THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

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






First photo of B16 I've seen this year, thanks to Beatrice, whose site unearthed it from the Brazilian website Fratres in unum, of a traditionalist community.
It is featured as the site's 'Photo of the Week' and is captioned: "Vatican, February 16, 2018: A friend and great collaborator of FratresInUnum. com, Felipe
Menegat, Knight of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, at right, met with Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI."

I have chosen not to post anything so far on a minor brouhaha in the past week in which a German regional newspaper in Bavaria quotes Mons. Georg Ratzinger as saying that his brother is afflicted with a neurologic condition that is worsening and could end his life at any time sooner or later. The Vatican Press Office took it upon itself to issue a denial. It has not been determined whether the pope's brother did make the statements at all.

Benedict XVI needs our prayers, and I do not doubt that those who love and admire him do not fail to pray for him everyday. I must admit I did not think that his physical condition would deteriorate so rapidly in the past 5 years - and God forbid he should be suffering from a degenerative neurological condition!

However, those who have been mocking him because they thought his renunciation of the Papacy in 2013 was nothing but self-indulgent 'fleeing from the wolves' ought to have second thoughts now. It's hard to think charitably of them for being so uncharitable to someone who does not at all deserve to be an object of mockery, least of all from persons who collectively would not amount to anything significant compared to what Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has been in his almost 91 years of life so far!


Benedict XVI’s 'final pilgrimage Home'
by JAMES DAY

February 21, 2018

Every so often we’re witness to a splurge of commentary about Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, as if the general populace is suddenly reminded that the man who resigned the Chair of Peter is in fact still alive. Most recently, reactions to a letter he sent to Massimo Franco of Corriere della Serra, in which the 90-year-old’s phrase, “with the slow decline of my physical strength, interiorly I am on a pilgrimage Home,” were cause for great concern and consternation with little attempt to understand the real meaning.

Such language is nothing new from Benedict XVI, now five years after his announcement to vacate active ministry of the Petrine office genuinely stunned everybody. There is nothing quite like the abdication of the See of Rome. And because Benedict has kept his promise of withdrawing to a life of prayer and silence, his rare public words draw much attention.

On his 85th birthday in 2012 — the last birthday he would celebrate as Bishop of Rome — Benedict XVI said, “I am now facing the last chapter of my life and I do not know what awaits me.” This was overlooked at the time, but it is a tone not unlike that of “I am on a pilgrimage home.” [He used similar language in his last-ever public address as Pope, from the balcony of the Apostolic Palace in Castle Gandolfo about two hours before his Pontificate officially came to an end.]

Benedict had long been on his pilgrimage home. He has long focused his attention on something the secular world has trouble fathoming—life after death, and what Catholicism refers to as the “four last things”: Death, Judgment, Hell, Heaven. Benedict’s mere enduring presence as a de facto monk speaking such rhetoric as “a pilgrimage home” and “the last chapter of life” rather laconically and matter-of-factly jolts our ears.

Each day is closer to the end, no matter how irascible that is to transhumanists and radical life extensionists. Benedict XVI’s interests are elsewhere, in fact they are otherworldly. He is now an old man comfortable with approaching death. In this way, his words resemble the late letters of Michelangelo, constantly referring to himself as an old man, feeble and often confused.

Il Divino’s final artistic obsession, the construction of new St. Peter’s, would become the site where Benedict XVI would celebrate his final public Mass 449 years later, having to be wheeled out on a mobile platform as he blessed the faithful on Ash Wednesday 2013. Ash Wednesday’s dictum during the imposition of ashes starkly echoes the Church’s reminder that all death is certain: “Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.”

It was the art and beauty of Michelangelo and others that Benedict XVI never tired of celebrating. It is those remarks often unnoticed when the fleeting talk of Benedict arises — the resignation and the state of the Church he left is almost always the focus — that can provide a meeting point for believer and nonbeliever alike, for both lapsed and practicing. How can admirers of the great works of Western culture, non-churchgoing they may be, ably discuss the magnitude of, say, Caravaggio’s “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas” without speaking with some reverence to the themes and symbols of the image?

Benedict stated it better time and again as pope, whether in Rome or around the world. In no less than Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia, perhaps the par excellence in the convergence of the secular and the holy, at the church’s dedication Mass in 2010, Benedict uttered, “[Antoni Gaudí] accomplished one of the most important tasks of our times: overcoming the division between human consciousness and Christian consciousness, between living in this temporal world and being open to eternal life, between the beauty of things and God as beauty.”

The Catholic belief of God becoming man in Jesus Christ is the ultimate expression of beauty to the believer — and to Benedict XVI. The via pulchritudinis, the “way of beauty” Benedict XVI often spoke about, achieved through prayer, work, art, and human relationships, not only is designed to lead one to the divine, but are in fact expressions of the way of Jesus Christ, the very way of beauty itself.

En route to Spain, Benedict was asked about faith and art. “An art that lost the root of transcendence would not be oriented to God,” he explained. “It would be a halved-art.” Benedict XVI was certainly not interested in halved-art any more than halved-truth or halved-reason. The great logical thinker who extolled the relationship between faith and reason in his landmark Regensburg speech was also privy to the logical result of art and beauty: where one’s soul is uplifted, there the transcendent awaits, to transform the point of convergence to the new realm of conversion.

We likely will never experience another Benedict XVI again, certainly not one who turned over the keys of influence for a life of obscurity. And yet even in his seclusion he reminds us our earthly existence is both short and only part of the journey. Yet still there is time for renewal, for a new understanding of our place in the world.

“I am at the eleventh hour,” Michelangelo once panted, “and not a thought arises in me that does not have death carved within it; but God grant that I keep him waiting in suspense for a few years yet.”

“He started dying at about 40 and did it for 50 years,” art historian Howard Hibbard remarked about Michelangelo. The same could be said about Benedict XVI. He has been on a pilgrimage home his whole life. [As we all are, or ought to be!]

I am posting the following without comments for now:

How Bergoglio is rewriting his life:
The years of the 'great desolation'

February 21, 2018


In the closed-door meeting that he held at the beginning of Lent, on February 15, with the priests of the Rome diocese of which he is bishop, Francis sketched out in an unexpected way the trajectory of his life, describing it as a series of “passages,” some of them bright, others dark.

Let’s review word by word this autobiography of his, very instructive on the personality of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in the official transcription that has been released and that respects the disorder of his speech in Italian.

The first phase is one of rapid and dazzling ascent toward what further on he would call “omnipotence”:

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“Right after I was ordained, I was appointed superior the next year, novice master, then provincial, rector of the faculty… A stage of responsibility that began with a certain humility, because the Lord has been good, but then, with time, you feel more sure of yourself: ‘I got this, I got this…’ is the word that comes most. One knows how to get around, how to do things, how to manage….”

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In effect, the young Jesuit Bergoglio celebrated his first Mass in 1969, in 1970 became novice master, and in 1973, at the age of just 37, was appointed superior of the Argentine province of the Society of Jesus. He held this position until 1979, when his successor was a Jesuit close to him, Andrés Swinnen, and then until 1985 was rector of the Colegio Máximo di San Miguel.

It must be noted, however, that already in this phase of success there emerged within him an inner disquietude, which he tried to resolve in 1978 by going “for six months, once a week” to a Jewish psychoanalyst, “who helped me greatly, when I was 42 years old,” as he himself revealed last summer in the book-length interview with the French sociologist Dominique Wolton.

But here is the second “passage” of his autobiography, no longer of ascent but of precipitous decline, which pope recounted to the priests of Rome:

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“And all of this ended, so many years of leadership… And there began a process of ‘but now I don’t know what to do.’ Yes, be a confessor, finish the doctoral thesis - which was there, and which I never defended. And then starting over and rethinking things. The time of a great desolation, for me. I experienced this time with great desolation, a dark time. I believed that it was already the end of life, yes, I served as a confessor, but with a spirit of defeat.

Why? Because I believed that the fullness of my vocation - but without saying so, now that I think of it - was in doing things, these things. But no, there is something else! I did not quit prayer, this helped me a lot. I prayed a lot, in this period, but I was ‘as dry as a log.’ I was helped so much by prayer there, in front of the tabernacle… But the last periods of this time - of years, I don’t remember if it was from 1980… from 1983 to ’92, almost ten years, nine full years - in the last period prayer was very much in peace, it was with great peace, and I said to myself: ‘What will happen now?” because I felt different, with great peace. I was a confessor and spiritual director, in that period: it was my work. But I experienced it in a very dark way, very dark and suffering, and also with the infidelity of not finding the path, and compensation, compensating for [the loss] of this world made of ‘omnipotence,’ seeking worldly compensations.”

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Desolation, dark time, dryness, spirit of defeat… In effect, beginning from 1986, when his bitter enemy Víctor Zorzín became the new provincial of the Argentine Jesuits, Bergoglio was rapidly pushed aside, sent against his will to study in Germany and finally forced into a sort of exile in the city of Córdoba, between 1990 and 1992, without any role anymore.

He sustained himself with prayer. But even as he recounts it today, Bergoglio experienced those years with great suffering, in never-resolved tension between the sense of defeat and the will to make a comeback.

And among those who held the power at the time in the Society of Jesus, both in Argentina and at its general curia in Rome, all the way up to superior general Peter Hans Kolvenbach, this lack of psychological balance of his and therefore his unreliability had become the shared judgment.

It was perhaps in order to offer a belated remedy for this quarrel that Pope Francis, last January 20 in Perù, speaking off the cuff to the priests and religious, wanted to recall that “I cared a lot” about Kolvenbach, “a Dutch Jesuit who died last year,” in part because “it was said that he had such a sense of humor that he was able to laugh at everything that happened, at himself and even at his own shadow.”

But getting back to the account of his own life that Francis presented to the priests of Rome, here is the third and last series of “passages,” all of them once again on the rise, starting with that “telephone call from the nuncio” that - he says - “put me on another path,” that of the episcopate.

It was the spring of 1992, and the Vatican nuncio in Argentina at the time, Ubaldo Calabresi, telephoned him to tell him that he would be consecrated bishop at the behest of the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Antonio Quarracino, who wanted him as his auxiliary.

What came afterward was an unstoppable rise: to coadjutor bishop with right of succession, to archbishop of Buenos Aires, to cardinal…

“And then the last passage, from 2013. I didn’t realize what had happened there: I continued to act like a bishop, saying: ‘You take care of it, since You put me here.’”

The miraculous turning point that in 1992 plucked him out of the exile in which his confreres of the Society of Jesus had confined him was “prepared [for him] by the Lord - he was careful to emphasize - precisely in that “dark, not easy” period.

But in any case that period did not resolve - to the contrary - his psychological qualms, as proven by two of the public “confessions” he has made as pope, one at the beginning of the pontificate and another a few weeks ago.

He told the first to students of Jesuit schools on June 7, 2013, in regard to his decision to live at Santa Marta instead of at the Apostolic Palace:

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"For me it is a question of personality: that is what it is. I need to live with people, and were I to live alone, perhaps a little isolated, it wouldn’t be good for me. I was asked this question by a teacher: 'But why don’t you go and live there?'. I replied: 'Please listen, professor, it is for psychological reasons'. It is my personality. I cannot live alone, do you understand?" [A big fat lie, of course, because all of his biographers make it a point to highlight his choice of living by himself in a two-room apartment in Buenos Aires instead of at the Bishops's Palace or in a Jesuit community which he could have done! In fact, one gets the impression that the dour, funeral-faced Archbishop of Buenos Aires lived with little joy in his life until he was elected pope, when he discovered the joy of immense popularity and being the object of total unqualified praise, as well as revelling in the immense authority that comes with being pope, sovereign of the church as well as of Vatican City State.]

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He told the second last January 16 to his fellow Jesuits from Chile in the closed-door conversation that was afterward transcribed and published with his permission in La Civiltà Cattolica on February 17, and it concerns the reason why he does not want to read the writings of his opponents.

The reason - he said - is that of safeguarding his 'mental health', or his 'mental hygiene',” terms that he hammered away at three times in just one minute of conversation, and that presuppose an apodictic judgment of “insanity” on those who criticize him, without room for a rational engagement:

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"For my own good [mental health] I do not read the content of internet sites of this so-called 'resistance.' I know who they are, I know the groups, but I do not read them for my own mental health. If there is something very serious, they tell me about it so that I know. You know them… It is displeasing, but you have to go on. Historians tell us that it takes a century for a Council to put down its roots. We are halfway there.

"Sometimes we ask: but that man, that woman, have they read the Council? And there are people who have not read the Council. And if they have read it, they have not understood it. Fifty years on! We studied philosophy before the Council, but we had the advantage of studying theology after it. We lived through the change of perspective, and the Council documents were already there.

"When I perceive resistance, I seek dialogue whenever it is possible; but some resistance comes from people who believe they possess the true doctrine and accuse you of being a heretic. When I cannot see spiritual goodness in what these people say or write, I simply pray for them. I find it sad, but I won’t settle on this sentiment for the sake of my own mental well-being [mental hygiene].”

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Reactions to this last interview and what he thinks of those who write against him ought to be the subject of a subsequent post here. Meanwhile, there's a new development on the Bergoglio scandal-a-day front:

Leaked documents raise question of pope’s
personal role in new Vatican financial scandal
by John-Henry Westen
Editor


ROME, February 20, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Leaked documents obtained by LifeSiteNews connect the Pope himself to a new Vatican financial scandal and raise serious questions about his global reputation as the “pope for the poor.”

LifeSiteNews has obtained internal documents of the U.S.-based Papal Foundation, a charity with a stellar history of assisting the world’s poor, showing that last summer the Pope personally requested, and obtained in part, a $25 million grant to a corruption-plagued, Church-owned dermatological hospital in Rome accused of money laundering. Records from the financial police indicate the hospital has liabilities over one billion USD – an amount larger than the national debt of some 20 nations.

The grant has lay members of the Papal Foundation up in arms, and some tendering resignations. Responding to questions from LifeSiteNews, the Papal Foundation staff sent a statement saying that it is not their practice to comment on individual requests.

Speaking of grants in general, the Papal Foundation said their mission has not changed. “The grants to help those in need around the world and of significance to the Holy Father are reviewed and approved through well-accepted philanthropic processes by the Board and its committees,” it said.

Lay membership or becoming a “steward” in the Papal Foundation involves the pledge “to give $1 million over the course of no more than ten years with a minimum donation of $100,000 per year.” Those monies are invested in order to make a perpetual fund to assist the Church.

However, the majority of the board is composed of U.S. bishops, including every U.S. Cardinal living in America. The foundation customarily gives grants of $200,000 or less to organizations in the developing world via the Holy See.

According to the internal documents, the Pope made the request for the massive grant, which is 100 times larger than its normal grants, through Papal Foundation board chairman Cardinal Donald Wuerl in the summer of 2017.

Despite opposition from the lay “stewards,” the bishops on the board voted in December to send an $8 million payment to the Holy See. In January, the documents reveal, lay members raised alarm about what they consider a gross misuse of their funds, but despite their protests another $5 million was sent with Cardinal Wuerl brooking no dissent.

Along with this report, LifeSite is publishing three leaked documents.

On January 6, the steward who until then served as chairman of the Foundation’s audit committee, submitted his resignation along with a report of the committee’s grave objections to the grant. In his resignation letter accompanying the report, he wrote:

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“As head of the Audit Committee and a Trustee of the Foundation, I found this grant to be negligent in character, flawed in its diligence, and contrary to the spirit of the Foundation. Instead of helping the poor in a third-world country, the Board approved an unprecedented huge grant to a hospital that has a history of mismanagement, criminal indictments, and bankruptcy.

“Had we allowed such recklessness in our personal careers we would never have met the requirements to join The Papal Foundation in the first place.”

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The audit committee chairman’s report noted that the Foundation’s “initial $8 million was sent without any supporting documentation.”

He said the board eventually received a “2-1/2 inch thick binder of information (mostly in Italian)” but it lacked essential details. The report notes:

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There was no Balance Sheet. There was no clear explanation as to how the $25 million would be used. Normal grant requests are fairly specific about how our money will be used. Buried in the thick binder was only a one-page financial projection labelled “Draft for Discussion” showing:
2017 1.6 million Euro PROFIT
2018 2.4 million Euro PROFIT
2019 4.4 million Euro PROFIT

And on this data, our Board of Directors voted to grant this failing hospital $25 million of our hard-earned dollars. To put this in perspective, rarely have we given above $200,000 to a grant request. I pointed out that there was NO PROFESSIONAL DUE DILIGENCE, just a lot of fluff. If the numbers presented were accurate, then this commercial enterprise should go to a bank. They don’t need our money. If the numbers were not accurate, then a decision could not be made.

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The lay members of the board have good reason to be concerned about the supposed recipient of their generosity. Pope Francis asked for the funds to be directed to the Istituto Dermopatico dell'Immacolata (IDI), a dermatological hospital in Rome that has been plagued with corruption and financial scandal for years.

On May 15, 2013, ANSA, the leading news wire in Italy, reported “police confiscated over six million euros worth of property and bank accounts as part of investigations into alleged corruption at the Italian hospital group Istituto Dermopatico dell'Immacolata (IDI).”

The news of Vatican financial corruption connected to the IDI hit international headlines in 2015 with a June 20 Reuters article showing the Italian magistrates suspected Vatican Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi diverted 30 million euros destined for a Church-owned children’s hospital to the Church-owned IDI.

Another ANSA piece from 2016 reported, “Finance police discovered IDI was 845 million euros in the red and 450 million euros in tax evasion while 82 million euros had been diverted and six million euros in public funds embezzled.”

In May 2017, La Repubblica – the only newspaper Pope Francis says he reads – reported on court rulings revolving around the IDI detailing twenty-four indictments, leading to a dozen convictions, some of which carried over three years in prison. The court recognized the evidence from the financial police including “about 845 million euros in balance sheet liabilities and over 82 million in diverted funds, plus the undue use of another 6 million public funds.”

On January 19, after numerous calls and emails among lay members supporting the audit committee’s position, the Foundation’s executive committee sent a letter trying to placate the donating members.

That document, sent by Foundation President Bishop Michael Bransfield, and signed by Cardinal Wuerl, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, as well as several Stewards on the executive, highlights that the request for the donation came directly from Pope Francis. They wrote:

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Many of us believe that, had it been us, we would have told the Holy Father that the Papal Foundation would not be able to help on this project – but we weren’t in the room with him. We can surmise what we would have done, had it been one of us, but we really don’t know. In fact, we have been explicit throughout our history that this is the Papal Foundation. We have worked in conjunction with the pope from the very beginning. We don’t approve every request he makes, but he is the Pope, and we listen to him, and we listen intently.

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The executive’s letter regrets “the significant degree of discontent” but admonishes: “If we do not have love in our hearts toward one another, we are like clanging gongs or clashing cymbals.”

“We do not believe it is in the best interest of Christ or his Church to presume bad faith or ill will…,” it adds, but allows it is “legitimate to have disagreements over prudential decisions.”

“The Papal Foundation has bylaws that put the ultimate control of the organization in the hands of the US-domiciled Cardinals,” says the letter.

The executive concedes that when a grant is “over one hundred times the size of many of our other grants, there should be near unanimity in the vote, and that is not what happened.”

The letter also notes that while half of the $25 million was already transferred to the Vatican – for the IDI – Cardinal Wuerl “has written to the Secretary of State to request, given the circumstances surrounding this grant, that the Holy See decline to accept any further monies pursuant to the grant that was approved in December.”

Moreover the executive proposes a “new grant policy wherein any grant of more than $1 million must be approved by a majority of both lay and clerical Trustees on the Board.”

A first attempt to quell the stewards was sent on January 8 suggesting that the massive request of funds for the corrupt hospital was actually a part of Pope Francis’s effort to fight financial corruption. Accompanied by a letter and reflection from Cardinal Wuerl, a “PF Stewards Report” explained that the $25 million request of the Pope for the IDI was made, “in the larger context of the Holy Father’s commitment to confront and eliminate corruption and financial mismanagement both within the Vatican itself and in outside projects with which it was involved or sponsored.” [By helping an institution known to be very corrupt and mismanaged???]

A highly trusted source inside the Vatican informed LifeSiteNews that much financial corruption continues unabated under Pope Francis even though the Pope is kept informed. [Remember Archbishop Farrell and John Allen swear Bergoglio knows everything that is said and done at the Vatican! Boy, is that ever a boomerang statement!]

The Papal Foundation has a stellar record of assisting the Popes to support the poor, largely in developing nations. Since their first gift to Pope St. John Paul II in 1990, the Foundation’s fund has grown to over $215 million, and has given a total of $121 million in grants and scholarships.

From a look at their recent grants it is evident that the use of funds heretofore has been above reproach. The wealthy American Catholic families funded the building of churches, monasteries, schools and seminaries in impoverished nations. AIDS hospices, facilities for care of youth with physical and mental disabilities, and the like have also benefited from their generosity.

It seems this scandal is the first in the 30-year history of the organization. The executive letter states: “It is true that over the last fifteen years, if not longer, most of our donations have gone to the poor, and most of those poor have been in the poorer countries of the world.” It acknowledges that throughout the organization’s history, “almost all of the decisions of the organization were made with near unanimity of the Board.”

A rough week for the Holy See
By Phil Lawler

Feb 22, 2018

Today is an unusually good day to pray for Pope Francis and for the Holy See. Not only because it’s the feast of the Chair of St. Peter, but also because it’s been an unusually rough week at the Vatican. [But does anyone recall when was the last time there was a good week at the Bergoglio Vatican?]

Consider:
o It’s very unusual — well, you might say that usually it’s unusual — for one cardinal to criticize another in public. But Cardinal Müller has scolded Cardinal Parolin for suggesting a “paradigm shift” in Catholic teaching on marriage, just after Cardinal Zen ripped into him for selling out the “underground” Church in China. Since Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the object of these two attacks, is the Secretary of State — second in influence only to the Holy Father himself — these public rebukes are unmistakable signs of turmoil.

o Archbishop Charles Scicluna, sent to Chile to check into complaints against the embattled Bishop Juan Barros, instead was forced to check into a Chilean hospital for urgent gallbladder surgery. The investigation will continue, led temporarily by a Spanish cleric who was Archbishop Scicluna’s deputy on the mission. But with the complaints about Bishop Barros (and about the Pope who supported him) reaching a crescendo, any delay is unfortunate. Doubly unfortunate, since no other Vatican official has the enviable credibility that Archbishop Scicluna brought to the task.

o More than five years after he was appointed to head the Ahiara diocese in Nigeria, Bishop Peter Okpaleke resigned, having never been able to gain acceptance among the clergy and faithful of the diocese. Pope Francis had put his authority on the line, insisting that the priests of Ahiara must accept their bishop, demanding that they repent their resistance, threatening to suspend them. Yet in the end he backed down. The bishop is gone; the rebellious priests remain. John Allen of Crux commented:

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Arguably, Francis has made life more difficult not only for himself, if he chooses to issue similar threats again, but for any future pope, since the precedent seemingly has now been set that if you just complain loudly enough and hold out long enough, the pope will eventually throw in the towel.

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[I still do not understand why Bergoglio was so invested in Mons. Okpaleke! As with the Barros case, it seems as if the very fact that his will is being opposed on something turns him obdurately adamantine in insisting on what is opposed, regardless of merit or lack thereof!]

o Father Anthony Spadaro, the Italian Jesuit known as the “Pope’s mouthpiece,” cited with approval a Twitter comment by an ally who suggested that the Vatican should impose an interdict on EWTN unless the television network dismissed its popular host Raymond Arroyo. The Tweet suggested that Arroyo was conducting a “war on [the] papacy” by inviting guests to criticize the written works of —not the Pope but of Spadaro. Since an interdict is a very serious canonical penalty — comparable to excommunication, applied to an institution — this extreme reaction suggests a dangerous level of paranoia among the Pope’s closest aides.

o The LifeSite News service exposed unprecedented controversy within the Papal Foundation, a charitable group of wealthy donors who support the charitable works of the Holy See. Ordinarily the Papal Foundation subsidizes projects in impoverished countries, with grants of about $200,000 at a time. But this year the Foundation was asked to supply an extraordinary sum — $25 million — for a hospital in Rome, the Istituto Dermopatico dell’Immacolata (IDI). Some members of the charitable group questioned the proposal, but the grant was pushed through, at the explicit request of Pope Francis himself. To complicate matters, the IDI has — in the words of a Foundation board member, who resigned in protest — “a history of mismanagement, criminal indictments, and bankruptcy.”

o A senior judge of the Roman Rota, Msgr. Pietro Amenta, was sentenced on child-pornography charges. Msgr. Amenta resigned from the Vatican tribunal after entering a guilty plea to the criminal charges — raising the question of why he was not fired, especially when it came to light that he had been accused of molestation on three previous occasions. He is only the latest in a serious of Vatican officials who have recently faced charges for sexual misconduct, none of them involving women. [The so-called 'gay lobby' has obviously found 'home sweet home' in the very heart of the Bergoglio Vatican (the Casa Santa Marta, that is). Poor St. Martha! - even if she is a saint, I cannot help think 'Poor St. Martha!' everytime I see or hear any reference to the Vatican hotel which our dearly beloved pope has chosen to make his residence. Clearly not the most felicitous of associations for the sister of Mary and Lazarus of Bethany! The hotel, by the way, is still under the general management of the pope's beloved protege Mons Ricca - he with the luridly colorful past of living the full homo-lifestyle, call boys and all, while serving in the Vatican's diplomatic service which he somehow conned into employing his live-in Swiss lover!]

The above will have to serve as a stopgap until I am able to catch up properly on this Forum, hopefully by tomorrow...

The proper way to receive the Eucharist. Whoever first proposed and/or approved the Novus Ordo way simply considered the consecrated Host a mere wafer given out as a token of the Eucharist and not the Eucharist itself.

Cardinal Sarah: 'Widespread Communion in the hand
is part of Satan’s attack on the Eucharist'


ROME, February 22, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) — The head of the Vatican department overseeing liturgy is summoning the Catholic faithful to return to receiving Holy Communion on the tongue and kneeling.

In the preface to a new book on the subject, Cardinal Robert Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, writes:

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The most insidious diabolical attack consists in trying to extinguish faith in the Eucharist, by sowing errors and fostering an unsuitable way of receiving it. Truly the war between Michael and his Angels on one side, and Lucifer on the other, continues in the hearts of the faithful. Satan’s target is the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Real Presence of Jesus in the consecrated Host.

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The new book, by Don Federico Bortoli, is entitled La distribuzione della comunione sulla mano. Profili storici, giuridici e pastorali (The distribution of Communion on the hand: A historical, juridical and pastoral survey).

Recalling the centenary of the Fatima apparitions, Sarah writes that the Angel of Peace who appeared to the three shepherd children in advance of the Blessed Virgin’s visit “shows us how we should receive the Body and the Blood of Jesus Christ.” His Eminence then identifies the outrages by which Jesus is offended today in the Holy Eucharist, including “so-called ‘intercommunion.’”

Sarah goes on to consider how faith in the Real Presence “can influence the way we receive Communion, and vice versa,” and he proposes Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa as two modern saints whom God has given us to imitate in their reverence and reception of the Holy Eucharist.

“Why do we insist on receiving Communion standing and on the hand?,” the Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship asks. The manner in which the Holy Eucharist is distributed and received, he writes, “is an important question on which the Church today must reflect.”

Here below, with the kind permission of La Nuova Bussola where the preface was first published, we offer our readers a LifeSiteNews translation of several key extracts from Cardinal Sarah’s text.

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Providence, which disposes all thing wisely and sweetly, has offered us book The Distribution of Communion on the hand, by Federico Bortoli, just after having celebrated the centenary of the Fatima apparitions.

Before the apparition of the Virgin Mary, in the Spring of 1916, the Angel of Peace appeared to Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco, and said to them: “Do not be afraid, I am the Angel of Peace. Pray with me.” ... In the Spring of 1916, at the third apparition of the Angel, the children realized that the Angel, who was always the same one, held in his left hand a chalice over which a host was suspended... He gave the holy Host to Lucia, and the Blood of the chalice to Jacinta and Francisco, who remained on their knees, saying: “Take and drink the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, horribly outraged by ungrateful men. Make reparation for their crimes and console your God.” The Angel prostrated himself again on the ground, repeating the same prayer three times with Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco.

The Angel of Peace therefore shows us how we should receive the Body and the Blood of Jesus Christ. The prayer of reparation dictated by the Angel, unfortunately, is anything but obsolete. But what are the outrages that Jesus receives in the holy Host, for which we need to make reparation?

o In the first place, there are the outrages against the Sacrament itself: the horrible profanations, of which some ex-Satanist converts have reported and offer gruesome descriptions.
- Sacrilegious Communions, not received in the state of God’s grace, or not professing the Catholic faith (I refer to certain forms of the so-called “intercommunion”), are also outrages.

o Secondly, all that could prevent the fruitfulness of the Sacrament, especially the errors sown in the minds of the faithful so that they no longer believe in the Eucharist, is an outrage to Our Lord.
- The terrible profanations that take place in the so-called ‘black masses’ do not directly wound the One who in the Host is wronged, ending only in the accidents of bread and wine.

Of course, Jesus suffers for the souls of those who profane Him, and for whom He shed the Blood which they so miserably and cruelly despise. But Jesus suffers more when the extraordinary gift of his divine-human Eucharistic Presence cannot bring its potential effects into the souls of believers.

And so we can understand that the most insidious diabolical attack consists in trying to extinguish faith in the Eucharist, by sowing errors and fostering an unsuitable way of receiving it. Truly the war between Michael and his Angels on one side, and Lucifer on the other, continues in the hearts of the faithful: Satan’s target is the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Real Presence of Jesus in the consecrated Host.

This robbery attempt follows two tracks: the first is the reduction of the concept of ‘real presence.’ Many theologians persist in mocking or snubbing the term ‘transubstantiation’ despite the constant references of the Magisterium (…)

Let us now look at how faith in the real presence can influence the way we receive Communion, and vice versa.
o Receiving Communion on the hand undoubtedly involves a great scattering of fragments.
- On the contrary, attention to the smallest crumbs, care in purifying the sacred vessels, not touching the Host with sweaty hands, all become professions of faith in the real presence of Jesus, even in the smallest parts of the consecrated species: if Jesus is the substance of the Eucharistic Bread, and if the dimensions of the fragments are accidents only of the bread, it is of little importance how big or small a piece of the Host is! The substance is the same! It is Him!

Inattention to the fragments makes us lose sight of the dogma. Little by little the thought may gradually prevail: “If even the parish priest does not pay attention to the fragments, if he administers Communion in such a way that the fragments can be scattered, then it means that Jesus is not in them, or that He is only ‘up to a certain point’.”

o The second track on which the attack against the Eucharist runs is the attempt to remove the sense of the sacred from the hearts of the faithful. (...) While the term ‘transubstantiation’ points us to the reality of presence, the sense of the sacred enables us to glimpse its absolute uniqueness and holiness. What a misfortune it would be to lose the sense of the sacred precisely in what is most sacred! And how is it possible? By receiving special food in the same way as ordinary food. (…)

The liturgy is made up of many small rituals and gestures — each of them is capable of expressing these attitudes filled with love, filial respect and adoration toward God. That is precisely why it is appropriate to promote the beauty, fittingness and pastoral value of a practice which developed during the long life and tradition of the Church, that is, the act of receiving Holy Communion on the tongue and kneeling. The greatness and nobility of man, as well as the highest expression of his love for his Creator, consists in kneeling before God. Jesus himself prayed on his knees in the presence of the Father. (…)

In this regard I would like to propose the example of two great saints of our time: St. John Paul II and St. Teresa of Calcutta.
o Karol Wojtyła’s entire life was marked by a profound respect for the Holy Eucharist... Despite being exhausted and without strength... he always knelt before the Blessed Sacrament. He was unable to kneel and stand up alone. He needed others to bend his knees and to get up. Until his last days, he wanted to offer us a great witness of reverence for the Blessed Sacrament.

Why are we so proud and insensitive to the signs that God himself offers us for our spiritual growth and our intimate relationship with Him? Why do not we kneel down to receive Holy Communion after the example of the saints? Is it really so humiliating to bow down and remain kneeling before the Lord Jesus Christ? And yet, “He, though being in the form of God, ...humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2: 6-8).

o St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, an exceptional religious who no one would dare regard as a traditionalist, fundamentalist or extremist, whose faith, holiness and total gift of self to God and the poor are known to all, had a respect and absolute worship of the divine Body of Jesus Christ. Certainly, she daily touched the “flesh” of Christ in the deteriorated and suffering bodies of the poorest of the poor. And yet, filled with wonder and respectful veneration, Mother Teresa refrained from touching the transubstantiated Body of Christ.

Instead, she adored him and contemplated him silently, she remained at length on her knees and prostrated herself before Jesus in the Eucharist. Moreover, she received Holy Communion in her mouth, like a little child who has humbly allowed herself to be fed by her God.

The saint was saddened and pained when she saw Christians receiving Holy Communion in their hands. In addition, she said that as far as she knew, all of her sisters received Communion only on the tongue. Is this not the exhortation that God himself addresses to us: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it”? (Ps 81:10).

Why do we insist on receiving Communion standing and on the hand? Why this attitude of lack of submission to the signs of God? May no priest dare to impose his authority in this matter by refusing or mistreating those who wish to receive Communion kneeling and on the tongue. Let us come as children and humbly receive the Body of Christ on our knees and on our tongue. The saints give us the example. They are the models to be imitated that God offers us!

But how could the practice of receiving the Eucharist on the hand become so common? The answer is given to us — and is supported by never-before-published documentation that is extraordinary in its quality and volume — by Don Bortoli. It was a process that was anything but clear, a transition from what the instruction Memoriale Domini granted, to what is such a widespread practice today...

Unfortunately, as with the Latin language, so also with a liturgical reform that should have been homogeneous with the previous rites, a special concession has become the picklock to force and empty the safe of the Church’s liturgical treasures. The Lord leads the just along ‘straight paths’ (cf. Wis. 10:10), not by subterfuge. Therefore, in addition to the theological motivations shown above, also the way in which the practice of Communion on the hand has spread appears to have been imposed not according to the ways of God.

May this book encourage those priests and faithful who, moved also by the example of Benedict XVI — who in the last years of his pontificate wanted to distribute the Eucharist in the mouth and kneeling — wish to administer or receive the Eucharist in this latter manner, which is far more suited to the Sacrament itself.

I hope there can be a rediscovery and promotion of the beauty and pastoral value of this method. In my opinion and judgment, this is an important question on which the Church today must reflect. This is a further act of adoration and love that each of us can offer to Jesus Christ. I am very pleased to see so many young people who choose to receive our Lord so reverently on their knees and on their tongues.

May Fr. Bortoli’s work foster a general rethinking on the way Holy Communion is distributed. As I said at the beginning of this preface, we have just celebrated the centenary of Fatima and we are encouraged in waiting for the sure triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary that, in the end, the truth about the liturgy will also triumph.

---

Ed Peters obviously wrote the ff piece unaware of Cardinal Sarah's essay. Of course, a canonist, his focus is on the general canonical indiscipline towards the Body and Blood of the Lord.

An important week for Eucharistic discipline – or lack thereof
On Bishop Paprocki, the German bishops, and Holy Communion
by Edward N. Peters

February 23, 2018

Three items on the discipline of holy Communion round out the week. Two are simple but diametrically opposed, a third is licit but ill-advised.

1. This is simply right. Bp. Thomas Paprocki of Springfield IL, no stranger to my readers, has reiterated that Catholic Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, one of the Bloody 14 [14 Catholic senators who, with 37 other senators, voted against putting the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to a Senate vote, in effect, killing any action for now on a law to ban late-term abortions] may not, in view of Durbin’s longstanding support for abortionism as seen in the light of Canon 915, be given holy Communion.

Paprocki’s statement is clear and, besides being canonically correct, is pastorally sensitive to the spiritual dangers into which Durbin has placed himself. May Paprocki’s prayers for Durbin’s return to his earlier respect for innocent human life bear fruit. As for Paprocki himself, no worries there — an accomplished amateur hockey player and goalie, he is used to taking hard shots while defending what is important.

2. This is simply wrong. The German bishops as a whole (and not just an executive committee thereof) have approved the administration of holy Communion to divorced-and-remarried Catholics under the malleable conditions typical of these times. Think Malta. The only mildly remarkable thing here is that this latest degradation of sacramental discipline has caused so few ripples in Catholic media. [Shows you how much so-called Catholic media is really in thrall to the world and its anti-Catholic animus (which is why they are also among the most fanatic of Bergoglidolators!]

But I suppose that no one really expected the German hierarchy to act other than to authorize disobedience to an inconvenient canon law, regardless of how unanimous the tradition behind that canon might be.

3. This one is licit, strictly speaking, but such a bad idea that the canon allowing it probably needs to reformed. Once again, the German bishops are acting, but the law was convenient so it was respected.

Canon 844 §4 allows baptized non-Catholics to receive holy Communion if “grave necessity urges” the local bishop or (here) the conference of bishops to allow such reception, provided further only that those seeking holy Communion claim (as most can) to satisfy some practical and minimal credal criteria. Effectively, then, the canon expects the “grave necessity” requirement to keep the Communion rite at Mass from turning into a free samples line.

The problem, obviously, is about when (besides, one might concede, at the time of death, an option already allowed under a different part of the canon) is it ever gravely necessary for non-Catholics to receive holy Communion? Not, when might it be helpful or decorous or embarrassment-squelching to receive holy Communion, but when is it necessary for them to receive, and gravely necessary to boot? I suggest, Never. Even Catholics are required to receive holy Communion only once a year (c. 920) 920).

But, unless the canon is establishing a criterion that can never be satisfied, what does the clause “grave necessity” mean? Apparently, pretty much whatever a bishop or (here) conference of bishops decides it means, including, as the Germans have decided, non-Catholic spouses who assert “serious spiritual distress” and a “longing to satisfy hunger for the Eucharist” — albeit, exactly the kind of healthy spiritual ferment that has occasioned countless baptized persons over the centuries to seek full communion with the Catholic Church. So much for that motivation.

Nevertheless this ruling falls narrowly within the law, I think, suggesting that maybe the law’s desire to legislate on an admittedly “hard case” has resulted in a bad law. As hard cases usually do. Other “hard cases” will doubtless follow. Just watch.

A last thought. How the Germans ruling on non-Catholic spouses receiving holy Communion will combine with their recent provisions for divorced-and-remarried Catholics receiving holy Communion — well, it makes the head spin.


Earlier, there was this summary report on Fr Dwight Lonegenecker's reaction to the misdeed of the Bloody 14 ...


Priest calls for excommunication of
14 Catholic senators who voted against
a bill to ban late-term abortion
By LISA BOURNE

A Catholic priest is calling on bishops to excommunicate the 14 Catholic-identifying U.S. senators who voted two weeks ago against banning late-term abortions. He is also calling on priests to deny the Catholic pro-abortion senators Holy Communion.

“Today is the day for their bishops to issue a formal statement acknowledging that these men and women have publicly denied their Catholic faith, and if not formally, then have informally excommunicated themselves,” Fr. Dwight Longenecker wrote in a recent blog post.

Many bishops often refuse to publicly correct pro-abortion politicians who say they are Catholic. Of these, a small number prefer to be more “pastoral,” handling the matter in private.

But Fr. Longenecker wasted no time on this premise, pointing out the reality of the infraction committed by public figures identifying themselves as Catholic when they publicly support abortion.
“Since their offense is public, it should be acknowledged publicly and their pastors should publicly rebuke them and deny them access to the sacraments,” he said, adding that if Church hierarchy does not do so, then Catholics should make their concerns known via the most effective channel — the collection basket.

“If the bishops and priests do not do this,” Fr. Longenecker added, “the faithful in their parishes and dioceses should rise up and blizzard them with letters, emails, and the one thing that will really make them sit up and take notice: withholding their contributions.”

Longenecker, pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary Parish in Greenville, S.C., wrote about the fact that 46 of 97 members of the U.S. Senate voted January 29 against ending debate on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, and the result of that was the Senate not being allowed to vote on the bill, and the senators in effect voting against the ban.

The bill’s premise is based upon the scientifically established fact an unborn child can feel pain at 20 weeks.

One of two proposed bills up for a possible vote to coincide with the annual March for Life, it was not perfect, allowing exceptions for babies conceived in rape or incest. It was regarded by some as feel-good legislation timed for the annual March when pro-life advocates and media would be paying attention. Despite its shortcomings, the bill would have banned most late-term abortions, a brutal and inhumane practice.

“So fourteen Catholic senators voted for this barbaric, inhumane practice to still be legal in the United States and thereby assured its continuation,” Fr. Longenecker stated. He called on
Catholic media to publish their names and to “publish the horror that they have enabled by their vote.”

He also stated that “every Catholic college, university, institute of learning, newspaper, and website should publish the names of the Catholic senators who voted for late-term abortion, and circulate their names as widely as possible.”

He included links to the official vote roll call and public record of the senators’ identifying as Catholic, as well as a chart containing their district, diocese, and bishop.

Fr. Longenecker remained vocal on social media throughout the week about his call to name the 14 Catholic pro-abortion voting senators, making numerous posts.

“USCCB website acknowledged Monday’s Senate vote in favor of late-term abortion was ‘appalling’,” he tweeted Thursday, February 1, “but fails to name and condemn Catholic senators who voted for dismemberment of unborn babies. That article now gone from website. Essentially — silence from the USCCB.”

The USCCB responded that its statement was still available on the conference website, but did not address the substance of Longenecker’s tweet.

“CRUX, National Catholic Reporter, and America Mag — leading Catholic online journals still all silent about Monday’s Senate vote and no comment on the Catholic senators who voted for late-term abortions,” he tweeted that same day. “Does silence indicate consent?”

“I expect the bishops of ‘The Fourteen’ will say, ‘It is better that I have a quiet word with them in private about this matter’,” Longenecker tweeted as well. “No. Their vote was a formal, public action in favor of late term abortion. Public crime demands a public condemnation.”

He used the #namethefourteen hashtag in all his posts related to the defense of human life.

“Neonatologist says, ‘Babies at 20 weeks gestation do feel pain’,” he quoted with a link to an article from The Federalist.
Longenecker also shared the Catholic World Report column on the matter by canon lawyer Ed Peters, wherein Peters termed the senators The Bloody 14.

One of his posts showed that North Dakota Democrat Sen. Heidi Heitkamp — who is among the Catholic pro-abort 14 — also high-fived New York Democrat Chuck Schumer upon the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act’s defeat.

Bishop David Kagan of Bismarck, N.D., took heat in October 2012 after a letter to the diocese’s parishes regarding the forthcoming election was leaked. The letter had discussed the non-negotiable issues of life and marriage, and asked Catholics to consider the Church’s teaching on those issues when voting. Some regarded the letter as telling people not to vote for Heitkamp, who was running for the Senate.

Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., had previously upheld the decision of one of his priests to deny Holy Communion to Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, one of the Catholic pro-abortion 14.

Providence, R.I., Bishop Thomas Tobin was critical of Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine during the 2016 election because of Kaine’s support for abortion, same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption, and women’s ordination. Tobin also publicly rebuked Democrat Cong. Patrick Kennedy for Kennedy’s support for abortion.

The names of the 14 Catholic senators who voted against the 20-week abortion ban are: Maria Cantwell — Washington; Susan Collins — Maine; Dick Durbin — Illinois; Kirsten Gillibrand — New York; Heidi Heitkamp — North Dakota; Tim Kaine — Virginia; Patrick Leahy — Vermont; Ed Markey — Massachusetts; Catherine Cortez Masto — Nevada; Claire McCaskill — Missouri; Bob Menendez — New Jersey; Lisa Murkowski — Alaska; Patty Murray — Washington; Jack Reed — Rhode Island.

The death of an Evangelical titan
When I started my own evangelical ministry some 20 years ago,
I drew some very practical inspiration from Billy Graham
by Bishop Robert Barron

February 22, 2018

The Rev. Billy Graham, famed preacher who was best known for his televised evangelism broadcasts, died Feb. 21 at his home in North Carolina at age 99.

I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Graham preach about twenty years ago in Cincinnati. At the time, Dr. Graham was around eighty years old and clearly in frail health. He came to the podium and commenced to speak, but the crowd of young people, stirred up by the Christian rock bands who had performed earlier, was restive and inattentive. Graham paused, folded his hands, and quietly said, “Let us pray.” With that, a stadium of fifty thousand people fell silent. Once a spirit of reverence held sway, the preacher resumed. I remember thinking, “What an old pro!”

That old pro, arguably the greatest Christian evangelist of the past hundred years, died this week at ninety-nine, and it’s difficult to overstate his impact and importance. It is said that he directly addressed 215 million people in 185 countries in the course of his ministry. No other preacher, in the entire history of Christianity, has had such a range.

At the height of his powers, he filled arenas and stadiums, for weeks at at time, in some of the most jaded, materialistic, and skeptical cities in the world. And when preachers and other religious celebrities all around him were falling into scandal and corruption, Billy Graham stood tall, a man of integrity.

His moral heroism was on particularly clear display in the early years of the civil rights movement. Especially in his native South, it was the unquestioned practice to seat black people in segregated sections of churches and arenas. Though it cost him quite a few of his traditional supporters, Graham insisted that his crusades should be racially integrated. Impressed by this show of courage, Martin Luther King Jr. became a friend and appeared with Graham at a crusade in 1957.

What was it about his preaching that was so compelling? I suppose in his early years, he demonstrated a fair amount of “flash,” prowling the stage, waving his arms, and moving dramatically from whispering to shouting. But as he matured, a fair amount of that theatricality faded away. What remained was a gentle sense of humor (usually self-deprecating), an obvious sincerity, a keen intelligence, and above all, a clarity in regard to the essentials of the Gospel.

Practically every Billy Graham sermon had the same basic structure: you have sought happiness in wealth, pleasure, material things, fame, etc., and you’ve never been satisfied; I want to tell you about what will make you happy. At this point, he would speak of Christ crucified and risen from the dead.

Now please don’t get me wrong — and don’t write me letters! As a Catholic, I affirm that there is more to salvation than accepting Jesus Christ in faith; there is the full integration into the life of Christ that happens through the instrumentality of the Church and her sacraments. Nevertheless, Catholics and Protestants come together in asserting — as Billy Graham consistently did — that we are sinners who stand in need of Christ’s saving grace. In point of fact, a generous ecumenism was one of the marks of Billy Graham’s approach. It didn’t bother him in the least if someone whose religious journey commenced at one of his crusades continued and came to fulfillment in the Catholic Church.

Much has been made of his relationship with presidents, monarchs, and prime ministers. He did indeed minister personally to twelve US presidents, and the wonderful Netflix series The Crown shows something of the impact he had on Queen Elizabeth II. But I’ve never been particularly taken with this dimension of Graham’s life, which seemed, to me anyway, more sizzle than steak.

In fact, one of the low points of his career had to have been his meek acquiescence to Richard Nixon’s anti-Semitic musings, captured on White House tapes. To his credit, Dr. Graham repeatedly apologized for that lapse. He was far more powerful and spiritually efficacious when he prayed over the thousands of ordinary people who had responded to an altar call at the close of a crusade.

When I started my own evangelical ministry, Word on Fire, some twenty years ago, I drew some very practical inspiration from Billy Graham. In his autobiography, Just As I Am, Graham stated that, as he was getting his ministry underway, he told his colleagues that three things tend to undermine an evangelist’s work: trouble with sex, trouble with alcohol, or trouble with money. They were all to endeavor, he said, to avoid these three traps. When I met with the Word on Fire board for the first time, I relayed this story, and I commented, “I’ll take care of the sex and the alcohol, you take care of the money!”

I love the story of Billy Graham’s first encounter with my evangelical hero, Fulton J. Sheen. These two titans of preaching were on the same train from Washington to New York. Sheen found out about Graham’s presence, and he knocked on the door of the Protestant’s berth and said, “Billy, I wonder whether we might have a chat and a prayer?” Though he was preparing for bed, Billy Graham acquiesced and the two of them spent several hours in spiritual conversation — the beginning of a friendship that endured until Sheen’s death. I’ve always taken great pleasure in that image of brotherhood across denominational lines.

I believe that anyone who reverences the Christian Gospel owes Billy Graham a debt of gratitude. Requiescat in pace.

23 February 2018
Can black really be white?
[And is 2+2 equal to 5 or whatever number you choose just because?]

February 23, 2018

Are you up to date on Bulverism ... google it if you don't know about it. I suppose we could coin a cognate verb and say that PF was Bulverising when he waxed eloquent last year on the deep and dark psychological maladies of all those ghastly young people who have Incorrect and Unbergoglian Tastes in liturgical matters.

It seems to me a term with possibilities. One could say "Don't you Bulverise me, you ..." in a very hostile tone of voice.

[Bulverism, coined by C.S. Lewis from a character he created in one of his novels to illustrate what it is, is a logical fallacy employing circular reasoning by assuming your opponent is wrong, and then proceeding to explain his error, thereby avoiding the basic question or evading the issues raised, focusing instead on asserting that an argument is flawed or false because of the arguer’s subjective motives or his identity. Which is exactly the position taken by Bergoglio and all his defenders against opponents of Bergoglianism. Unable to answer the main criticisms of Bergoglio’s teachings in a way that makes sense, they resort instead to ad hominem attacks.]

A thing I do not quite understand is PF's purpose in quoting before Christmas from the Commonitorium of St Vincent of Lerins.

The passage he alluded to also includes, though PF did not quote it, the phrase eodem sensu eademque sententia. Derived by S Vincent of Lerins from the text of S Paul, it was used by B Pius IX, incorporated in the decree on the papal ministry at Vatican I, and contained in the anti-modernist oath.

Very significantly, it was used by St John XXIII in the programmatic speech he gave at the start of the Council ... What the Council taught, so he laid down, was to be in the same sense, the same meaning, as the teaching of the preceding Magisterium.

St John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor made clear that it applied to questions of morality as much as to those of dogma. Benedict XVI used this same sanctified phrase in his 2005 Christmas address to the Roman Curia about the Hermeneutic of Continuity.

I have recently repeated a series of mine on this phrase which you could find via the search engine on this blog.

Eodem sensu eademque sententia - the same sense, the same meaning - because the teaching of the Church cannot and does not change.

If this phrase means anything at all, it must mean that the teaching of Familiaris consortio (1981; paragraph 84) and of Caritatis sacramentum (2007; paragraph 29), that divorced people who, having gone through a civil form of marriage, are in an unrepented sexual relationship with a new "spouse", should not approach the Sacraments, cannot already ... in less than a decade! ... have metamorphosed or "developed" into its exact and polar opposite.

Even Jesuits, even the Austrian aristocracy, whether or not adorned with umlauts [The reference here is to Cardinal Schoenborn, an Austrian count, with his umlauted surname], cannot really expect to get away with black being white, with non-X and X being identical. Come off it, chaps ... Magnum Principium stat non contradicendi.


It just so happens, Fr. Rutler has written an essay on Fr. Spadaro's infamous line that in theology, it is possible for 2+2 to equal 5, or some such pseudo-intellectual audacity... How telling it is that it is persons like Spadaro or Sorondo or Paglia - who probably all fancy themselves to be great intellectuals (and they would be, if sophistry and casuistry and constant violation of the non-contradiction principle were the hallmarks of a genuine intellectual) - who are Bergoglio's chief attorneys!

The mathematical innovations
of Father Antonio Spadaro
by FR. GEORGE W. RUTLER

February 23, 2018

Nearly fifty years ago, my parish secretary, who was elderly even then, kept the parish accounts using an abacus. I gave her the latest kind of electric adding machine, which she used dutifully, but I noticed that she then checked the results with her abacus, an instrument that has been reliable since long before the invention of Hindu-Arabic written numerals. Until then, ten human fingers provided a decimal system.

If we don’t get numbers right, we will not get much else right. This is a point Lewis Carroll made in his Adventures of Alice in Wonderland. An apocryphal story claims that Queen Victoria, having enjoyed the Alice tales, requested a first edition of Carroll’s next book, and was perplexed when it arrived: An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.

There is a convincing thesis that Carroll, as an Oxford mathematician, wrote Alice’s Wonderland adventures to satirize new non-Euclidean theories. For instance, when Alice expands to nine feet and shrinks to three inches, she tells the Caterpillar, “Being so many different sizes in a single day is very confusing.” The Caterpillar enjoys the confusion, which is Carroll’s way of saying that Euclidean and hyperbolic geometry, rooted as they are in different axioms, cannot both be true at the same time.

The guests at the Mad Hatter’s tea party are very likely symbolic commentaries on the discovery of quaternions by the Irish mathematician William Rowans Hamilton, in 1843.

The abstract algebra, which Carroll thought ridiculous, was the background of Hamilton’s theory of “pure time,” which he seems to have inferred from Kant’s concept of a Platonic ideal of time distinct from chronological time. But this does not deny the existence of time as we know it; and Kant himself was almost neurotically compulsive about timing every action of his day by his clock.

One wonders what Carroll would have thought of Einstein’s Relativity, or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. But Einstein did not expect that his theory in physics should provide any moral structure, and Heisenberg would not apply a principle of quantum mechanics to theological systems. Since then, many have made such mistakes, the first being the early Modernists and now an increasing number of people even in the heart of Rome, who muddle sciences and hold certainty suspect.

Father Antonio Spadaro, a close associate of Pope Francis, raised eyebrows in July 2017 when he described religious life in the United States, with such confidence that can come only from a profound knowledge of a subject or a total lack of it. Father Spadaro advises the Holy Father, who had never visited the United States before becoming pope.

In an essay in Civilta Cattolica called “Evangelical Fundamentalism and Catholic Integralism,” Father Spadaro spoke with disdain of a cabal formed by Evangelicals and Catholics motivated by a “triumphalist, arrogant, and vindictive ethnicism” which is creating an “apocalyptic geopolitics.” Religious fundamentalists behind this plot have included Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Trump who is a Manichaean.

The co-author of this imaginative literary exercise was a Protestant minister, Marcelo Figueroa who is editor-in-chief of the new Argentinian edition of L’Osservatore Romano to which office he brings the rich systematic theology of Argentinian Presbyterianism. The two authors were rhetorically florid in denouncing Yankee racism, obscurantism, and fascism, so unlike the temperate history of Spadaro’s own peninsula and Figueroa’s Argentinian utopia. If they want to condescend to the USA, they need a loftier platform.

Then in October 2017 Father Spadaro said in Boston, “It is no longer possible to judge people on the basis of a norm that stands above all.” The suggestion is that a mathematical principle of uncertainty also applies to theology where all is in flux and subjective.

Later, in a well publicized comment on “Twitter” which operates according to stable and constant principles of applied engineering, Father Spadaro typed: “In theology 2 + 2 can equal 5. Because it has to do with God and the real life of people…”

To put a charitable gloss on that, he may have simply meant theology applied to pastoral situations where routine answers of manualists may be inadequate. But he has made his arithmetic a guide to dogma, as when he said in his Boston speech that couples living in “irregular” family situations “can be living in God’s grace, can love and also grow in a life of grace.” Yet, despite his concern for freedom of thought and expression, Father Spadaro has recently expressed sympathy for calls to censor Catholic television commentators who insist that 2+2 = 4.

There are two things to consider here. First, some clergy of Father Spadaro’s vintage grew up in a theological atmosphere of “Transcendental Thomism.” Aquinas begins the Summa Theologica asserting in the very first Question, four times, that theology has a greater certitude than any other science. While it gives rise to rhymes and song, it is solid science, indeed the Queen of Sciences.

Transcendental Thomism was Karl Rahner’s attempt to wed Thomistic realism with Kantian idealism. Father Stanley Jaki, theologian and physicist, called this stillborn hybrid “Aquikantianism.” But if stillborn, its ghosts roam corridors of ecclesiastical influence. This really is not theology but theosophy, as romantic as Teilhard de Chardin, as esoteric as a Rosicrucian, and as soporific as the séances of Madame Blavatsky.

The second point is that not all cultures have an instinct for pellucid expression. The Italian language is so beguiling that it can create an illusion that its rotundity is profundity, and that its neologisms are significant. When it is used to calling you a Cattolico integralista or a restauratore, the cadences almost sound like a compliment. Even our Holy Father, who often finds relief from his unenviable burdens by using startling expressions, said on June 19, 2016: “We have a very creative vocabulary for insulting others.” [At which he happens to be a grandmaster.]

In saying that 2+2=5, Father Spadaro preserves a familiar if deluded intuition, and trailing behind him is a long line of children who in countless schoolrooms have been made to stand in corners for having made that mistake. A famous use of it was in George Orwell’s Ninety Eighty-Four speaking of its dystopia: “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later; the logic of their position demanded it … the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.”

Malleable arithmetic has its consequences in the solid world. There is Stalin’s consoling wisdom for apparatchiks: “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”

Unlike Orwell’s dystopia, the Third Reich was a fact, and in it, any science that was not ideological was bourgeois. In 1934, the senior German mathematician David Hilbert was asked by the Nazi minister of education, Bernhard Rust, “How is mathematics at Göttingen, now that it is free from the Jewish influence?” Hilbert answered, “There is no mathematics in Göttingen anymore.”

Imagine mathematics free from Catholic influence. To name but a few devout Catholics who transformed mathematics while confident that 2+2 = 4 instead of 5, even in theology, Father Spadaro notwithstanding, there are: Fibonacci, Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus, Bacon, Lully Bradwardine, Oresme, Brunellescchi, Nicholas of Cusa, Regiomantanus, Widmann, Copernicus, Tartaglia, Cardano, Ferrari, Descartes, Pascal, Formati, Saccheri, Cauchy, and Bolzano. My favorites are Pope Sylvester II who revived the decimal numeral system a thousand years ago, and the pioneer woman in mathematics, Maria Agnesi (d. 1799) who refined differential and integral calculus.

The Incarnate Christ subjected himself to his own laws of nature, including solid arithmetic. He kept count. He insisted that the Twelve not be eleven or thirteen. If 2+2 were 5 for him, he might have said: “When 2 ½ or 3 ¾ are gathered together, I am in the midst of them.” When he multiplied the loaves, he might have fed 5000 instead of 4000 with 8 ¾ baskets leftover, and after 6250 were fed instead of 5000, there might have been 15 baskets left over. And we would have a longer workweek, because God rested on the 8.75th day.

The late Vietnamese cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan said that in a certain sense, Jesus actually was a bad mathematician: “A shepherd had 100 sheep; one of them strayed. Without thinking, the shepherd went in search of it, leaving the other 99 sheep. When he found the lost sheep he put it on his shoulders (Luke 15: 4-5). For Jesus, 1 equals 99, perhaps even more…”

The cardinal could say that without distorting reality because he spent thirteen years in a Communist prison, nine of them in solitary confinement. Those are the real numbers of real years not spent in Wonderland.

Fr. Weinandy strikes again! As Sandro Magister puts it:

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Everyone remembers Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy for the open letter he sent to Pope Francis last summer, and which he himself made public on November 1 on Settimo Cielo:
> A Theologian Writes To the Pope: There Is Chaos in the Church, and You Are a Cause

Today, Saturday February 24, he returns to the fray with a lecture he gave this morning (Feb. 24) at the University of Notre Dame in Sydney, Australia, on the general theme of "The Church in the 21st Century".

In it, Fr. Weinandy describes and denounces the attack of unprecedented gravity that some of the “pastoral” theories and practices encouraged by Pope Francis are carrying out against the “one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic” Church and in particular against the Eucharist that is “source and summit” of the Church’s very life.

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Thanks to Catholic World Report for making the entire lecture available online.


The four marks of the Church and
the contemporary crisis in ecclesiology
We need to mount a robust defense and clear advocacy of the Church’s four marks, for without such an apologia,
the Church’s identity – what she truly is – becomes disordered, enfeebling her ability to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
by Fr. Thomas Weinandy, OFM

February 23, 2018

The Nicene Constantinopolitan Creed (381 AD) professes that we believe in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. Each mark, in its fullness, must be properly conceived and articulated, and yet only together, in their perichoretic relationship, do they form the theological foundation of the Church’s authentic self-understanding.

Without them the Church’s own self-identity would become opaque, possessing no discernable defining character, and so would be exposed to any and every imposed guise – either by herself or from without. Moreover, these four ecclesial marks are most fully expressed and most abundantly nurtured within the Eucharist liturgy.

In this talk I will argue for the above in the following way.
- First, I will examine, at some length, St. Ignatius of Antioch’s seven letters.
- Second, I will examine, more briefly, Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium. Each text perceives the Church’s revealed identity within these four defining marks.
- Lastly, with the aid of St. John Paul II’s encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia, I will contend that these four defining ecclesial marks are presently at risk.

This threat comes not only from within the Catholic theological community, but even and regrettably from within Church leadership. Because of this danger I will conclude by advocating the need to mount a robust defense and clear advocacy of the Church’s four marks.

Without such an apology, the Church’s identity – what she truly is – will become disordered, and so will enfeeble her ability to live and to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This enfeeblement, then, will also be most visibly enacted within the Eucharistic liturgy which will not only cause scandal but also, and more importantly, demean the Eucharistic liturgy as the supreme enactment of the Church being One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.

St. Ignatius of Antioch:
The Eucharistic oneness of the Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church
You may be wondering why I have chosen Ignatius of Antioch as my starting point since he lived almost two millennia before the Second Vatican Council and John Paul II. I have done so because I consider Ignatius to be one of the most prophetically advanced theologians within the Church’s long theological tradition.

Actually, as an Apostolic Father (d. 107) who was acquainted with much of the written New Testament, Ignatius helped to initiate what would become the Church’s theological tradition. (1) Importantly, for our topic, Ignatius is the first to bear witness to the distinctive hierarchical structure of the Church – the existence of bishops, priests, deacons and laity. He did not argue for this ecclesial arrangement, but presumed that it had faithfully and naturally developed from within the earliest apostolic churches – the nascent Christian communities of which he was himself a participating bishop member.

What Ignatius did do within his seven letters was develop an ecclesiology that embodied the four ecclesial marks, though he would not have thought to employ that theological designation. As we will see, in so doing, Ignatius was prophetically anticipating Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, as well as John Paul II’s encyclical concerning the foundational supporting and nourishing inter-relationship between the Church and the Eucharist.

Unity, for Ignatius, is the Church’s supreme present expression as well as her definitive goal. Ignatius exhorts Bishop Polycarp: “Give thought especially to unity, for there is nothing more important than this” (Ad Poly. 1). (2)

To the Magnesians Ignatius writes: “I pray for their [all of the churches] corporate as well as their spiritual unity – both of these are the gifts of Jesus Christ, our never-failing Life” (Ad Mag. 1). He closes his letter with this final appeal: “Farewell. See that there is a godly unity among you, and a spirit that is above all divisions; for this is Jesus Christ” (Ad Mag. 15).

Ignatius assures the Philadelphians that he did his “part as one dedicated to the cause of unity; for where disunion and bad blood exist, God can never be dwelling” (Ad Phil. 8). The Smyrnaeans, since they live in Christ and in communion with the Holy Spirit, participate “in the Divine Unity” (Ad Smy. 12). Unity is Jesus’s utmost gift for it is the gift of himself in whom the Church is assumed into the divine intimacy of the Trinity.

If unity is the Church’s aim, faith, for Ignatius, is the justifying source of that oneness. He exalts in the Smyrnaeans: “Glory be Jesus Christ, the Divine One, who has gifted you with such wisdom. I have seen how immovably settled in faith you are; nailed body and soul, as it were, to the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, and rooted and grounded in love by His blood. You hold the firmest convictions about our Lord” (Ad Smy. 1).

In particular it is the faith of the Apostles that establishes the Church’s oneness. Ignatius tells the Ephesians that “Christians who are in the power of Jesus Christ have ever been of the self-same mind as the Apostles” (Ad Eph. 11; cf. Ad Phil. 4).

Moreover, Jesus Christ, as already seen in the above quotes, is the sole source of this ecclesial unity for through faith in him all are united to him and to one another, and together, in communion with the Holy Spirit, are united to the one God and Father of all.

Echoing Paul, Ignatius professes that Christians are one new man in Christ since they are “united in faith” and so become one in him (Ad Eph. 20; cf. Ad Smy. 4; Ad Mag. 12). The ultimate and greatest effect of faith is that all “be one with Jesus and the Father” (Ad Mag. 1).

This ecclesial oneness through the unity of faith in Jesus Christ is witnessed in the faithful being united to their bishop in whom this unity of ecclesial faith is personified.

For Ignatius, there is a hierarchal unifying sequence. To honor the bishop is not so much to respect him as to esteem “the Father of him who is the Bishop of us all, Jesus Christ” (Ad Mag. 3). As one would obey the supreme bishop, Christ, so one is to obey him who is a bishop of the Bishop, Christ himself (cf. Ad Mag. 3, 6-7; Ad Tral. 2; Ad Phil. 3; Ad Smy. 8-9).

Ignatius tells the Ephesians how privileged they are: “If I myself reached such an intimacy with your bishop in a brief space of time – an intimacy that was less of this world than of the Spirit – how much more fortunate must I count you, who are as inseparably one with him as the Church is with Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ with the Father; so constituting one single harmonious unity throughout” (Ad Eph. 5).

Here we perceive again a logical sequence of causal unity. To be united to the bishop is to be in unity with the Church and to be united to the Church is to be in unity with Jesus and to be united to Jesus is to be in unity with his Father. And this oneness is founded, as Ignatius states above, upon the intimacy of the Holy Spirit. Similarly, Ignatius encourages the Magnesians:

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Do your utmost to stand firm in the precepts of the Lord and the Apostles, so that everything you do, worldly or spiritual, may go prosperously from beginning to end in faith and love, in the Son and the Father and the Spirit, together with your most reverend bishop and that beautifully-woven spiritual chaplet, your clergy and godly minded deacons. Be as submissive to the bishop and to one another as Jesus Christ was to his Father, and as the Apostles were to Christ and the Father; so that there may be complete unity, in the flesh as well as in the spirit (Ad Mag. 13). (3)

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For Ignatius, then, the bishop is the cornerstone of this ecclesial and apostolic unity for “where the bishop is to be seen, there let all of his people be; just as wherever Jesus Christ is present, we have the world-wide [catholic] Church” (Ad Smy. 8).(4)

Moreover, “we can have no life apart from Jesus Christ; and as he represents the mind of the Father, so our bishops, even those in the remotest parts of the world, represent the mind of Jesus Christ” (Ad Eph. 3).

Ignatius employs the analogy of an orchestral symphony and choir. Priests are to be attuned to their bishop “like strings on a harp” that results in praise of Jesus for their “minds are in unison” and their affections are “in harmony.” Therefore, the laity are to “come and join this choir, every one of you; let there be a whole symphony of minds in concert; take the tone all together from God, and sing aloud to the Father with one voice through Jesus Christ, so that he may hear you and know by your good works that you are indeed members of his Son’s Body. A completely united front will help to keep you in constant communion with God” (Ad Eph. 4).

This ecclesial oneness in Christ and in his Church, in turn, empowers Christians to perform the deeds of holiness, for only holy Christians within the holy Church are able to accomplish holy acts of love. Ignatius assures the Ephesians:

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Men who are carnal are no more capable of acting spiritually, nor spiritual men of acting carnally, than deeds of unbelief are possible for the faithful, or deeds of faith to the unbelieving. But with you, even what you do in the flesh is spiritual, for your actions are all done in Jesus Christ (Ad Eph. 8).
Furthermore:
Given a thorough-going faith and love for Jesus Christ, there is nothing in all this that will not be obvious to you; for life begins and ends with those two qualities. Faith is the beginning, and love is the end; and the union of the two together is God. All that makes for a soul’s perfection follows in their train, for nobody who professes faith will commit sin, and nobody who possesses love can feel hatred. As the tree is known by its fruits, so they who claim to belong to Christ are known by their actions; for this work of ours does not consist in just professions, but in a faith that is both practical and lasting (Ad Eph. 14).

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The Church is the fount of all holiness for its source is Jesus, who as the Christ, pours out his Holy Spirit upon all who believe in him. In this Spirit all of the faithful enact the holy deeds of love.

What we perceive in all of the above is Ignatius’s clear perception that as the Trinity of persons constitutes the one holy God, so within the economy of salvation the Father through his Son, Jesus, and through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, establishes the one, holy, catholic Church. This Church comprises all who believe in Christ. Being one in Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, Christians thus become children of the Father.

This oneness finds its ecclesial apostolic expression in the faithful being united to their bishops, the successors of the Apostles, and with the priests and deacons, for to be in communion with the Bishop and his apostolic council is to be united to Jesus in the Spirit and so born into the life of the Father – the fount and consummation of all oneness.

This ecclesial oneness of apostolic faith, for Ignatius, is supremely expressed and enacted within the Eucharist, for here all the faithful are united around their one bishop to celebrate one sacred liturgy whereby all become most fully one in Christ Jesus and so made holy in communion with his Eucharistic presence. Though he did not articulate it explicitly, Ignatius grasps that the Eucharist supremely embodies and so most fully makes actual all four marks of the Church.

Because those who espouse erroneous doctrines cast themselves outside of the Church and her Eucharistic assembly, Ignatius urges the Philadelphians:

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Make certain, therefore, that you all observe one common Eucharist; for there is but one Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, and but one cup of union with his Blood, and one single altar of sacrifice – even as also there is but one Bishop, with his clergy and my own fellow-servitors the deacons. This will ensure that all your doings are in full accord with the will of God (Ad Phil. 4).

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Ignatius warns the Ephesians that no one should “be under any illusion; a man who excludes himself from the sanctuary is depriving himself of the bread of God, for if the prayer of one or two has such efficacy, how much more powerful is that of the bishop together with his whole church. Anyone who absents himself from the congregation convicts himself at once of arrogance and becomes self-excommunicate” (Ad Eph. 5; cf. Ad Smy. 8).

Only those who are “in a state of grace” and are “united in faith” and so one “in Christ Jesus” are ready “to share in the one common breaking of bread – the medicine of immortality, and the sovereign remedy by which we escape death and live in Jesus Christ for evermore” (Ad Eph. 20; cf. ibid. 13).

Significantly, Ignatius does not extol the ecclesial importance of the Eucharist without simultaneously speaking of those who are incapable of joining in the Eucharistic assembly. By its very nature the Eucharist is a living enactment of Church’s oneness, a unity founded upon the one universal apostolic faith though which the faithful are united to their bishop, and so in communion with Jesus Christ, the head of his body the Church.

Only those, therefore, who are in a state of grace, and so conjoined to the Church, are able to participate in this supreme sacrament of faith. Heretics, those who reject the apostolic faith of the one, holy, catholic Church of Christ, literally ex-communicate themselves from being in communion with the Church, and so render themselves incapable of receiving Jesus in communion. Only those in communion with the Church are able “to go to communion” within the Eucharistic liturgy.

The Gnostics bear witness to this for “they even absent themselves from the Eucharist and the public prayers, because they will not admit that the Eucharist is the self-same body of our Savior Jesus Christ which suffered for our sins and which the Father in his goodness afterwards raised up again” (Ad Smy. 7).

Heresy, for Ignatius, is thus fundamentally destructive: it destroys the oneness of the Church by denying the universal apostolic faith, the very universal apostolic faith that constitutes the oneness of the Church. Thus, Ignatius is adamant:

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“No man who is responsible for defiling a household can expect to share in the kingdom of God…; how much more when a man’s subversive doctrines defile the God-given faith for which Jesus Christ was crucified. Such a wretch in his uncleanness is bound for the unquenchable fire, and so is anyone else who gives him a hearing” (Ad Eph. 16).

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Ignatius constantly warns the faithful to guard themselves “carefully against such men of that sort” and especially to “close your ears, then, if anyone [the Gnostics] preaches to you without speaking of Jesus Christ” who was truly born in the flesh, truly suffered and died in the flesh and is truly risen in the flesh (Ad Tral. 7 & 9).

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“Flee for your very life from these men; they are poisonous growth with a deadly fruit, and one taste of it is speedily fatal. They are not of the Father’s planting” for they deny the passion, cross and death of Jesus and so deny that he is the head of his body, “for the promise that we have from God is the promise of unity, which is the essence of himself” (Ad Tral. 11).

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For Ignatius, heresy is absolutely detestable precisely because it abolishes the unity of the Church, and it does so by denying the Church’s one, catholic and apostolic faith.

In concluding our study of Ignatius of Antioch, I want to make two final points. First, Ignatius wrote to six churches, five of which had compassionately sent their bishop and representatives to visit him while he made his martyr’s journey to Rome. He likewise wrote a letter ahead of himself to the church of Rome. He did so for the sole purpose of discouraging that church from meddling in and so obstructing his imminent martyrdom. He wrote his seventh letter to his good friend, Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna.

While all of these were individual local churches with their own presiding bishop, Ignatius clearly presumed that they all believed the same apostolic doctrine; that they all participated in the same sacramental practice; and that they all taught and upheld the same moral precepts. Thus, these individual churches were in universal communion with one another.

Not only did each bear witness to their being one, holy, catholic and apostolic, but together they also bore communal witness to these same ecclesial marks. No one church possessed a distinctive doctrinal or ethical defining difference from the others. They all enjoyed the same identifying ecclesial characteristics that were evident to all – both within and outside the Christian faith.

This ecclesial communion among the individual local churches, along with what makes them one in themselves and among themselves, will be important when we examine the present ecclesial crises surrounding the four marks of the Church. (5)

Secondly, Ignatius was acutely aware of the destructiveness of heretical teaching, for such erroneous teaching eliminated the very ecclesial marks that defined the Church. He, nonetheless, appears to be naïve in that he strongly gives the impression throughout his letters that bishops, by the very nature of their office, could never be heretics themselves. We see this in his constant emphasis and adamant demand that the faithful unwaveringly be obedient and loyal to their respective bishops.

What is to be made of such seeming naiveté? Ignatius may have been in the enviable position of never having encountered a heretical bishop, but if he ever did chance upon one, he would have had a ready response at hand. He would clearly have argued in the same manner that we have observed in our above study.

For a bishop to espouse heretical teaching, whether concerning doctrine, morals, or pastoral and sacramental practice which bears upon doctrine and morals, Ignatius would have contended that
- such a bishop no longer was in union with the catholic ecclesial community for he no longer professed the one apostolic faith of the Church and thus rendered himself incapable of exercising fully his office as bishop.
- He could no longer teach and govern as an authentic successor of the Apostles, nor could he preside over the Eucharistic liturgy in a manner that bore witness to and enriched the oneness of the holy catholic Church.

Simply put, such a heretical bishop would no longer bear within himself as a bishop the four defining marks of the Church and, therefore, he could no longer justifiably act as an ecclesial member within the Church. He may continue to act outside the Church, or even within the Church, but his actions would lack a genuine ecclesial character, for the essential and indispensable four marks of the church would be absent within his specious ministry. Such, I believe, would be Ignatius’s rejoinder to a heretical bishop. And an argument I will similarly employ in face of our contemporary ecclesial crisis.

Vatican-II: The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church
(Lumen Gentium) and the four marks of the Church
Now we will examine the Church’s four marks within the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church – Lumen Gentium. Before we do, however, we need to remember that concern for the Church’s oneness, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity did not jump from Ignatius to Vatican II. Such attention was always present, and markedly came to the fore with Pius XII’s encyclical, Mystici Corporis Christi.

For him, the one Body of Christ is founded upon the harmony of her apostolic faith and the universality of her calling to make all humankind holy. Pius’s encyclical, then, was the direct prelude to Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. What may seem surprising, then, is that Lumen Gentium does not allocate a specific treatment to the marks of the Church, but rather speaks of them within various ecclesial topics. Nonetheless, their importance is evident throughout, and, not unexpectedly, in accord with the thought of Ignatius of Antioch.

From the very onset, the Constitution, like Ignatius, emphasizes the foundational mark of oneness. For the Council, Christ is the light of the world and his light visibly shines forth in the Church. Therefore, “the Church, in Christ, is in the nature of a sacrament – a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and the unity among men” (LG. 1). (6) While contemporary humankind is drawn together ever more closely, “it still remains for them to achieve full unity in Christ” (ibid.). Having established the foundational ecclesial theme of unity, the Constitution allots a paragraph to each of the persons of the Trinity, and in so doing brings to the fore the other defining marks of the Church.

First, the Father determined, from the time of Adam, and specifically in his making a covenant with Abraham, “to call together in a holy Church those who should believe in Christ” (ibid. 2). This summons will find its completion at the end of time when all the elect “will be gathered together with the Father in the universal Church” (ibid.).

Second, concerning the Son, the Father sent the Son into the world precisely to restore all things in him (cf. Eph. 1:4-5). Therefore, all “are called to this union with Christ, who is the light of the world, from whom we go forth, through whom we live, towards whom our whole life is directed” (ibid. 3). In the Eucharist, then, “the unity of believers is both expressed and brought about” (ibid.).

Third, concerning the Holy Spirit, Jesus, the incarnate Son, having completed his salvific work sent for the Holy Spirit “that he might continually sanctify the Church, and that, consequently, those who believe might have access through Christ in one Spirit to the Father” (ibid. 4). Through the “hierarchic and charismatic gifts,” the Spirit constantly renews the Church and leads her “to perfect union with her Spouse” (ibid.). Having summarized the work of each person of the Trinity, the council concludes: “Hence the universal Church is seen to be ‘a people brought into unity from the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’” (ibid.). (7)

The Council, in these three paragraphs, has articulated the four marks of the Church, and in so doing has echoed Ignatius. The source and end of the Church’s oneness is founded upon the unity of the Trinity. Within the economy of salvation this unity is achieved in the Father uniting all believers in Christ through the Holy Spirit.

Moreover, as the Body of Christ, the Church embodies and fosters this communion with the Father in the Holy Spirit. Thus, the mark of perfect oneness also resides in the marital relationship of the Church being the Spouse of Christ. As the Constitution progresses, it not only re-affirms what it articulated concerning the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit but also expands its teaching.

As the Head of his Body, Jesus, as the Christ, bestows the mark of holiness upon his Church, for the Holy Spirit “functions as the principle of life, the soul” (ibid. 7) and, thus imbues the Church with a life of holiness. As the Savior and Lord of all, Jesus also confers upon his Church the mark of universality for “all men are called to this catholic unity which prefigures and promotes universal peace” (ibid. 13).

The Council further states: “For by communicating his Spirit, Christ mystically constitutes as his body those brothers of his who are called together from every nation” (ibid. 7). Likewise, through the hierarchic and charismatic gifts, Jesus, through the Spirit, gives to the Church an ecclesial structure that bears the mark of apostolicity, a mark that ensures that all of the Spirit’s gifts and graces flourish for the up-building of his Body (cf. ibid.).

The Constitution emphasizes that the “foundation of the Church is built by the apostles (cf. I Cor. 3:11) and from it the Church receives solidarity and unity” (ibid. 6). Specifically, “the Roman Pontiff, as the successor of Peter, is the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity of bishops and of the whole company of faithful” (ibid. 23).

Moreover, “in order that the episcopate itself might be one and undivided he [Jesus] put Peter at the head of the apostles, and in him he set up a lasting and visible source and foundation of the unity both of faith and communion” (ibid. 18; cf. 19 and 20). This unity among the episcopate is principally exercised within counsels and synods (cf. ibid. 23 and 25).

Moreover, episcopal conferences also contribute to “safeguarding the unity of the faith and the unique divine structure of the universal Church,” “for all bishops have the obligation of fostering and safeguarding the unity of faith and of upholding the discipline which is common to the whole Church…” (ibid. 23).

This ecclesial unity of doctrine and morals, which manifests the four marks of the Church, are expressed and nurtured within the sacraments, especially within the Eucharist. In this sacrament Jesus most fully unites himself to his earthly Church, his Body, and confers upon her his universal and apostolic holiness (cf. ibid. 7). (8)

The Council also accentuates, in the light of some erroneous Reformation views, that the holy Church of Christ is both visible and invisible and not two separate realities; as if the visible is of human origin and the invisible is of divine origin. This truth pertains to the Church’s sacramentality, for in and through her visible structure and sacramental acts, the grace of Christ is endowed upon the faithful and the world.

Thus, as in the Incarnation where the visible humanity is one with and so manifests the divinity of the Son, so the visible Church is one with and so manifests all of her invisible graces. The Constitution accentuates that the one visible and invisible Church “is the sole Church of Christ which in the Creed we profess to be one, holy, catholic and apostolic…” (ibid. 8).

Moreover, it deems that “this Church, constituted and organized as a society in the present world, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him” (ibid.).

The four marks of the Church are, then, most spiritually present and most visibly manifested within the Catholic Church for in her they fully subsist. These ecclesial subsisting four marks of the universal Church are realized and manifested not only within the Church as a whole but also within each of the individual local churches. In communion with the local apostolic bishop, especially within the celebration of the Eucharist, “these communities, though they may often be small and poor, or existing in the diaspora, Christ is present through whose power and influence the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church is constituted” (ibid. 26). In this light the Council clearly designates and defines those who are fully members of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

Fully incorporated into the Church are those who, possessing the Spirit of Christ, accept all of the means of salvation given to the Church together with her entire organization, and who – by the bonds constituted by the profession of faith, the sacraments, ecclesial government, and communion – are joined in the visible structure of the Church of Christ, who rules her through the Supreme Pontiff and the bishops. Even though incorporated into the Church, one who does not however persevere in charity is not saved. He remains indeed in the bosom of the Church, but “in body” and not “in heart” (ibid. 14). (9)

To be a full member of the Church demands that one share the faith of the visible Church, participate in the visible sacraments of the Church and be in communion with and be governed by the visible structure of the Church, for only in so doing does one live within the one, universal, and apostolic Church of Christ in which the full means of the Spirit’s holiness resides.

Significantly, the Council notes that, if one does not persevere in charity because of sinning gravely, one is still a member of the Church, but one no longer partakes of the Church’s life; for one no longer shares in her oneness, holiness, universality and apostolicity – for these are the means, the bond, and the fruit of ecclesial love. (10)

Having examined the four marks of the Church within the teaching of Ignatius of Antioch and Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, I now want to address the crisis that I perceive presently exists within the Church – a crisis in which the four marks of the Church are under subtle, but well-defined, attack.

I will do so in reference not only to Ignatius and Lumen Gentium, but also to John Paul II’s encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, for here he already identifies some of the assaults on the four marks of the Church and clearly responds to them.

The contemporary challenge to the four marks
of the Church and its Eucharistic impact
Prior to and following upon Vatican II, St. Pope John XXIII and Blessed Paul VI, in their respective encyclicals, Mater et Magistra and Ecclesiam Suam, stressed the importance of the Church’s teaching office – a ministry that fostered and upheld the apostolic faith so as to assure the one, universal, holiness of God’s people.

John Paul II, then, not only follows upon Ignatius and Vatican II, but places himself squarely within the immediate preceding papacies. Thus, John Paul steadfastly holds that oneness is the fundamental and indispensable mark of the Church. He writes in Ecclesia de Eucharistia:

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The Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops in 1985 saw in the concept of an “ecclesiology of communion” the central and foundational idea of the documents of the Second Vatican Council. The Church is called during her earthly pilgrimage to maintain and promote communion with the Triune God and communion among the faithful. For this purpose she possesses the word and the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist, by which she “constantly lives and grows” and in which she expresses her very nature. It is not by chance that the term communion has become one of the names given to this sublime sacrament (Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 34). (11)

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Granted the post-Vatican II Church was rife with divisions – disputes over doctrine, morals and the liturgy. These disagreements continue still. However, at no time during the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI was there ever any doubt as to what the Church teaches concerning her doctrine, morals, and liturgical practice.

Both recognized that what truly made the Church one is her unalterable apostolic and universal faith, and her sacraments, especially the Eucharist, as fount and means of her holiness. They, therefore, faithfully taught, clearly developed, and ardently promoted the Church’s doctrinal and moral teaching, and her authentic sacramental practice – all for the sake of guaranteeing and fostering her ecclesial communion. Such is not the case, in many significant ways, within the present pontificate of Pope Francis.

Challenge to the Church’s oneness
Much of Pope Francis’s pontificate is admirable and praiseworthy. One only needs to observe, to note a few, his defense of the sanctity of life, his concern for the poor and the marginalized, and his encouragement to the young.

At times, nonetheless, it would appear that Pope Francis identifies himself not as the promoter of unity but as the agent of division. His practical philosophy, if it is an intentional philosophy, seems to consist in the belief that a greater unifying good will emerge from the present bedlam of divergent opinions and the turmoil of the resulting divisions.

My concern here is that such approach, even if unintentional, strikes at very essence of the Petrine ministry as intended by Jesus and as continuously understood by the Church. The successor of St. Peter, by the very nature of the office, is to be, literally, the personal embodiment and thus the consummate sign of the Church’s ecclesial communion, and so the principle defender and promoter of the Church’s ecclesial communion.

Thus, a manner of proceeding that allows and even encourages doctrinal and moral divergences undermines the whole of Vatican II’s teaching on ecclesial communion, as well as that of the entire magisterial and theological tradition going back to Ignatius. By seeming to encourage doctrinal division and moral discord within the Church the present pontificate has transgressed the foundational mark of the Church – her oneness. How, nonetheless, does this offense against the Church’s unity manifest itself? It does so by destabilizing the other three marks of the Church.

Challenge to the Church’s apostolicity
Firstly, the apostolic nature of the Church is being undermined. As has often been noted by theologians and bishops, and most frequently by the laity (those who possess the sensus fidelium), the teaching of the present pontiff is not noted for its clarity. (12)

As the one most responsible for the unity of the Church, the pope is the one who is most responsible for ensuring the bond of faith. To be in full ecclesial communion with the apostolic Church, whether it is the pope or the newest convert, it is necessary to believe what the Apostles handed on and what the apostolic Church has consistently taught.

For Pope Francis, then, as seen in Amoris Laetitia, to re-conceive and newly express the previously clear apostolic faith and magisterial tradition in a seemingly ambiguous manner, so as to leave confusion and puzzlement within the ecclesial community, is to contradict his own duties as the successor of Peter and to transgress the trust of his fellow bishops, as well as that of priests and the entire faithful. Ignatius would be dismayed at such a situation.

If, for him, heretical teaching espoused by those who are only loosely associated with the Church is destructive to the Church’s unity, how much more devastating is ambiguous teaching when authored by a bishop who is divinely charged to ensure ecclesial unity. At least heresy is a clear denial of the apostolic faith and so can be clearly identified and as such properly addressed. Ambiguous teaching, precisely because of its murkiness, cannot be clearly identified, and so is even more troublesome for it fosters uncertainty as to how it is to be understood and thus how it is to be clarified.

Moreover, for Pope Francis to then take sides in the ensuing debate, a debate for which he himself is responsible, concerning the proper interpretation of the uncertain teaching is disingenuous. He has now allowed others to be the arbiter of what is true, when it is precisely the apostolic mandate of the pope to be the one who confirms the brethren, both episcopal and laity, in the truth.

Furthermore, to appear to sanction an interpretation of doctrine or morals that contravenes what has been the received apostolic teaching and magisterial tradition of the Church – as dogmatically defined by Councils and doctrinally taught by previous popes and the bishops in communion with him, as well as accepted and believed by the faithful - cannot then be proposed as magisterial teaching. The magisterium simply cannot fundamentally contradict itself concerning matters of faith and morals.

While such teaching and confirmation may be enacted by a member of the magisterium, such as the Pope, such teaching and confirmation is not magisterial precisely because it is not in accord with previous magisterial teaching.
- To act in such a manner, the pontiff, or a bishop for that manner, is acting in a manner that places himself outside the magisterial communion of previous pontiffs and bishops, and so is not a magisterial act.
- To act in a magisterial manner one has to be, including the pope, in communion with the entire ever-living magisterial tradition.

In the matter of faith and morals the teaching of no living pope takes apostolic and magisterial precedence over the magisterial teaching of previous pontiffs or the established magisterial doctrinal tradition. The magisterial and apostolic import of a present pontiff’s teaching lies precisely in its being in conformity with and so in living-communion with the abiding historical magisterial and apostolic tradition.

That Pope Francis’s ambiguous teaching at times appears to fall outside the magisterial teaching of the historic apostolic ecclesial community thus gives cause for concern, for it fosters division and disharmony rather than unity and peace within the one apostolic Church. There appears to be, as a consequence, no assurance of faith.

Challenge to the Church’s catholicity
Secondly, as we saw in examining the ecclesiology of Ignatius and especially Vatican II, all of the bishops throughout the world, who are in communion with the pope, are together responsible for the apostolic oneness of the Church. The universality of the Church is visibly manifested in that all of the particular churches are bound together, through the college of bishops in communion with the pope, by professing the same apostolic faith and by preaching the one universal Gospel to all of humankind. We saw this clearly expressed in Ignatius's letters.

Traditionally, this catholic oneness is most clearly exercised within universal councils and extraordinary synods. Moreover, as Lumen Gentium acknowledges, national bishops’ conferences, while attending to pastoral issues that pertain to their own culture and locale, also exercise this catholicity by safeguarding and promoting the universal doctrinal and moral teaching of the Church as well as insuring that the universal sacramental and liturgical disciplines of the Church are properly observed.

Thus, as exemplified in Ignatius and Vatican II, the entire visible hierarchical governance of the universal Church is structured precisely to maintain and promote ecclesial communion – a communion that embodies the one apostolic faith. This mark of catholic oneness is also presently challenged.

Pope Francis’s espousal of synodality has been much touted – the allowance of local geographical churches more self-determinative freedom. On one level this decentralization is welcomed for it encourages national bishops’ conferences and local ordinaries to take more governing responsibility.

As envisioned, however, by Pope Francis and advocated by others, this notion of synodality, instead of ensuring the universal oneness of the Catholic Church, an ecclesial communion composed of multiple particular churches, is now employed to undermine and so sanction divisions within the Church. This rupture is not simply on matters of local and national significance, but on issues that bear upon the doctrinal and moral integrity of the one Church of Christ.

We are presently witnessing the disintegration of the Church’s catholicity, for local churches, both on the diocesan and national level, are often interpreting doctrinal norms and moral precepts in various conflicting and contradictory ways. Thus, what the faithful are instructed to believe and practice in one diocese or country is not in conformity with what the faithful are instructed to believe and practice in another diocese or country.

The Church’s mark of oneness, a unity that the pope is divinely mandated to protect and engender, is losing its integrity because her marks of catholicity and apostolicity have fallen into doctrinal and moral disarray, a theological anarchy that the pope himself, maybe unwittingly, has initiated by advocating a flawed conception of synodality. To put this erroneous notion into practice, then, is to violate the catholicity of the Church herself.

Challenge to the Church’s holiness
This brings us to the fourth mark of the Church – her holiness. This mark is equally under siege, most especially, but not surprisingly, in relationship to the Eucharist.

For John Paul, Eucharistic communion “confirms the Church in her unity as the body of Christ” (ibid. 23; cf. 24). Because “the Eucharist builds the Church and the Church makes the Eucharist, it follows that there is a profound relationship between the two, so much so that we can apply to the Eucharistic mystery the very words with which, in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, we profess the Church to be ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic’” (ibid. 26). Of all the sacraments, therefore, it is “the Most Holy Sacrament” (ibid.). Likewise, it is apostolic for Jesus entrusted it to the Apostles and to their successors (cf. ibid. 27).

“The Eucharist thus appears as the culmination of all the sacraments in perfecting our communion with God the Father by identification with his only-begotten Son through the working of the Holy Spirit” (ibid. 34). Since the Eucharist conveys and nurtures most fully the four marks of the Church, John Paul insists:

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The celebration of the Eucharist, however, cannot be the starting-point for communion; it presupposes that communion already exists, a communion which it seeks to consolidate and bring to perfection.

The sacrament is an expression of this bond of communion both in its invisible dimension, which, in Christ and through the working of the Holy Spirit, unites us to the Father and among ourselves, and in its visible dimension, which entails communion in the teaching of the Apostles, in the sacraments and in the Church’s hierarchical order. The profound relationship between the invisible and visible elements of ecclesial communion is constitutive of the Church as a sacrament of salvation (ibid. 35). (13)

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In this proclamation, John Paul confirms, as seen above, the teaching of Vatican II, and echoes, inadvertently, Ignatius’s Eucharistic ecclesiology. To participate fully in the Church’s Eucharist, a liturgy that embodies and cultivates the four marks of the Church, one must also embody the four marks of the Church, for only in so doing is one in full communion with the Church so as to receive communion – the risen body and blood of Jesus, the source and culmination of one’s union with the Father in the Holy Spirit. Quoting from a document promulgated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, John Paul insists:

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“In fact, the community, in receiving the Eucharistic presence of the Lord, receives the entire gift of salvation and shows, even in its lasting visible form, that is the image and true presence of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church” (ibid. 39).14

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In the light of this, John Paul proceeds to address those issues that contravene this doctrinal understanding of the Eucharist and the reception of Holy Communion.

The first issue John Paul addresses, and the one that concerns us here, pertains specifically to holiness.(15) While one must profess the Church’s one apostolic faith, faith itself is insufficient for receiving Christ in the Eucharist. Referencing Vatican II, John Paul states that “we must persevere in sanctifying grace and love, remaining within the Church ‘bodily’ as well as ‘in our heart’” (ibid. 36). (16)

At the beginning of the Second Century, Ignatius, as we saw, made this same point – that one can only receive communion “in a state of grace” (Ad. Eph. 20). Thus, in accordance with the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Council of Trent, John Paul confirms:

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“I therefore desire to reaffirm that in the Church there remains in force, now and in the future, the rule by which the Council of Trent gave concrete expression to the Apostle Paul’s stern warning when it affirmed that in order to receive the Eucharist in a worthy manner, ‘one must first confess one’s sins, when one is aware of mortal sin’” (Ecclesia de Eucharistia 36). (17)

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In accordance with the doctrinal tradition of the Church, John Paul, therefore, insists that the sacrament of Penance is “necessary for full participation in the Eucharistic Sacrifice” when mortal sin is present (ibid. 37).

While he acknowledges that only the person can judge his or her state of grace, he asserts that “in cases of outward conduct which is seriously, clearly and steadfastly contrary to the moral norm, the Church, in her pastoral concern for the good order of the community and out of respect for the sacrament, cannot fail to feel directly involved” (ibid.).

John Paul intensifies his admonition by quoting Canon Law. Where there is “a manifest lack of proper moral disposition,” that is, according to Canon Law, when persons “obstinately persist in manifest grave sin,” they are “not to be permitted to Eucharistic communion” (ibid.) (18)

Here we perceive the present challenge to the Church’s holiness and specifically the holiness of the Eucharist. The question of whether divorced and remarried Catholic couples, who engage in marital acts, can receive communion revolves around the very issue of “outward conduct which is seriously, clearly and steadfastly contrary to the moral norm,” and, therefore, whether they possess “a manifest lack of proper moral disposition” for receiving communion.

Pope Francis rightly insists that such couples should be accompanied and so helped to form properly their consciences. Granted that there are extraordinary marital cases where it can be rightfully discerned that a previous marriage was sacramentally invalid, even though evidence for an annulment is unobtainable, thus allowing a couple to receive communion. Nonetheless, the ambiguous manner in which Pope Francis proposes this pastoral accompaniment permits a pastoral situation to evolve whereby the common practice will swiftly ensue that almost every divorced and remarried couple will judge themselves free to receive Holy Communion.

This pastoral situation will develop because moral negative commands, such as, “one shall not commit adultery,” are no longer recognized as absolute moral norms that can never be trespassed, but as moral ideals – goals that may be achieved over a period of time, or may never be realized in one’s lifetime. (19) In this indefinite interim people can continue, with the Church’s blessing, to strive, as best as they are able, to live “holy” lives, and so receive communion. Such pastoral practice has multiple detrimental doctrinal and moral consequences.

First, to allow those who are objectively in manifest grave sin to receive communion is an overt public attack on the holiness of what John Paul terms “the Most Holy Sacrament.” Grave sin, by its very nature, as Ignatius, Vatican II and John Paul attest, deprives one of holiness, for the Holy Spirit no longer abides within such a person, thus making the person unfit to receive holy communion.

For one to receive communion in such a, literally, disgraced state enacts a lie, for in receiving the sacrament one is asserting that one is in communion with Christ, when in actuality one is not.

Similarly, such a practice is also an offense against the holiness of the Church. Yes, the Church is composed of saints and sinners, yet, those who do sin, which is everyone, must be repentant-sinners, specifically of grave sin, if they are to participate fully in the Eucharistic liturgy and so receive the most-holy risen body and blood of Jesus.

A person who is in grave sin may still be a member of the Church, but as a grave-sinner such a person no longer participates in the holiness of the Church as one of the holy faithful. To receive communion in such an unholy state is, again, to enact a lie for in such a reception one is publicly attempting to testify that one is a graced and living member of the ecclesial community when one is not.

Second, and maybe more importantly, to allow those who persist in manifest grave sin to receive communion, seemingly as an act of mercy, is both to belittle the condemnatory evil of grave sin and to malign the magnitude and power of the Holy Spirit.

Such a pastoral practice is implicitly acknowledging that sin continues to govern humankind despite Jesus’s redeeming work and his anointing of the Holy Spirit upon all who believe and are baptized. Jesus is actually not Savior and Lord, but rather Satan continues to reign.

Moreover, to sanction persons in grave sin is in no manner a benevolent or loving act, for one is endorsing a state wherein they could be eternally condemned, thus jeopardizing their salvation.

Likewise, in turn, one is also insulting such grave-sinners, for one is subtly telling them that they are so sinful that not even the Holy Spirit is powerful enough to help them change their sinful ways and make them holy. They are inherently un-savable. Actually, though, what is ultimately being tendered is the admission that the Church of Jesus Christ is not really holy and so is incapable of truly sanctifying her members.

Lastly, scandal is the public pastoral consequence of allowing persons in unrepentant manifest grave sin to receive Holy Communion. It is not simply that the faithful members of the Eucharistic community will be dismayed and likely disgruntled, but, more importantly, they will be tempted to think that they too can sin gravely and continue in good standing with the Church. Why attempt to live a holy life, even a heroic virtuous life, when the Church herself appears to demand neither such a life, or even to encourage such a life?

Here the Church becomes a mockery of herself and such a charade breeds nothing but scorn and disdain in the world, and derision and cynicism among the faithful, or at best, a hope against hope among the little ones.

Conclusion
My conclusion will be brief. Much of what I have said, as you may have gathered, has been stated by others. Some will dismiss it as excessive or even mean-spirited. But that is not my intent or spirit at all.

As stated earlier there is much in the character of Pope Francis to admire, and we owe him our daily prayers for strength in facing the burdens of his ministry. However, that cannot excuse us from speaking the truth in love. Anyone experienced in religious life – or for that matter, in a marriage – will understand that sometimes the truth must be spoken bluntly – not out of bitterness, but out of fidelity to the persons involved and to safeguard the purpose they share.

What I have attempted to do, and I hope has been helpful, is place the contemporary crisis within the Church in its proper theological and doctrinal setting, that is, within the Church’s four defining marks. Only when we grasp that the Church’s very oneness, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity are at stake, what makes the Church truly herself, can we fully appreciate the degree and the consequence of the present crisis.

The Church’s very identity, our ecclesial communion, is being assailed, and because she is the Church of Christ, Jesus himself is being dishonored along with his saving work. What is presently being offered in its place is an anemic Church, a Church where the Holy Spirit is enfeebled, and so a Church that is incapable of giving full glory to God the Father. [But the only sensible way to look at it is that this anemic, enfeebled, incapable 'Church' is not the one true Church of Christ - which is one, holy, catholic and apostolic - but rather the ersatz 'church of Bergoglio'. The one true Church of Christ subsists for those Catholics who continue to live by the intact deposit of faith and see in Bergoglianism the open attempt to co-opt and subsume the one true Church to its ends.]

By attempting to manifest the perilous nature of the crisis, my goal was not simply to make this misfortune known, but to encourage all of us, bishops, priests and laity alike, to embark on an adequate response.

Such a response cannot be merely negative, a rebuttal of all the erroneous views and ambiguous arguments, though such is necessary,
but rather it must also be a response that is robustly positive.

From the time of St. Ignatius of Antioch to the time of the Second Vatican Council and St. John Paul II, the Church has continually proclaimed the good news of Jesus Christ and so the good news of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, a Church he conceived through his death and resurrection and to which he gave birth to in his sending forth the Holy Spirit. This constructive proclamation is what will renew the Church and so restore the fallen world to life in Christ.

Moreover, we must defend and promote a proper knowledge of and love for the Eucharist, for here, as we saw, the four marks of the Church are most fully expressed and abundantly nourished.

In the Eucharist above all the Church’s identity is most clearly enacted and made visible. For in the Eucharist we are made one with Christ and one with one another as together we profess and joyfully acclaim our one apostolic and universal faith, a faith that is imbued with the holiness of the Spirit, and so as one ecclesial community we worship and glorify God the Father – the source and end of all. Within the Eucharist, then, the Church’s four marks most beautifully shine.

Endnotes:
1. Within his seven letters, for example, Ignatius so argued against those who denied that the Son of God existed as an actual fleshly man but only appeared (docens) or seemed to do so, that is, the Docetists, so as to anticipate the doctrinal teaching of the Council of Chalcedon over three hundred years later (451 AD). For Ignatius, Jesus is the one and the same person of Son of God who existed from all eternity as God and who came to exist truly as man in time. Because of this incarnational reality all that pertains to the divine Son’s humanity – such as birth, suffering, and death, could rightly and properly be predicated of that one divine Son.
See T.G. Weinandy, “The Apostolic Christology of Ignatius of Antioch: The Road to Chacedon,” in Jesus: Essays in Christology (Sapientia Press: Ave Maria University, 2014), pp. 59-74. This essay was first published in Trajectories through the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers, ed. A. Gregory and C. Tuckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 71-84.
2. All quotations from Ignatius’s letters are taken from Early Christian Writers, trans. M. Staniforth, (Penguin Books: Baltimore, 1968).
3. For Ignatius, bishops, priests and deacons form an “Apostolic circle” or “council” and so only those who possess “these three orders” can rightly be named a “church” (Ad Tral. 3). The Trallians must always be in unity “with Jesus Christ and your bishop and the Apostolic institutions” (ibid. 7). Bishops, priests and deacons are ultimately “appointed” by Jesus Christ and “confirmed and ratified, according to his will, by his Holy Spirit” (Ad Phil, greeting).
4. Ignatius is the first to employ the term “catholic.” Here it refers to the universality of the Church. Only around 200 AD did it become a title – “the Catholic Church,” which designated it as the universal Church and so distinct from localized heretical sects.
5. Not without significance Ignatius makes reference to the other churches within his letters to the individual churches, especially at the conclusion of each of his letters. This referencing of the other churches testifies to their being in communion with one another and so to their individually and communally possessing the defining ecclesial characteristics – that of being one, holy, catholic and apostolic. Cf. Ad Eph. 21; Ad Mag. 15; Ad Tral. 12-13; Ad Rom. 9-10; Ad Phi. 10-11; Ad Smyrn. 11-13; Ad Poly. 7-8.
6. All quotations are taken from Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery, (Scholarly Resources Inc.: Wilmington, 1975).
7. The Constitution footnotes St. Cyprian, De Orat. Dom. 23; St. Augustine, Serm. 71, 20, 33; and St. John Damascene, Adv. Iconocl. 12. In the above paragraph I have placed in italics those words and phrases that speak of the four marks of the Church, though not designating them as such.
8. The Council does articulate an important aspect of the four marks of the Church that, while hidden in Ignatius’s theology, is never openly expressed, that is, the eschatological nature of these four ecclesial marks (cf. Ibid. 5). The Church fully becomes the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church only when Christ returns in glory. Then, his Body, the universal and apostolic Church, will be fully one with him in the Holy Spirit, thus sharing fully in his holiness. Again, as the Council later states: “While she slowly grows and matures, the Church longs for the completed kingdom and, with all her strength, hopes and desires to be united in glory with her king” (ibid. 5).
9. The Constitution footnotes St. Augustine, Bap. C. Donat. V. 28, 39: “Certe manifestum est, id quod dicitur, in Ecclesia intus et foris, non in corpore cogitandum.
10. For a more concise teaching on the four marks of the Church, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, numbers 811-835.
11. John Paul quotes Lumen Gentium, 26.
12. Pope Francis consistently uses the term “doctrine” in a negative manner – as being bookish and lifeless, far removed from the pastoral concerns of daily ecclesial life. This pitting doctrine and pastoral practice against one another is a false and dangerous dichotomy. The truths of doctrine are the guides and guardians of wise pastoral practice. Without doctrine, pastoral practice has no objective authentic anchor, and so is subject to sentimentality, pop-psychology, and the prejudices of contemporary culture.
13 At times one gets the impression that Pope Francis, as with the notion of doctrine, perceives the visible Church in a negative light. For the pope, the visible Church appears to assume the character of an impersonal governmental bureaucratic institution – created to make rigid rules and harsh regulations that often, again, have little bearing on the daily pastoral life of the Church – where the real Church exists in all its human tangled complexity. This view also comprises a false dichotomy. Yes, as with any big organization, there can be ecclesial bureaucratic red tape that is far from being constructive and helpful, and even pastoral, but the visible Church is, nonetheless, the sacramental sign and effective means by which, in which, and through which Jesus, through Holy Spirit, works his salvific wonders as Lord and Savior to the glory of God the Father. For this, love of the visible Church is not simply obligatory but a cause for rejoicing.
14. Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion, Communionis Notio (May 28, 1992).
15. He later addresses the issues of inter-communion with Protestant denominations, as well as the norms governing communion in relationship to the Eastern Orthodox Churches (cf. 43-46).
16. John Paul is quoting Lumen Gentium, 14.
17. John Paul is referencing the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1385 and the Council of Trent, DS 1647 and 1661.
18. John Paul is quoting Canon 915.
19. This understanding that negative moral norms are no longer absolute but goals to be achieved can be applied not only to those who commit adultery, but also to those who commit any other grave sin – fornication, homosexual acts, contraception, the molestation of children, stealing, etc. – and even murder. As long as they are attempting to do their very best, they can obtain the Church’s blessing and receive Holy Communion. Obviously such a pastoral practice is morally absurd.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 25/02/2018 04:03]

I'm happy to be able to pair off Fr. Weinandy's specific criticisms of Bergoglianism with a poignant if generic lament for the state of 'the Church' today under Bergoglio:

'Every man for himself':
Has 'the Church' arrived at her Dunkirk?
by Raymond Kowalski

February 15, 2018

I recently saw the movie Darkest Hour. It is the story of Winston Churchill’s first days as Britain’s prime minister, just nine months into the Second World War.

It is late May, 1940, and the Nazis have pushed into France, where the British, French, and Belgian forces have been trapped against the English Channel at Dunkirk. Churchill orders a garrison of British troops at a small nearby fort to fight a delaying action in order to allow as much time as possible for an evacuation of the hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers from the beach. When they have done all they could, the garrison is given the command “every man for himself,” freeing the soldiers from the necessity of obeying orders and allowing each man to survive as best as he can.

That’s where I am with my beloved Catholic Church. At age 72, I am in that small garrison that knows that the end is near. For us, there is no time to see how the mess that now engulfs the Catholic Church turns out. For Churchill and Great Britain, it all turned out well…five years later. But the soldiers in the sacrificial garrison never saw a sunrise in June. There was no help coming for them from Mother England.

I think of myself and people like me as “Bishop Sheen Catholics.” Over time, we have become the outpost. We know our faith. We know its doctrines, its dogmas, its morality, and its requirements. We are loyal. We are good soldiers. We follow orders. But we know when something is amiss. We know a contradiction when we see one. We hear the general giving ruinous orders and his lieutenants responding, “As you were.” Yet the general is not deterred.

For me, it started with Pope Francis’s “who am I to judge?” remark in 2013. I remember thinking, Wait a minute. When Christ created His first bishops and gave them the power to forgive sins, didn’t He say, “whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained?” Doesn’t this imply, or even require, making a judgment? How can a pope be asking such a question?

Since then, there have been so many actions, pronouncements, appointments, dismissals, attacks, defenses, exposés, and ambiguities that the Bishop Sheen Catholics have reached what Steve Skojec calls “outrage fatigue.” Each new affront to our faith sets off waves of profound commentary by extraordinarily well educated and experienced experts. They give us careful analysis, all based on well grounded scholarship, arguments, and opinions. It is exhausting to keep up.

As an attorney, I persuade and am persuaded by evidence, logic, and argument. But it was two powerful and scandalous images from this papacy that pushed me to my Dunkirk. The first was the postage stamp that the Vatican issued on October 31, 2017 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the riforma protestante.

This stamp depicts the Crucifixion. At the foot of the cross is Martin Luther, holding a Bible, and his theologian friend, Philipp Melanchthon, holding the Augsburg Confession. The image is a copy of the scene found on the tympanum above the doors of All Saints Lutheran Church in Wittenberg, Germany.

That the Vatican should even wish to commemorate this event raises questions enough, but to replace the traditional figures of the Blessed Mother and St. John at the foot of the cross is outrageous. The unspoken message could not have been clearer.

The second image was the 2017 Nativity scene erected by the Vatican in St. Peter’s Square. Augmenting and overwhelming the figures of the Holy Family were figures that ostensibly represented the seven corporal works of mercy. Among those figures, one stood out: a robust young man with hipster stubble who had obviously spent considerable time in the weight room. He represented “clothing the naked.” But this figure was no pitiable wretch. Quite clearly, he wanted to be naked, and he darn near was.

Even if you didn’t know the actual sodomitical connections within this travesty, you knew in your gut that Christmas had been hijacked with the Vatican’s approval. The unspoken message could not have been more clear.

So go ahead, you theologians, canon lawyers, and bloggers: keep up the commentary. But this Bishop Sheen Catholic does not have the time to wait for a resolution of the current mess, for consensus as to how the faithful should respond, or for help that will not come in my lifetime. For us, it’s every man for himself.

I used to have a condescending view of Protestants, with their 50,000 different denominations and their personally tailored relationship with God. We Catholics, on the other hand, had the “fullness of truth,” a single, coherent theology, and an unerring pope. To be truly Catholic, it was necessary to accept all of it without reservation.

Comes now this papacy, bringing with it a Catholicism that Fulton Sheen would not recognize. If I reject this new Catholicism and cling to what I know to be the authentic Church founded by Jesus Christ, am I no better than one of those Protestants, who also reject Catholicism and adhere to a belief system more to their liking?

Of course I pray for the pope. But I cannot bring myself to pray for this pope’s intentions. Not that I know the man’s mind. But I have seen enough of the fruits of this tree to be wary of it. No more plenary indulgences for me, I guess.

Someday in the future, people will look back at the reign of Francis and understand what was going on. For those of us living in the here and now, however, especially those of us nearing the end of the journey, we must decide how to conduct ourselves based on the best available information. We must process this information using our own education; experience; and, yes, conscience, and act accordingly.

How do we continue to follow the general’s orders?

Adjutórium nostrum in nómine Dómini (Our help is in the Name of the Lord).

HOW CAN WE EVER FORGET?


This image alone brings back the tremendous burden of poignancy one carries forever in the heart since our beloved Benedict announced his renunciation on February 11, 2013 - a poignancy made infinitely worse today because he could not have known the appalling magnitude of the unintended consequences brought on by his stepping down.

May God grant him the consolation that He alone can bring - and, though we are unaware what the Lord has in store for His Church at this moment in time, may that consolation redound to the good of the Church through these trying years without a shepherd worthy of the name and office.

Why we should now consider
Germany as 'mission territory'
Senior German churchmen have made clear that they believe something
different than what’s in the Catechism of the Catholic Church
by George Weigel

February 28, 2018

In his June 1908 apostolic constitution, Sapienti Consilio, Pope Pius X decreed that, as of November 3 that year, the Catholic Church in the United States would no longer be supervised by the Vatican’s missionary agency, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide). American Catholicism had grown up. The U.S. Church would now be a mission-sending Church, not “mission territory.”

This pattern has long characterized the organization of the world Church. Young local Churches begin as “mission territory” and their bishops are chosen in consultation with what’s now called the “Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples” (but which everyone in Rome still refers to by its old name, “Propaganda,” or simply “Prop”).

After these young Churches demonstrate that they can stand on their own spiritually, organizationally, and financially, they cease being “mission territory” and relate to the Roman Curia like the older local Churches; the bishops of these newly “graduated” local Churches are thus chosen in consultation with the Congregation for Bishops.

The rapid de-Christianization of Europe, however, prompts a thought-experiment:
- What should the Church do when this process of ecclesial maturation slips into reverse?
- Where do venerable but collapsing local Churches “fit” in their relationship to the Curia, the central government of the Catholic Church?
- If there can be a (sometimes lengthy) period of ecclesiastical apprenticeship during which a young, growing local Church is supervised by Propaganda Fide, might there be a parallel arrangement for decaying older local Churches, in which they’re taken into a form of ecclesiastical trusteeship aimed at rebuilding their evangelical, catechetical, and pastoral strength?
- And if we can imagine that (admittedly bold) move, which Roman agency should be the trustee?

For purposes of this thought-experiment, my nominee would be the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization. It seems the logical place. John Paul II’s 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio, the Magna Carta of the New Evangelization, called for urgent evangelism among Christians who had fallen away from the practice of the faith, or who had been poorly catechized, or who had, more likely, suffered both maladies, the latter contributing to the former.

That seems to describe most of the Church in western Europe. So perhaps the Church’s central administration should stop relating to dying European local Churches as if they weren’t dying, and recognize that they are, in fact, mission territory. But rather than putting such local Churches back under the supervision of “Prop,” put them into trusteeship under the supervision of a reconstituted and re-staffed Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization – just like a failed company that goes into Chapter 11 bankruptcy is supervised by a trustee until such time as the company can stand on its own feet again.

What would happen under this “trusteeship”? Again, let’s think outside the box. [It's an intriguing set of propositions but whether they're even doable at all under the present papal dispensation is highly questionable.]
- The trustee agency would recommend to the Pope replacements for failed bishops and nominees for empty sees, drawing candidates from around the world who had demonstrated success in enlivening a sclerotic or corrupt local Church. [How would one define a 'failed bishop' in this case, and would the pope, who alone can appoint bishops, agree with such a definition? Since all but a literal handful (you can count them on the fingers of one hand) of bishops in Germany promote and thrive on their apostate and heretical positions on Catholic doctrine and practice, then the latter must all be considered failed bishops, starting with Cardinal Marx who currently heads the German bishops' conference and is among the pope's advisers. How do you replace some 200 bishops in one fell swoop? And shouldn't they be the first objects of New Evangelization?]
- Pastoral life in the moribund local Church and the structures of its national bureaucracy would be examined by Catholics who are expert in making organization serve evangelization; those consulters would then make recommendations to the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization for mandated reforms.
- There would be apostolic visitations of seminaries and houses of religious formation, led by seminary rectors and religious men and women from living and growing communities, who would recommend needed changes; the trustee agency would then mandate their implementation.

Where might this form of trusteeship be tested? How about Germany? The practice of the faith is dying there. Senior German churchmen have made clear that they believe something different than what’s in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, whether the issue is the nature of marriage, the ethics of human love, the character of the Holy Eucharist and the priesthood, the authority of revelation, or the enduring effects of baptism.

And what could be more appropriate on the quincentenary of the Reformation than to call German Catholicism to a thoroughgoing Catholic reform?

Perhaps this thought-experiment – putting the German Church into ecclesiastical trusteeship – isn’t the answer to the Church’s German problem. But recognizing that Germany is mission territory is the beginning of any serious analysis of a grave situation, and any serious thinking about how it might be addressed.


Meanwhile, the intrepid Cardinal Sarah denounces the lack of faith on evident display by many bishops exemplified by those in Germany...

Cardinal Sarah:
'I denounce the lack of faith
in a betraying clergy'
by Marco Tosatti

February 27, 2018

In recent days, Cardinal Robert Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, was in Belgium for a presentation of his book, God or Nothing. He responded to certain tendencies to modify Catholic morality, in particular in regard to marriage and the family, as well as the Church's teaching on life issues.

Could some of his words be read as a response to the recent remarks of German Cardinal Reinhard Marx, of the Vice-President of the German Bishops’ Conference Franz Josef Bode, and of Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna?

It seems the answer is yes. Speaking to a church full of people, including the Apostolic Nuncio, Cardinal De Kesel, Mayor Woluwé-Saint Pierre, and Abbot Philippe Mawet, in charge of French-speaking pastoral ministry, who had criticized Sarah’s book a few days earlier in an article in the left-leaning daily Libre Belgique, the cardinal called out the ideologies and pressure groups that “with powerful financial means and ties to the media, attack the natural purpose of marriage and commit themselves to destroying the family unit.”

But the cardinal from Guinea, speaking in one of the most devastated local Churches of all of Europe, was not afraid to include tough words directed towards his brothers in the episcopate. “Some high-ranking prelates, above all those coming from opulent nations, are working to cause modifications to Christian morality with regard to the absolute respect for life from conception until natural death, the question of the divorced and civilly remarried, and other problematic family situations. These ‘guardians of the faith’ however ought not to lose sight of the fact that the problem posed by the fragmentation of the ends of marriage is a problem of natural morality...

These major drifts become manifest when some prelates or Catholic intellectuals begin to say or write about ‘a green light for abortion,’ ‘a green light for euthanasia.’ From the moment that Catholics abandon the teaching of Jesus and the Magisterium of the Church, they contribute to the destruction of the natural institution of marriage as well as the family and it is now the entire human family which finds itself fractured by this new betrayal on the part of priests."