to this story, “Though Cardinal Müller doesn’t come out and say it, his interview with Kathpress strongly implies that Pope Francis has told him that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith must not reply to the four cardinals’ dubia on Amoris Laetitia.”

Pentin’s tweet today appears to confirm this interpretation of the cardinal’s statements.

The burden is now on the Vatican to correct the pope’s statement. Failure to do so would damage the good name of the then-four Dubia cardinals – two of whom have since died – implicating them in a failure to follow correct ecclesial procedures.

What has been clear since the Dubia were first issued was the caution with which the four approached the matter. Their uprightness, their moral character, their love for the Church and the Pope, all indicate that they would never have taken action outside the established ecclesial procedures for addressing such matters.

OnePeterFive reached out to the Vatican Press Office for comment, but we have received no response at this time.



Meanwhile, this shocker from the Vatican by way of the Archbishop of New York about one of Bergoglio's Grand Electors in the 2013 Conclave:

---

‘The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, at the direction of Pope Francis, has instructed Cardinal McCarrick [85] that he is no longer to exercise publicly his priestly ministry’

---

June 20, 2018
Here is the full statement of Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, published on the website of the Archdiocese of New York:

---

The Archdiocese of New York, along with every other diocese in the country, has long encouraged those who as minors suffered sexual abuse by a priest to come forward with such reports.

As he himself announced earlier this morning, a report has come to the archdiocese alleging abuse from almost forty-five years ago by the now retired Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who, at the time of the reported offense was a priest here in the Archdiocese of New York. This was the first such report of a violation of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People ever made against him of which the archdiocese was aware.

Carefully following the process detailed by the Charter of the American bishops, this allegation was turned over to law enforcement officials, and was then thoroughly investigated by an independent forensic agency. Cardinal McCarrick was advised of the charge, and, while maintaining his innocence, fully cooperated in the investigation. The Holy See was alerted as well, and encouraged us to continue the process.

Again according to our public protocol, the results of the investigation were then given to the Archdiocesan Review Board, a seasoned group of professionals including jurists, law enforcement experts, parents, psychologists, a priest, and a religious sister.

The review board found the allegations credible and substantiated.

The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, at the direction of Pope Francis, has instructed Cardinal McCarrick that he is no longer to exercise publicly his priestly ministry.

Cardinal McCarrick, while maintaining his innocence, has accepted the decision.

This archdiocese, while saddened and shocked, asks prayers for all involved, and renews its apology to all victims abused by priests. We also thank the victim for courage in coming forward and participating in our Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program, as we hope this can bring a sense of resolution and fairness.

---

McCarrick has received the same penalty meted out earlier to serial abusers Marcial Maciel and Fernando Karadima by the CDF, except that he has not been publicly enjoined to spend the rest of his days in prayer and penitence. One is curious to know the details of the single case of abuse that the New York Archdiocese's review board found to be credible and substantiated. Was the cardinal given the chance to confront his accuser? Equally interesting would be to know the names of those who make up the review board.

I hold no brief for McCarrick, but in fairness to him, this seems to be the one and only time he has ever been linked, directly or indirectly, to a sex abuse case. It is interesting how seemingly quick - and quite coldly - the Vatican Secretary of State himself announced the Vatican's decision on McCarrick, considering all the time it took for Bergoglio to disavow his adamantine stand that Mons. Barros was simply 'innocent' of any and all accusations against him!

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


See earlier posts today, June 20, on the preceding page.



Why be (or continue to be) Catholic?
by REV. JAMES V. SCHALL, S.J.
CRISIS MAGAZINE
June 19, 2018


On a recent book review/TV interview program called Q/A, Ross Douthat, author of To Change the Church, was asked about his own beliefs.

He responded quite frankly that he was a Catholic. When asked why, Douthat replied that, as far as he could see, a divine intervention did take place in this world around the time and appearance of Christ. He added that the essence of this intervention has been best preserved down the subsequent ages by the Catholic Church. This sensible view is one that many Catholics would also accept as valid.

Indeed, probably the best way to see the divine intervention spelled out step by step is in Benedict’s JESUS OF NAZARETH. After reviewing most of the scholarly literature on this topic, Benedict concluded that the evidence seems to show that Christ was “who He said He was.”

But few are much concerned with an intellectual understanding of the facts of the matter. Something else is going on today. Not many really seem to worry about the truth of these issues, though that is where the real drama lies. [How particularly and resonatingly true that is in a world where even the supposed Vicar of Christ on earth blatantly tells lies, big and small, and there are only a few who call him to account!]

Freely to assent to truth is the heart of what it means to be civilized. In a way, however, our culture is beyond truth. We make up our own universe; the Supreme Court tells us this is our “right.” Such a development, wherein we impose our ideas on reality rather than let reality instruct us about what it is, usually means to opt for one or other current fantasy or ideology that is custom-designed to explain away things that we choose not to accept, no matter what the evidence.

Many millions of words have now been written about the meaning of the Irish abortion vote, one foreshadowed by a similar change in Quebec decades ago. In both cases, areas that had been proudly Catholic for centuries, suddenly decided to ditch its tradition in order to join the secular world, with its principles and practices. A radical change in these cultures had already taken place, as Plato would say, in the souls of the citizens of these areas. From this viewpoint, the change was not so surprising. Human order is built on fidelity to tradition and principle. It is not immune to change as if it were a material object. Indeed, reasonable change is part of its stability.

Likewise, many Catholic churches, orphanages, hospitals, and schools in Europe and America have closed. Muslims are willing to move into these edifices if allowed to do so. Many famous churches have long been national monuments or museums under government support. I read somewhere that, regarding the visiting of churches in Dublin, that the only people there were American tourists, often looking for their ancestors.

While there are signs of life in various areas of the Church, a survey of the whole, to be frank, is rather bleak. Whether Scripture or tradition gives us many grounds for expecting anything too different is doubtful. Christ himself asked the disciples whether, on his return, they thought there would be faith on earth (Luke 18, 7-8). This passage is always a testimonial to the powers that are in constant opposition to what Christ put into the world. [And what would Christ say when the man who is supposed to be his Vicar on earth has contributed the most in the past five years to a drastic weakening of the faith as Christ taught it, when this vicar is himself one of 'the powers that are in constant opposition to what Christ put into the world', specifically to the one true Church he established, to the point of setting up his own church in its place and on its ruins?]

In the past several years, I have perceived a noticeable loss of intellectual acumen that the Church had gained with John Paul II and Benedict. Many are upset by this lack of depth, especially more recent converts who came into the Church with the help of the vigorous thinking we still see from these two popes. But the main reason for the decline of Church membership is the desire to be like the rest of modern society. Many want Catholic teaching to be viewed and interpreted through a modern lens.

We no longer speak of “heretics” today. Instead, everybody is nice, with a “right” to his own opinion. Nothing is held as definite, precisely so that nothing binds. This freedom of opinion leads to everyone having mostly the same opinions, increasingly enforced by authority. Things that once seemed unchangeable are now changed or expected to change in the near future. The clergy and the bishops are not much help, as they seem — to many at least— to betray the same symptoms.

II.
In the light of these comments, and in spite of scandals and confusion in Rome, we still need to ask: “Why should we continue to be Catholic?”

Much of the controversy that swirls around the Holy Father has, at its origin, the feeling that certain basic —once thought non-negotiable — principles and practices have been revoked or at least implicitly allowed to pass away. Under the aegis of finely-tuned “mercy” and “discernment,” a method has been developed that was hoped would justify this accommodation of the Church to that modernity and those of its principles that everyone seems eager to embrace.

Recent remarks and decisions, often coming from Archbishop Luis Ladaria, the current Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, however, have been more careful. We have seen a firm statement that women cannot be priests. The German formula for interfaith communion at a wedding is set aside. A renewed interest in the centrality of doctrine appears in CDF documents. These are welcome signs. However:
- The dubia are still not answered.
- Good Catholics are still seen as rigid. The papacy often appears to act in the public eye like a political party of the left.
- Christianity is seen mainly as a force to lead sundry crusades over ecology, poverty, and immigration, yet such initiatives are difficult to square with good economics, science, and politics.

Not a few have also pointed out that an indirect papal input in the various pro-abortion and gay marriage votes in Ireland and Portugal occurred with Catholics being advised to deal with more “important” things. Their enemies, to give them credit, do not think these issues are among the lesser important things.

Many wonder whether the Church does not now see itself as simply a socio-political movement instrumental primarily in curing our temporal ills. [Not 'the Church' but the church of Bergoglio which has become the largest NGO on earth and arguably its most powerful!]

The irony is that the methods recommended in these areas have almost invariably, when tried, made things worse. We do find considerable talk of sanctity and holiness, but again, this is often of an activist kind. The contemplative life, the life that is needed to keep our souls in touch with the transcendent, seems to be minimized.

III.
Let us ask again: “Why be, or continue to be, Catholic today?” The only sensible reason is that what the Church teaches is true to its immediate origin in divinity itself. Has the Church on any major issue contradicted its own mandate? This is a delicate point, as only the Church believes that it is the sole depository of this mandate.

In thinking about these things, I again take my cue from the “heretics” who refuse to leave the Church but stay in it to transform it, as they say, into their image of modernity. In the end, they can find no place else to go. They are already wrapped within modernity’s orbit. The effort from within to transform Christianity into modernity, to align its basic premises with those of the modern world, may seem like a plausible, shrewd tactic, and many have already made this transition.

Catholics who remain in the Church and see the Church no longer consistent with its founding purpose often find themselves perplexed. Practically no one is excommunicated for holding any position associated with modernity. They see people, in apparent good standing, in the Church, who accept and practice most of the aberrations of modern social living. Indeed, it seems like we have two Churches holding contradictory views within the same Church. The usual division between liberal and conservative is practically useless as a way to understand the difference. The issue is a matter of truth, not interpretation.

To many, both inside and outside the Church, there seems to be much ecclesiastical confusion. Upsetting new interpretations constantly appear. Previously, many considered the Church wrong, but no one thought it did not hold or articulate what it affirmed on basic points of practice and doctrine.

The primary argument that the Church teaches the same things over time does not seem valid for many any longer. The same things are no longer being taught and affirmed in all dioceses, schools, seminaries, and institutions. Various attempts have been made to explain how the Church can be both loyal to its tradition and, without contradiction, accept the basic premises of modernity.

For instance, Jesus was said to look at current events and see what needed to be changed, and so he changed things according to what was needed at the time. “Loyalty” to tradition thus means doing the same for our time. First we do what needs to be done; then we develop a theory to justify it. The word “discernment” has come to mean the ability to read almost directly into temporary things or situations the action of the Holy Spirit. On the basis of what we think we discern, we can act with confidence that we are not following our own wills but that of the Holy Spirit.[Which really describes the Bergoglio strategy and tactics of imposing his image and likeness on the church of Christ - and could there be a worst Luciferian effrontery and slapdown of Christ, Second Person of the Trinitarian God, by the very mnan who is supposed to be his Vicar on earth?]

Or we can say that we do not know exactly what Jesus said or did, and that he really did not lay down basic principles that needed to be maintained over time to protect the authenticity of his teaching and revelation. He was merciful and compassionate, and the best we can do is to read the “signs of the times” and accommodate ourselves to where the Spirit, in mercy and compassion, is leading us. This approach would allow us to put aside our “absolutes” and embrace the pastoral changes that the culture has already put into place.

However plausible these positions may seem, if indeed they do seem plausible, they clearly avoid facing the central issue of whether a definite revelation in Christ was to be maintained for the good of man down the ages in spite of persecution, disagreement, and other cultural conditions in other eras.

Can we continue to be Catholic today? Only if one thing remains true and upheld. Only if the same teachings and practices that were handed down and guaranteed down the ages remain the foundation of the Church. This revelation in all its ramifications is what best explains human meaning and destiny.

If the substance of this revelation is not upheld, the question is no longer a merely human problem of whether or not to be loyal to a tradition. It is the breakdown of revelation itself since it is no longer credible on its own terms. The guarantee of Christ is to be with us till the end, with the central teachings and practices of his life at the center. If this content and sequence is not maintained in a living way, i.e., in a thoroughly nuanced but plain way, we have no reason still to be Catholic.

What is unusual about our time is not its opposition to or rejection of the truth of this revelation. Adversaries have been found in every era. What is new is the worry that radical changes have been made in an official way that would cause us to doubt the integrity of the original revelation.

At least some of us can still affirm with Douthat that a divine intervention did take place in Christ and that it is best preserved in the Catholic Church. The same intervention also gives us the criterion for judging when the latter is not credible —namely when the Church, as guardian of revelation, clearly changes its own truths instead of uphold them before the nations down the ages. This is why contemporary writers like Douthat carefully watch for changes that take place in Rome.

IS MY FACE RED - AND PURPLE WITH APOPLEXY!
Two days ago, I made this remark upon the announcement by Cardinal Dolan that the Vatican had deprived Cardinal Theodore McCarrick - one of the current pope's Grand Electors - of the right to practice his priestly ministry in public because a New York archdiocesan review board for sex abuse charges had found one accusation against him 'credible and substantiated' ....

---

McCarrick has received the same penalty meted out earlier to serial abusers Marcial Maciel and Fernando Karadima by the CDF, except that he has not been publicly enjoined to spend the rest of his days in prayer and penitence. One is curious to know the details of the single case of abuse that the New York Archdiocese's review board found to be credible and substantiated. Was the cardinal given the chance to confront his accuser? Equally interesting would be to know the names of those who make up the review board.

I hold no brief for McCarrick, but in fairness to him, this seems to be the one and only time he has ever been linked, directly or indirectly, to a sex abuse case. It is interesting how seemingly quick - and quite coldly - the Vatican Secretary of State himself announced the Vatican's decision on McCarrick, considering all the time it took for Bergoglio to disavow his adamantine stand that Mons. Barros was simply 'innocent' of any and all accusations against him!

---

Much of it stands, except my underlying assumption that "this seems to be the one and only time he [McCarrick] has ever been linked, directly or indirectly, to a sex abuse case". As Rod Dreher reveals in this article - 'everybody knew', and for a long time now, but no one did anything about it. And the details are easily the most disgusting I have read about the behavior of sex abuser priests.

Cardinal McCarrick: Everybody Knew
By ROD DREHER
THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
June 20, 2018

Remember how, after Harvey Weinstein was busted as a serial sexual abuser, it emerged that a whole lot of people knew this about Weinstein, but never said anything about it? The same thing is true about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was outed today (by the Catholic Church) as having sexually abused a minor years ago.

I had never heard that McCarrick abused minors, but I heard from many sources that he would go after seminarians. He had a habit of inviting them to his beach house, and always inviting one more young man than there was bed space for. The unlucky mark had to bunk with the Archbishop, who loved to snuggle.

Here are excerpts from an “open letter” to Pope Benedict XVI, written a decade ago by the sociologist Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine monk who specializes in studying the sexual behavior of Catholic priests:

---

While I was Adjunct Professor at a Pontifical Seminary, St. Mary’s Baltimore (1972-1984) a number of seminarians came to me with concerns about the behavior of Theodore E. McCarrick, then bishop of Metuchen, New Jersey.

It has been widely known for several decades that Bishop/Archbishop now Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick took seminarians and young priests to a shore home in New Jersey, sites in New York, and other places and slept with some of them. He established a coterie of young seminarians and priests that he encouraged to call him “Uncle Ted.” I have his correspondence where he referred to these men as being “cousins” with each other.

Catholic journalist Matt C. Abbott already featured the statements of two priests (2005) and one ex-priest (2006) about McCarrick. All three were “in the know” and aware of the Cardinal McCarrick’s activities in the same mode as I had heard at the seminary. None of these reporters, as far as Abbott knew, had sexual contact with the cardinal in the infamous sleepovers, but one had first hand reports from a seminarian/priest who did share a bed and received cards and letters from McCarrick.

The modus operandi is similar to the documents and letters I have received from a priest who describes in detail McCarrick’s sexual advances and personal activity. At least one prominent journalist at the Boston Globe was aware of McCarrick from his investigation of another priest, but until now legal documentation has not been available. And even at this point the complete story cannot be published because priest reporters are afraid of reprisals.[/dim

---

[I am greatly concerned about this supposed 'open letter' to Benedict XVI. If it had ever been published at all, surely no one could have ignored it, least of all the media! And if Dreher knew about it then, why didn't he use it? One has to wonder if Benedict XVI ever did get the letter - because I cannot imagine he would have simply ignored it.][P.S. Someone has provided a link to the open letter which, it turns out, was published on the traditionalist site TRADITION IN ACTION -
www.traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/a02z_007_SipeOpenLet...
My question remains: Was the letter sent to Benedict XVI at all. I hope Mons. Gaenswein sheds some light on all this.]*

In 2012, I was approached by a freelance journalist working for The New York Times Magazine on this story. Someone had told him to contact me, that I might be able to help him. It turns out that he didn’t need my help. This journalist had done what no others had been willing or able to do: found court documents about Uncle Ted’s settlements with adult men he had forced himself on, and land at least one on-the-record interviews with a victim.

The man, I was told, was an unwilling victim, but allegedly let McCarrick get away with it because as a bishop, McCarrick was in a position of total power over his future as a priest. It was the exact same reason that actresses submitted to Harvey Weinstein.

Why did this story never get published? That’s a good question. When I first spoke to the reporter, he was on the verge of publishing. Weeks, then months, went by, and no story. When I contacted him again, he told me he had no idea.

The editor on the story had changed, and the new editor kept making him go re-report things he had already nailed down. This was a mystery to him. Mind you, this reporter was coming at the story from an abuse of power in the workplace angle. He was not a Catholic, nor did he understand the intra-church dynamics of the scandal. I asked him for the name of the editor. He told me. I looked it up. The editor was a gay man whose marriage announcement had recently been in the Times.

Did that fact have anything to do with the fact that the McCarrick story was killed by the Times magazine? It is impossible to know at this point, but if I were Times executive editor Dean Baquet, I’d want to know why my newspaper had a good story about a Catholic cardinal using his power to sexually exploit his employees, but did not publish it.

But I can tell you this: Back in 2002, a liberal Catholic journalist and I were trading stories about covering the abuse scandal, and the obstacles to covering the story that we found on our own ideological sides. I told him that on the Catholic Right, I found a strong unwillingness to contemplate the possibility that mandatory celibacy played a role in creating a culture of secrecy and abuse. Also, there was a deep reticence to think critically about the role of authority within the Catholic hierarchy, and how that played into a culture of abuse and cover-up. We conservative Catholics had made such a big deal about the loss of authority within the Church, and had developed within ourselves a chronic reluctance to confront facts that called the integrity of the system into question.

Father Richard John Neuhaus, for example, once upbraided me angrily on the phone for publishing a story about Bishop James Timlin’s handling of the Society of St. John situation.

“The bishop told you there was no story there!” he growled.

I pointed out to Father Neuhaus that I had quoted the bishop saying that in the story. Neuhaus was aghast that I had published the story at all, given the bishop’s words.

“Father Neuhaus, why should I believe Bishop Timlin?” I said.

“Because he is a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church!” Neuhaus shouted.

Really, he shouted. Remember, this was February 2002, only a month after the scandal broke big in Boston. Churchmen like Father Neuhaus would come to learn in time how very wrong they were. I seem to recall Neuhaus writing about this, eventually. I bring it up here to point out how the scandal radically challenged fundamental views conservative Catholics had about the Church and how it works — so much so that they didn’t see what they didn’t want to see, in many cases.

That’s the kind of thing I told my liberal Catholic colleague. For his part, he told me that on the Catholic left, nobody will deal with the homosexual aspect of the scandal, in particular the gay networks within the Catholic Church. It was a third rail. They had an ideological commitment that this kind of thing was nothing more than a trumped-up fantasy of homophobic right wingers. The Catholic left was as committed to that view as the Catholic right was to its own shibboleths.

The thing is, you couldn’t really understand the Catholic abuse scandal without taking into account the homosexual networking, as well as the celibacy rule, and the culture of authority within the Church. None of these factors were or are complete explanations, but a complete explanation was impossible without taking them all into consideration. This was exactly what many Catholic partisans on both sides did not want to do. They only wanted confirmation of their prior beliefs. The facts of the scandal made fools of us all, eventually.

My own foolishness was exposed when I accepted the lies told by a conservative Catholic priest in 2005 — that he had been driven out of Pennsylvania by church liberals — because it played into my own prejudices, and besides, I was sure that I could tell who was lying and who wasn’t.

I was wrong. And I was a fool.

Now, the secular media has its own biases when it comes to covering the Catholic Church. Among them, in my experience, was a refusal to examine the role of homosexual networks within the Catholic priesthood in creating and protecting a culture of abuse within the Church. I do not know the extent to which these are still active, but this is what Richard Sipe told me for National Review in 2002:

---

One disturbing facet of this willingness to overlook serious sexual sin, say a number of priests and seminarians, is the existence of a discreet but powerful homosexual network within seminaries and chanceries.

A. W. Richard Sipe, a psychiatrist and former Benedictine monk who has treated scores of sexually abusive priests and has written extensively about the phenomenon, says that the reality of the gay network is well known to clerics and others closely familiar with the workings of the Catholic Church, though difficult to prove from public sources.

“I’ve reviewed over 100 cases of sexual abuse by priests. In there you get the documentation, which unfortunately often gets sealed by the Church after they settle the cases,” says Sipe, who is an expert witness in abuse cases. “It’s very clear that you can trace [the network], one person to another, through a sequence of appointments, the sequence of who follows whom in what position, and how they got there. It is a fact, and nobody can sincerely deny it.”

A typical pattern involves a priest becoming sexually involved with a seminarian or younger cleric, and then the junior man following his elder up the diocesan hierarchy. Sipe and others interviewed say this “bond of secrecy” introduces the possibility of blackmail: Those in positions of authority are prevented from acting against others because they themselves are compromised. It’s a form of mutually assured destruction.

---

Richard Sipe is not a conservative. He’s a social scientist who was telling me how the system works. When I was working on these stories, I learned that most gay priests who are sexually active do not molest children or adolescents. The problem is that they — as well as straight priests who are sexually active — have secrets, and learn to keep their mouths shut as part of an informal system of self-preservation.

And the psychological pressure they put on those who are relatively powerless within the system is enormous — or, I should say, was enormous. I haven’t reported on this stuff in over a decade. I don’t know to what extent any of this is still the case.

I remember now a series of abuse stories I was working on in 2001 for the New York Post, before things blew up big out of Boston. A source — a devout young Catholic man — had been telling me that he left seminary because he couldn’t stand the constant pressure from priests there to have sex with them. One of the seminary leaders told him that if he’s not gay, fine, but to go get a girlfriend. To me, it was clear that the priest-professor was trying to lead the kid into his own web of corruption, one way or the other. This young man was stricken and confused.

We had set up a time to meet to have an on the record conversation for my column. That morning, he phoned me, crying. He told me that he had e-mailed his professor the night before, telling him that he was going to sit down with me and spill his guts. The priest-professor asked if he could come over. The young man said yes. The priest-professor convinced him that if he went public, he would hurt the Church terribly. Is that really what the young man wanted to do? No, the kid said, it wasn’t. The kid — I say “kid,” but he was in his early 20s — wept on the phone with me, and said he was cancelling our meeting. He couldn’t do that to the Church. Nothing I said changed his mind. That devil had gotten inside this devout young man’s head, and done a number on him.

Are Catholics today, in 2018, less susceptible to that kind of manipulation? I don’t know. I’d like to think so, but I don’t know. Believe me when I tell you that a lot of people in the church knew about Cardinal McCarrick’s sex life. How many of them have gone public with it? Not Cardinal McCarrick’s successors in Newark, Archbishop Myers (a conservative) and Cardinal Tobin (a liberal), who knew about at least two settlements with McCarrick’s victims. I just found this posted in 2010 by Richard Sipe. Excerpt:

---

There is documentation that records McCarrick’s sexual activity and sleeping arrangements with seminarians and young priests even when he served as the first bishop of Metuchen after serving as an auxiliary bishop in New York.

On file are the unsealed “MEDIATION DOCUMENTATION FOR FR. G.” that involved McCarrick, the dioceses of Metuchen and Newark, NJ. (2006) A financial settlement was reached. The case was sent to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, but it has not yet responded. Documents include the history of McCarrick’s initial sexual gesture and approach to the victim then a seminarian, in the bishop’s Metuchen residence in 1986.

Documentation includes handwritten correspondence (letters and cards) from McCarrick postmarked between 1987 and 2005. Many of the letters are signed “Uncle Ted.” The names of other priests who were either seen having sex with McCarrick or witnessed McCarrick having sex with another priest are also included in the file. One of the priests is still in active ministry another left the ministry and was assisted by the church and McCarrick to re-educate for another profession. The names of other sexually active priests are also in the reports. Records of McCarrick’s activities with these priests are also included in medical evaluations and records all reviewed by Bishop Hughes of Metuchen already in 1995.

Excerpts from the legal Settlement Documents include firsthand accounts that are also in the Newark Archdiocese records of an incident on a trip with McCarrick, then Archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, with a seminarian and two young priests when they shared a room with two double beds, it reads:

McCarrick, wearing just underwear, got into bed with one of the priests: “Bishop McCarrick was sitting on the crotch of Fr. RC As I was watching TV with Fr BL [full names appear in the documents], bishop McCarrick was smiling and laughing and moving his hands all over Fr. RC’s body. Bishop McCarrick was touching Fr. C’s body, rubbing his hands from head to toe and having a good time, occasionally placing his hands underneath Fr. C’s underwear. [I was] feeling very uncomfortable while trying to focus on television, and Fr. B.L., started smiling. As I looked at the bed next to me, Bishop McCarrick was excitedly caressing the full body of Fr. R.C. At that moment, I made eye contact [with] Bishop McCarrick. He smiled at me saying, “Don’t worry, you’re next.” At that moment, I felt the hand of Fr. B.L. rubbing my back and shoulders. I felt sick to my stomach and went under the covers and pretended to sleep.”

McCarrick continued to pursue the young man, sent him notes and telephoned him. Notes reveal that it was the custom the Archbishop McCarrick to call his protégés “nephew” and encouraged his entourage to call each other “cousin” and for them to call him “uncle Ted.” On another occasion McCarrick summoned the young man to drive him from the Newark Cathedral to New York City. He took him to dinner; and after, rather than returning to Newark as anticipated McCarrick went to a one-room apartment that housed one bed and a recliner chair. McCarrick said that he would take the chair, but after showering he turned off the lights and clad in his underwear he climbed into bed with his guest. Here is the account from the documents:

“He put his arms around me and wrapped his legs around mine. Then He started to tell me what a nice young man I was and what a good priest I would make someday. He also told me about the hard work and stress he was facing in his new role as Archbishop of Newark. He told me how everyone knows him and how powerful he was. The Archbishop kept saying, “Pray for your poor uncle.” All of a sudden, I felt paralyzed. I didn’t have my own car and there was nowhere to go. The Archbishop started to kiss me and move his hands and legs around me. I remained frozen, curled up like a ball. I felt his penis inside his underwear leaning against my buttocks as he was rubbing my legs up and down. His hands were moving up and down my chest and back, while tightening his legs around mine. I tried to scream but could not…I was paralyzed with fear. As he continued touching me, I felt more afraid. He even tried several times to force his hands under my shorts. He tried to roll me over so that he could get on top of me, but I resisted, I felt sick and disgusted and finally was able to jump out of bed. I went into the bathroom where I vomited several times and started to cry. After twenty minutes in the bathroom, the Archbishop told me to come back to bed. Instead I went to the recliner and pretended to fall asleep.”

In a letter dated four days after this incident McCarrick wrote a note signed “Uncle Ted” that said in part: “I just wanted to say thanks for coming on Friday evening. I really enjoyed our visit. You’re a great kid and I know the Lord will continue to bless you…Your uncle has great spots to take you to!!!”

There are additional documents that substantiate this particular relationship. One can safely say that now-retired Cardinal McCarrick was same-sex active and can be presumed to have a homosexual orientation. Neither fact has interfered with his career as a cleric in the Roman Catholic Church.

The power position of a cardinal places him above suspicion and makes him immune from criticism; this in defiance of the solid historical record of periodic moral violations of some clerics (and politicians) in high places. The facts are clear, simple, and typical of the heritage of tolerance of abuse and cover-up inculcated by Theodore E. McCarrick, archbishop of Newark (1986-2000). There is documentation that records McCarrick’s sexual activity and sleeping arrangements with seminarians and young priests even when he served as the first bishop of Metuchen after serving as an auxiliary bishop in New York.

---

The journalist who wrote the spiked story for The New York Times Magazine had all of this information, and the priest he interviewed was the priest who vomited. It’s part of the legal record. Can you imagine having a reporter who had all this information on a Roman Catholic cardinal, and you being an editor who decided not to publish it? On what possible grounds can you justify that? That because it wasn’t minors, it might have been consensual, and that We May Never Really Know?

Bull. I find it far more plausible that it have been the possibility that once you start pulling on the McCarrick thread, an entire sexual underground of gay clerical cruising might have been revealed.

I don’t know, but I hope now, in this era of #MeToo, priests and others who have suffered under this conspiracy of silence find their voice. And I hope that media organizations — secular and religious — who knew about McCarrick, but chose to stay silent, are shamed, and make up for their silence by seeking out victims and reporting on their stories.

The cover-ups have to end. The conspiracies of silence must stop. In its report on today’s news, the Times reports on the sordid details of what the church commission finds that McCarrick did. Note the final quote from the victim’s attorney:

---

The monsignor, “under the guise of measuring his inseam, unzipped his pants, and sexually assaulted him,” Mr. Noaker said. “The kid had just turned 16, and kind of pulled back, and McCarrick was a little surprised by that.”

“Let’s not tell anyone about this,” the monsignor told the student, according to Mr. Noaker.

Over the following year, Monsignor McCarrick occasionally saw the teenager and told him how good-looking he was. The young man was again selected in 1972 to be a Christmas Mass altar boy, and vowed to be more cautious this time, his lawyer said. Another man did the measuring, but Monsignor McCarrick was there and cornered him in a bathroom, Mr. Noaker said.

“He just came in, grabbed him, shoved his hand into his pants and tried to get his hand into his underwear, and the kid had to struggle and push him away,” the lawyer said.

“These were significant sexual assaults,” Mr. Noaker said. “If someone like that is running an entire archdiocese, what does that mean for predators in the diocese? It probably means that they have secrets that they keep.”

---

I’m with Michael Brendan Dougherty here:

---

@michaelbd
Here's the angle on the Cardinal McCarrick story that I wish people would follow up on: All the priests in Newark and DC who have been morally compromised just by knowing the truth about him, and remaining silent about it.

@michaelbd
Every bishop who worked closely with McCarrick should be asked, "What did you know and when did you know it? Can you document expressing your concerns to Rome?"

---

Watch to see what happens with the McCarrick story. We are about to find out if #MeToo also covers gay bishops who sexually abused men under their authority, and punished, or threatened to punish, those who might have outed them. Watch especially to see how The New York Times reports on this, given its 2012 failure.

Finally, if there is any justice, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, head of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, will not be able to get away with this as his only statement on the McCarrick scandal:

---

“As clergy in God’s Church, we have made a solemn promise to protect children and young people from all harm. This sacred charge applies to all who minister in the Church, no matter the person’s high standing or long service. This morning was a painful reminder of how only through continued vigilance can we keep that promise. My prayers are with all who have experienced the trauma of sexual abuse. May they find healing in Christ’s abundant love.

The Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People (http://www.usccb.org/charter) outlines a process for addressing allegations, holding us accountable to our commitment to protect and heal. I express my gratitude to Cardinal Dolan, who has carried forward with clarity, compassion for the victims, and a genuine sense of justice. With him, I express my deep sadness, and on behalf of the Church, I apologize to all who have been harmed by one of her ministers.'

---

Does that include seminarians and priests, Your Eminence? I find it impossible to believe that Cardinal Dolan, or McCarrick’s successors in Metuchen, Newark, and Washington (including Cardinals Wuerl and Tobin) , knew nothing of Uncle Ted’s Gay Predation. Yet they allowed him to retire with dignity, to play a key role (by his own recollection at Villanova a few years ago) in the election of Pope Francis, and to serve as an envoy of sorts for Francis. What did these cardinals know, and what did they do about it? And who else in power knew, and said or did nothing? Why not? What kind of power did McCarrick have, anyway?

It might surprise you to learn that the person who tried to get me taken off the McCarrick trail back in 2002, was a prominent conservative layman, a closeted gay man who intervened at his dear friend the Cardinal’s request. He did not succeed; I failed to get the story because none of the people who were telling me what they knew about McCarrick were willing to go on the record. Still, you would not have expected a man like this to run interference for a liberal cardinal who loved to force seminarians to share his bed.

But then, you wouldn’t expect a New York Times editor to spike a story about a Catholic cardinal who sexually exploited those in his employ. This scandal has made for some very strange bedfellows. In 2001, when I first contacted the heroic Father Tom Doyle for a comment on a sex abuse story I was working on for the New York Post, he warned me that if I continued on the path of investigation, I would “go to a place darker than you can imagine.” He was trying to warn me. He was right. It’s still dark — but on days like today, when the truth finally comes out, there is light.

More light, please.

Obviously, the New York Archdiocese investigation into a single accuser's charges against McCarrick opened a can of worms so unspeakable - and the worms were bound to wriggle out into the public light sooner or later - the Vatican could not afford NOT to take the penalty it decided to mete on McCarrick. In the face of all this, McCarrick's insistence on his innocence - as if this had been the only case that could have turned up against him - becomes even more bizarre and unconscionable. Will he now do a public mea culpa, as he should?

Then there is Cardinal Pell on the other side of the world who will be going to trial for a few accusations, which pale into insignificance compared to the onus of just the documented charges against McCarrick! I pray he will be exonerated of all charges if only to avoid yet another PRINCE OF THE CHURCH held up to such public disgrace.

How did Cardinal McCarrick’s secret last so long?
By Phil Lawler
CATHOLIC CULTURE.org
June 20, 2018

At least fifteen years ago, I wrote a confidential email message to a few trusted friends, telling them to brace themselves. Within a few days, I said, a major secular newspaper would break a sensational story about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. To my surprise, the newspaper never ran the story — which finally came out today.

At the time, several reporters had spoken with me about the cardinal. Most had been unable to find anyone willing to go on record with complaints. Rod Dreher, one of the journalists who was investigating the rumors, now writes about the frustration he felt when witnesses refused to go public. I ran into the same brick wall; while I heard multiple accusations, without a willing witness I had only hearsay evidence. But at least one reporter found a former seminarian who was ready to tell his story — or so I was told. Yet that story never emerged — at least not in the mainstream media.

Today Rod Dreher reveals that a delegation had gone to Rome sometime before 2000, to caution Vatican officials against the rumored appointment of then-Archbishop McCarrick as Cardinal-archbishop of Washington. Their advice was ignored. In 2003, as the rumor mill churned, I heard that a bold American bishop had confronted the cardinal, urging him to resign in order to avoid a scandal. Again the plea was dismissed.

Now that the story has finally surfaced, Dreher wants to know: “Why were so many bishops willing to run cover for Ted McCarrick all these years?” That’s a good question. But I have another.

Why were so many journalists willing to let the rumors go unexplored? Or, if they did explore the rumors, why were they willing to drop the story, at a time when so many other allegations were splashed across the headlines? Could it be because, for anyone seeking to influence a cardinal, the threat of disclosure is more effective than disclosure itself?

Concerning Cardinal McCarrick
by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf
June 22, 2018

Card. McCarrick. What to say?

I remember that it was Card. McCarrick who suppressed information in a memorandum to US bishops from the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, about guidelines for voting in these USA.

I remember that it was Card. McCarrick who, after Card. Arinze – while presenting Redemptionis Sacramentum to the press corps – responded to my question about Communion for pro-abortion Catholic politicians, made a bee line to the cameras and microphones after the presser and said, “What Card. Arinze meant to say, was…” and then turned Arinze’s point on its ear.

*[Damian Thompson has posted this acknowledgement by the then Nuncio in Washington

that he received Mr Sipe's letter to Benedict XVI and had sent it on to the Vatican in the diplomatic pouch. We really need GG to say whether the letter got to Benedict XVI at all - we've traced it so far to the Nunciature in DC, whence it would have gone to the Secretariat of State, where I do not know what the protocol is for letters addressed directly to the pope, whoever he is. The point is having the letter sent through the diplomatic pouch only guarantees it gets to the Secretariat of State, but after that what?

Mr Sipe should have known better and sent the letter directly to Mons. Gaenswein at the Vatican by certified mail or Fedex requiring the recipient's signature acknowledging receipt - that way, he would have been able to follow it up with Gaenswein himself, because as it was, how did he expect to track the fate of his letter after consigning it to the diplomatic pouch? And why did he not raise a stink in the media after failing to get any answer to the letter directly or indirectly? Everyone and his uncle would have gobbled up a story that says "Pope ignores open letter accusing prominent cardinal of serial sex abuses"! Surely AP, The New York Times and Der Spiegel could have used that as their prime 'evidence' that Benedict XVI was involved somehow in covering up sex abuses in the Church hierarchy!

I cannot believe those 3 media giants went to such effort and expense to dig up something, anything, HUGE they could use against B16, had they known of the Sipe letter; or that knowing about it, they chose not to divulge it at all for the whole world to know - even if it would have helped their make-Benedict-resign pressure play enormously - because, somehow, they were part of the vast conspiracy to protect McCarrick! Am I missing something here?]

We already know he lies without blinking an eyelash whenever he wants to because it is convenient for his narrative as 'I alone am right' Bergoglio, but he has now developed a new stratagem for seeming to be orthodox on some issue one day and almost immediately reverting to his usual apostate stance...

Latest papal hijinks at 30,000 feet:
Pope's intercommunion 'hokey-pokey'

June 22, 2018

First he is in, then he is out, then he is in again, now he shakes it all about.

Many of us dread the papal plane comments now. Yesterday, June 21st, during an in-flight news conference, the pope was asked about his recent decision requesting the Catholic bishops’ conference of Germany not publish nationwide guidelines for allowing Communion for such couples.

Carol Glatz at CNS reports that in response he said the guidelines went beyond what is foreseen by the Code of Canon law “and there is the problem.” The code does not provide for nationwide policies, he said, but “provides for the bishop of the diocese (to make a decision on each case), not the bishops’ conference... This was the difficulty of the debate. Not the content,” he said saying it will have to be studied more. He said he believed what could be done is an “illustrative” type of document “so that each diocesan bishop could oversee what the Code of Canon Law permits. There was no stepping on the brakes,” he said. I suppose by "illustrative document" he means something like Amoris Laetitia?

The bishops’ conference can study the issue and offer guidelines that help each bishop handle each individual case, he said. Some people think this indicates a change of mind over this issue, which was on, then off, then on again, the off again. Now it seems to be back on! Certainly Cardinal Marx public surprise at the pope's request not to publish the guidelines would seem to indicate the pontiff had given Marx no reason to think this would not go through.

An alternative scenario is that he did not change his mind, but he did know that he had no alternative but to go along with the CDF or essentially be declaring himself to be a heretic. So this is, as with so many things before, his way of saying "do it anyway... under the covers -- I can’t ‘declare it’ but you can be "pastoral". Now everybody at Mass can be considered an exception.

The argument is that there is a “grave necessity” that arises from the threat to marital unions and the faith of the Catholic part in mixed unions that stems from the prohibition on non-Catholics from Holy Communion, which means that such couples cannot licitly receive Communion together. Secondly, the fact that many non-Catholic spouses in such unions already do receive Communion in Catholic churches with their Catholic spouses (policing such matters is often nigh on impossible), hence the need for a pastoral framework to guide it. Supporters believe there is just enough room in the law (Canon 844.4, for those interested) to make that happen.

This is what Bishop Schneider had to say on what is going on recently:

---

"We can discover in this context also the problematic and contradictory principle of canon 844 of the Code of the Canon Law (about the administration of certain sacraments such as the Holy Eucharist to non-Catholic Christians in situations of emergency or danger of death).

This principle contradicts the Apostolic Tradition and the constant practice of the Catholic Church throughout two thousand years. Already in the sub-apostolic time of the second century, the Roman Church observed this rule as Saint Justin witnessed it: “This food is called among us the Eucharist, of which no one is allowed to partake but the man who believes that the things which we teach are true” (Apol. I, 66).

The problem created recently by the German Bishops’ Conference is – to be honest – only the logical consequence of the problematic concessions formulated by canon 844 of the Code of the Canon Law."

---

Seven German bishops, led by Cardinal Rainer Woelki, have asked the Vatican to rule on the proposals which state that Protestant spouses may receive Communion after making a “serious examination of conscience”, and must also “affirm the faith of the Catholic Church”, and wish to end “serious spiritual distress” and a “longing to satisfy hunger for the Eucharist” (why they can't become Catholics if these criteria are all met is not discussed in the document).

Cardinal Woelki's request demonstrates that, despite assurances from Marx who is the German Conference president, that there is no attempt to alter Church doctrine, the proposal has deeply divided the German hierarchy. In the March 22 letter, authored by Woelki and six other German bishops and published in English in full here, the seven bishops say they “do not consider” the German bishops’ decision on Feb. 20 to allow Protestant spouses to receive Holy Communion in some cases to be “right” because they do not believe the issue to be a pastoral one but rather a “question of the faith and unity of the Church which is not subject to a vote.”

In their letter, the seven bishops lay out four points calling for clarification: They question
- whether such a proposal is pastoral matter or one concerning the faith and Church unity;
- why a person who shares the Catholic faith on the Eucharist should not become Catholic;
- whether “spiritual distress” is really exceptional or simply part of striving for unity; and
- if a bishops’ conference should be making such a decision without reference to the universal Church.

They add that they have “many other fundamental questions and reservations” about the proposal and so prefer to seek a solution within the field of ecumenical dialogue which is “viable for the universal Church.” Cardinals Francis Arinze, Walter Brandmüller, and Paul Cordes all decried the German bishops' conference document.

Cardinal Gerhard Müller, former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, denounced it as a “rhetorical trick” and said the conditions mentioned in the draft document could never be met while staying faithful to Church teaching. He noted that most of the bishops who support the proposals are not theologians and stressed that interdenominational marriage is “not an emergency situation.”

For the good of the Church, he added, a “clear expression of the Catholic faith” is needed, for the Pope to “affirm the faith,” especially the “pillar of our faith, the Eucharist.” The Pope and the CDF, he went on, are supposed to “give a very clear orientation” not through “personal opinion but according to the revealed faith.”

A source close to two bishops opposed to the bishops' conference consensus told the Register May 4 that the “official answer is that there is no answer.” The Holy Father, he said, had “failed to fulfil his obligation as pope regarding a question of dogma which his office must decide.”

The Pope “refused” to take a line, he stressed, “and the CDF was left to act as a postman, not to affirm the faith, but to announce this information.” The dicasteries, he said, “are useless” if all will be given over to bishops’ conferences to decide.

Well, now the pope has given a clear indication of his position, on a plane. [Not that he had not earlier given more than one indication of his own personal preference on the issue, including his initial weaselly and patently absurd instruction for the German bishops to go back and try to reach a unanimous stand. Since only 7 out of more than 200 bishops were opposed, did he really think a unanimous position would end up voting down the guidelines they had previously approved by a resounding majority? Obviously he fully expected the seen 'dissenters' to fold down and go with the majority!]

And his position is, as usual, deeply troubling and worrying for anyone like me who actually takes what the Church teaches seriously, because it appears to contradict what the Church has always taught without much thought or care. It seems to move towards an Protestant/Anglican position that "all are welcome at the Lord's table" which contradicts principles of evangelisation and mission and the CCC as well as Sacred Scripture (cf 1 Cor 11:27).

Where does that leave us? Where does it leave Catholics like me who teach the faith?


Pope changes tack on intercommunion,
now says local bishops should decide
by Steve Skojec

June 22, 2018

I tried to warn everyone.
When it comes to Pope Francis, you cannot trust what he says. There’s more and more evidence of that all the time.

And of course, we must never forget The Peron Rule.

On the matter of intercommunion, it’s true that he signed off on the CDF’s rejection of the German bishops’ handout.

Catholics who wanted to believe the best immediately got excited. “Hey look! He’s orthodox on this one!”

But now, we see what it for what it was: sleight of hand. A rhetorical head fake. Another papal shell game.



“Pope says local bishop should make the call on intercommunion” reads a new headline over at Crux. The pope has circled back to the intercommunion issue and spun it in a new direction. If you want to see what he did, you have to pay close attention to the way the cups move. Do you see which one the ball — which of course represents papal authority and approval in our little metaphor here — is under when he starts? Watch closely – the emphasis is mine:

---

After a day of touting ways in which Christians might share in greater unity, that commitment to coming together didn’t prevent Pope Francis from backing the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog in its decision to insist on caution regarding proposals for intercommunion with Protestants.

On a return flight to Rome on Thursday from a day-long ecumenical pilgrimage to Geneva, Francis said he supported the Vatican’s Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal-elect Luis Ladaria, in requiring a rethink of a draft proposal from the German bishops that would allow for non-Catholics to receive communion under certain conditions...

Last month, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) rejected the German proposal, which was approved by roughly three-quarters of the bishops during a meeting earlier in the spring. In a letter published this month, Ladaria said the proposal was “not mature enough to be published.”

Francis said that Ladaria did not act unilaterally, but with the pope’s permission…

---

Up until now, we’re all on the same page. Everybody is watching the cup labeled, “Francis forbids intercommunion via the CDF”. But while he’s talking about Ladaria having his permission, he’s distracting us. People are watching his words, and when he sees our eyes are not on his hands, he makes the switch. The ball goes under another cup so quickly that almost nobody even sees the transition. Slow it down and keep your eye on the ball:

---

…and that under the Code of Cannon [sic] Law it is up to the local bishop to decide under what conditions communion can be administered to non-Catholics, not local bishops’ conferences.

“The code says that the bishop of the particular church, and that’s an important word, ‘particular,’ meaning of a diocese, is responsible for this… it’s in his hands.”

Moreover, Francis said, the problem with having an entire bishops’ conference deal with such questions is that “something worked out in an episcopal conference quickly becomes universal.”

---

Did you see him make the switch?

The problem with the Bergoglian version of this illusion is that there’s no final reveal. The magician distracts the audience from what’s happening on the table and then thanks them for coming without ever lifting the cups to show them where the ball landed. He doesn’t actually want them to know he performed his magic, because his whole job was simply to distract them long enough that they forget he was pulling a trick at all.

The ones watching the stage show go home assuming the ball stayed right where it was.

But it’s not under the “Francis forbids intercommunion via the CDF” cup anymore. It’s now under the “Francis says individual bishops can decide the rules on intercommunion” cup.

Some people have seen him perform his version of this trick enough times that they’ve learned how to look for the switch. But most, unfortunately, have not. And since they’re confident that the ball is still under the cup it should be under, they will argue with anyone who tells them otherwise.

Meanwhile, the Catholic media is unlikely to report on the unscrupulous magician who isn’t really doing harmless party tricks, but playing a confidence game. So the game will continue.

Departing from my imperfect metaphor before it falls all the way apart, I’d like to return for a moment to what I wrote back in April. I said that I believed Francis wasn’t happy with the flaming bag of… um… intercommunion handouts that was left on his doorstep. The Germans overstepped. They got a little too cute. This isn’t how Francis works, and that’s “a good part of the reason why this document was rejected. Because where Francis seems most comfortable working through insinuation, the Germans tried to create something more explicit. In writing.”

He more or less confirmed exactly this when he said, in the comments cited above, that “something worked out in an episcopal conference quickly becomes universal.”

We can’t have that. Remember what he told the Lutheran lady who asked him if she could receive Communion back in November 2015:"I wouldn’t ever dare to allow this, because it’s not my competence. One baptism, one Lord, one faith. Talk to the Lord and then go forward. I don’t dare to say anything more."

No ruling from the top. No official decree. Much easier to kick it downstairs and create chaos. Atomize and deconstruct the universal faith, one bishop at a time.

Because Hagan lío or something.

Bergoglio with representatives of the Italian Forum delle Famiglie.


Last week, I posted this brief item:

---

Sometimes, depending on his audience,
Bergoglio remembers to be 'Catholic'

Meeting with members of Italy's national Forum of Family Associations on June 16, Pope Francis underscored that there is only one family recognized by God, that which comes from the union of a man and a woman - "there are no other family forms" - and that "selective abortion is like Nazism in white gloves".

There is a terrible translation of the original Italian article in the Huffington Post
www.huffingtonpost.it/2018/06/16/papa-francesco-la-famiglia-e-solo-uomo-donna_a_23460514/?ncid=tweetlnkithpmg...
some parts of which may raise eyebrows, but as Antonio Socci points out, there has only been embarrassed silence from the Left to the Pope's words on the family, considering that last week, new Family Minister Lorenzo Fontana unleashed vehement attacks from the left and the LGBT groups they support when he made similar statements.

(At least, Fontana didn't say that "Even if the man and woman are not believers, as long as they love each other and unite in matrimony, then they are in the image and likeness of God. That is why marriage is such a great sacrament". Ooops! Would non-believers have a sacramental marriage, to begin with? And a human being need not get married to be 'in the image and likeness of God' - we are all created that way.)

So why didn't he say any of this but simply kept silent during the great French debate on 'marriage for everyone' and after the corresponding law was passed in 2014, nor on the occasion of the 2016 Irish referendum that recognized same-sex 'marriage', nor when the Cirinna law which did so in Italy was debated and passed that same year?

I do not doubt Bergoglio opposes abortion on demand but he is careful not to say this too often and only to selected groups because he wants to have his cake and eat it too (oppose abortion but not trumpet his views in larger forums so as not to provoke the disaffection of the secular world he so loves to woo).

As for God making every human being in his image and likeness, how does he square that with his never-denied statement to Juan Carlos Cruz that God made him the way he is - though there is nothing in Genesis that says God made humans other than man and woman, and the Old Testament is rife with God's punishment of sexual deviants (or is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah one that won't be found in the Bible of the church of Bergoglio)?

---

Aldo Maria Valli had a more extended reaction to Bergoglio's seemingly 'orthodox' statements.


Clearcut words on the family?
Unfortunately no!
Translated from

June 18, 2018

A friend said to me: “You must be happy now that the pope has spoken in favor of a family created from the union of a man and a woman. Is that ot what you ‘traditionalists’ have been wanting him to say?”

My answer was simple: No, I am not happy. And for many reasons. First, if we have come to a point where we have to consider it news and a reason to be happy that the pope, any pope, has said something ‘Catholic’ means that something is already very wrong, to begin with.

The second reason is that the words he spoke off the cuff contain errors that will simply feed more equivocation and confusion. Let’s listen to him:

---

“Today, sad to say, one speaks of ‘diversified’ families, of different types of families. It is true that ‘family’ is a generic word, as in family of stars, families of trees, of animals – it is generic. But there is only one human family that is the image of God, man and woman. Only one. It may be that a man and a woman are non-believers, but if they love each other and unite in matrimony, then they are the image and likeness of God, even if they do not believe in him. It is a mystery: St. Paul calls it ‘a great mystery’, ‘a great sacrament’ (cfr Eph 5,32). A real mystery.”

---

Let us focus on this sentence: “It may be that a man and a woman are non-believers, but if they love each other and unite in matrimony, then they are the image and likeness of God, even if they do not believe in him.” [Words most worthy of a world-class anti-Catholic!] Really??? Is it really sufficient that a man and a woman, though non-believers love each other and unite in matrimony (What matrimony? Civilian? Catholic? Does it not make a difference?) to become the image and likeness of God? [Besides, every man is created in the image and likeness of God as God originally conceived his human creatures would be. Until with the free will he endowed on them, Adam and Eve quickly opted for the devil-destroyer instead of God-creator, and he needed to send down his Son to give fallen man a chance to regain his original God-given nature – in the image and likeness of God - through the grace of living as Christ commands us.]

And can the pope really cite St. Paul to support his view? Let us first read Ephesians 5 in full:

---

1 So be imitators of God, as beloved children,
2 and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.
3 Immorality or any impurity or greed must not even be mentioned among you, as is fitting among holy ones,
4 No obscenity or silly or suggestive talk, which is out of place, but instead, thanksgiving.
5 Be sure of this, that no immoral or impure or greedy person, that is, an idolater, has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.
6 Let no one deceive you with empty arguments, for because of these things the wrath of God is coming upon the disobedient.
7 So do not be associated with them.
8 For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light,
9 for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth.
10 Try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.
11 Take no part in the fruitless works of darkness; rather expose them,
12 for it is shameful even to mention the things done by them in secret;
13 but everything exposed by the light becomes visible,
14 for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore, it says:
“Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead,
and Christ will give you light.”
15 Watch carefully then how you live, not as foolish persons but as wise,m
16 making the most of the opportunity, because the days are evil.
17 Therefore, do not continue in ignorance, but try to understand what is the will of the Lord.
18 And do not get drunk on wine, in which lies debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit,
19 addressing one another [in] psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and playing to the Lord in your hearts,
20 giving thanks always and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father.
21 Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.
22 Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.
23 For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body.
24 As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.
25 Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her
26 to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word,
27 that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
28 So [also] husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.
29 For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church,
30 because we are members of his body.
31 “For this reason a man shall leave [his] father and [his] mother and be joined to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.”
32 This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.
33 In any case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband.

---

As we see, Paul says indeed that two becoming one flesh is a great mystery, but only if they do so in the light of Christ, according to divine law and therefore, the law of the Church. To say that any couple, even if they are non-believers ipso facto become this ‘great mystery’ is a distortion. A serious one.

It is not enough to love and unite in matrimony (of any kind) in order to be in the mage and likeness of God. It is not human love that sanctifies matrimony. What sanctifies a union and makes it an image of God is the presence of God. If I don’t ‘invite’ God into my marriage, if I don’t unite myself to another in matrimony in the light of Christ and in obedience of divine law, if I don’t ask for God’s blessing, if I don’t live marriage in its sacramental dimension, I can love whoever I want but I cannot claim that the union will bring me closer to being in the image and likeness of God.

Nor can I use St Paul to back me up. If only because Paul’s words (taken with those of Jesus in Matt 19,3-6) have a decisive consequence which is, the indissolubility of the marriage bond. And that is the fundamental reason why I cannot be happy at what the pope said. Because once again, it is a source of confusion.

And I will be told: But you are never going to be satisfied! No, I am only trying to be the Catholic that I am.

There is yet another reason I am not happy with the pope’s words: The pope who said them to the Italian forum of family associations, defending the family as one created from the union of a man and woman and condemning abortion as Nazism in white gloves is the same one who then went on to invite Fr James Martin, paladin of the LGBT cause, to be a featured speaker at the World Meeting of Families in Dublin this July.

The same pope who, returning from his trip to World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, told the media that it was not necessary to harp too much on questions like abortion and same-sex ‘marriage’, the same one who allows invitations to leading representatives of worldwide abortion advocacy to come and lecture at the Vatican, the same one who said that he could never understand the words ‘non-negotiable values’ used by his predecessors, the same who in Amoris Laetitia defends cas-by-case situational morality. And so on and so forth.

So, what then is this pope’s teaching? The answer is that, with Pope Francis, papal magisterium now longer reaffirms truth but, as he himself says, only to ‘start processes’. Prof. Roberto Pertice explained it well in his essay Fine del cattolicesimo Romano (The end of Roman Catholicism):

---

We have a pontificate that intends to de-construct the figure of the pope and the papacy itself, to make papal magisterium more elastic and adaptable, to de-potentiate the sacraments, to minimize the importance of the search for stable principles, to sustain the primacy of the [presumed] concreteness of reality over the [presumed] abstraction of laws.

---

These are what one must take into account when considering this pontificate. Without ever ceasing to point out, in any case, its internal contradictions and ts true and proper doctrinal errors, whether they are deliberate or not.

Not surprisingly, the more charitably-inclined Robert Royal seems to take Bergoglio at his word - what it was, that is, when he spoke to the Italian forum of family associations:

Francis condemns 'eugenic'
abortions and fake marriage
by Robert Royal

JUNE 18, 2018

I’d been on the road for much of the past week and hadn’t been very carefully following the news. But I woke yesterday to the heartening news that Pope Francis had strongly condemned selective abortion and the various attempts to redefine marriage as something other than a life-long commitment between one man and one woman.

Even more, he did so off-the-cuff, departing from the text he had prepared to deliver to the Forum delle famiglie, the national forum of Italian family associations. It’s usually been on just such occasions – when he speaks spontaneously and “from the heart” – that he’s delivered the most troubling remarks of his pontificate. It was largely because of those remarks and his early criticism of Catholics who are constantly “insisting” and “obsessing” on life issues and marriage that he alienated and, sad to say, even lost the confidence of many active Catholics – even before the ambiguities and implied [doctrinal] infidelities of Amoris laetitia.

He has, of course, condemned abortion and gay “marriage” on multiple occasions. But the world, Catholic and not, seemed to sense that his heart wasn’t in it. The coverage of his recent remarks in the main secular outlets was very brief, usually just reproducing parts of an Associated Press story – quite a contrast to the extensive coverage when he seemed to be moving towards modern culture.

The Wall Street Journal made the obvious observation that the latest remarks were “unusually strong for a pope who has generally played down medical and sexual ethics and taken a strikingly conciliatory approach to gay people.”

The question arises: why now? There was the humiliating spectacle last month of the Irish overwhelmingly voting to rescind a law prohibiting abortion, after voting for gay marriage in 2015. Perhaps more to the point, just this past week, legislators in Argentina’s Chamber of Deputies approved a bill allowing abortion up to fourteen weeks by just four votes.

Pope Francis was silent about Ireland – a very odd reticence by a man who has no qualms about weighing in on public issues like climate change, fossil-fuel exploration, immigration, Middle Eastern politics, Buddhist persecution of Muslim Rohingyas, international economics – the list goes on. All these have moral dimensions, of course, though it’s hard to see what expertise or insight the Vatican brings to such complex situations. By contrast, allowing abortion in Ireland means the direct and immediate killing of thousands of innocents.

The pope was (perhaps) not entirely silent on this question in his native country. Back in March, he sent a letter to Argentina. It was only five paragraphs in length and mostly a thank-you for a letter he had received congratulating him on completing five years as pope. It was quite mild and, even when he turned to the question of abortion, mixed together multiple issues:

---

I ask you all that you be channels of the Good and the Beautiful, that you lend your support in defense of life and justice, so that peace and fraternity may appear, so that you make the world better by your work, so that you care for the weakest, and share with full hands all that God has given you.

---

You would have to be an Argentinean to know for certain whether this was read as strong opposition to impending abortion changes, or whether this was the right tone given the way particular nations respond to papal comments – but the official Vatican News account didn’t even mention abortion.

Perhaps that was one reason why the latest comment was not at all subtle, more in keeping with what many Catholics expect from the occupant of the Chair of Peter. Pope Francis went to the modern touchstone of evil, comparing “selective” abortions (usually because of fetal abnormalities, sex, etc.) with the Nazi eugenics program of race purification. This time, he says, we are doing the very same thing “with white gloves,” as if it’s just a medical procedure.

Though it comes too late for the millions of innocents who will die now in Ireland and Argentina, still, it’s good that Francis gave this full-throated affirmation. We might add it wasn’t only the Nazis who practiced eugenics in the name of racism: Margaret Sanger, hero to so many American abortion advocates and founder of Planned Parenthood, took the same view – though maybe she wore lace-gloves.

It’s interesting that Francis was also so vocal about marriage. The off-the-cuff remarks refer a lot to Amoris laetitia, the very text that many of us feel both seeks answers to current troubles with marriages and – despite the announced intention of pursuing a path of mercy and discernment – weakens, perhaps implicitly contradicts, Our Lord’s strong words about the indissolubility of marriage. And will likely lead to even further confusion and breakdown.

Still, there are very good things in the recent remarks: “Life in a family: it’s a sacrifice, but a beautiful sacrifice. Love is like making pasta: you do it every day. Love within matrimony is a challenge, for the man and the woman. What’s the biggest challenge for a man? To make his wife more a woman. More woman. That she grow as a woman. And what is the challenge for a woman? To make her husband more of a man. And thus they go forward, both of them.”

This insistence on growing into being men and women will not win the Holy Father any awards at the U.N., or the E.U., or the various gender activist groups that have half-welcomed the tone he adopted from the first days of his papacy. There are other things in these off-the-cuff remarks less straightforward. But he’s affirmed “male and female He created them” and supported traditional marriage.

Where would the Church be now if only, as pope, he had stayed close to these sorts of peasant insights and not been drawn into the swamps of modernist German theology? [Too little, too late - and too suspect and too pat. He was tailoring his words to the audience he happened to be addressing - traditionalist, orthodox Catholic Italians. And none of it can ever neutralize, let alone abrogate, the sense and practical consequences of the apostate AL.]

In a round-up of 'what's the left up to' these days, Fr. Z includes the above tweet from the Vatican's leading LGBT paladin who, I suspect, is being given free rein to indulge his obsession because he is also acting as the surrogate for Bergoglio, who obviously cannot be as openly articulate about his posture of sexual laissez-faire as Martin is self-indulgently so - even if the pope's reported 'God loves you as you are' to Juan Carlos Cruz was, in effect, a message to all sexual deviants, Catholic or not.

A most un-Catholic and anti-Catholic message that ignores everything the Bible (Old and New Testaments) says about sexual deviancy. Not just ignoring Genesis which clearly says God created man and woman whom he then commanded to 'Go forth and multiply', not go forth and proliferate 'gender' permutations and combinations that were never part of the divine plan. Else, why Sodom and Gomorrah and all the numerous condemnations of sexual deviancy and perversion in the Bible?

Yet, as far as I recall, Martin in his public pronouncements does not go beyond what the Catechism says about disordered sexuality to argue about the wrongness of the Catholic position against sexual deviancy. Perhaps, who knows, in his book he goes back to Genesis and all the way to St Paul, and what the Bible says, in more ways than one, about the subject - but there is no way he could possibly turn around what the Bible says to represent his, Martin's, laissez-faire on sexual deviancy. And if that's not possible, then why would he quote the Bible at all? But here we are today, with him touting a psalm to prove his point that the Church is wrong about condemning sexual deviancy.

Anyway, here's Father Z on Fr. Martin's pathetically tawdry and un-magnificent obsession:

---

Did you get that? God created homosexuals as they are. In other words, God intentionally made them to desire to have sex with members of the same sex. That would put sodomy on par with normal sexual relations, which is patently absurd. [Which is, of course, the same reductio ad absurdum one gets with Bergoglio's unqualified "God loves you as you are" to Juan Carlos Cruz.]

This is scandalous, because the people whom he addresses may take his falsehood to be permission – from an authority figure in the Church – to commit sodomy.

No. This is nothing short of pernicious.

Homosexual inclinations are disordered. God made all of us. Therefore we are all good. He made us to live virtuous lives and to seek the Truth. God foresees that some people will have this flaw or that defect or some problem or other. However, these very problems, while not willed by God, are foreseen by God as possible means by which people can reach the joy of heaven. By striving for holiness and by offering the suffering that results from saying “No!” to a disordered desire, people can receive great graces and set good examples for their neighbors out of charity.

---

Remember the chronology: Martin writes his LGBT manual, Building Bridges (or whatever), in the guise of showing unconditional love to everyone; Bergoglio appoints him to be a member of the Vatican's new super-dicastery on communications; and Martin seems to consider that his carte blanche to lecture and write every chance he gets to promote LGBT advocacy - seemingly revelling in the protests and condemnations raining down on him from orthodox Catholic voices who have the same access he has to the media.

I choose to begin this post with the implacably concrete evidence of the de facto posture of laissez faire adopted by Bergoglio and his church on the matter of sexual deviancy because it serves to underscore even more the latest turn of the Bergoglian screw on the upcoming synod on 'the youth'. (Who are they kidding? It's yet another synodal assembly prefabricated by Bergoglio, Baldisseri and their cohort at the Synod Secretariat, towards an end pre-determined by Bergoglio and about which, no doubt, a full draft of his post-synodal exhortation is already on hand).

This latest turn of the screw is described by Andrea Gagliarducci, who unbelievably persists - all evidence to the contrary - in making believe that everything untoward happening in the Vatican is done behind Bergoglio's back and without his knowledge or support. This Vaticanista is astute enough to uncover and report on all the machinations attendant to the Bergoglio Vatican yet insists that Bergoglio cannot be blamed for any of it! For once, I shall post his column without any comments - because any and all comments would come down under the general comment I have made above about Gagliarducci and his so-called'analyses'. [P.S. As you can see, I could not entirely refrain from commenting!]

Pope Francis and dialogue at all costs

June 25, 2018

Meeting the World Council of Churches on June 21, Pope Francis said dialogue is not a strategy, but a necessity, and thatin the end dialogue always seems to be “operating with a loss.” He was obviously referring to ecumenical dialogue, but the speech showed Pope Francis’s rationale.

On June 20, excerpts of a long interview Pope Francis granted to Reuters already confirmed this rationale. Speaking about Cardinal Joseph Zen’s concern about a possible agreement with China, Pope Francis underscored that yes, dialogue is a risk, but “I prefer the risk than the certain defeat coming from not dialoguing.” [My comment is not addressed to Gagliarducci but to Bergoglio: Dialogue is not a risk, unless you enter into it prepared to compromise your essential principles! And dialogue is a strategy the way you employ it - when it is dialog for the sake of dialog, i.e., it makes it seem you are doing something when you are simply filling up time indefinitely, and have no intention of resolving anything definitively because it becomes instead a never-ending dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, in which every synthesis generates a new antithesis, etc, etc.]

This is the outward Church approach. This approach has an extraordinary missionary strength, [????? Can someone make sense of this?] but also its limits, if not handled with care.

One of these limits became very clear when the Instrumentum Laboris (working document) of the 2018 Synod on young people was presented June 19. The document is very long, and it is a strong candidate to be the longest working document ever in the history of Synods, with its 214 paragraphs and 52 pages.

The document’s limits come from the “outward Church” approach. [I think Gagliarducci uses this equivocal term to describe Bergoglio's 'church going out to the peripheries' (while abandoning the center!). In which necessarily, such a church gets caught up in matters that are really external to the primary mission of 'the Church', i.e., the one true Church of Christ.]

First of all, the document is overall a sociological document. So was the case with the guiding lines of the Synod, and with the International Seminar that preceded the Synod and the so-called pre-Synod with the participation of young people [who will not be participating in the synodal assembly at all but will be represented by the bishops who will be named synodal participants, none of whom, it is safe to say, will be younger than 40. See www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/sage.html
for a list of the youngest bishops today from age 40-48. Among contemporary prelates, Cardinal Arinze holds the age record for having been named bishop at the age of 32.]

Reality is described, but there is no mention of how to shape reality. As if the Catholic Church had nothing to propose to the world, and to young people.

In addition, the “spiritual thirst” of young people (and people who are not young anymore, too) is apparently marginalized. The working document claims that the culture of indifference is not winning, and that there is a return of the sacred. The document, however, does not go in depth to the reasons why the sacred is coming back, while it emphasizes social issues – like poverty and marginalization.

This is fruit of the “pastoral of the ear,” the need to be listening to the people. [So you listen, and then what? Does the person listening not have any input at all, or any criteria by which to deal with what he hears? Or will he rather let his interlocutors have the last and only word on any topic?] The dialogue, however, is not presented as a full proposal. It is rather an assessment of things as they are.

Hence, another important – and probably underestimated – problem: the 2018 Synod’s working document is probably the first Vatican document containing the term LGBT. [And here we come to the crux of the matter, the apparent pretext for which this 'youth synod' was called - which is, to somehow have the church of Bergoglio legitimize the proliferation of sexual variants and deviants that appears to be as infinite as the possibilities every person can think of!]

The Holy See has always refused categorizations like LGBT, as people must be considered as people, and not qualified according to their sexual orientation.

The issue is introduced in paragraph 197. The paragraph reads that “some LGBT young people, through various contributions sent to the Secretariat of the Synod, long for the benefits of a greater proximity and care from the Church.”

The document also reads that “some Bishops’ Conferences are trying to understand what to propose to young people that chose to come together in homosexual couples instead of heterosexual couples and who wish above all to stay close to the Church.”

The theme of the pastoral closeness for homosexual couples is not new. In 1986, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a “letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the pastoral care for homosexual people.”

However, the use of the term LGBT is problematic, and could reverberate in the international arena. The Holy See has always opposed the use of the term LGBT in United Nations documents, as it did not want to sign a UN document on discrimination against homosexuals for the same reasons.

The Holy See’s basic principle is that all human beings are considered equal, despite their sexual orientation. For this reason, it cannot support the categorization of people according to their sexual behavior, which the term LGBT gives rise to, nor a document that talks about discrimination against homosexuals. The Holy See focuses on the need to defend every human being.

From a wider perspective, the Holy See has always been suspicious of terms like “Islamophobia” and “Christianophobia” (although it has used this term occasionally), always on the principle of not judging people on the basis of categories. Fostering human dignity also means understanding the inner reasons of the hatred, beyond any religious belonging.

Now, it may be possible that, when the Holy See fights for these principles in the international arena and rejects LGBT terminology, some will recall that the Holy See already used LGBT in a document, claiming that it means that the category has been formally accepted. It might seem a remote possibility, or a mere quibble about details. But nothing is a detail in international congresses. The Holy See knows it: everything is handled with extreme care, from the choice of the words to the themes to develop.

Asked why the term LGBT was included in the Synod’s working document, Cardinal Baldisseri, secretary general of the Synod, said that the Instrumentum Laboris merely took it from the final document of the pre-Synod of young people, to which they were very faithful.

In fact the term LGBT is not included in the pre-Synod document, so Cardinal Baldisseri was at least mistaken. [Or, he has taken on the lying that seems to be endemic in the Bergoglio Vatican, starting with the lord and master himself!] But even if it were, the pre-Synod document is not an official Vatican document. [Carefully selected] young people responded to the questions posed by the Secretariat, but they also complained that the whole final text seemed to have been pre-compiled.

The truth is that, even in that case, there was a lack of will from the Church to educate people. The pastoral of the ear is not accompanied by the spreading of the Christian message. [As awkwardly as Gagliarducci says it, he identifies the basic problem with the so-called 'pastoral of the ear' - a stupid term, to begin with, if I may say so!]

Assuming the worst, one might say that this happened in bad faith. That there is an agenda behind Pope Francis’s back that aims at changing doctrine, or to put the Church and consolidated pastoral practices in crisis with marginal adjustments that at first do not generate scandal. [Oh please! That's the Bergoglian principle of graduality: Make seemingly minor changes to words or to actual pastoral practice that gradually, in time - sooner rather than later - have become adopted as to modify traditional practice to the point that presto!, what was merely supposed to be a lexical or 'pastoral' change is then held up as the new doctrine, even while barefacedly claiming that doctrine has not changed at all!]

Thinking negatively, one could conclude that the Pope is misinformed, as could be deduced by the fact that he said in a Reuters interview that he got to know about the Dubia letter from newspapers. [And how was that a case of him being misinformed? He got the letter - perhaps he chose not to read it, or is making believe he never read it! Go ahead, Gagliarducci, say it, speak the truth! The pope was selling a barefaced lie!]

However, such concerns may be exaggerated. Beyond agendas and ideological pushes, it is the way things are handled that have become superficial. This is how potentially good ideas like the pastoral of the ear can become boomerangs. Sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly. This is the risk of the dialogue at all costs promoted by Pope Francis. [It simply is beyond my abilities to try and make sense of this paragraph!]

Perhaps this is the most overt act of shameless apostasy from the Roman Catholic Church dared so far by the followers of the church of Bergoglio who, as one of the apostate German bishops says, "With our handout, we only tok the pope at his words". See, they can be far more daring than Bergoglio who carefully always leaves himself some wiggle room or some deniability excuse in his own apostate statements, remembering that he is still the pope who was elected to lead the Roman Catholic Church, not his own church, and ever careful not to commit any technicality that would enable his critics to accuse him of material heresy and/or formal apostasy.


A few months later than scheduled but
despite CDF prohibition, German bishops
publish their intercommunion handout anyway
by Maike Hickson

June 27, 2018 3 Comments

Today, the German bishops published their very controversial pastoral handout which allows Protestant spouses of Catholics, in certain cases, to receive Holy Communion.

Since Pope Francis, through the Congregation for the Doctrine on the Faith, objected on June 21 to the German bishops' conference publication of the text, the German bishops have now simply declared that the document is not theirs, and therefore, is not official.
[[The chutzpah they have in publishing the document and claiming it is 'not official' is worthy of the most blatant Bergoglio lie so far - that he first learned of the Four Cardinals' DUBIA from reading about it in the newspapers. Considering that he claims to read only one newspaper - and not his 'own' newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, but either Il Messaggero or La Repubblica - one can easily check if either of those two newspapers failed to report about the DUBIA when the cardinals decided to publish it two months after failing to receive any reply from the pope or the CDF to whom they wrote the DUBIA!]

The title of the 39-page document, called an 'orientation guide', translates to: “Walking with Christ – tracing unity. Inter-denominational marriages and sharing in the Eucharist.”
https://www.dbk.de/fileadmin/redaktion/diverse_downloads/dossiers_2018/08-Orientierungshilfe-Kommunion.pdf

The controversial handout was approved by the German bishops with a two-thirds majority in February of this year, but its publication was initially held up because of high-ranking opposition both in Germany and in Rome – including the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which claimed the pope’s explicit approval in rejecting the initiative.

Curiously, this pastoral handout has no author or no organizational name attached to it. [Deliberately so, in order that the bishops' conference can claim they have nothing to do with it. Do they really think Germans today are as unquestioning as they generally were during the Hitler's Third Reich?] No one, therefore, officially takes responsibility for it.

As the German bishops’ website Katholisch.de reports, Cardinal Reinhard Marx – the President of the German bishops’ conference – spoke recently with Pope Francis about the matter, presumably during the June 11-13 meeting of the Council of Nine Cardinals.

He claims he made it clear to the pope that “the text does not appear as a document of the Bishops’ Conference, given that it also relates to a dimension [sic] of the Universal Church.” These are the same words used by the Permanent Council of the German bishops conference which met June 25-26 in Bonn and decided to publish the text despite the earlier Vatican ban. The Permanent Council consists of 27 bishops, each of whom represents one of the 27 German dioceses, and meets 5-6 times a year.

[Let it not be forgotten that the Bergoglio-approved CDF objection to the handout was not for its content per se, but because the pope considered the document 'not mature enough for publication'. Presumably, Marx's supposed argument with the pope made the latter decide that "fine, if it was not an official document, then let it be published!" Which, of course, as we Bergoglio-watchers-with a critical eye-and-ear know, is exactly what he always wanted anyway, and that the CDF's written prohibition was merely pro forma, to make the pope's critics - the more gullible of them, anyway - think that 'Oh, so he is being Catholic, after all!", as with his later statements (seeming orthodox but deeply flawed) about the family and abortion to the Italian forum of family associations.]

Barring any further objection, it is to be assumed that the seven German opposing bishops (among them Cardinal Rainer Woelki of Cologne) who had contacted Rome and asked the Vatican for help in this matter have now given up their resistance.

As the Permanent Council now declares, this text is available as an orientation guide and its implementation is now subject to the responsibility of individual bishops.

It is possible that this move was taken after the pope’s comments last week, saying that the problem with the German handout was that under canon law, intercommunion is under the jurisdiction of the local bishop, not a national conference.

“The code says that the bishop of the particular church,” Francis said on a return flight from Geneva to Rome on 21 June, “and that’s an important word, ‘particular,’ meaning of a diocese, is responsible for this… it’s in his hands.” He went on to insist that the problem with a national body of bishops issuing a guideline like this is that “something worked out in an episcopal conference quickly becomes universal.”

The Permanent Council also declared that in publishing the handout, they felt “duty-bound to move forward courageously.” The May 25 letter from the CDF, signed by Prefect Luis Ladaria, soon to be a cardinal, is also cited as an “interpretative frame” for this handout, although it told the German bishops not to publish their intercommunion handout.

Cardinal Marx apparently was able to convince the pope during the last C9 meeting to approve publication after all – or at least, of the compromise [or trick] in its method of promulgation.

A note published by the German bishops conference today, written and signed by Cardinal Marx and then also signed by Pope Francis, says the the two agreed on 12 June that
1) the CDF letter “gives some recommendations,” but “does not give instructions” to the German bishops.
2) “the Holy Father does not wish that the text appears as a text of the bishops’ conference, because it relates to a dimension of the Universal Church” but shall be an “orientation guide” for bishops who “wish in their diocese to work out criteria in accord with can. 844 CIC.”
3) the Roman dicasteries will continue to work on this topic, as well, looking at the experiences of other bishops’ conferences.
4) Finally, “since the text of the German bishops’ conference shall be an orientation guide for individual bishops, it may also be made public for the use of the bishops.” [Oh, all these pathetic semantics to justify open apostasy!]

The German bishops, in their own statement today, insist that it is about Protestant spouses of Catholics “in individual cases”, and that they wish to preserve the connection between “ecclesial community and Eucharistic community,” and, therefore, they will not, in general, admit Protestant Christians to Holy Communion.

The German bishops made it clear that they are open to further reflection as proposed by the CDF in May. [Yeah right. As if they would ever reconsider the basic premise of the handout that makes a mockery of the Eucharist, and as if anyone could put back their evil genie back into the bottle!] “We offer here our collaboration, both to the Holy Father and to the Roman Curia,” the Permanent Council writes.

The statement of the Pemanent Council insists that the German bishops wish to allow some Protestant spouses of Catholics to receive Holy Communion when they have a “serious spiritual desire.”

It is perhaps Cardinal Walter Kasper most of all who can claim this development as a personal victory. It was he who, during the Luther Year 2017, told the German bishops that is was now up to them to come up with proposals. As the German newspaper Die Sueddeutsche reported at the time, Cardinal Kasper said in April of 2017, during a service at the Lutheran Church of Rome, that he expected “concrete steps forward” during the course of the year. “We may not limit ourselves, in this year of the Reformation, to friendly gestures,” he said, and then added: “But the decision lies now in the hands of the German bishops’ conference.” It appears that his trust in their ability to move this initiative forward has been rewarded – but they were not without assistance from the Holy See.

Bishop Gerhard Feige (Magdeburg) — one of the main authors of this professedly ecumenical document — just restated in an interview that the German bishops with their new handout were inspired by Pope Francis and his words in 2015 to a Protestant spouse who wished to receive Holy Communion. The Pope had then encouraged her to “Speak with the Lord and move forward. I dare not say more.” Bishop Feige now explains that he had, in 2015, personally spoken with the Pope about these comments:

---

During the German bishops’ ad limina visit to Rome [in November of 2015], I directly asked the Pope one week later [after the pope’s comments in the Lutheran Church of Rome] how we are to understand his words. He then repeated, nearly verbatim, that which he had said in the Christuskirche: “Generally, I cannot change anything, but speak with the Lord and move forward"...
With our handout, we only took the Pope at his words.

---

Before today's Bergoglio-approved publication of the apostate handout, Ms Hickson wrote a round-up of recent criticisms of inter-faith communion by some leading German theologians:
https://onepeterfive.com/opposition-mounts-to-intercommunion-canonist-says-pope-has-made-a-complete-mess/

And look whom Bergoglio has just named to head APSA, the Administration for the Patrimony of the Holy See, which is the Vatican's most important financial base! The abjectly servile and more-Bergoglio-than-Bergoglio Mons. Nunzio Galantino, who has heretofore been his eyes-ears-and-altogether-surrogate at the Italian bishops's conference...

Pope Francis calls a ‘Hail Mary’
pass on Vatican financial reform
by John L. Allen Jr.

June 27, 2018

ROME - For some time now, Pope Francis’s ambitious attempt at financial reform of the Vatican has seemed like an American football game in which the pope’s team is down late in the fourth quarter, and backed up against its side of the field.

On Tuesday, Francis did what teams in that situation generally do - he called a “Hail Mary” pass [from University of Notre Fame football lore, so-called because it is a desperate last-chance move to win the game, with Our Lady's help if not by anything else] by naming today a loyal but largely untested ally to take over the Vatican’s main financial center of power. It is, in a real sense, both the most reassuring and also the riskiest move we’ve seen from the pontiff in some time.

The pope tapped Bishop Nunzio Galantino to take over the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA), which controls both the Vatican’s vast and significantly under-valued real estate holdings and also its investment portfolio.

From the outside, it’s often assumed that the big deal in terms of papal finances is the Institute for the Works of Religion, better known as the “Vatican bank.” In reality, that’s a misunderstanding for two reasons.

First, the bulk of the bank’s roughly $8 billion in assets does not belong to the pope. Instead, they’re funds belonging to religious orders, Catholic associations and movements, and other entities in the Church, which the Vatican can’t simply draw upon to cover its operating expenses.

Second, the process of reform of the Vatican bank began under Pope Benedict XVI and by now is largely complete. Individuals who weren’t supposed to have accounts in the first place have been weeded out of the system, and under the watchful eye of the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority, suspicious transactions are carefully monitored.

But insiders have understood for some time that the real action is at APSA, which controls the vast majority of the assets the pope actually has at his disposal, and which has a reputation for insularity and resisting efforts at transparency and accountability.

In recent months, many insiders concluded that Francis had largely abandoned the whole idea of financial reform.
- His much-vaunted new Council for the Economy, intended to set financial policy, has struggled to find its voice;
- the Secretariat for the Economy, intended to implement policy, is leaderless as Australian Cardinal George Pell is back home fighting off charges of “historical” sexual abuse; and
- the allegedly independent Auditor General’s position has been vacant for months now after its one occupant was sent packing under still-murky circumstances.

In a recent interview with Reuters, however, Francis appeared to show new determination. He frankly acknowledged that “there is no transparency” at APSA in terms of the Vatican’s real estate holdings; he said that Italian Cardinal Domenico Calcagno, the previous head of APSA and a figure who has himself been accused of involvement in an embezzlement scheme in his previous diocese, was on his way out; and said, “We have to move ahead on transparency, and that depends on APSA.”

In the wake of that interview, the question remained of what Francis was prepared to do about it. Tuesday brought the answer, as Francis tapped the 69-year-old Galantino to take the reins at APSA.

Widely seen as the pontiff’s closest ally in the Italian bishops’ conference and the most outspoken carrier of his agenda in Italian affairs, Galantino was spotted by Francis while serving as the bishop of the relatively obscure diocese of Cassano all’Jonio.

Francis stunned the Italian clerical establishment in December 2013 when he named Galantino as the secretary of the über-powerful Italian bishops’ conference, known by its acronym CEI. At the time Galantino had only been bishop in Cassano all’Jonio in the southern Italian region of Calabria for two years, a position no one ever saw as a launching pad to prominence.

Earlier in 2013, Francis had asked the president of CEI, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco of Genoa, to poll the bishops about candidates for the secretary’s position. Bagnasco offered a complete list of all the Italian bishops and whom they had flagged. A few men emerged as consensus candidates, while Galantino reportedly had only one vote from almost 500 prelates.

Nevertheless, Francis bypassed the advice he himself had requested and decided Galantino was his man, taking the unusual step of writing to the people of the diocese to “ask permission” to borrow their bishop. Four months later, Francis named Galantino to a full five-year term.

Why did Francis latch on to Galantino? Well, when he was named a bishop in 2011 by Pope Benedict XVI, he asked that whatever money people would have spent buying him gifts for the occasion be used instead to serve the poor.

Galantino opted to live at the diocesan seminary rather than the bishop’s palace in Cassano all’Jonio, he didn’t want either a secretary or a chauffeur, and he asked people to call him “Don Nunzio” rather than “His Excellency.”

So far as anyone knows, Galantino has a spotless personal track record, never having been implicated or ever whispered about in any financial impropriety that might compromise his credibility in his new role. Moreover, his close association with the boss certainly suggests he’ll have the heft to assert his authority.

The great unknown, however, is whether Galantino will have the strength to stand down the forces that are bound to resist real change, because the trash heaps of Vatican history are littered with the carcasses of well-intentioned reformers who turned out to be unable to get the job done.

Blessed Pope Paul VI, for instance, created the Prefecture for Economic Affairs in 1967 in an effort to modernize and rationalize Vatican finances, and yet a series of presidents proved unable even to put together a comprehensive annual financial statement. St. Pope John Paul II tried bringing in a tough-as-nails American cardinal, Edmund Szoka of Detroit, but he too was unable to engineer a real transformation.

One could go on multiplying examples, but the point is clear: Vatican agencies such as APSA have a long history of absorbing waves of putative reform and remaining essentially unchanged, and in the abstract, there’s no particular reason to believe Galantino will succeed where others have failed.

The truth is, Galantino is a largely untested manager of a small diocese, who then moved into a role at the bishops’ conference that required him to articulate the pope’s line but not really implement it in any administrative or managerial sense.

In other words, from the point of view of the task he’s been asked to take on, there’s not much to go on in assessing whether Galantino is up to the job. That, however, is the point of a Hail Mary pass … and, of course, teams keep running the play because every so often, it actually works.

Phil Lawler comments:

APSA appointment is another false step
on Vatican financial accountability
By Phil Lawler

June 27, 2018


John Allen of Crux writes that the appointment of Bishop Nunzio Galantino as new head of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA) is “the most reassuring and also the riskiest move we’ve seen from the pontiff in some time.” I agree with 50% of that assessment. The move is definitely risky. But reassuring? To me, not at all.

APSA, for those who have not been following the Vatican’s halting steps toward financial reform, is the agency responsible for managing the Vatican’s enormous real-estate portfolio. It is also the agency that has given us “Msgr. €500,” the agency that has been implicated in no-bid contracts and sweetheart leases, the agency that has successfully warded off outside auditors. Earlier this week the Pope acknowledged: “We have to move ahead on transparency, and that depends on ANSA.”

Bishop Galantino, Allen accurately observes, has been recognized as “the pontiff’s closest ally in the Italian bishops’ conference.” So Pope Francis will have a trusted friend at the head of the agency that needs reform.

However, Bishop Galantino, who has no background as a financial manager, will be taking charge of an agency that has successfully resisted previous efforts at reform. What is the likelihood that he will produce concrete results, where other experienced and hard-headed managers have failed?

Furthermore, if Bishop Galantino does not produce reform, and complaints about APSA continue, another factor comes into play. Pope Francis has shown a strong tendency to ignore complaints about the prelates who are his special favorites. So there is a distinct possibility that the Holy Father will now be less likely to credit reports about corruption at APSA.

There is a simple first step toward financial transparency: an outside audit. [Some have referred to the APSA as the Vatican's 'central bank'. If that is so, why can it not be audited and monitored periodically by the European Union's Moneyval the same way IOR has been since 2011?]

I haven't the time to post the item just now, but read this
wdtprs.com/blog/2018/06/what-if-the-papal-conclave-took-plac...
and weep at the numbers that show how, come June 29, Bergoglio will have named more cardinal electors than his two predecessors combined, and other moves to 'pre-dispose' the next Conclave towards a Bergoglio-II.

What happened to Pope Francis’s
vision for Latin America?
His 'master plan' for a missionary Church has fallen by the wayside
by Fr Raymond de Souza, SJ

June 28, 2018

The script for the pontificate of Pope Francis was written six years before his election, at the Aparecida plenary assembly of the Episcopal Conference of Latin America (CELAM). In the sixth year of the pontificate however, the set has been transformed, the actors seem miscast, the plot has been altered and the curtain is set to come down early. Has the great continental mission proclaimed at Aparecida been abandoned?

A continental episcopal conference for Latin America – stretching from Mexico to Argentina and including the Caribbean – was established by Pius XII and held its first plenary meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 1955. But it was the second plenary, in Medellín in 1968, that made CELAM a major force. Medellín marked a definite turn toward the “preferential option for the poor” as a hallmark of the Church in Latin America.

The subsequent rise of liberation theology in the 1970s meant that the third plenary conference, in Puebla in 1979, would have to clarify to what degree Marxist categories could be employed in service of the Gospel. The new pope who came to Puebla, John Paul II, knew something about that, and set out to sift the wheat from the chaff.

It was a sign of how important the CELAM plenary – where more than half of the global Catholic population is represented – had become that St John Paul II made it his first foreign trip only three months after his election, keeping the appointment Paul VI had made.

The next assembly, held in Santo Domingo in 1992 to mark the quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, was less consequential. There were complaints about heavy-handed control from Rome, and it was not clear if there was an appetite for another CELAM plenary.

But after a long interval there was a plenary in 2007, under the CELAM presidency of Cardinal Javier Errázuriz, Archbishop of Santiago. Aparecida was at least equal in importance to Medellín, and was described by many as a coming of age for CELAM.

Described in 2012 by George Weigel as the “master plan for the New Evangelisation in Latin America”, the papal biographer reported favourably on his discussions about Aparecida with Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the principal drafter [via his ghostwriter and one-man brain trust at the time, Mons. Victor Fernandez] of the final document.

When less than a year later Bergoglio was elected Pope, Weigel was only one of many observers to interpret his election in relation to Bergoglio’s leadership at Aparecida. “Everyone in the Church, [Aparecida] writes, is baptised to be a ‘missionary disciple’,” wrote Weigel. “Everywhere is mission territory, and everything in the Church must be mission-driven.”

[Weigel, of course, tended to read everything at the time in terms of his book on evangelical Catholicism, seeking to see its fulfillment in Jorge Bergoglio's 'church turning outward'. Who thought then that the church of Bergoglio would turn outward so much that it would almost completely forget the primary mission of the Church of Christ he was elected to lead - namely, "to preach the Gospel to all nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" - in order to become a prime mover in the secular world, becoming a virtual extension of the United Nations, partnering and supporting it in all its ultra-liberal objectives, some of which are blatantly anti-Catholic and anti-Christian. The missionary church Weigel and his fellow early enthusiasts of Bergoglio has been turned into the world's largest NGO more dedicated to secular material goals and only paying lip service to its spiritual, religious and moral mission.]

Indeed, CELAM proposed a “great continental mission” that was the pastoral plan for all of Latin America. When weeks after his election Pope Francis announced his new principal advisory group, the council of cardinals, it included Cardinal Errázuriz and Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, also on the Aparecida drafting committee. It seemed clear that the Aparecida moment had arrived for the Church Universal.

When later that year Pope Francis issued the exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, he confirmed that the entirety of the Church’s activity should directed toward missionary discipleship, calling for a Church that went out of herself, leaving behind the sacristy for the streets, the chancery office for the field hospital. [Like any Catholic with common sense couldn't see through the falsehoods and megalomania that informs that execrable document! Its very title is a travesty - the joy of what gospel is Bergoglio exalting but that of his own, certainly not Christ's!]

Five years later, the great continental mission has stalled on multiple fronts. The most dramatic end of Aparecida’s missionary energy is in Chile, where sexual abuse cases were so disastrously managed in both Chile and Rome [by the two principal figures of Aparecida - Errazuriz and Bergoglio] that it has now metastasised into a catastrophic crisis from which it will take at least a generation to recover. There will be precious little energy left for missionary initiatives as Chile will be preoccupied with investigation, recrimination, litigation, compensation, contrition and reconciliation.

The role of Cardinal Errázuriz brought Pope Francis’s mishandling of Chile into his inner circle. Meanwhile, media reports of an alleged scandal in Cardinal Maradiaga’s diocese has meant that neither of the Latin Americans on the Council of Cardinals has been a force advancing the Holy Father’s pastoral priorities [Well, at least those are two less prelates working to advance Bergoglio's dubious pastoral priorities exemplified by Amoris laetitia and his ultimate support of the German bishops' intercommunion apostasy! When the pope's pastoral priorities have been so consistently to subvert and countermand some of the most essential and venerated elements of Catholic doctrine, then I hope all the world's 5000 bishops will distract themselves from those priorities!]

Yet it is also those pastoral priorities that, counter-intuitively, have distracted the Church from its primary proclamation of the Gospel. [What a paradoxical statement of the obvious! When 'pastoral priorities' distract from the proclamation of the Gospel, then 'the Church' is really not carrying out Christ's mandate! The daily chronicles of this pontificate more than abundantly provide evidence of that utter failure.]

The family synod process in 2014 and 2015, culminating in the publication of Amoris Laetitia in 2016, focused enormous energy inward, as even the Holy Father’s most enthusiastic supporters could not agree on what was being taught. The mission of proclaiming anew the Gospel message for marriage and family life was compromised by doctrinal disputes over ambiguous footnotes and language apparently at odds with the settled teaching, for example, of John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor.

Surprisingly, the pontificate has devoted extraordinary energy precisely to the affairs of the sacristy, as it were: the five-year plus discussion of bureaucratic reform discussed by the Council of Cardinals, the implementation of financial reforms and their reversal, the implementation of sexual abuse reforms and their reversal, the resignation of the new prefect of communications and its partial reversal. The prospect, made possible by reforms by Pope Francis, that a new multi-year round of revised liturgical translations is in the offing is yet another sacristy-intensive initiative. [The obvious logical folly of Bergoglio's 'church going outwards' was that his absurd exclusive focus on 'the peripheries' would inevitably mean forsaking the center and all the faithful who do not happen to be 'peripheral'! Forgetting that any power - man or organization - needs a solid and firm center from which to function, and that it cannot hope to accomplish anything in the peripheries unless 'the center holds'. Would anyone say that Casa Santa Marta 'holds'???]

External factors have also blunted the capacity of the Latin American Church to implement Aparecida. Recent attempts to liberalise abortion laws in both Chile and Argentina have consumed ecclesial energy on issues that Pope Francis would prefer not to be “obsessed” about.

Moreover, the decade since Aparecida has been politically difficult in the CELAM countries. Venezuela is the most cruel reality, with the population starved by its own government, but just this year the bishops in Honduras, Nicaragua and Ecuador have all been seized by the necessity of dealing with political crises. The Mexican bishops, for their part, are attempting to deal with continuing lethal violence against their priests. It is very difficult to engage in missionary work when various depredatory regimes are filling the field hospital with bodies.

It has proved a particular challenge for Pope Francis, reluctant as he is to criticise leftist regimes. [Evil is evil, whether it is committed by those on the right or on the left. He not only chooses not to criticize the regimes in China, Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, to name a few, and denounce the evils they have been perpetrating [as a Catholic pope would) - but he has chosen to lend them the support of his moral authority over and over!]

As he prepares to welcome Bolivia’s Evo Morales – the man who gave Pope Francis the hammer-and-sickle crucifix – this Saturday for the sixth time, the Holy Father must lament that the Church’s credibility regarding “preferential option for the poor” requires it to oppose regimes that claim the same mantle.

Perhaps the clearest evidence though that Aparecida has been abandoned is the 2019 synod for the Amazon region. More than a decade after Aparecida, the great continental mission has failed to provide adequately for the vast mission territory at the heart of its own continent. The synod, in its preparatory phase already laying the groundwork for the ordination of married men as priests, is not aimed at launching a great missionary push into the interior from the surrounding countries, but leaving the Amazon to itself, conceding that the great continental mission is inadequate to the task.

The proposal is breathtaking, namely that the same celibate priesthood which evangelised the entirety of Latin America in the face of immense challenges is today not a viable option. The radical step of ordaining married men is based on the premise that missionaries cannot be found for the task. The Church permanently in mission envisioned at Aparecida has concluded that missionary failure is now permanent.

A Church turned inward [and hasn't Bergoglio denounced that from the start, starting in the pre-Conclave congregations of 2013?], plagued by scandal, on the back foot on life issues, confronted by catastrophic political failure and unable to evangelise its own interior – that is not the galvanising vision of CELAM in 2007. Far from being an Aparecida moment for the entire Church, Aparecida has been abandoned even at home.

['Aparecida' was always a pious illusion which the churches of Latin America were in no position to carry out because in 2007, most of their membership had already been decimated by mass desertion of Catholics for the evangelical sects that by then already dominated the continent in terms of religious fervor and missionary zeal.]

Why and how was a blogpost by Marco Tosatti on May 26 - recounting a Spanish site's 2013 report about a clerical sex abuse cover-up by then Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires - taken offline shortly thereafter? Note the 'PAGINA NON TROVATA' (page not found) resulting from subsequent attempts to access the post. (I have to admit that since I have not been very thorough these days in my quick skims of the sites I try to follow daily, I completely missed the above post and have only become aware of it now that the news has been recycled as an 'exclusive' by World News Daily.)

I suppose I am more surprised that Tosatti has apparently not commented so far on the suppression of the post, and I am curious whether anyone other than the blogsite owner can take a post offline, otherwise one must conclude that Tosatti took it offline himself for some reason, such as that he concluded his source was not reasonably reliable. In any case, the post was captured by another blogsite before it was taken offline, and Atila Sinke Guimarães, editor of the website Tradition-in-Action, took it upon himself to call attention to the post and to translate it to English.

BERGOGLIO ENTANGLED IN ANOTHER COVER-UP
by Atila Sinka Guimaraes
Editor



On May 26, 2018, journalist Marco Tosatti posted an article on his website Stilum Curiae reporting the involvement of Pope Francis in a cover-up for a pedophile priest in Buenos Aires when he was Archbishop of that city. The article refreshed some little-known old data reported by the Spanish blog Publico. Soon after, however, Tosatti's article was removed from that site, probably due to pressure from the Vatican.

Nonetheless, his full article had been screen-captured and posted by another Italian website – Acta Apostolicae Sedis. The Brazilian blog Fratres in Unum made the piece accessible in Portuguese, where I found it, with its various Spanish and Italian links. I thank the blog for this important public service. I am translating the data into English and passing the information on to my readers.

---

In May 2013, the Appeals Tribunal of Quilmes, Buenos Aires, Argentina, confirmed a sentence by the City Court condemning the Diocese to pay US $27,000 (115,600 pesetas) to a victim of pedophilia to compensate for his psychological suffering and the moral damage he suffered.

Soon after, the Spanish blog Publico highlighted the case which involved a then 15-year-old Argentinian – Gabriel Ferrini – who had been abused by Fr. Ruben Pardo in 2002. Immediately after being sexually violated, the youth reported the crime to his mother, Beatriz. She went to the Bishop of Quilmes, Luis Teodorico Stöckler.

The Diocese of Quilmes is subordinate to the Province of Buenos Aires whose Archbishop at that time was none other than Jorge Bergoglio. Bishop Stöckler called the priest to confront him with the accusation. Pardo acknowledged the abuse before the Bishop 96 hours after the abuse took place.

But since the Bishop delayed in punishing the priest, Beatriz Varela, the boy's mother, tried to communicate with Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio. However, he refused to receive her and ordered his bodyguards to prevent her from entering his residence. At the same time the Archbishop of Buenos Aires was hosting the pedophile priest in a comfortable residence under his jurisdiction.

The abuse took place on August 15, 2002. Beatriz Varela was a worker in a diocesan school of Quilmes. She had asked the vicar of the local parish, Fr. Ruben Pardo, to catechize her two sons. The priest went to her house and, after giving some classes there, told Beatriz that he would continue the instruction in the church, providing that Gabriel spend the night there. He also told the mother that in this way the youth could serve his early morning Mass.

With his mother’s consent, the youth went to the rectory for the class. That evening, Pardo invited Gabriel to sleep with him in his bed. The youth first interpreted the gesture as a paternal invitation, until the moment when the priest actually violated him sexually. Gabriel reported: “I knew he was violating me but I couldn’t think of how to avoid it, because I was in shock and very afraid.”

When the priest ended the abuse and fell asleep, Gabriel slipped out and ran back to his house and reported what had happened to his mother. Beatriz went straight to Bishop Luis Stöcker. She stated: “Initially, he showed consternation, but, as the time went by, he did not take any action.” Instead, she continued, the Bishop “tried to minimize the case, saying that I had to be merciful with persons who chose celibacy as a vocation because they have moments of weakness.”

Beatriz told the Bishop that she wanted “truth, justice and the guarantee that such a thing would not happen to anyone else.” The Bishop then threatened to cut her employment. “I worked for a school in the Diocese,” she said, explaining her difficult situation.

Next, Beatriz had recourse to the Church Tribunal, whose president “refused to accept the denunciation.” Fifteen days later, she was interviewed by four priests “who submitted me to a humiliating interrogation with lascivious and tendentious questions, as if I were the one who had induced the abuse, when they knew for sure that the abuser had admitted the fact 96 hours after the episode before the Bishop, who reprimanded him.”

The mother of the victim also went to the Archdiocese, to the residence of Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio. He refused to receive her and sent his security guards to expel her from the property. Soon afterwards, she learned that Fr. Ruben Pardo was a guest at the Vicar’s House in the Flores neighborhood, a residence directly dependent on the Archbishop of Buenos Aires. She observed: “Bergoglio must have known this because no one can be installed in the Vicar’s House without the authorization of the Archbishop.”

She boldly accused Pope Francis: “This is Bergoglio’s way: He speaks against cases of pedophilia in the Church, but uses hypocrisy, lies and complicity to cover them... In the Church everyone knows and everyone keeps silent; thus, all are accomplices.”

She also mentioned other cases she knew about: “There were priests who were transferred to the Archdiocese of Cordoba after I made the denunciation. Last Friday a desolate mother called me because her 4-year-old daughter had been violated by those two priests, who still work in the school. … Other children are still at risk.” The mother of the abused girl did not want to go to press, but she did start a lawsuit against the priests.

Regarding the final verdict of the Appeals Tribunal and the Court of Quilmes, Varela nonetheless has other bitter memories: “When the priest who abused my son died [of AIDS in 2005], the process disappeared for two years. When the lawsuit was at risk of expiring [because of the statute of limitations], my son tried to commit suicide. He had to be interned for one-and-a-half months in a psychiatric clinic. No amount of money can compensate for what we have suffered.”

Ferrini himself said about the verdict: “The verdict established a judicial precedent and can help other victims so that it will not be so difficult for them to find a solution. It is necessary to take action because many people are afraid or too ashamed to denounce and quarrel with someone in clerical garb.”

---

So this was the case that Tosatti highlighted in the blogpost that was then suppressed.

This case resurfaced at the very moment when Bergoglio was being besieged by public indignation over his nomination of and cover-up for Bishop Barros in the Diocese of Osorno, Chile. So, following his old pattern of action, Bergoglio apparently sent his “security guards” to threaten the Italian journalist who was trying to make these data public.

Years ago in Buenos Aires he used the same strong arm system against Beatriz Varela; now in Rome he seems to be using an identical procedure with Marco Tosatti. [This is all conjecture, of course. One hopes Tosatti himself will shed light on how and why his post was suppressed.] Let me help to expose this plot, if it exists. I do not like “security guards” used for this purpose. They remind me of the methods of All Capone.

Further, I believe it is time for us Catholics to become aware of what the “honest, pure, merciful and humble” procedures of our Holy Father really are.

For the record, the story touted by WND as its 'exclusive' basically translates Tosatti's blogpost and adds nothing new to it.
http://www.wnd.com
/2018/07/mom-accuses-pope-of-cover-up-of-sons-sex-abuse/#sThiR1FwHizOm4cA.99

If the report were even partially untrue, then the Vatican simply ought to have issued a statement to say so!.

Editor’s note: This article originally ran at Catholic Family News. It is edited and published here with the author’s permission.

I thought it was serendipitous to come across this fresh article the day after I posted the 'suppressed' report about Bergoglio's alleged cover-up of a Buenos Aires priest for his sexual abuse of a teenager back in 2002. But better than serendipitous, it is truly Providential.

Surely one of Benedict XVI's most memorable and significant inflight news conferences was the one he gave enroute to Portugal for his apostolic voyage there, that included the best attended rosary vigil and Mass yet held in the Shrine to Our Lady of Fatima. He was just emerging from the terrible dark onus that the media had sought to crush him with since 2009 - a perverse all-out effort to make him the scapegoat and principal culprit for the scourge of sexual abuses inflicted by priests on minors and children, after fresh revelations in 2009 of decades-old and decades-long crimes principally in Ireland, Germany, and Belgium.

As if he had not, since 2002 when tasked with it by John Paul II, almost singlehandedly taken on the task of exposing that scourge and seeking to eliminate it once and for all. No, as far as media reporting went in those hellish months of 2009-2010, Joseph Ratzinger was the cause and probably a direct or indirect participant himself if not in sexual crimes than in their cover-up.

To no avail was his historic letter to the Catholics of Ireland in March 2010 that looked unflinchingly at the sex-crime blight on St. Patrick's land and the pitiful state of the Irish Church that allowed that blight to flourish. AP, the New York Times and the Der Spiegel group continued their months-long joint enterprise to uncover even one single instance that might incriminate Joseph Ratzinger in the sex abuse crisis.

I look now at the trip to Portugal and the subsequent trip the United Kingdom that followed it - whereby the Anglophone media that had tried its best to poison the atmosphere for months before Benedict XVI even arrived had no choice but to do a sudden turnaround, when the pope and his Catholic flock in England proved the quiet but luminous power of the Catholic faith in day after wondrous day of that five-day visit - as the twin events that caused the media titans triumvirate to quietly fold up their tent and give up their search for what would always be unfindable, the telltale clay feet by which they had hoped to force Benedict XVI to resign in shame.

So I am very grateful to Matt Gaspers for this providential recounting of what Benedict XVI said about the Third Secret on his way to Fatima in 2010. A tour de force that I cannot imagine any other contemporary pope would have been capable of expressing in so few words.

Last week Tuesday, June 26, marked the eighteenth anniversary of the release of The Message of Fatima, a booklet published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in which the Vatican claims to have revealed the entire Third Secret of Fatima – that is, the third part of the secret entrusted to the three shepherd children by Our Lady on July 13, 1917.

The CDF booklet provides Sister Lucia’s description of a mysterious vision (previously unpublished) concerning “a Bishop dressed in White” who passes “through a big city half in ruins” and is eventually “killed by a group of soldiers” atop “a steep mountain” near “a big Cross,” followed by “the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions” who were following the Holy Father and are killed in the same manner. What is missing is the continuation of Our Lady’s words (recorded by Lucia in her Fourth Memoir): “In Portugal the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved etc.” – a key phrase of the Blessed Virgin consigned to the status of a footnote at the back of the booklet.

I gave a Fatima-themed talk at a local parish on June 26. Toward the beginning, I chose to emphasize the following words of Pope Benedict XVI during his May 13, 2010 homily at Fatima: “We would be mistaken [lit. ‘One would be deceiving himself’, in the original Italian] to think that Fatima’s prophetic mission is complete.”

Although the theme of my talk was the Five First Saturdays (based on a conference talk I gave last May), I took the opportunity to stress that Fatima – including its “prophetic mission” – is not only relevant, but vital for us here and now, contrary to what certain men in the Church would have us believe. We need look no farther for the vital relevance of Fatima than the recent headlines announcing more despicable crimes on the part of Catholic clergy.

Roughly a week before my parish talk, news broke that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, archbishop emeritus of Washington, D.C. (retired since mid-2006), has been forbidden by the Holy See to exercise public ministry due to a “credible and substantiated” allegation of sexual abuse. Both McCarrick and Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the current D.C. archbishop, released statements on the incident, as did Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, who was tasked with overseeing the investigation (the incident of abuse occurred some 45 years ago, when then-Father McCarrick was a priest of the Archdiocese of New York).

For the record, this “credible and substantiated” case is not the only incident in Cardinal McCarrick’s past (far from it, OnePeterFive demonstrated, quoting the formerly Catholic journalist Rod Dreher at length). Later in the day on June 20 (date of the McCarrick announcement), other prelates admitted to knowing about other allegations of “sexual behavior with adults” involving the now disgraced cardinal, two of which resulted in “settlements.”

This is the same Cardinal McCarrick, by the way, who stated in 2007 that he would not feel “comfortable” denying Holy Communion to openly pro-abortion politicians, despite being clearly admonished otherwise in 2004 by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then-prefect of the CDF and the future Pope Benedict XVI.

It is also the same Cardinal McCarrick who proudly admitted to having “talked up” (i.e., lobbied for) Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio among his fellow cardinals prior to the 2013 Conclave that elected Bergoglio as Pope Francis.

Just a week after the McCarrick announcement, LifeSiteNews reported that “[a] priest and diplomat who served at the Vatican’s embassy in Washington, D.C.” – note the location (McCarrick’s turf) – “has been convicted of possession and distribution of child pornography, according to the Holy See.”

The report goes on to explain, “The Vatican City State tribunal declared [Msgr. Carlo Alberto] Capella specifically guilty of ‘publishing, transmitting, offering, and holding’ child pornography in the form of cartoons, photos, and videos, which he had downloaded on his phone,” while also observing that “The conviction of Capella follows several high-visibility scandals that have troubled Pope Francis and the Vatican in recent months” – most especially, the case of Bishop Juan Barros, a Chilean prelate appointed by none other than Pope Francis.

Do you recall what Benedict XVI stated back in 2010? “One would be deceiving himself to think that Fatima’s prophetic mission is complete.” He uttered those words on May 13. Two days prior, while en route to Fatima, he uttered even more explosive words in response to an equally controversial question, one directly related to clergy sexual abuse.

On May 11, 2010, during the flight to Portugal, Benedict fielded a small number of pre-selected questions from the media that were presented to him by Fr. Federico Lombardi, S.J., then-director of the Holy See Press Office. The third and final series of questions reads as follows (emphasis added):

---

Your Holiness, what meaning do the Fatima apparitions have for us today? In June 2000, when you presented the text of the third secret in the Vatican Press Office, a number of us and our former colleagues were present. You were asked if the message could be extended, beyond the attack on John Paul II, to other sufferings on the part of the Popes. Is it possible, to your mind, to include in that vision the sufferings of the Church today for the sins involving the sexual abuse of minors?

Here, in part, was Benedict’s explosive answer:
'In 2000, in my presentation, I said that an apparition – a supernatural impulse which does not come purely from a person’s imagination but really from the Virgin Mary, from the supernatural – that such an impulse enters into a subject and is expressed according to the capacities of that subject. … Consequently, I would say that, here too, beyond this great vision of the suffering of the Pope, which we can in the first place refer to Pope John Paul II, an indication is given of realities involving the future of the Church, which are gradually taking shape and becoming evident. So it is true that, in addition to moment indicated in the vision, there is mention of, there is seen, the need for a passion [=suffering] of the Church, which naturally is reflected in the person of the Pope, yet the Pope stands for the Church and thus it is sufferings of the Church that are announced.

The Lord told us that the Church would constantly be suffering, in different ways, until the end of the world. … As for the new things which we can find in this message today, there is also the fact that attacks on the Pope and the Church come not only from without, but the sufferings of the Church come precisely from within the Church, from the sin existing within the Church. This too is something that we have always known, but today we are seeing it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church comes not from her enemies without, but arises from sin within the Church, and that the Church thus has a deep need to relearn penance, to accept purification, to learn forgiveness on the one hand, but also the need for justice. Forgiveness does not replace justice."

---

Although he did not give a simple “yes” in response, Benedict implied an affirmative answer to the question concerning “the sufferings of the Church today for the sins involving the sexual abuse of minors”.

By emphasizing that the Third Secret concerns “the future of the Church,” and, more specifically, “a passion of the Church” resulting “from sin within the Church” that is manifesting itself “today … in a really terrifying way,” Benedict unmistakably affirmed that the Third Secret deals with much more than a failed assassination attempt. (The idea that anyone familiar with the facts and in his right mind could buy such an absurd explanation is both insulting and comical.)

Yet Benedict’s lengthy answer in 2010 raises another question: where in Sister Lucia’s description of the vision do we see anything about “sin within the Church”? Simply put, there is no indication of it whatsoever, which obviously means, in the words of Mother Angelica, that “we didn’t get the whole thing.”[1]

The Third Secret speaks of apostasy
Thankfully, due to the testimony of several key witnesses and scholars – and the efforts of men like Fr. Nicholas Gruner and John Vennari (may they rest in peace), who worked tirelessly to spread this crucial testimony – we know the substance of Our Lady’s still hidden words, which can be summarized by a single word: apostasy. Here is a brief sampling of the testimony to that effect, most of which can be found in Volume 3 of The Whole Truth about Fatima by Frère Michel de la Sainte Trinité [2]:

---

“I cannot say anything of what I learned at Fatima concerning the third Secret, but I can say that it has two parts: one concerns the Pope. The other, logically – although I must say nothing – would have to be the continuation of the words: In Portugal, the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved.” [3] – Joseph Schweigel, S.J., d. 1964 (interrogated Sister Lucia about the Third Secret on behalf of Pope Pius XII on Sept. 2, 1952)[4]

“In the period preceding the great triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, terrible things are to happen. These form the content of the third part of the Secret. What are they?

If ‘in Portugal the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved,’ … it can be clearly deduced from this that in other parts of the Church these dogmas are going to become obscure or even lost altogether.Thus it is quite possible that in this intermediate period which is in question (after 1960 and before the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary), the text makes concrete references to the crisis of the Faith of the Church and to the negligence of the pastors themselves.” [5] – Fr. Joaquin Alonso, C.M.F., d. 1981 [Cleratian priest and official Fatima archivist for over sixteen years; had unparalleled access to Sister Lucia]

“The Secret of Fatima speaks neither of atomic bombs, nor nuclear warheads, nor Pershing missiles, nor SS-20’s. Its content concerns only our faith. To identify the Secret with catastrophic announcements or with a nuclear holocaust is to deform the meaning of the message. The loss of faith of a continent is worse than the annihilation of a nation; and it is true that faith is continually diminishing in Europe.” [6] – Bishop Alberto Cosme do Amaral, d. 2005 [former bishop of Fatima-Leiria], remarks made in Vienna, Austria on Sept. 10, 1984]

“It [the Third Secret] has nothing to do with Gorbachev. The Blessed Virgin was alerting us against apostasy in the Church.” – Cardinal Silvio Oddi, d. 2001 [Vatican diplomat and personal friend of Pope John XXIII, from whom he knew certain details concerning the Third Secret] [7]

“In the Third Secret it is foretold, among other things, that the great apostasy in the Church will begin at the top.” – Cardinal Mario Luigi Ciappi, O.P., d. 1996 [personal theologian to Popes John XXIII and John Paul II) [8]

---

Perhaps the most compelling testimony of all is that of Sister Lucia herself, who related the following to Fr. Augustine Fuentes during a Dec. 26, 1957 interview:

---

Father, the devil is in the mood for engaging in a decisive battle against the Blessed Virgin. And the devil knows what it is that offends God the most, and which in a short space of time will gain for him the greatest number of souls.Thus the devil does everything to overcome souls consecrated to God, because in this way the devil will succeed in leaving the souls of the faithful abandoned by their leaders, thereby the more easily will he seize them.

That which afflicts the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Heart of Jesus is the fall of religious and priestly souls. The devil knows that religious and priests who fall away from their beautiful vocation drag numerous souls to hell. … The devil wishes to take possession of consecrated souls. He tries to corrupt them in order to lull to sleep the souls of laypeople and thereby lead them to final impenitence. He employs all tricks, even going so far as to suggest the delay of entrance into religious life. Resulting from this is the sterility of the interior life, and among the laypeople, coldness (lack of enthusiasm) regarding the subject of renouncing pleasures and the total dedication of themselves to God. …

Hence from now on we must choose sides. Either we are for God or we are for the devil. There is no other possibility.” [9]

---

Apostasy and moral corruption
You might be asking: What does apostasy (loss of faith) have to do with clergy sexual abuse? More than we might think, precisely because purity of faith and purity of heart (and, ultimately, of conduct) are profoundly interrelated. St. Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354-430) touches upon this truth at the end of his treatise On Faith and the Creed (Ch. 10, 25), where he explains:

---

This is the faith which in few words is given in the Creed to Christian novices, to be held by them. And these few words are known to the faithful, to the end that in believing they may be made subject to God; that being made subject, they may rightly live; that in rightly living, they may make the heart pure; that with the heart made pure, they may understand that which they believe. [10]

---

If our minds are not subject to God through “obedience to the faith” (Rom. 1:5; cf. 16:26), then our wills inevitably stray from following the dictates of His law. And vice versa: if we choose to commit grave sins – especially sins of the flesh – and thus form a deep-seated habit of sin, our interest in the truths of Faith will eventually be snuffed out, just as “the end of the commandment” – that is, the result of keeping God’s law – “is charity from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and an unfeigned faith” (1 Tim. 1:5). By choosing to sin, we become “lovers of pleasure more than of God: Having an appearance indeed of godliness but denying the power thereof” (2 Tim. 3:4-5) – namely, the power of grace to change sinful behavior.

Does this not fittingly describe men like Cardinal McCarrick, those who have lived for decades with “an appearance of godliness” that was, in fact, a veneer covering a disgusting habit of unnatural vice?

“The Secret, it is terrible!”
Let us recall once more the words of Benedict XVI:

---

… that the greatest persecution of the Church comes not from her enemies without, but arises from sin within the Church, and that the Church thus has a deep need to relearn penance, to accept purification, to learn forgiveness on the one hand, but also the need for justice. Forgiveness does not replace justice.

---

[Did you ever bother to listen to Benedict XVI when he was pope, 'Santo Padre' Bergoglio???? In a few words, he demolishes your whole idea of 'mercy' devoid of truth and of justice!]

“Be not deceived,” St. Paul warns us, “God is not mocked” (Gal. 6:7). Likewise, “Revenge is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord” (Rom. 12:19; cf. Deut. 32:35).

The abominable crimes of men like Cardinal McCarrick – sins that are overwhelmingly homosexual in nature and cry to Heaven for vengeance – will not go unpunished. The frightening reality is that the chastisement for such sins impacts the entire Mystical Body of Christ and the world at large.

With this in mind, let us reflect on one final piece of evidence concerning the Third Secret and its contents. It is found in a book written by Frère François de Marie des Anges, a confrère of Frère Michel, and relates to Cardinal Albino Luciani, who reigned for a mere 33 days as Pope John Paul I (Aug. 26-Sept. 28, 1978):

---

In 1977, to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima, Cardinal Albino Luciani led a group of about fifty Italians from Venice to the Cova da Iria, among whom there were about a dozen priests. They went to the Carmel of Coimbra on July 11. The Patriarch of Venice, the future Pope John Paul I, celebrated Mass in the Convent Chapel.

Then, on Sister Lucy’s request, he conversed with her for almost two hours. At the end of that interview, ‘the Cardinal appeared very pale, to the extent of leaving an impression on those individuals who were present.’

The photographs taken of him a few months later, in the beginning of the year 1978, when he preached on Lent in his native land, show him again ‘with an expression which was not habitual to him, extremely serious.’

During that sojourn, his brother and sister-in-law, Edoardo and Antonietta Luciani, perceived that the Cardinal was strangely absorbed, pensive, and inscrutable. ‘One evening,’ relates Regina Kummer in her biography of John Paul I, ‘during dinner, Antonietta suddenly noticed his extreme and anguished pallor. He excused himself and without giving further explanations, he took his breviary and withdrew into his bedroom. The same thing happened the next evening. As a good hostess, she asked him if the food was the cause of his discomfort.

The Cardinal answered them: I was just thinking of what Sister Lucy told me at Coimbra... The Secret, it’s terrible.’” [11]

---

NOTES:
[1] Quoted by Christopher A. Ferrara in his book, The Secret Still Hidden (Pound Ridge: Good Counsel Publications, 2008), p. 68. In the Aug-Sept. 2011 issue of Inside the Vatican magazine, Dr. Robert Moynihan (founder and editor-in-chief of ITV) revealed that Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the apostolic nuncio to the United States who had recently passed away, personally recommended The Secret Still Hidden to Moynihan.
[2] Last May, during his Rome Life Forum speech, Cardinal Raymond Burke praised Frère Michel’s work as a “monumental study of the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima” and quoted from Volume 3 as follows: “In short, the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary undoubtedly refers much more to the third Secret than even the second. For the recovery of peace will be a gift from Heaven, but it is not, properly speaking, the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Her victory is of another order, supernatural, and then temporal by addition. It will first be the victory of the Faith, which will put an end to the time of apostasy, and the great shortcomings of the Church’s pastors.”
[3] Quoted by Frère Michel de la Sainte Trinité in The Whole Truth About Fatima, Volume III: The Third Secret (1942-1960), trans. John Collorafi (Buffalo: Immaculate Heart Publications, 1990), p. 710.
[4] Ibid., see pp. 337-338.
[5] Ibid., p. 687.
[6] Ibid., p. 677-678.
[7] See Maike Hickson, “Cardinal Oddi on Fatima’s Third Secret, the Second Vatican Council, and Apostasy,” OnePeterFive, Nov. 28, 2017.
[8] See “Alice Von Hildebrand Sheds New Light on Fatima,” OnePeterFive, May 12, 2016.
[9] See The Whole Truth About Fatima, Vol. III: The Third Secret, pp. 505, 507.
[10] Philip Schaff (Ed.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 3 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., fifth printing – January 2012), p. 333.
[11] Frère François de Marie des Anges, Fatima: Intimate Joy, World Event, Book IV Fatima: Tragedy and Triumph (Buffalo: Immaculate Heart Publications, 1994), pp. 143-144. Concerning the origins and purpose of this work, the author himself explains in his Preface: “When Brother Michael [AKA Frère Michel] left our community [the Little Brother of the Sacred Heart] in 1989, in order to consecrate himself to the contemplative life in Chartreuse [as a Carthusian monk], he had not yet drafted the fourth volume [of The Whole Truth About Fatima] announced as ‘In the End My Immaculate Heart will Triumph.’ Some months later our Father Superior [Abbé Georges de Nantes] asked me to pursue Brother Michael’s studies on Fatima, in preparing a summary of the three volumes already in print, and of the fourth volume which is yet to appear. … The last part of this work [Book IV of Fatima: Intimate Joy, World Event], abridged from the fourth volume [of The Whole Truth About Fatima] deals primarily with the period 1960-1991. Thus this book will show convincingly the actuality of the prophetical warnings contained in the great Secret of Fatima, as also the worldwide importance of the message of Our Lady in these last years of the 20th century” (pp. viii-ix).

I would contradict Magister on his title for this post: Bergoglio is not at all inscrutable - on the contrary, he is very scrutable, i.e., he will do or say anything to keep his critics 'guessing'. Though any serious critic of this pope would long ago have stopped 'guessing' about him: He is the secular ultraliberal spirit of Vatican II in frightening flesh and blood, so regardless of how many twirls and turns he makes like a weathercock responding to the wind, you cannot doubt what his bedrock position is (if there is anything that can be said to be a bedrock for this most mutable and adaptable slave of the Zeitgeist).

What a joke he makes of the fact that Peter - and his Successors - are meant to be the Rock on which the Church of Christ is built. Just as well that this particularly unworthy and most unsuitable Successor of Peter almost from Day 1 of his pontificate chose deliberately to build his own church on his own shifting sands, the church he touts as his 'improved' version of the one true Church of Christ, the very Lord whose Gospel he has set about corrupting by amending, editing and providing alien exegeses of the Word of God any chance he gets.

And among the many things he chooses to ignore from the Lord's 'Sermon on the Mount' - which in Bergoglio's 'gospel', seems to amount only to the first and incomplete sentence of the Beatitudes, "Blessed are the poor..." - is that line, "Let your 'Yes' mean 'Yes,' and your 'No' mean 'No.' Anything more is from the evil one." (Mt 5,35). [Which providentially links back to Sister Lucia's words in the preceding post on Satan's modus operandi, which we have seen brilliantly at work on this pope in the past five years!] Matthew 5,35 should be the epitaph for Magister's post, an admonition that Bergoglio blithely ignores!]

Francis the Inscrutable-
Who brakes only to speed up

July 1, 2018

This year there are at least three U-turns that Francis has made on crucial questions, but always without making it clear if these are definitive and sincere, seeing what he has said and done before and after the apparent reversals. [Aww, stop already about expecting Bergoglio to make anything 'clear' other than his now fullblown anti-Catholicism!]

The first U-turn has to do with the ordination of women to the priesthood. Here, properly speaking, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has not contradicted himself, because every time he has been asked since becoming pope he has always said he is against it personally, for example after his voyage to Sweden, where he had however embraced a female Lutheran bishop.

But at the same time he has long allowed the favorable opinions to run free, especially figures on friendly terms with him, like Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna. [And still, I believe, disgracefully president of the Munich-based Ratzinger Schuelerkreis Foundation.]

Last May 29, nonetheless, there appeared in L'Osservatore Romano a note from the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Spanish Jesuit Luis Ladaria, who reconfirmed that the NO to women priests is “definitive” and “infallible.”

Ladaria enjoys the esteem of Francis, who a few days ago also made him a cardinal. It must be said, however, that the supporters of women priests have not given up, because meanwhile, Francis has set up a commission to study the ordination of women not to the priesthood but to the diaconate, which is however still a sacrament and is the first of the three steps in Holy Orders that culminate in ordination as bishop.

To judge by the preparatory document of the synod for the Amazon, scheduled for 2019, it is projected that this same region will see the ordination of the first women deacons. And then who knows.

The second U-turn has to do with allowing communion to Protestant spouses who are married to Catholics. When asked about this very question three years ago, while he was visiting the Lutheran church in Rome, Pope Francis leaned heavily toward the favorable side. And in Germany, where mixed couples are numerous, this new practice has spread to such an extent that last February a majority of the German bishops approved a document that justifies it.

Seven bishops including one cardinal, however, appealed to Rome. The pope called them in for consultation, took some time, but then handed the issue back to Cardinal Ladaria, who with a letter dated May 25 written “with the explicit approval of the pope,” blocked both the document and the practice that had entered widely into use, putting everything off until a future reflection “at the level of the universal Church” and of an overall ecumenical accord, meaning a remote and improbable future, since the Orthodox Churches are unshakably against so-called “intercommunion.”

Except that a few days ago, returning from his voyage to Protestant Geneva, Francis once again reopened the question, praising the document made null and void by Ladaria, and asserting that “there has been no braking” on the matter of inter-communion.

The third and most striking U-turn had to do with the bishops of Chile - one in particular, Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid - complicit in the sexual abuses decades ago by his mentor, Fernando Karadima, whow as subsequently tried for his crimes and convicted by the CDF in 2011.

Until a few months ago, Francis had been saying that he was absolutely sure of the innocence of these bishops, and defended them with drawn sword against those who were “calumniating” them.

But then the 2400 pages of the canonical investigation that he finally ordered led him to confess that he had been spectacularly mistaken “through the lack of reliable and balanced information.” Whose fault was that?

Most of the suspicion has fallen on Cardinal Francisco J. Errázuriz, a longtime friend of Bergooglio. But at the origin of the deception is above all a Jesuit, Germán Arana, who shuttles between Rome, Spain, and Chile, and continues to belong, even after the blunder, to the most intimate circle of the pope’s confidants.

It is in this circle of his allies that Francis’s weak spot is to be found. And seeing what has gone before, it appears altogether unlikely that in the future he will make a real U-turn precisely here, with a drastic housecleaning. [Casa Santa Marta - does the name continue to merit the patronage and protection of that most humble saint? - has apparently turned into a den of rogues led by the biggest rogue of all, Bergoglio, who puts his trust in fellow rogues to do his bidding without question. No housecleaning is possible if the master himself is incapable of allowing anyone but rogues into his magic circle!]

A propos, I must confess to something that always gives me pause at Sunday Mass - the first prayer in the Canon of the Mass, known familiarly by its first two words, "Te igitur"; the prayer translates in English as:

---

Therefore, most merciful Father, we humbly beg of Thee and entreat Thee through Jesus Christ Thy Son, Our Lord. Hold acceptable and bless + these gifts, these + offerings, these + holy and unspotted oblations which, in the first place, we offer Thee for Thy Holy Catholic Church. Grant her peace and protection, unity and guidance throughout the world, together with Thy servant (name), our Pope, and (name), our Bishop; and all Orthodox believers who cherish the Catholic and Apostolic Faith.

---

First, I must confess that when I say the prayer, I say 'all the priests of the world' instead of just one particular priest; I add to the words 'our Pope", "our Emeritus Pope"; and instead of just "our Bishop" (Cardinal Dolan, in my case), I say "all the bishops of the world". Fine so far - until I get to the final clause "and all orthodox believers who cherish the Catholic and Apostolic faith" - it gags me to realize that many among the priests and bishops and most of all, the pope, whom I am praying for, are far from being "orthodox believers who cherish the Catholic and Apostolic faith" and far from providing 'unity and guidance' to the Church.

I've already remarked once on the brief prayer said during the incensing of the altar and the offertory gifts:

---

Let my prayer, O Lord, be directed as incense in Thy sight: the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice. Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth, and a door round about my lips. May my heart not incline to evil words, to make excuses for sins.

---

I do not know if there is a similar prayer in the Novus Ordo equivalent of a High Mass when there is some incensing done, but I would not be surprised if there is none, because surely everytime Bergoglio as pope finds he has to say such a prayer, he would surely realize it is a prayer that should accompany him throughout his waking hours!

BTW, a great resource for understanding the why, wherefore, and whence of the prayers and ceremonies said at Holy Mass (the traditional Mass, in this case, but it will also illumine the parts of the Novus Ordo that have not been too Protestantized or dumbed down) may be found online here
sanctamissa.org/en/spirituality/explanation-of-the-prayers-and-ceremonies-guera...
It is an English translation of lectures given by the legendary 19th century Abbot of the great Benedictine Abbey he founded at Solesmes, Dom Prosper Gueranger (1805-1875), liturgist par excellence, a Venerable of the Church as his cause for canonization is underway. He founded the French Benedictine Congregation (now the Solesmes Congregation), which re-established monastic life in France after it had been wiped out by the French Revolution. He wrote The Liturgical Year, which covers every day of the Catholic Church's Liturgical cycle in 15 volumes. He was well regarded by Pope Pius IX, and was a proponent of the dogmas of papal infallibility and the Immaculate Conception.]

Strange I cannot find a version in Italian!

Again, how providential that my random googling just now should end up with finding this prayer from my 'favorite' contemporary saint. In the 1990s, the years leading to his beatification in 1999 and canonization in 2002, no Catholic visiting Italy could have been impervious to the Padre Pio phenomenon, when it seemed every cab driver in Rome and every parish church venerated him, not just for his holiness even while alive and his miracles and stigmata, but also because his entire life was phenomenally exceptional for someone who lived in our day. I was 'hooked', and he has become one of the most comforting 'presences' surrounding me at all times.

Padre Pio prayed this prayer
after receiving Holy Communion
by Philip Kosloski
ALETEIA.org
July 1, 2018

Padre Pio loved the celebration of Mass and the reception of Holy Communion. He once said, “It would be easier for the world to exist without the sun than without the Holy Mass.”

He fully believed that Jesus was truly present, body, blood, soul and divinity during the celebration of Mass. This great gift inflamed in his own heart a deep and abiding love of God. He said, “At times during the Mass I am consumed by the fire of Divine Love. My face seems to burn.”

Below is a profound prayer that Padre Pio composed and prayed after receiving Holy Communion. It relates his firm belief in Jesus’s presence in the Holy Eucharist and his desire for Jesus to remain forever in his heart.

---

Stay with me, Lord, because I am weak and I need Your strength, that I may not fall so often.

Stay with me, Lord, for You are my life, and without You, I am without meaning and hope.

Stay with me, Lord, for You are my light, and without You, I am in darkness.

Stay with me, Lord, to show me Your will.

Stay with me, Lord, so that I can hear Your voice and follow you.

Stay with me, Lord, for I desire to love You ever more, and to be always in Your company.

Stay with me, Lord, if You wish me to be always faithful to You.

Stay with me, Lord, for as poor as my soul is, I wish it to be a place of consolation for You, a dwelling of Your love.

Stay with me, Jesus, for it is getting late; the days are coming to a close and life is passing. Death, judgement and eternity are drawing near. It is necessary to renew my strength, so that I will not stop along the way, for that I need You. It is getting late and death approaches. I fear the darkness, the temptations, the dryness, the cross, the sorrows. O how I need you, my Jesus, in this night of exile!

Stay with me, Jesus, because in the darkness of life, with all its dangers, I need You.

Help me to recognize You as Your disciples did at the Breaking of the Bread, so that the Eucharist Communion be the light which disperses darkness, the power which sustains me, the unique joy of my heart.

Stay with me, Lord, because at the hour of my death I want to be one with You, and if not by Communion, at least by Your grace and love.

Stay with me, Jesus, I do not ask for divine consolations because I do not deserve them, but I only ask for the gift of Your Presence. Oh yes! I ask this of You.

Stay with me, Lord, for I seek You alone, Your Love, Your Grace, Your Will, Your Heart, Your Spirit, because I love You and I ask for no other reward but to love You more and more, with a strong active love.

Grant that I may love You with all my heart while on earth, so that I can continue to love you perfectly throughout all eternity, dear Jesus.

---

Cardinal Baldisseri, Pope Francis, and Cardinal Farrell at a pre-synod youth meeting, March 19, 2018. Why do I see the three witches of Endor chanting "Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Double, double toil and trouble"?

The shameless machinations, maneuverings and manipulations that have hardly been dissembled at various Bergoglian synodal assemblies illustrate most excellently how Satan works his evil through faithless clerics, including the reigning pope. The following report shows how the upcoming 'youth synod' is a great theater for observing Satan at work. It's a synodal assembly purportedly about 'the youth' but obviously not with any of them as participants, because to take part in a synodal assembly, one must be a bishop to begin with, or otherwise some privileged non-episcopal person, even lay, appointed by whoever happens to be pope. However, I fully expect that one of Bergoglio's pre-synod stunts will be to name a number of under-30s people among the personal appointees he is entitled to name to a synod.


The St. Gallen Mafia’s LGBT 'youth synod'
by JULIA MELONI

July 3, 2018

October’s youth synod is about finishing the old business of the St. Gallen mafia. It will mark four years since Archbishop Bruno Forte crafted a manipulated synodal report on the “precious support” found in same-sex relationships — released the very day that two Italian political parties backed homosexual unions.

Pope Francis approved the text before it was published, and his homily that day excoriated “doctors of the law” — an “evil generation” — for resisting the “God of surprises.” Archbishop Forte, meanwhile, declared to the media that “describ[ing] the rights of people living in same-sex unions” is a matter of “being civilized.”

Both men are followers of the late Cardinal Carlo Martini — the [self-styled] “ante-pope” and mafia leader. Martini endorsed same-sex civil unions before his death, after battling Humanae Vitae for years and preaching “discernment” on sexual issues in Night Conversations. In it the Jesuit plotted to use young “prophets” to revolutionize the Church — and said it would “never occur” to him to “judge” homosexual couples, years before Pope Francis’s “Who am I to judge?”

Other St. Gallen mafia alumni — the kingmakers behind Pope Francis’s election — crusaded for “gay Masses,” hailed “gay marriage” laws as “positive,” and tried to make homosexuality “central” to the family synod. Amoris Laetitia’s principal ghostwriter — the author of Heal Me With Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing — has openly lamented the pushback against the homosexual agenda at the 'family synods'.

Amoris Laetitia, as one priest has shown,
https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/priest-explains-how-amoris-laetitia-was-really-written-to-normalize-homosex
was really written to legitimize homosexual activity — but Humanae Vitae, natural law, and the Catechism’s language still stand in the way.

This is why Archbishop Forte and Cardinal Baldisseri planned, in prior synods’ working documents, to use young people to revolutionize moralizing language on sexuality (78), permitting a “re-reading” of natural law (30). Last year, Archbishop Forte already explained how the youth synod will develop Amoris Laetitia’s vow to integrate “everyone” (297). [The numbers refer to the pertinent paragraphs in AL.]

Cardinal Baldisseri recently presented the synod’s Instrumentum Laboris, which lauds conscience for discerning “what gift we can offer … even if maybe not fully up to the ideal.” It says “some LGBT young people” want “greater care from the Church” — pushing the question of “what to propose” to young same-sex couples.

Baldisseri claims this revolutionary first use of “LGBT” by the Vatican merely quotes a pre-synodal document by young people — yet the ideological term never appears there. It’s an ominous disparity, given his history of synodal manipulation. [Disparity? It's an outright lie!]

Another leader behind the Instrumentum Laboris is Fr. Giacomo Costa, S.J., the Vice President of the Martini Foundation, handpicked by the pope to help lead the synod as a special secretary. Fr. Costa’s writings have promoted same-sex couples’ struggle for “social and civil rights.” He also helped write the synod’s preparatory document, which vows to execute Amoris Laetitia 37’s promise to “make room for the consciences of the faithful,” who “are capable of carrying out their own discernment.”

He and the Instrumentum Laboris are thus promoting Martini’s “School of the Word,” where young people just listen to the Bible for their own answers about God’s will. At the pre-synodal meeting, young Catholics, non-Catholics, and atheists were led in meditation on Jesus’s promise that truth will “make you free” (John 8:32), as explicated by Gandhi (“[God] is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist”) and the Muslim poet Rumi (“You are a copy of the holy Book of God… Look for whatever you want within yourself”).

Fr. Costa then helped oversee the young writers and editors of the pre-synodal text, as shown by photos of teams at work. While those handpicked young people deny a “conspiracy” or “agenda,” a number are aligned with groups militating for a revolution on sexuality.

Their first draft demanded “open-mindedness” on sexuality and the “welcoming” of “everyone” who violates the Church’s “desired ‘standards.’” Their final text said young people “may want the Church to change her teaching” on contraception, abortion, homosexuality, cohabitation, marriage, and the priesthood. While it diplomatically admitted that “many” youths accept these teachings, it announced that what’s “important” is “discussion” with dissenting “convictions” on these “polemical issues.”

One of the four writers behind the first section works as a producer for Fr. Thomas Rosica, a Martini disciple who gave skewed briefings against “exclusionary language” on homosexuality at the family synod. Fr. Rosica recently acknowledged his staff member’s role in the document and said to “really pray” that “the right young people” are delegates at the synod (23:37).

Another one of the four writers — a journalist featured at Crux —represented the Lay Centre. This group tried to influence the family synod by hosting Msgr. Philippe Bordeyne, a participant of a “shadow council” on legitimizing same-sex unions (and an expert at a Vatican seminar for this synod). Both Msgr. Bordeyne and the Lay Centre’s co-founder sit on the board of a Martini-patronized group working to “welcome” homosexual couples.

Before sending its three delegates to the pre-synodal meeting, the Lay Centre hosted Cardinal Tobin, who once welcomed an “LGBT pilgrimage” to Mass and recently said the Church is “moving on the question of same-sex couples.” One young delegate told him about the Church’s “mistakes” in ministering to those “of a different sexual orientation” (38:36). Cardinal Tobin criticized a “cold,” “nominalistic ethic,” saying young people’s “greatest fear” is that the Church “judges them...Now, I think we can correct that, but we’re gonna need help,” he told her (43:04).

She then helped edit the pre-synodal text, saying the meeting showed that “all of us, even if we disagree with Church teachings … are hopeful and still want to be engaged.” She was also trained to fight for “radical inclusion” by Voices of Faith, whose latest conference attacked the Church for being “homophobic and anti-abortion.”

One Voices of Faith delegate helped write the text’s second section lamenting “rules” and “judgment.” Another was surprised by others’ silence on “LGBT” issues, admitting that the question of including “homosexuality and gender” in the text was “contested until the end.”

That section is subversively modeled on the English Facebook group’s pleas for bold, open orthodoxy:

---

[The Church] must be stable and not “water down” her truths. [The young] want the Church to openly address issues often considered taboo: homosexuality, abortion, birth control, and gender.

---

Mysteriously, this cry metamorphosed into this:

---

The young … desire answers which are not watered-down, or which utilize pre-fabricated formulations. We, the young Church, ask that our leaders speak in practical terms about controversial subjects such as homosexuality and gender issues, about which young people are already freely discussing without taboo.

---

Baldisseri also emphatically told the young writers to “explore the [delegates’] different cultures,” so their first draft avoided “very Catholic things” like Adoration and called Jesus a “historical figure.” Others pushed back, yet there was a “tense point” where the meeting’s organizers expressed their desire that the writers not stay up amending the text.

The “huge online community” requesting the Extraordinary Form of the Mass claims it wasn’t “properly” represented by online moderators, who accused those young people of being a “lobby.” [And they obviously were - having been pre-selected for the most part by their Bergoglian bishops!]

Meanwhile, Fr. James Martin, S.J., is boasting that “LGBT” — a political term that Cardinal Baldisseri falsely attributes to the young people’s text — is now “harder” to criticize. Fr. Martin’s pro-“LGBT” book has been glowingly endorsed by Cardinal Farrell — a key leader behind the synod and the World Meeting of Families — and Fr. Martin recently headlined a conference organizing young people to lobby the synod, sponsored by an LGBT group that received extensive funding to push the homosexual agenda at the family synod.

Fr. Martin — who dreams of the day when the Catechism’s language on homosexuality will change, priests will be able to “come out” and same-sex couples will be able to kiss at Mass — has been handpicked by the Vatican to headline the World Meeting of Families along with several top revolutionaries, cardinals who’ve already said conscience determines whether one can receive the Holy Eucharist while engaging in homosexual activity, and who’ve already flaunted brazen homosexual-themed events within the sacred spaces of the Church.

We’re clearly in a well-plotted endgame now. According to the men behind Pope Francis’s election — including ominously scandal-ridden figures like Cardinal Danneels, Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick — the timeline was estimated at just four or five years to “make the Church over again.”

Yet another Bergoglio-led ecumenical
prayer for peace in the Middle East
But orthodox participation underscores how this pope has been
glossing over the raging intra-Orthodox conflict in the Ukraine

July 5, 2018

Pope Francis has invited to Bari, on Saturday July 7, the heads of the Churches of the Middle East - Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant - for a day of prayer for peace in that region.

But there is another conflict in the East that is looming over this assembly. It is the conflict that has Ukraine as its epicenter and is dramatically dividing the Orthodox world, with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople on one side and on the other the Patriarch Kirill of Moscow “and all Rus".

Bartholomew will be in Bari. But not Kirill, who will instead be represented by his head of external relations, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk. Who a few days ago sternly rejected yet again the idea of creating an autonomous Orthodox Church in Ukraine, going so far as to say that “blood will flow” if this is legitimized and therefore removed from the jurisdiction of the patriarchate of Moscow.

And legitimized by whom? By none other than the Patriarch of Constantinople, who would have the discretion to do this in that he is traditionally “primus inter pares” among all the heads of Orthodoxy.

Settimo Cielo provided one month ago, after Metropolitan Hilarion’s visit to the Vatican, the essential facts of the dispute, which in spite of being primarily internal to Orthodoxy also involves the Catholic Church to a significant extent, especially after Pope Francis lined up solidly on the side of the Russian Orthodox Church:
> In Ukraine, Between Orthodox and Catholic, Francis Sides With Moscow

Currently in Ukraine there are three Orthodox communities. The only one canonically recognized by the whole of Orthodoxy, with Metropolitan Onufry, is the one subject to the patriarchate of Moscow. But in addition there is an independent patriarchate headed by a former high-ranking official of the Russian Church, Filaret. And finally there is another Ukrainian Orthodox Church that has proclaimed itself as such, with Metropolitan Methodius.

For some time there has been a very strong push in Ukraine to rejoin these three great trunks in a single autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, under Moscow but as one of the many autocephalous Orthodox Churches, which includes the Russian Orthodox Church, but of which Bartholomew is 'primus inter pares'..

On the political terrain, the government of Kiev is also very involved in supporting this new autonomous Orthodox Church. And so is the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, 4 million faithful strong whose Major Archbishop, Sviatoslav Shevchuk, was received in audience by Pope Francis two days ago.

But both of these external expressions of support are have simply sharpened the hostility of the patriarchate of Moscow against the entire operation. [Remember that, unlike Pope Francis, who has taken the side of the Russians, Archbishop Shemchuk has openly condemned Russia's aggression against the Ukraine in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.]

As for the Greek Catholics, Hilarion has gone so far as to accuse them of wanting to absorb the new entity, turning it from Orthodox to Catholic, thus bringing it under Rome. [An absurd notion, to begin with. As if Shemchuk did not already have his hands full with the Church he now heads and Ukraine's political conflicts!]

And Francis practically agreed with the powerful Russian metropolitan, when he received him at the Vatican last May 30, at which time Bergoglio aimed a tough reprimand at the Ukrainian Catholics who, he said, “interfere in the internal affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church.”

Both Bartholomew and Hilarion are canvassing the Orthodox world inch by inch, to survey the positions of the various Churches and bring them over to their side. On July 7, the two will see each other in Bari and two days later the Patriarch of Constantinople will be in Moscow for what could be the decisive head-to-head with Kirill.

Bartholomew has not yet shown his cards, even if it is clear that he and his closest colleagues - chief among them Metropolitan Ioannis of Pergamum, one of the greatest living theologians - want to see the birth of a unified and autonomous Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

ThePpatriarchate of Moscow, however, has made no mystery of its intentions. It has already stated and restated in the harshest of terms its “no” to the operation. And the reasons for this are understandable.

The Ukrainian Church subject to the jurisdiction of Moscow numbers a good 40 percent of the parishes of the entire Russian patriarchate, about 12,000 out of 30,000. Losing them would be a tragedy for Moscow.

And if to these 12,000 parishes are added thousands more belonging to the other two Ukrainian Churches now in existence, the new unified Ukrainian Orthodox Church would become the second most populous Orthodox Church in the world, able to rival the Patriarchate of Moscow, until now the undisputed Orthodox leader in terms of membership.

A reliable recent survey showed that the creation of a unified and autonomous Orthodox Church enjoys the approval of 31.3 percent of the population of Ukraine,, while those against are 19.8 percent, the indifferent are 34.7 percent, and those not answering are 14.2 percent. With variations from area to area, the greatest proportion of those in favor, 58 percent, are in western Ukraine, and the most against, 28.2 percent, are in the east.

Even among the 85 bishops of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church subject to the patriarchate of Moscow, the temptation to strike out on their own is making inroads. Their official position, unanimously adopted last June 25, is that autocephaly is not among their current objectives. But right afterward, in Athens, on another official visit to the Orthodox of Greece, Bishop Victor clarified that “the Ukrainian Orthodox Church does not categorically set itself against the idea of autocephaly.”

Autocephaly would revert the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to its original status, according to the historical reconstruction made by Metropolitan Ioannis of Pergamum, who says that the transfer of the metropolis of Kiev from the jurisdiction of Constantinople to that of Moscow in 1685, was simply a provisory and revocable measure.

No need to add that the Patriarchate of Moscow reacted with fury to Ioannis's historical footnote, declaring it false.

In addition to peace in the Middle East, it would be well that Pope Francis and his two Orthodox guests in Bari pray as well for 'peace' in the Orthodox world.

Catching up with the few photo posts available of Benedict XVI in June and July...

Beginning with June 29, which was the 67th anniversary of Joseph
Ratzinger's ordination to the priesthood, and this precious videoclip
showing the highlights of that day in 1951.

How providential it is that this is probably the only film
documentation available so far of the priestly ordination of
a future pope!


This June 29, however, Pope Francis - for the third time in three
consistories - took his new cardinals to pay their respects to
Benedict XVI at Mater Ecclesiae.

Click here for the videoclip: [BTW, how long has the pope walked with that uneven gait?]
www.facebook.com/vaticannews.it/videos/2515532925139189/


The reigning pope appears to have kissed the ring of the Emeritus. Why the sudden impulse?

Let me be a killjoy, but I find this Bergoglio 'ritual' a not-too-subtle way of co-opting Benedict XVI into his choice of new cardinals by busing them to the Emeritus Pope's residence and having them received in the chapel, where the latter was, of course, expected to bless the new cardinals. I don't see any blessing actually given in this videoclip, although it does appear to end with a prayer they all say together.

On July 2, Benedict XVI welcomed a delegation from Brazil led by Cardinal Raymundo Damasceno Assis of Aparecida. With him were Professors Rudy Albino de Assunção (and his family) and Gilcemar Hohemberger, of the Centro Universitario Catolica de Quizada, co-authors of a recent book published in Portuguese, entitled O Primado do Amor e da Verdade: O Patrimonio spiritual do Joseph Ratzinger/Bento XVI (The Primacy of Love and of Truth: The Spiritual Patrimony of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI).

Assunção has authored 5 other books on Benedict XVI: O Sacrificio do Palavra: A liturgia da Missa segundo Bento XVI (Sacrifice of words: The liturgy of the Mass according to Benedict XVI); Bento XVI, a Igreja Catolica, e O 'Espiritu da Modernidade': Un analisi da visao do papa teologo sobre 'o mundo di hoje' (Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church, and the 'spirit of modernity': An analysis of the theologian pope's views on 'the world today"; and a 3-volume set entitled Ser Cristao na Era Neopaga (Being Christian in the Neo-Pagan Era), which is a translation into Portuguese of the interviews given by Cardinal Ratzinger to the now defunct monthly magazine 30 GIORNI.

Vatican News reported the meeting:

---

In the late afternoon of July 2, Cardinal Raymundo Damasceno Assis visited Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI in the Vaticna Gardens.

“He welcomed us near the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes. He sat on a bench and we sat beside him. He listened to all of us with great patience and paternal affection. The meeting lasted almost half an hour”, Cardinal Assis told Vatican News.

Dom Damasceno was accompanied by Professors Rudy Albino de Assunção (with his family) and Gilcemar Hohemberger – authors of a recent book on the Emeritus Pope – as well as members of the Editora Molokai publishing house, who presented him with a set of books containing his homilies as Pope translated to Portuguese.

---

On his Facebook Page, Assunção posted the photos of “my entire family photographed with the great, paternal and unforgettable Benedict XVI”.

With Cardinal Damsceno Assis:


Prof. Hohemberger, who also presented the Emeritus with the three volumes of his papal homilies translated to Portuguese:



The new book co-authored/edited by Hohemberger and Assunção:


Prof. Assunção and family with the Holy Father:




An advertisement in Rio de Janeiro for a special 4th of July book sale featuring books by or on Benedict XVI, including those written by Assunção:

BTW, do not under-estimate Catholic book sales in Brazil, which has the world's largest Catholic population, currently estimated at about 137 million, even if they now represent only about 65%
of the country's total population. Even if only 1% buy Catholic books, that's still 1.37 million, which represents a great incentive for Catholic book publishers and authors.


In June, other than the visit of the new cardinals, only these were seen online and captured thanks to Beatrice on her website, which has become my chief
source of B16 photo leads...


Right, a visit on June 1 by the President Minister of Bavaria, Marcus Söder (CSU); left, a visit on June 6 by Mons. Antonio Guido Filipazzi, Apostolic Nuncio
to Nigeria, and another Italian priest not identified in the caption provided. Filipazzi was consecrated archbishop by Benedict XVI in 2011 after he named him
Nuncio to Indonesia. Filipazzi was reasssigned to Nigeria in 2017.

There's a brief YouTube video of Minister Söder"s visit, which also shows his earlier meeting with Pope Francis.
youtu.be/7sRZcsmioTc

In the post above, we saw how a Brazilian professor anthologized interviews with Cardinal Ratzinger under the unifying title of "Being Christian in a neo-pagan world".
And a neo-pagan, anti-Christian world is what the Vatican has turned into under Bergoglio.


Towards a 'Christ-free' church?
Editorial
by Riccardo Cascioli
Translated from

July 5, 2018

Today and tomorrow, a huge international conference is taking place at the Vatican to highlight the third anniversary of the Bergoglio encyclical Laudato Si.

The conference is entitled «Saving our Common Home and the Future of Life on Earth», organized by the new Dicastery for Integral Human Development, along with Caritas International and a group called Global Catholic Climate Movement. [How’s that for a clunky title – is there such a thing as ‘Catholic climate’?]

Taking part are politicians, scientists, economists, representatives of various NGOs (non-governmental organizations), all true believers and advocates of ecologism and the ‘battle’ against climate change.

I will not get into the content of the conference – as this is something I have written about many times, even recently. But I believe it is worth underscoring a curious detail that made the news during the media conference to introduce the event.

Inasmuch as “it is necessary to lead by setting a good example” – explained the officials of the Dicastery, the conference too will underscore ‘good practices”, and the Dicastery proudly announced that it is the first Vatican office to be ‘plastic-free’.

Plastic seeming to be the current Public Enemy Number 1, the Dicastery has banned its use within the dicastery offices – employees and officials alike are enjoined to bring their own glassware and silverware from home. And since Catholics are supposed to be ‘missionary’ by nature, the dicastery looks to extend this initiative to all the other Vatican offices.

But that’s not all. Since the desire for good is infinite, the secretary of what is, in effect, the Vatican’s ecologism dicastery, added that the objective is for the Vatican to be ‘carbon neutral’, i.e., free of carbon dioxide emissions, since CO2 has been identified by the climate-change warriors as the principal cause of ‘global warming’. [How pathetic these pre-fabricated formulations are that make up the non-arguments of the climate-change fanatics!]

So are we then going to have the monsigors and other officials of the dicastery engaged in quantifying the CO2 emissions of everyone at the Vaticanwith a view to reducing and making up for these emissions? [Given that all living human beings inhale oxygen and exhale CO2 continuously, just imagine the CO2 emissions from Bergoglio alone with his non-stop loquacity!] I will refrain from the facile ironies brought up by considering how to reduce the emissions of these monsignors and their fellow prelates, to get to the heart of the matter.

Assuming but not conceding that this theory of manmade global warming is correct, should the Catholic Church serve to launch any ecologistic campaigns? Is it for this that Christ instituted his Church? To liberate man from the use of plastics? Is the mission of the Church to ‘save the planet’ rather than to save man from eternal damnation?

One cannot help being upset to listen to cardinals and bishops at the Vatican speaking the language of the World Wildlife Fund and the various UN agencies, which are driven by neo-pagan ideologies and global political projects that have the stamp of Freemasonry [and therefore anti-Catholicism] all over them.

It is most disconcerting to hear the hierarchy make prophecies about ending the use of plastics, the use of solar panels for energy, and sorting waste for recycling. It is as if Christian witness has been reduced to ‘good works’ and ‘setting good examples’, but all in a secular context.

One has the impression that, at certain levels of the Church hierarchy today, what they really want is not just to be ‘plastic-free’ to be ‘Christ-free’ in which Christ would be an obstacle that hinders reaching out to others!

A WWF official has in fact commented that in the title of this conference, as in the Bergoglio encyclical, the choice was made to speak about ‘our common home’, not of ‘Creation’ which is the religious term.

“The choice not to use the religions term in the title is the first sign of a great opening toards dialog with all men of goodwill”, the WWF official said.

Indeed, the church of Bergoglio has chosen not to speak of ‘Creation’ which has its own hierarchical order. It chooses not to speak of a Creator God who motivates our responsibility towards all Creation. Because to do so would be divisive.

Instead, let us talk of biodiversity, of plants and animals to be saved, of plastics and other non-biodegradables that must be banned. This way, everyone will understand!

But if it has come to this point, then it is evident that the choice of the church [of Bergoglio] is to be free of Christ.

Pope dismissed Cardinal Zen's concerns
about any Vatican deal with China by
saying 'He's a little bit scared' -
But he has every reason to be!

June 27, 2018

In his recent interview with Philip Pullella of Reuters, Pope Francis was also asked about China and Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin's recwent statement that "the dialogue [with China] moves forward with successes and failures, two steps forward and one back.”

Francis expressed confidence in an agreement between the Holy See and the Chinese authorities, even if this does not come soon: