The Great China-American Abyss

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

August 17, 2023

Imagine if the United States treated China in the same way it does us.

What if American companies simply ignored Chinese copyrights and patents, and stole Chinese ideas, inventions, and intellectual property, as they pleased and with impunity?

What if the American government targeted Chinese industries by dumping competing American export products below the cost of production—to bankrupt Chinese competitors and corner their markets?

What would the communist Chinese government do if a huge American spy balloon lazily traversed continental China—sending back to the United States photographic surveillance of Chinese military bases and installations?

How would China react to America stonewalling any explanation, much less refusing to apologize for such an American attack on Chinese sovereignty?

Envision a U.S. high-security virology lab in the Midwest, run by the Pentagon, allowing the escape of an engineered, gain-of-function deadly virus.

Instead of enlisting world cooperation to stop the spread of the virus, the American government would lie that it sprung up from a local bat or wild possum.

Washington would then make all its relevant military scientists disappear who were assigned to the lab while ordering a complete media blackout.

America would forbid Chinese scientists from contacting their American counterparts involved in the lab, despite the deaths of more than 1 million Chinese from the American-manufactured disease.

And what if during the first days of the pandemic, Washington had quietly prevented all foreign travel to the United States, while keeping open one-way direct flights from America to major Chinese cities?

How would Beijing respond if American biotech company warehouses were discovered in rural China with unsecured vials of deadly viruses and pathogens?

Would China be angered that it was never notified by an American company that it had left abandoned COVID and HIV viruses and malaria parasites in its facilities—along with rotting genetically engineered dead rats littering the floors with hundreds more lab animals abandoned in laboratory cages?

What would Chairman Xi Jinping have done if American-made fentanyl was shipped in massive quantities to nearby Tibet on the Chinese border? And what if it would be deliberately repackaged there as deceptive recreational drugs and smuggled into China, where it annually killed 100,000 Chinese youth, year after year?

What if 10,000 Americans this year illegally crossed the Indian border into China and disappeared into its interior?

What if an allied Asian nation—such as South Korea, Japan, or Taiwan—went nuclear? And what if, in North-Korean style, it serially blustered to send one of its nuclear missiles into the major cities of China?

What if almost monthly China discovered an American military operative teaching incognito at a major Chinese university or among the ranks of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army?

Would China object if an American femme fatale agent was sleeping with a high-ranking Chinese official of the Chinese communist politburo?

Or what if one of the chauffeurs of its top-ranking Chinese officials was a nearly two-decade-long American agent?

What would be the Chinese reaction if there were 350,000 American students attending schools all over the Chinese nation, with perhaps 3,000-4,000 of them actively engaged in national security espionage on behalf of the United States?

These “what-ifs” could be expanded endlessly. But they reflect well enough the great asymmetry in the bizarre Chinese-American relationship.

Obviously, China would not tolerate Americans treating it as it does America.

Why then does the imbalance continue?

Do naïve Americans believe that the more China is indulged, the more it will respond in kind to American magnanimity?

Does the United States believe that the more China is exposed to our supposedly radically democratic and free culture, the sooner it will become a good democratic citizen of the global community?

Are we afraid of China, because it has four times our population, and believes its economy and military will overtake ours in a decade?

Are we terrified that its ruthless Chinese government is entirely amoral, utterly ruthless, and capable of anything?

Or are our political, cultural, and corporate elites so compromised by their lucrative Chinese investments and joint ventures, that they prioritize profits over their own country’s national security and self-interest?

And did the Biden family—including President Joe Biden himself—in the past receive millions of dollars from Chinese energy and investment interests?

Did Hunter Biden’s quid pro quo decade of grifting result in millions in Chinese money fill the Biden family coffers—all in exchange for the current Biden and past Obama administrations going soft on Chinese aggression?

No one seems able to explain the otherwise inexplicable.

But one way to get along with China, and to regain its respect is to deal with it precisely the way it deals with the United States.

Anything less and America will continually be treated with even more Chinese contempt—and eventually extreme violence.

YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The U.S. Is In Real Decline

No Kidding!

By: Victor Davis Hanson

Part One: Energy – August 1, 2023

Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

     Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional”

There is proverbially a lot of rot in any great nation, which accordingly can endure a lot of self-induced damage.

But has the U.S. exhausted its reserves? Britain after World War I denied that its empire was doomed and its standard of living unsustainable. The Soviet Union was in decline gradually, then abruptly by 1989 became doomed. In the fourth century AD, Rome had established a modus vivendi of incorporating non-Romans into the empire, defending its borders, and tamping down on corruption. A century later, the Western empire collapsed from internal decay and tribal invasions across the Danube and Rhine.

Affordable energy had been America’s strength. We are still the largest combined natural gas and oil producer in the world—but determined to forfeit that advantage on the world stage and at home damage the viability of the middle class.

We were once the premier nuclear-generated power nation as well. No longer. Joe Biden and his surrogates on the state level have systematically waged war on fossil fuels, precluding even the reasonable idea that oil, gas, and coal can serve as necessary transition fuels over the next half-century, guaranteeing the American standard of living until the advent of viable alternative and renewable energies.

The only time Biden focuses on oil and gas is before a midterm or general election when he hurriedly will either drain more of the strategic petroleum reserve or showboat a few more new federal energy leases.

A state like California has the highest taxed and the costliest electricity in the continental United States, mostly as a result of bragging that it is self-sufficient in daytime electricity production due to massive and heavily subsidized solar and wind farms. Yet it keeps mum that after dark it must import equally large amounts of fossil-fuel-generated power from neighboring states.

One of the most bizarre developments during the Biden years has been the complete exemption given massive and growing Chinese coal use, coupled with the furor over domestic natural gas production and use.

Think of the logic: we coax and ignore our Chinese enemies who are hell-bent on record dirty coal use while hectoring the mostly now green American public on their supposedly toxic use of clean-burning natural gas—as if we could persuade 1.4 billion Chinese to cease burning coal by showing them that 330 million Americans can sacrifice by not burning natural gas.

Here again, is the ancient bureaucratic principle in play of focusing on the misdemeanor of the law-abiding, as a way to square the utter inability to deal with the felony of law-breaking.

As the U.S. is pushed to embrace the massive use of electrical vehicles, the vast majority of which will be charging after commute hours and in the dark, the more it resists nuclear and fossil fuel power generation, the only sure ways of producing steady and reliable electricity when the sun goes down.

As the elite clamp down on gas cooktops, pizza ovens, and gas water heaters of the middle classes, it is silent on the use of private jets, or the energy consumption in huge homes over 5,000-6,000 square feet, of the Obamas-Al Gore sort.

In California, we are far more likely to blow up a hydroelectric plant on a manmade reservoir than to create a new one—on the theory that someday we will have clean energy in abundance, but for now, the middle classes must suffer for energy-consuming sins.

A final thought. The Left pushes mass transit as the cure-all for supposedly wasteful and consumptive automobile use. Yet it can offer no alternative to the car that any sane American would consider.

In California, its multibillion-dollar price tag “high-speed” rail is stagnating between Merced and Bakersfield. After a decade, not a foot of track has been laid, and no one yet can explain why anyone would wish to go over 100 mph an hour from Bakersfield to Merced.

The Bay Area’s once state-of-the-art BART rail system is in decay. The cars are increasingly unreliable, dirty, and crime-ridden.

BART either cannot or will not ensure the safety of its passengers, in the toxic manner of all major contemporary urban mass transit systems. Why? In part, because to enforce laws against turnstile-jumping, harassment of passengers, or various assaults in stations would be, in the Age of Post-George-Floyd, somehow inappropriate.

One does not have to be a conspiracist to see that the Left likes mass transit and hates cars for reasons other than energy-per-mile individual consumption. The more millions become captives of trains, the more unions control their very lives, the more the state alone can ensure their safety, the more the government can determine their travel and commute, and the more “equity” can be enforced.

Part Two: Racial Relations – August 2, 2023

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

     Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”

I say America is in serious trouble because the Left has attacked systematically all of the U.S.’s great strengths and advantages on the world stage. It apparently thinks it must dismantle the old America before it can create a “new” America, something like a European Union state, only far more radical and volatile.

One, we were the only multiracial constitutional state that had avoided the tribalism and violence of the Balkans, Rwanda, or the Middle East. Europe, for all its public grandstanding about ecumenicalism, has yet to have a black president or prime minister. The idea that Barack Obama could become a Russian or Chinese citizen and reach similar pinnacles of political power is absurd. (And for that matter, include Mexico and much of Asia and Latin America.)

Yet race relations in the U.S. are at a historic low. More than 50 years of affirmative action have morphed into woke extremism, or the idea of racially separate graduations, dorms, workshops, and safe spaces. When working out, keeping a reasonable weight, camping, or showing up on time are now deemed racist, then there is no more Civil Rights movement which has instead descended into caricature.

The more minorities reached parity with or exceeded the income of, the majority population, the angrier and more volatile racial relations became. The operative principle seems to be something like “Before we can have racially blind relations in the 21st century, we must first make up for the racism, largely in the South, of the prior two centuries by similarly fixating on race, but in reverse fashion of granting preference to nullify past bias.”

No one dares talk about the violence of the inner city that makes 19th-century Dodge or Tombstone seem tame in comparison. No one discusses the utter failure of the inner-city schools or the need for intact families and omnipresent fathers to ensure any chance at parity. Instead, there is the notion that if blacks appear in 50 percent of television commercials, such ecumenicalism will magically either curb gunslinging on Saturday nights in Chicago or improved math scores in the Detroit or Baltimore public schools.

Why do we obsess over the supposedly suggestive illiberal themes of Jason Aldean’s, “Try That In a Small Town,” when rap and hip-hop for decades have institutionalized violent misogyny, homophobia, violence against the police, anti-Semitism, and blanket anti-white lyrics?

Orwellian censorship, coupled with deplatforming, cancel-culture, ostracism, and shadow banning, make any reasonable discussion of race taboo. The Left—instead of the old 1960s agenda of integration and assimilation—leveraged race and tribalism to create permanent constituencies, nursed on grievance and victimhood, and expectant of endless government redress and largess.

In a strange development, the Left believes by according affirmative action and reparatory admissions and hiring to the African-American upper-middle class and wealthy and privileged, thereby the mostly neglected black underclass, trapped in the neglect and pathologies of the inner city, will somehow benefit.

After George Floyd and the defunding of police forces and the decriminalization institutionalized by the Soros-funded prosecutors, there was an epidemic of inner-city crime, as smash-and-grab and carjacking became commonplace and swarm shoplifting became quasi-legal.

The result is that while elites of all races are bonding as never before, the minority underclass is angrier and more separate from the mainstream than at any time in the last half-century. That reality is evident by the avoidance of entire swaths of urban America by liberal city-dwellers—even as the latter are prone to call “racist” anyone who describes honestly their segregationist behavior.

One sign of toxic racial relations can be found in online newspapers and internet news sites that report crime.

When a murder makes the news and the perpetrator is known to be black (55% of all homicide offenders constitute 12% of the population), the news site either does not describe the race of the murderer or mentions it only at the very end of the article—usually in dire contrast if the perpetrator is considered white.

Yet if one reads the following comment section (and published comments are increasingly rare despite usually being carefully censored of racist and foul language), the so-called reading public, often disguised by pseudonyms, appears utterly cynical. The posters express disgust with the dishonesty of the media, but also no longer show much sympathy for “root causes” or why blacks continue to murder others (mostly other blacks) at over four times their numbers in the general population. Oddly, the more leftwing media tries to censor the news to disguise racial disparity, the more the public resents its one-sided selective censorship and veers into outright hostility.

Part Three: Insecurity –  August 4, 2023

Nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus.

“We can endure neither our vices nor the remedies for them.”

Livy

There are unfortunately other barometers of U.S. ossification.

America’s great strength was also its security. We were protected by two oceans and a similar English-majority-speaking and constitutional state on our northern border. In the modern age, we used to insist on only legal immigration from an often corrupt and impoverished Mexico. No longer.

In just three years, the Biden administration destroyed the southern border, allowing seven million illegal aliens to enter without audit, despite a Covid epidemic, 100,000 American deaths attributable to the free importation of Mexican-produced fentanyl, and the multibillion-dollar cartels’ use of the border to levy fees on millions entering illegally.

The administration’s agenda seems to be homeostasis or symmetry. That is, when the southern United States resembles the poverty and corruption of Mexico, then illegal immigration will largely cease, given there would be no reason to emigrate to a place identical to one’s one, in terms of economics, security, and culture.

Aside from the border, the U.S. military is in decline. Its agenda is no longer just battle efficacy as a sure way to reaffirm deterrence, but a fast-track means to institutionalize a woke agenda, without the Sturm und Drang of federal and state legislative approval. Does the Pentagon have inestimable amounts of time, labor, and capital on its hands to indulge in exploring white rage, abortion on demand, pregnancy flight suits, and transgendered surgeries? Did it so well plan the flight from Kabul or the maintenance of artillery shell stocks, that it could indulge such hot-button social issues?

Whereas the Left used to harangue Pentagon nominees about their revolving-door defense contractor board memberships and lobbyist roles, today they grow mute on such conflicts of interests—if the official in question has demonstrated a faithful adherence to woke principles. And in circular fashion, that reality is known to officers up for promotions, who in turn make the necessary woke adjustments.

The discussion of future Joint Chiefs of Staff appointments center now not necessarily on their proven record of military excellence but on the degree they have been advocates of gay, transgendered, race, and gender agendas.

Unfortunately, this advocacy is not just positive, but negative as well. It entails an overt harangue about “white privilege,” “white rage,” and“white supremacy”—most famously voiced by Gen. Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in congressional testimonies—without supporting data confirming “systemic racism.”

The result of such fixations is a radical drop-off in enlistments, perhaps in aggregate reaching a 40,000-person shortfall in all the services. Stranger still, the military remains in denial, blaming the lack of interest in military service to out-of-shape youth, competition from a robust job market, gang affiliation, or criminal upticks—almost anything other than the creation of a hostile climate to the one demographic that has died at twice its numbers in the general population in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are other symptoms of our calcifying military. Our arsenals are emptying as a direct result either of our massive arms shipments to Ukraine or a multibillion-dollar abandonment of weapons in Afghanistan. And our defense industries shrink.

Whether Javelins, artillery shells, or missiles, the military is short of munitions and will be for years.

Our submarine fleet, once the hallmark of our naval superiority, is severely crippled and underfunded—a fact compounded by the dearth of shipyards. The entire navy is a shadow of its former Reagan-era strength. Our weapons systems in theory are unrivaled, but so expensive and scarce to be of dubious utility in a real war, given the rapid consumption of munitions—as we see from the insatiable rate of expenditure in Ukraine.

And while the military enjoys excellent leadership from the colonel level downward, our top brass has scant record of success. What was disturbing about Afghanistan was not just the humiliating flight and careless abandonment of an entire theater arsenal, but the lack of any repercussions for the culpable officers in charge, both in theater and in Washington.

The more wars we stalemate or lose—Iraq, Afghanistan, the Libyan bombing—the more there is little introspection about the causes of such defeats.

Can the U.S. restore its military in time? Only if it were to drop woke and return to meritocracy, stop the politicization of the services, spend 5 percent of GDP on defense, end the revolving-door profiteering of defense-contractor generals, and invest in war-production industries. The only way to recruit American youth is to stop berating millions of them for their purported sins, and get out of the abortion, transgendered, race, and sex virtue-signaling business.If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.Plato

Pope John Paul II’s inspiring encyclical on moral theology, Veritatis Splendor, was promulgated thirty years ago, on August 6, 1993. The encyclical has certainly lost none of its intellectual force or deep wisdom, and it remains as pertinent today as ever. When this papal teaching first appeared, however, it was greeted with a torrent of hostility by many of the Church’s moral theologians.  

Bernhard Häring (Pope Francis’ favorite moral theologian) described himself as “greatly discouraged” after reading John Paul II’s work. This is not a surprise since the pope was correcting the errors that Häring and other revisionist theologians had propagated in the Church since the end of Vatican II. As John Paul II pointed out, it was not a matter of isolated or limited dissent but a “systematic calling into question of traditional moral doctrine” (4).   

The fundamental option, proportionalism, the sovereignty of conscience, and moral subjectivism—all of these heterodox doctrines were thoroughly refuted through arguments woven with principled reasoning. For a time, it looked like the philosopher-pope had succeeded in his herculean effort to renew moral theology. But then came the papacy of Pope Francis, which has consistently sought to marginalize and undermine the principal moral teachings of this encyclical.    

Veritatis Splendor is now virtually ignored at the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences. Instead, the new faculty, hired by Archbishop Paglia, are keen to emphasize how the moral law must be constantly modified and updated in response to cultural evolution and historical experience. At a conference on moral theology held last year in Rome, some theologians expressed their utter disdain for Veritatis Splendor and the need for its correction. 

Fr. Julio Martinez, professor of moral theology at Comillas Pontifical University, said that it was necessary “to untie the knots Veritatis Splendor made in Catholic morals.” Veritatis Splendor, he stated, initiated “a very profound development in moral theology with the introduction of the concept we call intrinsic evil.” According to Fr. Martinez, this is a “controversial philosophical concept that brought serious difficulties for moral theology.”  

Of course, it is ludicrous to suggest that the notion of intrinsic evil was just discovered thirty years ago by John Paul II. On the contrary, this doctrine was defended by secular philosophers like Aristotle, asserted by the Church Fathers along with St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, and taught without objection in the Catholic Church for many centuries.     

Also, the newly appointed head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernandez, has made it clear through word and deed that he has little use for Veritatis Splendor. In one of his recent interviews, he conveyed his dismissive view of this encyclical because its particular concern is “to set certain limits.” Hence, according to Fernandez, “it is not the most adequate text to encourage the development of theology.”  

The bishop’s reductive assessment, however, is way off base. Veritatis Splendor does far more than establish moral limits, though that task is certainly not alien to moral theology. Jesus Himself was not diffident about setting limits to our behavior. But John Paul II presents a holistic vision of moral theology, a brilliant synthesis of biblical Christian teaching, philosophy, and theology that covers a wide range of interrelated topics including human freedom, the divine and natural law, human nature, and the role of conscience in moral decision-making.  

The renowned Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre praised Veritatis Splendor as a major intervention in moral debate and a “striking contribution…to ongoing philosophical inquiry.” In his view, this encyclical clearly provided a viable platform for the creative development of theology or philosophy. But the liberal theologians who dominated the academy were simply not interested. John Paul II can hardly be blamed for the fact that in 2023 we have no theologians of the same stature as Karl Rahner or Joseph Ratzinger.   

The principal theme of Veritatis Splendor is quite simple and should be uncontroversial: the Christian faith includes specific moral demands because it is “on the path of the moral life that the way of salvation is open to all” (3). Those demands are clearly laid out in the Decalogue that is re-promulgated in the New Testament.  

The encyclical opens with an exegesis of Jesus’ dialogue with the rich young man in Matthew’s Gospel (chapter 19). Jesus draws this man’s attention to the centrality of the Decalogue’s precepts. Thus, “from the very lips of Jesus, the new Moses, man is once again given the commandments of the Decalogue” (12). One of those commandments is also powerfully reaffirmed with a reference to the original order of creation in Jesus’ teaching on adultery (Mark 10:4-12).  

Moreover, God has conveyed to His people these same specific moral requirements as the natural moral law that proscribes certain conduct such as adultery, theft, and the taking of innocent life. These “limits” that seem to disturb Archbishop Fernandez so much protect the fundamental goods of human nature such as marriage and life. They also represent the “path involving a moral and spiritual journey toward perfection” (15).   

But with a few notable exceptions, post-Conciliar moral theology has been centered on an imprudent and misguided attempt to mitigate the prohibitions found in Scripture and the natural law. Revisionist theologians have proposed theories like proportionalism (a variation of utilitarianism) that allow for exceptions to moral norms so long as the goal of a greater good or at least a lesser evil is realized. Nothing is intrinsically evil or good because everything depends on context. And they have suggested that the negative precepts forbidding certain actions that are expressed in Scripture are less than absolute.   

But John Paul II insists that to deny the truth of moral absolutes such as the prohibition against adultery is philosophically untenable because it opens the door to moral subjectivism. It is also inconsistent with Revelation, for “Jesus Himself reaffirms that these prohibitions allow no exceptions” (52). While someone may not be subjectively culpable for committing an adulterous act (through ignorance or compulsion), adultery is always objectively wrong no matter what the circumstances may be.  

If this encyclical needs to be “corrected” and cast aside, what sort of moral theology will take its place? We get a strong hint at the alternative to the principles of Veritatis Splendor by reading Pope Francis’ ambiguous apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, ghostwritten in part by Archbishop Fernandez. Pope Francis’ exhortation clearly sides with the revisionists when it comes to issues like intrinsic evil. In chapter eight he explains:  

It is reductive simply to consider whether or not an individual’s actions correspond to a general law or rule, because that is not enough to discern and ensure full fidelity to God in the concrete life of a human being…. It is true that general rules set forth a good which can never be disregarded or neglected, but in their formulation they cannot provide absolutely for all particular situations. (304)  

Pope Francis insists upon his fidelity to St. Thomas Aquinas when he declares that “the more we descend to matters of detail, the more frequently we encounter uncertainty” (304). But, for Aquinas, moral ambiguity surfaces only when there are affirmative norms at stake. Amoris Laetitia completely disregards the essential Thomistic distinction between affirmative precepts (such as “one must return borrowed items”), which apply always but not in every situation, and certain negative precepts (“do not commit adultery”), which are valid without exception.  

According to Aquinas, while we cannot always determine what should be done in accordance with an affirmative precept, we can determine what must not be done in accordance with negative precepts (Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 140, a. 1). When it comes to some negative norms such as “do not commit adultery,” there is never moral uncertainty or confusion, no matter how deeply we immerse ourselves in the details. Veritatis Splendor follows this Thomistic line of reasoning and argues for the decisive importance of these negative moral norms as a necessary safeguard against the encroachment of moral relativism. 

According to Fr. Martinez, however, Pope Francis has disentangled those “knots” conceived by John Paul II by introducing discernment as a way of guiding the moral decision-making process. As he observes, “To put the focus on discernment in order to find the good is a really new thing in moral theology.”  

Indeed, Amoris Laetitia equates the operation of conscience with the process of discernment rather than judgments that apply stable moral principles to specific situations. One can “discern” that a particular action, even one that violates one of the commandments, is what “God himself is asking amid the concrete complexity of one’s limits” (303). But as John Finnis and Germain Grisez point out in their critique of Amoris Laetitia, the traditional view of discernment presented by St. Ignatius Loyola and others is not concerned with what is morally right or wrong but with choosing between two morally acceptable possibilities. 

Veritatis Splendor is rooted in the moral certitudes embedded in Sacred Scripture and the sound philosophy of peerless thinkers like Aquinas—it enriches us both through its wisdom and its moral prescription. Amoris Laetitia, on the other hand, distorts or rejects the wisdom of saints like Augustine and Aquinas and favors a more relaxed paradigm where virtually every moral rule is subject to exception after a process of discernment. It privileges sentiment and pragmatic reasoning over moral truth and consistency. Since the moral terrain is so dimmed by shades of gray, moral principles can do no more than give us a general sense of direction. Conscience must do the rest of the work by creatively discerning the right course of action.  While Veritatis Splendor is in continuity with Scripture and Tradition, Amoris Laetitia represents a radical breach with both.Tweet This

While Veritatis Splendor is in continuity with Scripture and Tradition, Amoris Laetitia represents a radical breach with both. Catholics must decide which option they prefer. It’s a stark choice between the clarity of mind and coherence of popes like St. John Paul II or the web of incongruities and discontinuities found in papal documents like Amoris Laetitia. 

Author

• Richard A. SpinelloRichard A. Spinello is Professor of Management Practice at Boston College and a member of the adjunct faculty at St. John’s Seminary in Boston. He’s the author of The Encyclicals of John Paul II: An Introduction and Commentary and The Splendor of Marriage: St. John Paul II’s Vision of Love, Marriage, Family, and the Culture of Life. 

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Archbishop Viganò suggests a cardinal has proof Francis’ election was corrupt and his ‘pontificate’ null

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Speaking to Catholic Family News editor Matt Gaspers, the Italian prelate said that this particular cardinal is not speaking publicly ‘so as not to break the Pontifical secret’, but that in fact he has already broken the Pontifical secret by talking about it in private conversations.

Archbishop Carlo Maria ViganóAbp. Carlo Maria Viagnó

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Mon Aug 14, 2023 – 3:03 pm EDT

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(LifeSiteNews) – There is a new development regarding the discussion as to whether or not Pope Francis’ papal election at the March 2013 conclave was valid. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has claimed that a cardinal who participated in the conclave told friends “that he has witnessed facts that render the election of Jorge Mario null and void.”

Speaking to Catholic Family News editor Matt Gaspers, the Italian prelate added that this cardinal does not wish to reveal these facts “publicly so as not to break the Pontifical secret: the secret that he has already broken by talking about it with those who can do nothing, which forces His Eminence into silence before the Church.” In his view, these facts might render it possible that the Church’s “Pastors could perhaps settle the question” of the 2013 papal election.

Archbishop Viganò thinks this is a mistaken approach, based on a false legalism.

“We are not talking about the Seal of Confession,” the prelate wrote in his new interview, “but rather about matters that have reason to be reserved until this is to the detriment of the institution that brought them into force; otherwise we find ourselves like the Pharisees of the Gospel, who asked Our Lord if it was lawful to pull a donkey out of the well on the Sabbath day.”

This is a stunning report: So far, no cardinal who participated in the 2013 conclave has come out making such a statement, n\

Most prominently, a Vatican reporter close to Pope Francis, Gerard O’Connell, published in 2019 a book about the 2013 conclave in which he reveals that a meeting of progressive cardinals discussing a possible candidate took place on March 11, 2013, one day ahead of the first day of the conclave. Among the cardinals were Godfried Danneels, Walter Kasper, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, and Karl Lehmann, all members of the so-called “Sankt Gallen Group.”

Cardinal Kasper told LifeSite at the time that he did indeed participate in that meeting but denied that there was anything unethical.

He told LifeSite in 2019 that “it is really simply reasonable and normal – yes, it is even absolutely necessary for the forming of a personal judgment and conscience – that cardinals meet in order to reflect in a small circle (when all of them are together, there are 180-200, then everybody can only speak one time), and to weigh things and to receive information (not everybody knows each other) and then to form together a non-binding opinion.”

Speaking specifically about the March 11 meeting, Kasper added, “At our meeting, afterwards no one was bound and fixed; each could also continue his own reflection, and no one was later asked whether and how he voted.” But he implied that the results of that meeting were further shared with other cardinals when he expounded: “That one afterwards speaks with someone who was not present that evening [at the meeting] and informs him, cannot be forbidden either. That has nothing to do with solicitation. When additionally someone from that group afterwards thinks for himself privately and then speaks about how many [votes] there roughly would be, then that is his personal opinion which binds no one.”

British influence and McCarrick lobbying

Another important hint about somewhat irregular happenings in preparation for the 2013 conclave came from another book published in 2017. Catherine Pepinster, the former editor-in-chief of the British Catholic weekly The Tablet, claims in The Keys and the Kingdom: The British and the Papacy from John Paul II to Francis that the British Foreign Office may have played an important role in the 2013 papal election, especially by way of organizing another key meeting ahead of the conclave that was to promote Bergoglio.

Based on many interviews with key figures such as Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor and the British Ambassador to the Holy See Nigel Baker, she claims that the U.K. “played a crucial role in the election of the Argentinian destined to shake up the Catholic Church.”

Pepinster recounts in her book how the British government, through its ambassador to the Holy See, was instrumental in setting up a March 7 meeting at the ambassador’s residence at the Palazzo Pallavincini where key cardinals – especially Murphy-O’Connor – networked with lesser-known cardinals to promote Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio for pope.

Calling Bergoglio’s election a “very British coup,” Pepinster’s work suggests that a secular power was involved in the election of a pope. Here, she specifically mentions Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor.

“The British influence on the conclave was against all the odds, yet it happened,” Pepinster stated. “That was down to one of the most capable cardinals I’ve ever met – Cormac Murphy-O’Connor – playing the most powerful non-voting role in the choosing of a pope I’ve ever known.”

Pope Francis seemed to have been aware of the British cardinal’s role in his election. The Guardian‘s obituary of the prelate in 2017 stated, “A few months after his election, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was apparently lightheartedly to credit Murphy-O’Connor, when the two met at a papal audience. The pope pointed to his old friend and said, ‘You’re to blame!’”

Now-disgraced former cardinal Theodore McCarrick also described how certain influencers tried to get Bergoglio elected. LifeSite contributor Liz Yore summed up his own testimony as he presented it in October 2013, only months after Bergoglio’s election:

McCarrick told the audience that before the cardinal electors “went into the general conversations,” he was approached by “a very interesting and influential Italian gentleman.” The influential Italian visited McCarrick at the seminary where McCarrick was staying in Rome. This “very brilliant man, very influential man in Rome” said, “What about Bergoglio? Does he have a chance?” McCarrick said he was surprised at the question, and replied, “I don’t think so because no one’s mentioned his name.” The man said, referring to Bergoglio, “He could do it, you know, reform the church.”

Although McCarrick was beyond the age to vote in the 2013 conclave, he spoke at the General Congregation proceedings before the conclave. As he explained in his Villanova talk, he seized the opportunity to lobby for a Latin American Pope, urging his fellow cardinal electors that he hoped that whoever was elected pope would be someone who, if not himself a Latin American, would “have a very strong interest in Latin America because half the Church is there … that’s where the people are.”

None of these hints alone suffice to make a case in this very crucial matter, though.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider, who is  highly respected among many faithful Catholics, holds that Pope Francis’ papacy is a valid one. Writing in 2020 (while Pope Benedict XVI was still alive), the Kazakh bishop of German descent insisted:

Declaring Pope Francis to be an invalid pope, either because of his heresies or because of an invalid election (for reasons of alleged violations of the Conclave norms or for the reason that Pope Benedict XVI is still the pope because of his invalid renunciation) are desperate and subjectively taken actions aimed at remedying the current unprecedented crisis of the papacy. They are purely human and betray a spiritual myopia. All such endeavors are ultimately a dead end, a cul-de-sac. Such solutions reveal an implicit Pelagian approach to resolving a problem with human means; a problem, indeed, which cannot be resolved by human efforts, but which requires a divine intervention.

One need only examine similar cases of the deposition of a pope or declaration of the invalidity of his election in Church history to see that they provoked rivaling and combating claimants to the papal office.

It is unclear whether Archbishop Viganò has spoken directly to the cardinal in question. He told Gaspers that “if these confidences are true, I dare not think of the moral travail of those who are preparing to take the secret to the grave, when they would have had the opportunity of unmasking the intrigues and plots of the Saint Gallen Mafia.”

“If they are not true,” he continued, “it would not make sense to talk about it even with the most trusted people (who, however, must have told others, since the news has leaked).”

LifeSite reached out to Archbishop Viganò and to two respected cardinals for comment and shall update this report should we hear back from them.

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Dr. Maike Hickson was born and raised in Germany. She holds a PhD from the University of Hannover, Germany, after having written in Switzerland her doctoral dissertation on the history of Swiss intellectuals before and during World War II. She now lives in the U.S. and is married to Dr. Robert Hickson, and they have been blessed with two beautiful children. She is a happy housewife who likes to write articles when time permits.

Dr. Hickson published in 2014 a Festschrift, a collection of some thirty essays written by thoughtful authors in honor of her husband upon his 70th birthday, which is entitled A Catholic Witness in Our Time.

Hickson has closely followed the papacy of Pope Francis and the developments in the Catholic Church in Germany, and she has been writing articles on religion and politics for U.S. and European publications and websites such as LifeSiteNews, OnePeterFive, The Wanderer, Rorate Caeli, Catholicism.org, Catholic Family News, Christian Order, Notizie Pro-Vita, Corrispondenza Romana, Katholisches.info, Der Dreizehnte,  Zeit-Fragen, and Westfalen-Blatt.

TOPICS

What is Decivilization?

By: Victor Davis Hanson

Part One – July 26, 2023

The Biden administration, with assent from California politicos, bureaucrats, Indian tribes, and green activists, is partnering with the state to destroy four major dams on Northern California’s Klamath River. Their ostensible idea is to facilitate better salmon runs, in part due to concessions to Native American lobbyists.

The government brags that the dismantling will mark the greatest destruction of dams in history—as if 1984-like regress is progress. Note: this will likely start a trend. So expect to see more dam busting in our future, especially in the Pacific Northwest where dams, hydroelectric power, flood control, and irrigation created the region’s 20th-century prosperity.

Such radical environmentalism might make sense if California was underpopulated, enjoying a budget surplus, blessed with excess water capacity, exporting electricity, and not subject to wild cycles of drought and flooding.

But the reality is that blowing up dams is about the worst policy the state could adopt given present realities of a water-short, 41-million-person state that each night imports huge amounts of electricity, suffers from alternating droughts and floods, and enjoys beautiful man-made recreation lakes for millions of middle and lower-middle class residents in its northern and eastern mountain ranges.

The state downplays these concerns, claiming the dams are of little value for flood control or for ensuring water supplies, and provide a mere 70-80,000 homes electricity, etc. etc., while the region’s surrounding population seems clearly opposed to the destructions.

So the Klamath nihilist project is a sort of mammoth California Water Project in reverse. It will jump-start a larger process of undoing the century of dam, reservoir, and aqueduct building that made viable the California anomaly of two-thirds of the population living where one-third of the precipitation falls.

In another Orwellian twist, over half of the money needed to blow up the dams will come from a California water bond once passed by voters on the misinformation and disinformation that it would likely go to building more dams for water storage. Or as NPR gleefully put it, the cost is covered, “with another $250 million from a California voter-approved water bond.” In California, a water bond translates into destroying water projects.

Dam busting is but a tiny part of a larger decivilization project wrought by elites who experiment on the middle class as if they were white rats in a university lab, with the proviso that the architects of chaos never assume they will never experience the blowback themselves.

Have you noticed who suffered from the lockdowns? Amazon, or mom-and-pop stores? Did Dr. Fauci worry about the millions who lost two years of their schooling and have never caught up? Did the criminologist at Harvard or Stanford who dreamed up critical legal theory or emasculating the police ever live in the inner city?

So what do defunding the police, outlawing clean-burning natural gas heaters and cooktops, allowing the homeless to take over the streets of major American cities, where storm drains send untreated feces and urine out to the nearby bay, destroying the southern border, and ceding on Saturday night entire swaths of the inner American city to Wild West shootouts, in which both the shooter and shot are never prosecuted, have in common?

Nihilism.

Ask yourself: who is more likely to be prosecuted: a criminal in nocturnal Chicago on a Saturday night who murders a bystander or a bystander who marched peacefully on January 6 and never entered the Capitol?

What drives this decivilizational impulse?

The age-old banes of Western civilization: affluence and leisure that convince postmodern societies that all the hard work of earlier civilization—ensuring fertility, security, plentiful food, clean water for urban use and irrigation for food production, public health that requires clean and safe streets—function as if on automatic pilot. The 1950s gave us safe water treatment plants, the 2020s gave us the new green idea of hosing feces-strewn runoff from the sidewalks to the storm drains to the oceans.

Our best and brightest must assume that our ancestors were never starving, facing constant epidemics, short of clean water, or without security at night, and so sacrificed to build and invest and ensure that their progenies might have what they did not.

Part Two – July 28, 2023

The architects of decivilization are the supposed elites who come out of our purported top schools, with allegedly impressive alphabetic degrees after their names. A Pete Buttigieg is a good example of their pomposity and incompetence, as he lectures us about racist freeway clover-leaf ramps, but cannot deal with an imploding air travel industry, near-miss jet collisions, precivilizational violence on subways, blocked ports, and cargo ships stacked out to the horizon.

In other words, they are the academic “scientists” and “experts” who craft our homeless policies, defund our police, decriminalize shoplifting and carjacking, ban natural gas, and dream up mass lockdowns and quarantines (“follow the science”).

But they themselves prove quite unimpressive characters—with little or no common sense, questionable aptitude, but plenty of hubris.

In other words, our experts are those who subsidized gain-of-function viral research in Wuhan under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army, insisted that herd immunity is of negligible value in battling COVID, planned the skedaddle from Afghanistan, bragged about their California high-speed-rail future, gave us modern monetary theory that pooh-poohed $31 trillion in aggregate debt, and laughed at broken-windows theories as they turned the subways and rails of a once safe New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles into something out of the era of the 1870s train robberies.

A final note to this epidemic of decivilization.

Have you noticed that our elites never apologize, never concede, never express remorse? A John Kerry wants to take away gas hot water heaters, but not Gulfstreams. Gavin Newsom would put you in jail for “not following the science” if you did not wear a mask in a park but had no problem dining while maskless with lobbyist contributors at the tony French Laundry.

If Bay Area scientists don’t believe in dams, then why do they not cut off the vast water transfers via the California aqueduct and the Hetch Hetchy lines into the San Francisco-San Jose 8-million-person corridor?

Jack Smith may well put military veteran and Trump-aid Walt Nauta in prison for claiming “I don’t know” when asked about the movement of presidential papers at Mar-a-Lago, but he would never indict an admitted liar like former CIA Director Brennan or former interim FBI Director McCabe.

So decivilization is also a synonym for a bankrupt elite who believes the floodwaters they unleash will never drown themselves.

Ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant. (‘Where they create a desert, they call it peace.’)

Drops the Gavel on Trump Evidence – And This Verdict Affects Every Single American 

By Sean Kerrvin|August 8, 2023 

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What’s Happening:

Every citizen of America has the guaranteed right to free speech. Anyone trying to deny that right, including the government, should be challenged, and stopped. The voice of the people must be heard for our nation to survive.

Almost daily there is a news story about attempts to stop free speech. This is a scary situation especially during the ramp up to a very important presidential election next year. Leftists everywhere have tried to silence former President Donald Trump and this latest attack against him could be dangerous for every American.

From Breitbart:

Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan M. Dershowitz said Sunday that former President Trump should have the right to see and reveal the evidence against him, despite Special Counsel Jack Smith’s effort to obtain a protective order against that disclosure.

The chief thug of leftist ideology in government is trying to steal Trump’s First Amendment right to free speech. If he succeeds there is no stopping the government from attacking citizens and trampling on their constitutional rights.

Smith’s argument is that Trump was threatening him based on a Truth Social post from Trump that stated, “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” The post did not mention anyone specific and if follows Trump’s age-old attitude about defending himself in business and life. Smith had his feelings hurt and is trying to manipulate the law to hide his unconstitutional legal tactics from public scrutiny.

Smith wants to hide documents from Trump, and the public, and not allow Trump’s legal team proper time to defend against the government’s claims. This case could have massive legal consequences against Trump and Dershowitz believes the public should know what’s going on throughout this case.

From Breitbart:

“He has a First Amendment right — and we have a First Amendment right — to know what’s in the documents,” Dershowitz said.

Smith’s legal tactics have been questionable from the beginning of his investigation. The special prosecutor keeps leaving out specific details that exonerate Trump while he plays up specifics and half-truths that might help convict Trump.

From Breitbart:

“Nor should the prosecutor have purported to quote from [Trump’s] January 6 speech” while leaving out Trump’s urging to protest at the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically,” Dershowitz said.

Americans should join Dershowitz in calling out the government’s attacks against Trump. Democrats, who are calling for prosecutors to destroy Trump, will gladly stomp all over the freedoms and constitutional rights of Americans. They want Trump gone from the political scene and they don’t care how many citizens they harm as long as they get Trump.

Key Takeaways:

• Special prosecutor asks judge to cut off free speech for Trump.
• Harvard law professor says the legal request is dangerous for Americans.
• First Amendment rights should trump any prosecutor fears or requests.

Source: Breitbart

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Sean Kerrvin 

Sean is a former mainstream media journalist who walked away from the leftist machine. He now works to deliver news and insights to benefit Americans who want truth and liberty to prevail under the Constitution.

The U.S. Is In Real Decline

No Kidding!

By: Victor Davis Hanson

Part One: Energy – August 1, 2023

Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

     Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional”

There is proverbially a lot of rot in any great nation, which accordingly can endure a lot of self-induced damage.

But has the U.S. exhausted its reserves? Britain after World War I denied that its empire was doomed and its standard of living unsustainable. The Soviet Union was in decline gradually, then abruptly by 1989 became doomed. In the fourth century AD, Rome had established a modus vivendi of incorporating non-Romans into the empire, defending its borders, and tamping down on corruption. A century later, the Western empire collapsed from internal decay and tribal invasions across the Danube and Rhine.

Affordable energy had been America’s strength. We are still the largest combined natural gas and oil producer in the world—but determined to forfeit that advantage on the world stage and at home damage the viability of the middle class.

We were once the premier nuclear-generated power nation as well. No longer. Joe Biden and his surrogates on the state level have systematically waged war on fossil fuels, precluding even the reasonable idea that oil, gas, and coal can serve as necessary transition fuels over the next half-century, guaranteeing the American standard of living until the advent of viable alternative and renewable energies.

The only time Biden focuses on oil and gas is before a midterm or general election when he hurriedly will either drain more of the strategic petroleum reserve or showboat a few more new federal energy leases.

A state like California has the highest taxed and the costliest electricity in the continental United States, mostly as a result of bragging that it is self-sufficient in daytime electricity production due to massive and heavily subsidized solar and wind farms. Yet it keeps mum that after dark it must import equally large amounts of fossil-fuel-generated power from neighboring states.

One of the most bizarre developments during the Biden years has been the complete exemption given massive and growing Chinese coal use, coupled with the furor over domestic natural gas production and use.

Think of the logic: we coax and ignore our Chinese enemies who are hell-bent on record dirty coal use while hectoring the mostly now green American public on their supposedly toxic use of clean-burning natural gas—as if we could persuade 1.4 billion Chinese to cease burning coal by showing them that 330 million Americans can sacrifice by not burning natural gas.

Here again, is the ancient bureaucratic principle in play of focusing on the misdemeanor of the law-abiding, as a way to square the utter inability to deal with the felony of law-breaking.

As the U.S. is pushed to embrace the massive use of electrical vehicles, the vast majority of which will be charging after commute hours and in the dark, the more it resists nuclear and fossil fuel power generation, the only sure ways of producing steady and reliable electricity when the sun goes down.

As the elite clamp down on gas cooktops, pizza ovens, and gas water heaters of the middle classes, it is silent on the use of private jets, or the energy consumption in huge homes over 5,000-6,000 square feet, of the Obamas-Al Gore sort.

In California, we are far more likely to blow up a hydroelectric plant on a manmade reservoir than to create a new one—on the theory that someday we will have clean energy in abundance, but for now, the middle classes must suffer for energy-consuming sins.

A final thought. The Left pushes mass transit as the cure-all for supposedly wasteful and consumptive automobile use. Yet it can offer no alternative to the car that any sane American would consider.

In California, its multibillion-dollar price tag “high-speed” rail is stagnating between Merced and Bakersfield. After a decade, not a foot of track has been laid, and no one yet can explain why anyone would wish to go over 100 mph an hour from Bakersfield to Merced.

The Bay Area’s once state-of-the-art BART rail system is in decay. The cars are increasingly unreliable, dirty, and crime-ridden.

BART either cannot or will not ensure the safety of its passengers, in the toxic manner of all major contemporary urban mass transit systems. Why? In part, because to enforce laws against turnstile-jumping, harassment of passengers, or various assaults in stations would be, in the Age of Post-George-Floyd, somehow inappropriate.

One does not have to be a conspiracist to see that the Left likes mass transit and hates cars for reasons other than energy-per-mile individual consumption. The more millions become captives of trains, the more unions control their very lives, the more the state alone can ensure their safety, the more the government can determine their travel and commute, and the more “equity” can be enforced.

Part Two: Racial Relations – August 2, 2023

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

     Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”

I say America is in serious trouble because the Left has attacked systematically all of the U.S.’s great strengths and advantages on the world stage. It apparently thinks it must dismantle the old America before it can create a “new” America, something like a European Union state, only far more radical and volatile.

One, we were the only multiracial constitutional state that had avoided the tribalism and violence of the Balkans, Rwanda, or the Middle East. Europe, for all its public grandstanding about ecumenicalism, has yet to have a black president or prime minister. The idea that Barack Obama could become a Russian or Chinese citizen and reach similar pinnacles of political power is absurd. (And for that matter, include Mexico and much of Asia and Latin America.)

Yet race relations in the U.S. are at a historic low. More than 50 years of affirmative action have morphed into woke extremism, or the idea of racially separate graduations, dorms, workshops, and safe spaces. When working out, keeping a reasonable weight, camping, or showing up on time are now deemed racist, then there is no more Civil Rights movement which has instead descended into caricature.

The more minorities reached parity with or exceeded the income of, the majority population, the angrier and more volatile racial relations became. The operative principle seems to be something like “Before we can have racially blind relations in the 21st century, we must first make up for the racism, largely in the South, of the prior two centuries by similarly fixating on race, but in reverse fashion of granting preference to nullify past bias.”

No one dares talk about the violence of the inner city that makes 19th-century Dodge or Tombstone seem tame in comparison. No one discusses the utter failure of the inner-city schools or the need for intact families and omnipresent fathers to ensure any chance at parity. Instead, there is the notion that if blacks appear in 50 percent of television commercials, such ecumenicalism will magically either curb gunslinging on Saturday nights in Chicago or improved math scores in the Detroit or Baltimore public schools.

Why do we obsess over the supposedly suggestive illiberal themes of Jason Aldean’s, “Try That In a Small Town,” when rap and hip-hop for decades have institutionalized violent misogyny, homophobia, violence against the police, anti-Semitism, and blanket anti-white lyrics?

Orwellian censorship, coupled with deplatforming, cancel-culture, ostracism, and shadow banning, make any reasonable discussion of race taboo. The Left—instead of the old 1960s agenda of integration and assimilation—leveraged race and tribalism to create permanent constituencies, nursed on grievance and victimhood, and expectant of endless government redress and largess.

In a strange development, the Left believes by according affirmative action and reparatory admissions and hiring to the African-American upper-middle class and wealthy and privileged, thereby the mostly neglected black underclass, trapped in the neglect and pathologies of the inner city, will somehow benefit.

After George Floyd and the defunding of police forces and the decriminalization institutionalized by the Soros-funded prosecutors, there was an epidemic of inner-city crime, as smash-and-grab and carjacking became commonplace and swarm shoplifting became quasi-legal.

The result is that while elites of all races are bonding as never before, the minority underclass is angrier and more separate from the mainstream than at any time in the last half-century. That reality is evident by the avoidance of entire swaths of urban America by liberal city-dwellers—even as the latter are prone to call “racist” anyone who describes honestly their segregationist behavior.

One sign of toxic racial relations can be found in online newspapers and internet news sites that report crime.

When a murder makes the news and the perpetrator is known to be black (55% of all homicide offenders constitute 12% of the population), the news site either does not describe the race of the murderer or mentions it only at the very end of the article—usually in dire contrast if the perpetrator is considered white.

Yet if one reads the following comment section (and published comments are increasingly rare despite usually being carefully censored of racist and foul language), the so-called reading public, often disguised by pseudonyms, appears utterly cynical. The posters express disgust with the dishonesty of the media, but also no longer show much sympathy for “root causes” or why blacks continue to murder others (mostly other blacks) at over four times their numbers in the general population. Oddly, the more leftwing media tries to censor the news to disguise racial disparity, the more the public resents its one-sided selective censorship and veers into outright hostility.

Part Three: Insecurity –  August 4, 2023

Nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus.

“We can endure neither our vices nor the remedies for them.”

Livy

There are unfortunately other barometers of U.S. ossification.

America’s great strength was also its security. We were protected by two oceans and a similar English-majority-speaking and constitutional state on our northern border. In the modern age, we used to insist on only legal immigration from an often corrupt and impoverished Mexico. No longer.

In just three years, the Biden administration destroyed the southern border, allowing seven million illegal aliens to enter without audit, despite a Covid epidemic, 100,000 American deaths attributable to the free importation of Mexican-produced fentanyl, and the multibillion-dollar cartels’ use of the border to levy fees on millions entering illegally.

The administration’s agenda seems to be homeostasis or symmetry. That is, when the southern United States resembles the poverty and corruption of Mexico, then illegal immigration will largely cease, given there would be no reason to emigrate to a place identical to one’s one, in terms of economics, security, and culture.

Aside from the border, the U.S. military is in decline. Its agenda is no longer just battle efficacy as a sure way to reaffirm deterrence, but a fast-track means to institutionalize a woke agenda, without the Sturm und Drang of federal and state legislative approval. Does the Pentagon have inestimable amounts of time, labor, and capital on its hands to indulge in exploring white rage, abortion on demand, pregnancy flight suits, and transgendered surgeries? Did it so well plan the flight from Kabul or the maintenance of artillery shell stocks, that it could indulge such hot-button social issues?

Whereas the Left used to harangue Pentagon nominees about their revolving-door defense contractor board memberships and lobbyist roles, today they grow mute on such conflicts of interests—if the official in question has demonstrated a faithful adherence to woke principles. And in circular fashion, that reality is known to officers up for promotions, who in turn make the necessary woke adjustments.

The discussion of future Joint Chiefs of Staff appointments center now not necessarily on their proven record of military excellence but on the degree they have been advocates of gay, transgendered, race, and gender agendas.

Unfortunately, this advocacy is not just positive, but negative as well. It entails an overt harangue about “white privilege,” “white rage,” and“white supremacy”—most famously voiced by Gen. Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in congressional testimonies—without supporting data confirming “systemic racism.”

The result of such fixations is a radical drop-off in enlistments, perhaps in aggregate reaching a 40,000-person shortfall in all the services. Stranger still, the military remains in denial, blaming the lack of interest in military service to out-of-shape youth, competition from a robust job market, gang affiliation, or criminal upticks—almost anything other than the creation of a hostile climate to the one demographic that has died at twice its numbers in the general population in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are other symptoms of our calcifying military. Our arsenals are emptying as a direct result either of our massive arms shipments to Ukraine or a multibillion-dollar abandonment of weapons in Afghanistan. And our defense industries shrink.

Whether Javelins, artillery shells, or missiles, the military is short of munitions and will be for years.

Our submarine fleet, once the hallmark of our naval superiority, is severely crippled and underfunded—a fact compounded by the dearth of shipyards. The entire navy is a shadow of its former Reagan-era strength. Our weapons systems in theory are unrivaled, but so expensive and scarce to be of dubious utility in a real war, given the rapid consumption of munitions—as we see from the insatiable rate of expenditure in Ukraine.

And while the military enjoys excellent leadership from the colonel level downward, our top brass has scant record of success. What was disturbing about Afghanistan was not just the humiliating flight and careless abandonment of an entire theater arsenal, but the lack of any repercussions for the culpable officers in charge, both in theater and in Washington.

The more wars we stalemate or lose—Iraq, Afghanistan, the Libyan bombing—the more there is little introspection about the causes of such defeats.

Can the U.S. restore its military in time? Only if it were to drop woke and return to meritocracy, stop the politicization of the services, spend 5 percent of GDP on defense, end the revolving-door profiteering of defense-contractor generals, and invest in war-production industries. The only way to recruit American youth is to stop berating millions of them for their purported sins, and get out of the abortion, transgendered, race, and sex virtue-signaling business.

The U.S. Is In Real Decline

No Kidding!

By: Victor Davis Hanson

Part One: Energy – August 1, 2023

Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

     Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional”

There is proverbially a lot of rot in any great nation, which accordingly can endure a lot of self-induced damage.

But has the U.S. exhausted its reserves? Britain after World War I denied that its empire was doomed and its standard of living unsustainable. The Soviet Union was in decline gradually, then abruptly by 1989 became doomed. In the fourth century AD, Rome had established a modus vivendi of incorporating non-Romans into the empire, defending its borders, and tamping down on corruption. A century later, the Western empire collapsed from internal decay and tribal invasions across the Danube and Rhine.

Affordable energy had been America’s strength. We are still the largest combined natural gas and oil producer in the world—but determined to forfeit that advantage on the world stage and at home damage the viability of the middle class.

We were once the premier nuclear-generated power nation as well. No longer. Joe Biden and his surrogates on the state level have systematically waged war on fossil fuels, precluding even the reasonable idea that oil, gas, and coal can serve as necessary transition fuels over the next half-century, guaranteeing the American standard of living until the advent of viable alternative and renewable energies.

The only time Biden focuses on oil and gas is before a midterm or general election when he hurriedly will either drain more of the strategic petroleum reserve or showboat a few more new federal energy leases.

A state like California has the highest taxed and the costliest electricity in the continental United States, mostly as a result of bragging that it is self-sufficient in daytime electricity production due to massive and heavily subsidized solar and wind farms. Yet it keeps mum that after dark it must import equally large amounts of fossil-fuel-generated power from neighboring states.

One of the most bizarre developments during the Biden years has been the complete exemption given massive and growing Chinese coal use, coupled with the furor over domestic natural gas production and use.

Think of the logic: we coax and ignore our Chinese enemies who are hell-bent on record dirty coal use while hectoring the mostly now green American public on their supposedly toxic use of clean-burning natural gas—as if we could persuade 1.4 billion Chinese to cease burning coal by showing them that 330 million Americans can sacrifice by not burning natural gas.

Here again, is the ancient bureaucratic principle in play of focusing on the misdemeanor of the law-abiding, as a way to square the utter inability to deal with the felony of law-breaking.

As the U.S. is pushed to embrace the massive use of electrical vehicles, the vast majority of which will be charging after commute hours and in the dark, the more it resists nuclear and fossil fuel power generation, the only sure ways of producing steady and reliable electricity when the sun goes down.

As the elite clamp down on gas cooktops, pizza ovens, and gas water heaters of the middle classes, it is silent on the use of private jets, or the energy consumption in huge homes over 5,000-6,000 square feet, of the Obamas-Al Gore sort.

In California, we are far more likely to blow up a hydroelectric plant on a manmade reservoir than to create a new one—on the theory that someday we will have clean energy in abundance, but for now, the middle classes must suffer for energy-consuming sins.

A final thought. The Left pushes mass transit as the cure-all for supposedly wasteful and consumptive automobile use. Yet it can offer no alternative to the car that any sane American would consider.

In California, its multibillion-dollar price tag “high-speed” rail is stagnating between Merced and Bakersfield. After a decade, not a foot of track has been laid, and no one yet can explain why anyone would wish to go over 100 mph an hour from Bakersfield to Merced.

The Bay Area’s once state-of-the-art BART rail system is in decay. The cars are increasingly unreliable, dirty, and crime-ridden.

BART either cannot or will not ensure the safety of its passengers, in the toxic manner of all major contemporary urban mass transit systems. Why? In part, because to enforce laws against turnstile-jumping, harassment of passengers, or various assaults in stations would be, in the Age of Post-George-Floyd, somehow inappropriate.

One does not have to be a conspiracist to see that the Left likes mass transit and hates cars for reasons other than energy-per-mile individual consumption. The more millions become captives of trains, the more unions control their very lives, the more the state alone can ensure their safety, the more the government can determine their travel and commute, and the more “equity” can be enforced.

Part Two: Racial Relations – August 2, 2023

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

     Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”

I say America is in serious trouble because the Left has attacked systematically all of the U.S.’s great strengths and advantages on the world stage. It apparently thinks it must dismantle the old America before it can create a “new” America, something like a European Union state, only far more radical and volatile.

One, we were the only multiracial constitutional state that had avoided the tribalism and violence of the Balkans, Rwanda, or the Middle East. Europe, for all its public grandstanding about ecumenicalism, has yet to have a black president or prime minister. The idea that Barack Obama could become a Russian or Chinese citizen and reach similar pinnacles of political power is absurd. (And for that matter, include Mexico and much of Asia and Latin America.)

Yet race relations in the U.S. are at a historic low. More than 50 years of affirmative action have morphed into woke extremism, or the idea of racially separate graduations, dorms, workshops, and safe spaces. When working out, keeping a reasonable weight, camping, or showing up on time are now deemed racist, then there is no more Civil Rights movement which has instead descended into caricature.

The more minorities reached parity with or exceeded the income of, the majority population, the angrier and more volatile racial relations became. The operative principle seems to be something like “Before we can have racially blind relations in the 21st century, we must first make up for the racism, largely in the South, of the prior two centuries by similarly fixating on race, but in reverse fashion of granting preference to nullify past bias.”

No one dares talk about the violence of the inner city that makes 19th-century Dodge or Tombstone seem tame in comparison. No one discusses the utter failure of the inner-city schools or the need for intact families and omnipresent fathers to ensure any chance at parity. Instead, there is the notion that if blacks appear in 50 percent of television commercials, such ecumenicalism will magically either curb gunslinging on Saturday nights in Chicago or improved math scores in the Detroit or Baltimore public schools.

Why do we obsess over the supposedly suggestive illiberal themes of Jason Aldean’s, “Try That In a Small Town,” when rap and hip-hop for decades have institutionalized violent misogyny, homophobia, violence against the police, anti-Semitism, and blanket anti-white lyrics?

Orwellian censorship, coupled with deplatforming, cancel-culture, ostracism, and shadow banning, make any reasonable discussion of race taboo. The Left—instead of the old 1960s agenda of integration and assimilation—leveraged race and tribalism to create permanent constituencies, nursed on grievance and victimhood, and expectant of endless government redress and largess.

In a strange development, the Left believes by according affirmative action and reparatory admissions and hiring to the African-American upper-middle class and wealthy and privileged, thereby the mostly neglected black underclass, trapped in the neglect and pathologies of the inner city, will somehow benefit.

After George Floyd and the defunding of police forces and the decriminalization institutionalized by the Soros-funded prosecutors, there was an epidemic of inner-city crime, as smash-and-grab and carjacking became commonplace and swarm shoplifting became quasi-legal.

The result is that while elites of all races are bonding as never before, the minority underclass is angrier and more separate from the mainstream than at any time in the last half-century. That reality is evident by the avoidance of entire swaths of urban America by liberal city-dwellers—even as the latter are prone to call “racist” anyone who describes honestly their segregationist behavior.

One sign of toxic racial relations can be found in online newspapers and internet news sites that report crime.

When a murder makes the news and the perpetrator is known to be black (55% of all homicide offenders constitute 12% of the population), the news site either does not describe the race of the murderer or mentions it only at the very end of the article—usually in dire contrast if the perpetrator is considered white.

Yet if one reads the following comment section (and published comments are increasingly rare despite usually being carefully censored of racist and foul language), the so-called reading public, often disguised by pseudonyms, appears utterly cynical. The posters express disgust with the dishonesty of the media, but also no longer show much sympathy for “root causes” or why blacks continue to murder others (mostly other blacks) at over four times their numbers in the general population. Oddly, the more leftwing media tries to censor the news to disguise racial disparity, the more the public resents its one-sided selective censorship and veers into outright hostility.

Part Three: Insecurity –  August 4, 2023

Nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus.

“We can endure neither our vices nor the remedies for them.”

Livy

There are unfortunately other barometers of U.S. ossification.

America’s great strength was also its security. We were protected by two oceans and a similar English-majority-speaking and constitutional state on our northern border. In the modern age, we used to insist on only legal immigration from an often corrupt and impoverished Mexico. No longer.

In just three years, the Biden administration destroyed the southern border, allowing seven million illegal aliens to enter without audit, despite a Covid epidemic, 100,000 American deaths attributable to the free importation of Mexican-produced fentanyl, and the multibillion-dollar cartels’ use of the border to levy fees on millions entering illegally.

The administration’s agenda seems to be homeostasis or symmetry. That is, when the southern United States resembles the poverty and corruption of Mexico, then illegal immigration will largely cease, given there would be no reason to emigrate to a place identical to one’s one, in terms of economics, security, and culture.

Aside from the border, the U.S. military is in decline. Its agenda is no longer just battle efficacy as a sure way to reaffirm deterrence, but a fast-track means to institutionalize a woke agenda, without the Sturm und Drang of federal and state legislative approval. Does the Pentagon have inestimable amounts of time, labor, and capital on its hands to indulge in exploring white rage, abortion on demand, pregnancy flight suits, and transgendered surgeries? Did it so well plan the flight from Kabul or the maintenance of artillery shell stocks, that it could indulge such hot-button social issues?

Whereas the Left used to harangue Pentagon nominees about their revolving-door defense contractor board memberships and lobbyist roles, today they grow mute on such conflicts of interests—if the official in question has demonstrated a faithful adherence to woke principles. And in circular fashion, that reality is known to officers up for promotions, who in turn make the necessary woke adjustments.

The discussion of future Joint Chiefs of Staff appointments center now not necessarily on their proven record of military excellence but on the degree they have been advocates of gay, transgendered, race, and gender agendas.

Unfortunately, this advocacy is not just positive, but negative as well. It entails an overt harangue about “white privilege,” “white rage,” and“white supremacy”—most famously voiced by Gen. Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in congressional testimonies—without supporting data confirming “systemic racism.”

The result of such fixations is a radical drop-off in enlistments, perhaps in aggregate reaching a 40,000-person shortfall in all the services. Stranger still, the military remains in denial, blaming the lack of interest in military service to out-of-shape youth, competition from a robust job market, gang affiliation, or criminal upticks—almost anything other than the creation of a hostile climate to the one demographic that has died at twice its numbers in the general population in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are other symptoms of our calcifying military. Our arsenals are emptying as a direct result either of our massive arms shipments to Ukraine or a multibillion-dollar abandonment of weapons in Afghanistan. And our defense industries shrink.

Whether Javelins, artillery shells, or missiles, the military is short of munitions and will be for years.

Our submarine fleet, once the hallmark of our naval superiority, is severely crippled and underfunded—a fact compounded by the dearth of shipyards. The entire navy is a shadow of its former Reagan-era strength. Our weapons systems in theory are unrivaled, but so expensive and scarce to be of dubious utility in a real war, given the rapid consumption of munitions—as we see from the insatiable rate of expenditure in Ukraine.

And while the military enjoys excellent leadership from the colonel level downward, our top brass has scant record of success. What was disturbing about Afghanistan was not just the humiliating flight and careless abandonment of an entire theater arsenal, but the lack of any repercussions for the culpable officers in charge, both in theater and in Washington.

The more wars we stalemate or lose—Iraq, Afghanistan, the Libyan bombing—the more there is little introspection about the causes of such defeats.

Can the U.S. restore its military in time? Only if it were to drop woke and return to meritocracy, stop the politicization of the services, spend 5 percent of GDP on defense, end the revolving-door profiteering of defense-contractor generals, and invest in war-production industries. The only way to recruit American youth is to stop berating millions of them for their purported sins, and get out of the abortion, transgendered, race, and sex virtue-signaling business.

Pope Francis seems to know that his time is coming, and he is paving the way for his succession. Please read: Pope Francis’s Haste: Preparing His Succession? Please also read: Where Are Wokeism and Cancel Culture Taking Us?

Pope Francis’s Haste: Preparing His Succession?

by Luiz Sérgio SolimeoAugust 3, 2023

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“The Consistory of a Pope in a Hurry”

As his pontificate draws to a close, Pope Francis, in his eagerness to completely change the Catholic Church before rendering accounts to the Creator, is speeding up reforms and appointing prelates consistent with his religious ideology.

Thus, the upcoming consistory to elevate twenty-one more cardinals from his lineup indicates the haste with which he is acting. As a religious commentator put it, the September 30 consistory is the “consistory of a pope in a hurry.”¹

A “Synod” to Transform the Church

The Synod of Synodality is accelerating the institutional, doctrinal, dogmatic, and moral changes he has implemented throughout his pontificate.

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Pope Francis himself has stated that, through the Synod, he intends to transform the monarchical Church, as Our Lord founded it, into a direct democracy in which the faithful decide instead of the hierarchy.²

“Synod on Sodomy”

Fr. James Martin’s appointment as a member of the Synod, as well as the presence of Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, S.J., at the head of the event as the relator general designated by the pope, has caused the event to be called the “Synod on Sodomy.”³

In an interview with the German Catholic news agency KNA, Cardinal Hollerich stated that Church teaching condemning this sin against nature is wrong and must be changed:

“I believe that the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching is no longer correct. . . . I think it is time for a fundamental revision of the doctrine.”⁴

Amoris Laetitia’s ghostwriter appointed Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith

In the same vein of revising Catholic doctrine, Pope Francis on July 1 appointed Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández, regarded as his ghostwriter,⁵ to head the Vatican’s doctrinal office, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. He is also the president of the Pontifical Biblical Commission and the International Theological Commission.

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Upon appointing Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández to succeed Cardinal Ladaria, Pope Francis wrote Archbishop Fernández a letter presenting his conception of the Dicastery:

“The dicastery over which you will preside in other times came to use immoral methods. They were times when, rather than promoting theological knowledge, possible doctrinal errors were pursued. . . . What I expect from you is certainly something very different.”⁶

As Archbishop Fernández explains, the pontiff promised that July 1 letter to inform what he wanted him to do in the dicastery. He obviously agrees entirely with the letter’s content and believes the former Holy Office and Inquisition used immoral methods to persecute theologians.⁷

Commenting on the alleged “immoral methods” the former Holy Office employed, in an interview with an Argentine radio station, the archbishop mentions the reaction of a progressive theologian who made an act of revenge against the former Holy Office. Incidentally, that act was of a baseness more befitting a delinquent than a theologian. Says Archbishop Fernández:

“At the time of the Second Vatican Council, there were great theologians who this institution persecuted. And there is a famous case of a great theologian who urinated [on] the Holy Office’s door one night as a gesture of contempt in the face of this persecutory methodology.”⁸

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That progressive theologian was Fr. Yves Congar, O.P., one of the principal drafters of Vatican II texts.⁹Journalist Robert Blair Kaiser, a former Jesuit novice sent by Time magazine to cover the Council, narrates the episode,¹⁰ which Prof. Roberto de Mattei confirms, writing: “Congar himself, twice, in 1946 and 1954, urinated on the door of the Holy Office, as a sign of contempt toward the supreme institution of the Church.”¹¹

“Heal Me With Your Mouth. The Art of Kissing”

To get to know the new Prefect of the former Holy Office better, it is well to recall that as a young priest in 1995, Archbishop Fernández wrote an erotic-mystical book titled Sáname con tu boca. El arte de besar (Heal Me With Your Mouth. The Art of Kissing).¹²

The book is illustrated with pictures of sculptures of naked men and women kissing. On page 10 of the opening chapter, the sculpture shows a frontally and totally naked woman, with her head tilted to one side, being kissed by an also naked man. Page 18 displays another sculpture of apparently a couple, also naked, holding each other and kissing.

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Along with erotic-mystical considerations on kissing, he gives practical advice on how to kiss and lists obstacles that hinder this practice, such as bad breath (for which he offers advice to avoid), untrimmed mustaches, and so forth.

Carnal Kissing, a Mystical Act?

The author seems to give the sensual kiss between man and woman a mystical note, a fusion of personalities.

“Your whole being, and not just your lips, is committed in a kiss. . . . A kiss is a meeting of the two in a moment when nothing else exists, but them, and nothing else is worthwhile.”¹³

Further on, he writes:

“If those slow, leisurely, trembling kisses are missing, it may indicate that love has ceased to be an encounter of two who admire each other, contemplate each other, and adore each other.”¹⁴

“The kiss is the thermometer of love. That’s why, when things don’t work out between the two, you have to follow the paths that lead to the kiss rather than pretending to fix it in bed. What can those paths be? The most important are five: talk, look, touch, create, seek.”¹⁵

For him, the sensual kiss so merges personalities that “[b]ecause they understand this, many prostitutes lend themselves to all kinds of sexual games, but they don’t let themselves be kissed by just anyone.”¹⁶

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He takes the metaphorical kiss used in Scripture and by mystics to indicate the union of a soul with God, to be the carnal kiss between a man and a woman. He asks:

“What is that infinite kiss reflected from God in our kisses?”¹⁷

The book’s last chapter is titled: “The supermystical kiss.”¹⁸

A Poet?

Archbishop Fernández also considers himself a poet. However, some of his poems in the book leave us in doubt, like this excerpt:

“You don’t realize it / clueless [distracted] / Your murderous lips / And your eyes do not warn / The wandering eyes / That remain detained / before the divine meat / of your mouth. … How was God so ruthless/ To give you that mouth…/ There is no one who can resist/ witch/ hide it.”¹⁹

This is a unique book, even more so because—as the archbishop informs us—he wrote it for his pastoral work with young people. What effect did this “pastoral” work have on those young people, particularly in this age of religious ignorance and the deification of sexual pleasure? Nor did the archbishop explain the moral norms one must follow in this grave matter.

Negating Humanae Vitae

He has an erroneous notion of morality—a normative science that guides human acts, forbidding what is evil and allowing what is good—by considering it only as an expression of mercy.

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One deduces that from his article, “The Trinitarian Dimension of Morality II: Deepening the Ethical Aspect in the Light of ‘Deus caritas est.’”²⁰ In the name of mercy, he accepts contraceptives, contrary to the Church’s constant teaching, as recalled by the Encyclical Humanae Vitae.

Archbishop Fernández says that when a couple uses periodic abstention for birth control, and the wife figures that imposes a heavy burden on her husband, “[i]n that case, an uncompromising rejection of all condom use would make compliance with an external norm take precedence over the grave obligation to care for the loving communion and conjugal stability that charity more directly demands.”²¹

Now, Humanae Vitae categorically states:

“Therefore, We base Our words on the first principles of a human and Christian doctrine of marriage when We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children.”²²

Same-sex “marriage”

Archbishop Fernández is also ambiguous concerning homosexual sin. On the blessing of homosexual unions, he says they cannot be equated with marriage.

“Now, if a blessing is given so as not to cause that confusion, one will have to analyze and confirm it. As you will see, there is a point where you move out of a properly theological discussion and into a rather prudential or disciplinary question.”²³

Is Pope Francis Designating His Successor?

One may wonder whether Pope Francis intends to make his protégé and ghostwriter, Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández, his successor by appointing him as Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. Does he expect that, just as Cardinal Ratzinger succeeded John Paul II after occupying that position, the same may happen with the Argentine archbishop who succeeds him in the Chair of Saint Peter? That would guarantee the continuity of his transformation of the Church.

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Footnotes:

1. John L Allen Jr/ Crux, “The consistory of a pope in a hurry,” Catholic Herald, July 10, 2023, https://catholicherald.co.uk/the-consistory-of-a-pope-in-a-hurry/, accessed Jul. 25, 2023. 
2. Luiz Sérgio Solimeo, “A Confused, Upside Down ‘Synodal Church,’” https://www.tfp.org/a-confused-upside-down-synodal-church/. 
3. The John-Henry Westen Show, “Cardinal Müller’s take on Pope Francis’ pick for the Synod: Fr. James Martin,” July 13, 2023, https://www.lifesitenews.com/episodes/cardinal-mullers-take-on-pope-francis-pick-for-the-synod-fr-james-martin/, accessed Jul. 25, 2023. 
4. Catholic News Service, “Cardinal Hollerich says church teaching on gays ‘no longer correct,’” Angelus, Feb. 2, 2022, https://angelusnews.com/news/world/cardinal-hollerich-says-church-teaching-on-gays-no-longer-correct/, accessed Jul. 25, 2023. 
5. Hannah Brockhaus, “Pope Francis appoints Argentine Archbishop Fernández as head of doctrine dicastery.” “Pope Francis has named Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández, his longtime personal theologian and ghostwriter, to lead the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.” Catholic News Agency, Jul. 1, 2023, https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/254710/pope-francis-appoints-argentinas-archbishop-fernandez-as-prefect-for-church-doctrine; Edward Pentin, “Archbishop Fernández Defends ‘Amoris Laetitia’ From Its Critics.” “Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández, rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina and the author who drafted Amoris Laetitia said the Pope wishes pastors to consider ‘the complexity of particular situations’ where he believes the terms ‘fornicator’ or ‘adulterer’ would be inappropriate.” National Catholic Register, Aug. 21, 2017, https://www.ncregister.com/blog/archbishop-fernandez-defends-amoris-laetitia-from-its-critics. 
6. Christopher White, “Pope appoints new head of Vatican doctrinal office to promote theologians,” National Catholic Reporter, Jul. 1, 2023, https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/vatican-news/pope-appoints-new-head-vatican-doctrinal-office-promote-theologians, accessed Jul. 25, 2023. 
7. Víctor “Tucho” Fernández: “Me llegaron a decir que yo no fundamentaba la visión de la Iglesia sobre los homosexuales,” Radio Perfil, Jul. 3, 2023, https://www.perfil.com/noticias/modo-fontevecchia/victor-tucho-fernandez-me-llegaron-a-decir-que-yo-no-fundamentaba-la-vision-de-la-iglesia-sobre-los-homosexuales-modof.phtml, accessed Jul. 25, 2023. 
8. Idem, ibidem. 
9. Cfr. Yves Congar, O.P., My Journal of the Council, trans. Denis Minns O.P. (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2012), pp. 870-871. 
10. Robert Blair Kaiser, “Story Confirmed: Congar Did Pee on the Wall of the Holy Office” Kaiser’s Vatican II Journal, Sep. 26, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20140126035352/http://robertblairkaiser.com/blog/2012/09/story-confirmed-congar-did-pee-on-the-wall-of-the-holy-office/; Novus Ordo Watch, “Fr. Yves Congar urinated on Wall of Holy Office,” June 12, 2016, https://novusordowatch.org/2016/06/congar-urinated-on-holy-office-wall/. 
11. Journal d’un théologien (1946-1954), (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2000), pp. 88, 293, in Roberto de Mattei, “Complessità e paradossi nella storia della Chiesa,” https://www.corrispondenzaromana.it/complessita-e-paradossi-nella-storia-della-chiesa/. 
12. Editorial Lumen, Buenos Ayres, Argentina, 1995. (Our translation and emphases from the Spanish original.) 
13. Sáname con tu boca. El arte de besar, p. 13. 
14. Sáname con tu boca. El arte de besar, p. 15. 
15. Idem, p. 21. 
16. Idem, p. 55. 
17. Idem, p. 69. 
18. Idem. p. 71ss. 
19. Idem, p. 40. In the Spanish original: “No te das conta/ despistada [distraída]/ Tus labios asesinos/ Y tus ojos no advierten/ Los ojos divagantes/ Que quedan detenidos/ ante la carne divina/ de bu boca. … Como fue Dios tan desapiadado/ Para darte esa boca…/ No hay quien resista/ bruja/ escóndela.” 
20. Revista Teología, Tomo XLIII, No. 89, 2006. 
21. Op. cit., p. 150. 
22. Humanae Vitae, No. 14, https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae.html. 
23. Javier Arias, “Víctor Manuel Fernández a InfoVaticana: ‘Lo que está mal, está mal y yo defiendo la moralidad objetiva,’” Infovaticana.com, Jul. 5, 2023, https://infovaticana.com/2023/07/05/victor-manuel-fernandez-a-infovaticana-lo-que-esta-mal-esta-mal-y-yo-defiendo-la-moralidad-objetiva/, accessed Jul. 25, 2023.Categories