New post on Roma Locuta EstThe Devil travels to Chinaby Edward J. BarrApril 19, 2021 (Edward J. Barr) – Sources inform us that while the Devil had an enjoyable time visiting the US in January (see “The Devil came to Mass this weekend”), he returned home to find hell even more tumultuous than normal. A fierce battle was raging between the guardian demon of China and the guardian demon of the United States (some theologians believe that just as each country has a guardian angel, the Devil has assigned guardian demons to tempt nations to defy the good offered by God). Each tried to tear and rip the putrid flesh from each other while lower-ranking demons chose sides and joined the fray. The Devil smiled at the chaos as the smell of sulfur filled his black lungs. This was what he hoped to accomplish on earth. Yet he had to be sure his minions were working toward the same goal – the destruction of souls. “Why are you maggots fighting among yourselves? There is still much good on earth to expunge!” The guardian demon of China spoke first. “This fool is taking credit for the destruction of the Church in the United States, claiming it is the greatest victory we have achieved in recent years.” He scowled in the direction of the guardian demon of the United States. “It is nothing to what I accomplished in China. I have the largest country in the world under the thumb of an officially atheistic government. Their abortion numbers dominate the globe! The guardian demon of the United States quickly interjected. “That’s right, you already had a government that was so stupid it doesn’t even believe that we exist. They think this place doesn’t exist. Any clown could steal such dense souls! I had a country that claimed it was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and look how they love us!” He puffed out his half-decomposed chest in pride at scoffed. “What has he done?”“I’ll show you,” said the guardian demon of China. In a blink of an eye, the three demons were at Victoria Park in Hong Kong. “Look at this. No protests. All the prominent Christians are thrown in jail. I guided the government to crush all dissent, with barely any opposition from other governments or so-called faith leaders. Plus, look what they’re doing to the Uighurs. Beautiful.” The Devil beamed. “Outstanding work.” The guardian demon of the United States pointed a bent finger at his counterpart from China. “Of course, as you said, there was barely any opposition.” The Devil frowned. “What about that babbling Cardinal, Zen? He knew what was going on.” The demon smiled. “He’s been marginalized. I guided the Chinese to cut a deal with the Vatican. They haven’t said anything about the persecution. The Chinese are good at throwing money around,” said the guardian demon of China. “The Church barely gives Zen the time of day. I even heard one of his brother bishops at the Vatican said that the Chinese “best realize the social doctrine” of the Church.” The Devil was pleased. If persecution of believers was the social doctrine of the Church, hell had better prepare for a massive influx of new residents. He relished the hate that could invigorate his dark domain. “Ha. Who said you can’t serve God and Mammon,” he chuckled?The guardian demon of the United States could hold in his fury no longer. “You idiot. You are given an easy assignment and brag about policies that would have been enacted without you. The Chinese have not believed in us for decades. I had to turn a once Christian nation into a nation of unbelievers. You have a government that controls everything in the country and won’t allow any freedom.” The Devil watched as the two demons pared off. Teeth grinding, foul drops of sweat fell from their bodies. The Devil laughed as they tore into each other, hurling insults and curses. Time to feed the fire. “China does seem to be further along in the destruction of its soul than the United States. Even those former Christian countries are Europe are more lost than America.” It’s always good to kick a demon when he’s down, he thought. The guardian demon of the United States’ head spun around.“What?” he yelled. “I did more in my time as the guardian demon of the United States than all the others before me. Remember how the US was before I took over in the 1960s? The Devil glared at him. The demon of the United States was his most cunning underling. That’s why he gave him the prize country to destroy. He has been very effective. Jealousy and envy were good; he was glad to see the demon’s disgust. The guardian demon of China piled on. “Great job, fool. I heard you even allowed a Catholic to get elected president.” All sound ceased. An eerie silence permeated Victoria Park. It seemed as if time froze. The ground shook violently and shadows fell over Kowloon Bay. The Devil shot lasers of fire into the demon of the United States. “A Catholic is president. To hell with you!” he thundered. The demon fell back and didn’t stop. A faint cry emanated from the abyss. “Let me explain…” Edward J Barr is a Catechist, an attorney, an intelligence officer, a Marine, and a university faculty member. He earned a Master’s degree in theology from the Augustine Institute. Mr. Barr is a contributing writer for the Roma Locuta Est blog (www.RomaLocutaEst.com)Edward J. Barr | April 19, 2021 at 8:42 pm | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: https://wp.me/p7YMML-6M1
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Will Wokeness Finally Cannibalize Itself? By: Victor Davis HansonApril 18, 2021 Hat Tip: Rip McIntosh As it cannibalizes its own, Woke LTD is exposed as a money-making machine for its elite BLM Marxist architects, and reveals the hypocrisies and careerist self-interests of its corporate and bicoastal elite tag-alongs. Part 1: Wokeness Really Will EndWhat fueled—and what ended—the Jacobin beheadings, the Hollywood blacklistings, and #MeToo, these flights of collective madness and score-settling? An original, resonant complaint often jumpstarted these movements: The French Girondists could not stop rising food costs and seemed incompetent in war, so Jacobins took over with initial public support; In the late 1940s or early 1950s there were real communists inside the US government and major US institutions that were or had been pro-Soviet at a time when the Russians got the bomb, overran Eastern Europe, and their communist allies took over China; Harvey Weinstein was a sexual ogre who for years used his leftwing virtue-signaling exemptions and insider power to seduce, coerce— and on occasions allegedly rape—young women with absolute impunity. So at first, like a prairie fire, all these combustions spread, as the voices of outraged pledged to end business as usual. But what then ended the rule of the outraged as they quickly became outrageous? Soon, the most radical took control, went on their accustomed power-jihads, and leveled accusations without proof that were to be synonymous with guilt. Original revolutionaries themselves were soon targeted as insufficiently revolutionary. Finally a sickened public collective concluded, “It can’t go on like this”. So the Jacobins absorbed, but also cannibalized, the radical Montagnards and Girondins. Erstwhile revolutionaries like Danton and Hébert were accused of being trimmers and were executed. A cultural proto-Marxism swept France, targeting the church, and all the traditions of the Ancient Regime, even to the extent of renaming the days and months of the year. Yet by early 1794 the nihilist Reign of Terror was devouring its own, until at least the Thermidors intervened and sent them to the guillotine as purveyors of nihilism. The ultimate antidote Napoleon was not far from the horizon.
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You are probably well aware that family members, friends, your doctor, your employer, businesses and government agencies will attempt to coerce and force you to take the experimental COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injection, so don’t you think it’s important for you to make an informed decision?
If you are being coerced or forced to take the experimental COVID-19 gene modification injection and need legal help to fight this violation of your rights and liberties, then please feel free to contact my office at 281.698.8698. A member of my staff will give you the name of an attorney who will fight to defend your rights.
This coronavirus plandemic appears to have been initiated by Bill Gates and his New World Order co-conspirators at Event 201, a high level pandemic exercise conducted in New York City on October 18, 2019. This plandemic was carried out in conjunction with the Chinese Communists, whose lab in Wuhan developed the SARS-CoV-2 virus and unleashed it on the world, the World Health Organization (WHO), and Anthony Fauci. The purpose of the plandemic has been to create fear, panic and mass hysteria in the U.S. and in the world population. They knew that this would wreck the U.S. economy and cause the masses to turn to the almighty State to save them. It’s all about control, power and money.
Branch Covidiansare a new religious cult. They hide their faces with masks, which symbolizes their willingness to give up their right of free speech and be censored. They social distance, lockdown, become obsessed about germs, wash their hands incessantly, and stand in line to “be saved” by an experimental COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injection.
The CDC gives the definition of the term vaccine on its website. Historically, a vaccine is a protein from a virus or bacteria, or a whole killed virus or bacteria, that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific infecting organism, the pathogen, that can cause a disease. If you are immune to an infectious disease, then you can be exposed to the pathogen without becoming infected and you cannot transmit the infecting organism.
In reality, the so-called COVID “vaccine” is an experimental mRNA gene modification procedure which injects foreign mRNA, made in a pharmaceutical lab, into every cell in your body. This foreign mRNA, which carries genetic information, hijacks your cells and causes them to produce the spike protein of the coronavirus. This mRNA experimental injection has never before been used in humans.
In 2005 and again in 2012, an experimental mRNA injection was tested in animal studies against the coronaviruses that caused the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). A month later, the animals were exposed to the live virus. Many of the animals developed a hyper immune response that caused a cytokine storm in the lungs and other major organs, causing many to die. The FDA would not allow either one of the experimental coronavirus mRNA injections to undergo human trials, because of the adverse events that occurred in the animal studies.
Catastrophic Health Consequences
Research into experimental mRNA gene modification injections is still in its infancy, although it has been studied over the past 20 years. This form of experimental therapy has the potential of causing the following significant and catastrophic health consequences.
Auto immune disease where the immune system attacks the cells of the body
A hyper-inflammatory reaction, known as an antibody dependent enhancement reaction, that worsens the infectious disease process, causing a cytokine storm, leading to organ failure or neurological damages
An increased risk of blood clotting
A disruption of the normal protein producing abilities of the cells which could lead to hormone imbalances, infertility, heart, liver and neurological diseases, among others
An inability to stop a runaway production of viral particles, causing a hyper reaction by the immune system
The experimental COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injection neither provides immunity nor prevents transmission of the virus. That is why the CDC still recommends that individuals, who receive this experimental COVID-19 mRNA injection should still wear masks and social distance. Read this paragraph again.
The health authorities claim that this experimental mRNA injection is nothing more than another flu shot. This is a lie. In fact, it is an experimental COVID-19 mRNA genetic modification injection that will permanently damage your health and shorten your life span. You cannot reverse this experimental injection.
If this experimental COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injection doesn’t provide immunity or prevent transmission, then why would you expose yourself or your family members to the likelihood that this experimental COVID-19 mRNA injection is highly likely to cause you or them serious adverse health effects or death?
This is why I am doing everything I possibly can to warn you, and I encourage you to pass this information to your family members, friends, fellow church members and associates.
By referring to this therapy as a “vaccine,” the pharmaceutical companies acquire liability protection under the 2005 PREP Act. This provides these pharmaceutical companies with protection from lawsuits from patients who may be injured or killed by this gene modification injection. This injection is being promoted to the general public as being “just like getting the flu vaccine.” Calling it a “vaccine” is being done because vaccine injuries or deaths are exempted by federal law from any product liability lawsuits.
Physicians across America, such as Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance and American Frontline Doctors have used combinations of Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), Azithromycin, Cortisol, Dexamethasone, Budesonide, and aspirin, as well as Vitamin D3, Zinc, Vitamin A, B Complex, Vitamin C, Magnesium and Quercetin to effectively prevent and treat the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the COVID-19 illness. We have treated over 300 patients at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center using these protocols, and all have recovered and done well.
Starting in June 2020, India began dispensing HCQ packages to large portions of its population to prevent the COVID-19 disease. In contrast, Anthony Fauci, the public health establishment, pharmaceutical companies and conventional doctors have refused to promote the known benefits of HCQ, Ivermectin, Vitamin D3, Zinc and other products to prevent or treat the COVID-19 disease. It’s all about power, control and money and there is a fortune to be made in giving this COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injection to everyone in the world.
Let’s look at the facts by comparing the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in both the United States and India.
As you can see, India, which is a poor, third world country and has over 4 times the population of the United States, has had dramatically fewer COVID-19 cases and deaths. It is reasonable to conclude that this is due to India’s widespread use of HCQ.
Pfizer Cooked the Books
If you read the Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson websites regarding their so-called COVID “vaccines,” then you will find that they each state that their “vaccines” do NOT have FDA approval. They have only been authorized by the FDA under the Emergency Use Authorization (EUS) Act. To obtain FDA approval of a medication or a vaccine requires published animal experimental trials, followed by human experimental trials. This takes several years. There have been no published animal studies on any of the COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injections.
Pfizer had a human clinical trial of its experimental COVID-19 gene modification injection that was completed in November 2020. Pfizer claimed that this experimental mRNA injection was 95% effective in preventing COVID-19 infections. Pfizer cooked the books. Peter Doshi, Associate Editor of the esteemed British Medical Journal (BMJ), reviewed Pfizer’s available data, and pointed out the inconsistencies and weaknesses of Pfizer’s pre-approval trials. Doshi concluded that rather than Pfizer’s widely publicized 95% effective rate, these “vaccines” were, at best, 29% effective. At this low rate, this never would have been approved. That means that if you have taken this experimental COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injection, then you have become the guinea pig.
Already, the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson experimental COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injections have been suspended due to adverse effects and deaths.
The CDC refuses to admit that any of these reported deaths were related to the experimental COVID-19 injection. Really? In the first 4 months, there have been 3,005 deaths reported from the experimental COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injection, between December 14, 2020 – April 12, 2021. In the previous 13 years, between August 1, 2007 – November 30, 2020 there were 3001 vaccine deaths reported to VAERS. In just 4 months there were more deaths reported to VAERS from the experimental COVID-19 gene modification injection than in the previous 13 years from all vaccinations. That should give you pause.
There have also been over 50,000 reported adverse reactions due to the experimental COVID-19 injection. It is estimated that less than 10% of adverse reactions to vaccinations are reported to VAERS, which means there could have been upwards of 500,000 adverse reactions.
Israel currently leads the world in the percentage of its population, 53%, that has received the experimental COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injection. According to a study by Dr. Herve Seligman, member of AIX-Marseille University Faculty of Medicine Emerging Infectious and Tropical Diseases Unit and Haim Yativ, those Israelis who have received the experimental COVID-19 gene modification injection are 15x more likely to die from COVID-19 infections than those who did not receive the experimental injection. Israel uses the Pfizer experimental COVID-19 injection exclusively.
From Vaccine Passports to Implanted Microchips
In order to coerce people to receive the experimental COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injection, national governments are planning to initiate vaccine passports which businesses and schools will require for their employees, students and customers. Over the next 2-3 years, as the experimental COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injection begins to cause serious health problems, with hundreds of millions of people dying, the government health bureaucrats will blame these deaths on new variants or mutations of the COVID-19 virus. New experimental COVID injections will be developed as booster shots and will be made mandatory. You will not be allowed to buy or sell without having had the latest experimental COVID-19 gene modification injection documented in your vaccine passport.
When this occurs, then Bill Gates’ microchip will arrive on the scene. It will be mandated to be inserted into the right hand or forehead of every person. This will make it easy for the authorities or businesses to swipe the microchip for all financial transactions, which will be done using cryptocurrency. The microchip will allow the government authorities to monitor your finances, your health, your activities and your location.The microchip will be activated by an enzyme called Luciferase, which will cause the microchip in your hand or forehead to glow when a health problem or infection is present. Government computers, as well as Google and other social media companies, will be able to access the data on your microchip. The government will have control over your finances and your life.
Those who have yielded to societal pressure and have received the experimental COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injection are already on a slippery slope, leading them to more easily accept the microchip, which may be the mark of the beast, 666, in their right hand or in their forehead, as described in the book of Revelation 13:16-18, “He causes all, the small and the great, the rich and the poor, and the free and the slaves, to be given a mark in their right hands or in their foreheads, and he decrees that no one will be able to buy or sell except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for the number is that of man; and his number is 666.”
Many misguided individuals are under the delusion that this experimental COVID-19 gene modification injection will provide them with a healthy life. That is why your family members, friends, your doctor, your employer, businesses and government agencies will attempt to coerce and force you to take the experimental COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injection, and then have the microchip inserted in your hand or forehead. But now you know the rest of the story.
So “Take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything to stand firm.” Stand firm and just say “No!”
Remember, no one may coerce or force you to take the experimental COVID-19 gene modification injection. This violates the Nuremberg Code which was established after the Nuremberg trials after World War II. The Nazi doctors who performed experiments on Jewish prisoners at the concentration camps were found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. The Nuremberg Code specifically forbids experimentation on individuals without their informed consent. Not only does forced experimentation violate the Nuremberg Code, but it also violates federal law.
If you are being coerced or forced to take the experimental COVID-19 gene modification injection and need legal help to fight this violation of your rights and liberties, then please feel free to contact my office at 281.698.8698. A member of my staff will give you the name of an attorney who will fight to defend your rights.
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Prominent Italian Professor Lauds Archbishop Viganò and Discusses Doctrinal Confusion Since Vatican II
Professor Enrico Maria Radaelli, a prominent Italian theologian, has now joined the Vatican II debate and strongly endorses Archbishop Viganò’s critique of the Council and its ambiguities and manipulations. Quoting Father Schillebeeckx and Cardinal Suenens, the professor shows how key figures intentionally inserted ambiguous formulations and used the term “pastoral Council” in order to relax the Church’s doctrinal teachings. But he warns us: “Take off the Dogma and you will unleash the Antichrist”
Who is Professor Radaelli?
Professor Radaelli is a Catholic philosopher, theologian, and disciple of the Swiss intellectual Romano Amerio (1905-1997), “one of the greatest traditionalist Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century” according to Sandro Magister. As such, he is a strong critic of the Second Vatican Council and of the post-conciliar Popes and their attempts at eliding over doctrinal changes that were introduced at Vatican II. In 2003, the well-respected Vatican Correspondent Sandro Magister endorsed one of his books in which he criticized ecumenism and did not spare criticizing the Popes who promoted it. Magister then called it “important because it enriches the body of theological criticism of modern Catholicism written by intellectually sound ‘traditionalist’ authors.” Such eminent and learned people as the recently-deceased Professor Antonio Livi, the also recently-deceased philosopher Roger Scruton, Bishop Mario Olivero, the theologian Brunero Gherardini, and the journalists Alessandro Gnocchi and Mario Palmaro have collaborated with Radaelli in his book projects.
On July 4, Radaelli published a statement on Aldo Maria Valli’s website, strongly endorsing Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s recent interventions pointing to the problems of Vatican II, its organization and its documents. He also signed the recently published July 15 Open Letterof gratitude to Viganò and Bishop Athanasius Schneider for raising this debate.
Background to Professor Radaelli’s Intervention
The Open Letter was issued after Archbishop Viganò had gratefully and approvingly responded to twointerventions concerning the Second Vatican Council of Bishop Athanasius Schneider from early June with a June 9 intervention, adding a June 15 statementabout some of the problematic propositions that can be found in Vatican II documents. In this document, he also stated that it would be better if this Council were to be “forgotten.” He then answered interview questions from the Catholic commentator and book author Phil Lawler concerning the history and background of the turbulent Second Vatican Council and the signs that it had been manipulated by a small group of modernists, on June 26. In a response to LifeSiteNews editor-in-chief, John-Henry Westen, Archbishop Viganò clarified his earlier words that he thinks Vatican II should be forgotten by saying he considers the Council to be valid but manipulated. Finally, on July 6, this Italian prelate and former papal nuncio in Washington, D.C. responded to a critique by the Italian journalist Sandro Magister, who claimed that he was on the “brink of schism.” “I have no desire to separate myself from Mother Church,” Viganò wrote in reply.
Catholic Family News considers it important to now have Radaelli’s reaction to the interventions of Archbishop Viganò also presented to the English-speaking public, due to his prominence and learning. Therefore, we are publishing for the first time an English translation of Professor Radaelli’s July 4 statement with the permission of Aldo Maria Valli. Moreover, Radaelli was so kind to send us a longer, explanatory text of his position which will be published separately in due course.
There are No Liberals or Conservatives, Only Heretics or Catholics
In light of his own critique, this Italian theologian is very grateful to Archbishop Viganò for putting his finger into the wound of the post-conciliar Church in order to heal it. He refuses to accept the terms “liberals” and “conservatives” with regard to the Church’s discourse, saying that “today, the same abuse goes on in the scrimmage about the holy stance taken by Archbishop Viganò. Indeed, it is time to stop with the unfair and malicious practice of applying such exclusively, merely political categories to the Church, which is an exclusively, solely religious society!”
For Radaelli, there are only two categories in the Church: either one is a “heretic” or one is a Christian who remains “faithful to the Dogma and to the true pre-Montinian liturgy.” For him, Viganò’s position is “the only rightful stance to take,” unlike those Popes who are “unfaithful to Dogma.”
We Need Metaphysics, Not Hermeneutics
Furthermore, Radaelli discusses the term “hermeneutics,” which for him is “another trick that we have to tolerate” and that is linked with “hermeneutics” and “historicism” as promoted by Joseph Ratzinger. “Let us take again in our hands the metaphysics,” the theologian writes, “the only Catholic science, the only concrete methodology, the only rational philosophy,” and this after “almost sixty years of a dark hermeneutical and historical night.”
He points out in light of this approach of interpreting the Council documents in light of Tradition – the so-called “hermeneutic of continuity” – that previous Councils did not even need to be interpreted: “None of the documents, the decrees and the anathemas produced by the twenty ecumenical Councils of the Church,” he writes, “has ever needed to be sifted by anybody’s interpretations, since the Dogma doesn’t allow it, being too clear to be ‘interpreted.’”
He opposes and calls “muddled” Pope Benedict XVI’s words given during a December 2005 speech about “the ‘hermeneutic of reform’, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us.”
States Radaelli: “The ‘hermeneutics of reform in the continuity’ is, scanning the terms one by one: first, just an interpretation (=hermeneutics); second, of discontinuity (=reform); third, in the orthodoxy (=continuity). It is therefore an opinion, a working hypothesis, it is nothing more than an opinion about a vague concept that pretends to be in continuity with the sound development of the Dogma while, at the same time, reforming it, thus wishing to be at the same time its very opposite, and the total sum of everything, that is, to be something and its absolute contrary, however without letting it be noticed, without unveiling the conflict, the contradiction, the harshest war — up to their ultimate essence — between both things.”
The Italian professor asks which interpretation, then, should be the authoritative one – the Pope’s (not spoken ex cathedra) or someone else’s? “Here is where the armies fight against each other already since sixty years ago,” he comments, thus pointing out that, as long as a document needs interpretation, there will be a continuous battle over how to interpret it. We could add here that this is exactly the case with many documents issued by Pope Francis now, the latest example being his post-synodal exhortation Querida Amazonia.
Radaelli also shows that two key figures of the Vatican Council – Father Edward Schillebeeckx and Cardinal Leo Suenens – both clearly worked for ambiguity and vagueness. Schillebeeckx admitted that they intentionally used “diplomatic” language in order to “draw out the conclusions” later, while Suenens was the one convincing Pope John XXIII to use the term “pastoral” Council, rather than “dogmatic” one. “The gimmick consists in never utilizing the dogmatic level of the Magisterium, but always and only the ‘pastoral’ level, in order not to be forced to pronounce an infallible teaching,” which “must be perfectly true and certain and, because of its divine indefectibility, doesn’t allow any ambiguity – since ambiguity is a defect.”
Take Off Dogma and You Will Unleash the Antichrist
For Professor Radaelli, Dogma is the protection against the Antichrist, therefore an ambiguous teaching will make to Church vulnerable to the influence of the enemy. He says that the “dogmatic level” (as presented by the Pope or by him together with a Council) is the “true and only Katéchon [the one who will be eventually removed before the full manifestation of the Antichrist (see 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7)] that can bridle the Antichrist. The Katéchon is the Dogma.”
“Take off Dogma and you will unleash the Antichrist,” the author concludes.
But this removing of Dogma might also be taking place by way of silencing it, not necessarily openly contradicting it, continues the professor. “You need only to hide it … then pretend that it isn’t there and use the pastoral level of the Magisterium with daredevil impudence, as if the pastoral level didn’t entirely depend on the Dogma and hadn’t the precise moral obligation to always be – as best as it can – coherent and absolutely consequent to it, as it has always happened throughout the centuries,” he then says, adding: “to unleash the Antichrist you need only this de facto evaporation of the Dogma, this ‘not taking into account’.”
Here, Radaelli speaks of an “abnormal and empty modernist building which the Church has no turned herself into,” and he praises Viganò for “showing the courage to address the problem which had been narcocized by almost sixty years of shameful snares elaborated first of all by the highest pastors of the Church, by those who held the highest responsibilities.”
*****
Editor’s Note: Below is the full text of Professor Radaelli’s text translated into English. As our readers will notice, Professor Radaelli is a man of clear words and strong statements. He shows himself a critic not only of the Second Vatican Council’s ambiguities but also of the conciliar and post-conciliar Popes who have been involved in allowing the ambiguities of that Council – which had been consciously placed there by some prominent Modernists – to continue to affect the Church’s life and teachings. Here, he does not spare Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and also challenges Cardinal Walter Brandmüller for their attempts at defending a “hermeneutic of continuity” with regard to the Council, as if there had not taken place a shift of the Church’s teaching and doctrine. We at CFNhave never shied away from strong words that ring with truth. Longtime CFNeditor John Vennari (RIP) was often criticized for referring to the Second Vatican Council as the “best council the Protestants ever had.” Although we must manifest the proper respect due to the office held by those in authority, that due respect does not prevent us from naming things as they are. Dr. Radaelli’s style may be a bit jarring to some readers, but that should not detract from the merits of his arguments.
Letters from Babylon
I say:
It’s sixty years since the abuse of the terms “liberals” and “conservatives” began being used to cheat the public: Today, the same abuse goes on in the scrimmage about the holy stance taken by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. Indeed, it’s time to stop with the unfair and malicious practice of applying such exclusively, merely political categories to the Church, which is an exquisitely, solely religious society!
It’s just about time to stop it, because this is only a sinful way to hide the fact that they want us to believe that the filth is gold and the gold is filth. An authentic nonsense.
Whenever, in the IV century, the Arian heretics were defined as “liberals” while those who remained faithful to the Dogma were said to be “conservative”?
Whenever, in the XVI century, the Lutheran-Calvinist heretics were called “liberals” while those who were faithful to the laws of God taught by the holy Roman Church were labelled as “conservatives”?
Just talking.
P. S.: Oh, I almost forgot:
Monsignor Viganò’s Strong Shoulder Shove to Roncalli-Ratzinger’s Maxi-Snare.
Just cut it out! It’s time to stop with these miserable cunnings that turn reality upside-down making the heretics look nice and making the firm and holy saints who are faithful to God look like nefarious troglodytes: the so-called “liberals” are nothing but those who summarize in their perverse doctrine a jumble of the worst heresies that merged into Modernism; by contrast, the so-called “conservatives” are simply those Christians who remain faithful to the Dogma and to the true and holy pre-Montinian liturgy at the risk of falling out with the world, Popes included.
Even in the contemporary case of the strong and severe stance taken by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò on the Second Vatican Council — which is actually the only rightful stance to take — he is not to be labelled as a “conservative”, but is rather to be considered a Christian who is faithful to the Dogma, while the Popes who called, led, defended, and still defend that perverse Assembly are not to be deemed good and valiant “liberals”, but rather Popes who are unfaithful to the Dogma, in this specific case precisely modernist and neo-modernist Popes.
The question is that these fake categories must be replaced by the true ones. Enough with the subterfuges: leave the heresy to the heretics and the truth to the faithful.
The only acceptable categories in the context of a doctrinal debate inside the Roman Catholic Church are “heretic” for those who don’t adhere to the Dogma and to the pastoral Magistry [i.e., Magisterium – Ed.] intimately connected to it, as it is taught by the dogmatic Magistry, and “Catholic” for those who adhere to it.
There are no more categories. And those used today are mere falsehood.
That’s not all: stop talking about “hermeneutics”, too, another trick that we have to tolerate as if it were our duty to hang from the lips of the Frankfurt School like good teacher’s pets of Pope Ratzinger, who made of hermeneutics and historicism his Polar stars: let’s take again in our hands the metaphysics, the only Catholic science, the only concrete methodology, the only rational philosophy, so that we may again and finally witness firsthand — after almost sixty years of a dark hermeneutical and historicist night — the true reality of the Church, before we will land face first on it because of the contemporary, horrible reality that plagues the Church: it will be too late then.
None of the documents, the decrees, and the anathemas produced by the twenty ecumenical Councils of the Church has ever needed to be sifted by anybody’s interpretations, since the Dogma doesn’t allow it, being too clear to be “interpreted”, no matter what Cardinal Brandmüller may affirm about it.
Furthermore, it’s about time to stop talking of the much more muddled, convoluted and twisted hermeneutics mentioned by Pope Ratzinger in his utterly grievous Address to the Roman Curia of 22 December 2005: «the hermeneutic of reform — he remarked in those reflections of his —, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church.»
Please somebody give as a gift to the much august Author — who is more and more in danger — of such a convoluted conceptualism and invite him to read as soon as possible The Emperor’s New Clothes, a beautiful fairy tale by Andersen that could suggest to him the reasons why he should end his decades-long effort — whose insistence is rather worthy of much better goals — to produce, one after the other, only soft feathery pillows whose unique utility consists in allowing him to lay his head — which is profoundly thirsty for peace — and his exhausted elbows on them, so to be able to sleep quietly in the middle of the uproar of the world, so much for the lightning bolts of Ez 13:18, the holy Word of God.
The “hermeneutics of reform in the continuity” is, scanning the terms one by one: first, just an interpretation (=hermeneutics); second, of discontinuity (=reform); third, in the orthodoxy (=continuity).
It is therefore an opinion, a working hypothesis, it is nothing more than an opinion about a vague concept that pretends to be in continuity with the sound development of the Dogma while, at the same time, reforming it, thus wishing to be at the same time its very opposite, and the total sum of everything, that is, to be something and its absolute contrary, however without letting it be noticed, without unveiling the conflict, the contradiction, the harshest war — up to their ultimate essence — between both things.
Ratzinger! Oh, Ratzinger! When will you stop tangling yourself up in piles of white, soft feathers only in order not to see the blood of Redemption that flows around you and so — who knows? — maybe even save yourself?
That Address to the Roman Curia is way too much famous, it is quoted again and again, many hosannas are sung to it because in its simplicity — hermeneutics of continuityYES, hermeneutics of rupture NO — it seems to solve all the impervious, long-standing problems generated and never solved by the Second Vatican Council. However, no one penetrates beyond the surface of those lines in which their most august Author allows the perpetration of a very serious crime, a crime as serious as to cut at the root all the power of the very famous scheme that outsmarts everybody: continuity, yes; rupture, no, hermeneutically speaking, of course, that is, always in a Rashomon-style way, as in Kurosawa’s movie, in which four hermeneuts interpret the same episode reaching four irreconcilable conclusions: interpretation is reality.
Alright, but which interpretation? Why should the Pope’s interpretation — since he is not talking ex cathedra — be truer than mine?
That’s the point. Here is where the armies fight against each other already since sixty years ago. Right: always walking and fighting on a pile of leaves that hides to the soldiery of Cardinals, Bishops, Monsignors and simple faithful — no matter whether they are “liberals” or “conservatives” — the great snare that make them all fall in the one pothole, obligingly, because anyone of them has been well trained by the clerical regime: and I say “anyone” because no one of them manifests the public, necessary opposition which is due — no one except, now, the aforementioned Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.
However, why, after the very same Amerio in his Iota Unum — and successively, repeatedly, the undersigned in his own books — pointed out that even the neoterics remorselessly, shamelessly and bluntly admitted it — see Fr. Schillebeeckx, who writes: « Nous l’exprimons d’une façon diplomatique, mais après le Concile nous tirerons les conclusions implicites » (p. Edward Schillebeeckx op, in De Bazuin n. 16, 1965) — why on earth, I ask, does everybody still keep refusing to face the facts and to stop accepting this conciliar maxi-snare of ambiguity?
This is the fraudulent gimmick that the writer denounces since decades, suggested by Cardinal Suenens to the alert, refined and great insight of the so-called “Good Pope” John XXIII, who immediately put it in practice since the formal opening of the Council — conferring to it a merely “pastoral” nature, not at all a “dogmatic” one, as it should have been because of the presence of the Pope — on 11 October 1962: and the gimmick consists in never utilizing the dogmatic level of the Magisterium, but always and only the “pastoral” level, in order not to be forced to pronounce an infallible teaching, which natura sua — by his own nature — must be perfectly true and certain and, because of its divine indefectibility, doesn’t allow any ambiguity — since ambiguity is a defect —, not even an intentional one, thus it doesn’t allow any “interpretation” either.
The dogmatic level, the highest level of teaching, held only by the Pope — or by a Council, but only if it is in union with the Pope — is the true and only Katéchon that can bridle the Antichrist. The Katéchon is the Dogma.
Take off the Dogma and you will unleash the Antichrist.
And it is not even really necessary to take it off — the Dogma: you need only hide it — as the shrewd French Cardinal suggested to the placid Pope from Bergamo — then pretend that it isn’t there and use the pastoral level of the Magisterium with daredevil impudence, as if the pastoral level didn’t entirely depend on the Dogma and hadn’t the precise moral obligation to always be — as best as it can — coherent and absolutely consequent to it, as it has always happened throughout the centuries in the life and therefore in the practice of the holy Magisterium of the Church.
There it is: to unleash the Antichrist you need only this de facto evaporation of the Dogma, this “not taking it into account”, this shrewd “forgetting” — let’s call it this way — which, of course, is completely immoral, sinful, and based on Machiavellianism applied to the Word of God.
A very, very simple and little rule. But a firm one: if, for example, the Pope called a Council to which he denied any faculty to enunciate a locutio ex cathedra, e.g. by prescribing to it the magisterial level called “pastoral”, the definitions that that Pope would put forward in such a Council “would never run the risk” — let’s call it this way — “of being infallibly true”: that’s what Cardinal Suenens and Pope Roncalli wanted to achieve and indeed achieved: “Never to be forced to pronounce infallible truths, but, on the contrary, to be sure to be always allowed to say anything, perhaps even some heresies (provided that they are not noticed, but for this you need only wrap the language in a fog of ambiguity, thank you Schillebeeckx), in any case: first, the Pope will never risk to be accused of formal heresy, that is, of the crime of heresy proper; second, the infallibility Dogma, the Dogma that guarantees exactly that, will never been undermined.”
In order to know every detail about this maxi-snare, I invite the reader to peruse my All’attacco! Cristo vince [Charge! Christ Wins], Aurea Domus Editions, Milan 2019, § 16, pp. 63-7, that can also be ordered from the writer.
This perverse device is the engine, the pivot, the material cause and the efficient cause, the genius absconditus — the hidden demon — of the abnormal and empty modernist building which the Church has now turned herself into, it’s the device without which, then, the Church wouldn’t be such a preagonal ruin as it is, Modernism wouldn’t have succeeded in ousting Truth from the highest Throne and the Bride of Christ would be today more splendid, holy and glorious than ever.
However, in spite of this perverse device — that the writer summarized in the formula “War of the Two Forms”, talking about it and illustrating it in every language since more than ten years — nobody has ever opened a debate, nobody has ever, in any way, at least taken it into account, nobody has ever turned the head at least to look at it in the rear-view mirror.
Today an Archbishop is showing the courage to address the problem, a problem which had been narcotized by almost sixty years of shameful snares elaborated first of all by the highest Pastors of the Church, by those who held the highest responsibilities.
Today, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò is not afraid to acknowledge that the Second Vatican Council must be cancelled both in its totality and in each one of its thousands of ambiguities which its advocates resorted to in order to surreptitiously introduce concepts that, if the Council had been opened at the due dogmatic level, not only would have been strongly rejected, but would have also explicitly and even more harshly anathematized.
Enough with the Roncalli-Ratzinger-style maxi-snares. Let the Church come back to her role of unique Polar star of divine salvation by adhering strongly and with absolute resolution to the firm clarity of the Dogma: « Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one.» (Mt 5:37)
Enrico Maria Radaelli
International Science and Commonsense Association (ISCA) Department of Metaphysics of Beauty and Philosophy of Arts, Research Director and Professor of Formal Gnoseology
Dr. Maike Hickson, born and raised in Germany, studied History and French Literature at the University of Hannover and lived for several years in Switzerland, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation. She 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. Her work has appeared in American 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.
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ALL fought against this back in the early 1970s and continued that fight into the 1990s, testifying before the National Institutes of Health in 1993 and helping push the Dickey/Wicker Amendment in 1996 (which was never brought to the US House floor for a vote) after the Clinton administration rescinded a five-year ban on baby body part harvesting.
While the FDA’s interest in aborting babies in order to harvest their body parts is not new news, pro-life advocates have been watching them like hawks.
In 2015 we warned that Planned Parenthood — the nation’s #1 abortion chain — was trafficking in baby body parts after the Center for Medical Progress concluded a three-year investigation into their practices.
In August 2018 we sounded the alarm again asking why nothing had been done to act on CMP’s investigative report. The Trump administration sprung into action and banned the practice in September 2018.
Of course, trafficking in baby body parts isn’t new. But this time, from 2012 and until the Trump administration stopped the practice in 2018, Judicial Watch has uncovered for the first time that it was the federal government trafficking in baby body parts rather than 3rd party vendors. E-mails from the FDA are as cold as ordering a cut of meat from the butcher’s shop: “It is strongly preferred to have a male fetus if at all possible … [but] undetermined sex or female is better than no tissue.” Some of the responses are absolutely heartbreaking: “We only check external genitalia and if it’s not there … we have no way of telling.” That’s because the act of an abortion is so violent, the bodies of these babies are so mangled that it becomes hard to tell which organs are which.
I NEED YOUR HELP TO END THE CHILD KILLING.
The time for half measures and the “regulation” of this industry of death needs to stop RIGHT NOW.
You know that we are on the frontlines fighting this scandal. We have pushed Congress to ban this practice once and for all because lives are at stake.
These investigations are incredibly sad to read and take plenty of work, but they are meaningless unless we begin to educate pro-life activists, policy and thought leaders, our bishops and priests as well as being able to take a stand and defend the Holy Eucharist from those who excuse this trafficking as acceptable.
For federal employees to line up and purchase ‘fresh’ aborted baby body parts reminds us that when given the chance the federal government will stoop as low as it can go — to Hell if it has to — to do their gruesome research.
Help me stop it with a $100 or $35 gift today by clicking here.
Thank you and God bless you!
Yours in the LORD Who IS Life! Judie Brown President American Life League
Letter #15, 2021, Friday, April 16: Happy Birthday Pope Benedict Happy Birthday, Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI! Today, April 16, Pope Benedict XVI turns 94. Born in 1927, Benedict became Pope in 2005 on April 19, at the age of 78. He resigned his ministry on February 28, 2013, after just under 8 years as Pope, at the age of 85. Pope Francis, who was elected Pope at the age of 76, is now 84. Francis has now been Pope a bit more than 8 years, so Francis’s pontificate (2013-present) has just recently become longer than Benedict’s (2005-2013). It is curious to note that Benedict’s health seemed very fragile in 2013, so fragile that it seemed he was constrained to resign his post in part due to ill health and physical weakness. Now, more than eight years have passed — more years than he was active as Pope — and his mind still seems very clear indeed, despite his increasing frailty. Ad moltos annos vivas (“May you live for many more years”), Pope Benedict, ad moltos annos vivas. (link and link in Italian, with many photos) *** P.S. I also think this video is of considerable interest. It shows Pope Benedict on the day he announced his resignation, on February 11, 2013. He is speaking in Latin, and announces that he must resign his papal ministry due to his advancing age. Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who clearly had already been informed of the announcement and so was ready with a brief speech, which he reads (you can see the speech in his hands), and then embraces Pope Benedict. The video is only one minute and fifty seconds long. (link) This other link has the same Latin speech with a simultaneous English translation, so you may hear for yourself what the Pope said at the moment of his resignation. (link) Below are three articles from other writers and news agencies: (1) Hannah Brockhausof Catholic News Agency gives an overall roundup on Benedict’s birthday; (2) Father Raymond de Souzaof the National Catholic Registerspeaks of Benedict’s theological career and his key importance as a figure who has helped “hold back” the seemingly ever more imminent departure from the traditional faith of the Church of the increasingly “progressive” Catholic Church in Germany; and (3) CNA writers in an article in May 2020 give a quite interesting account of Benedict’s own understanding of his life and work found in the magisterial, official biography by German author Peter Seewald. In a wide-ranging interview at the end of the 1,184-page book, Benedikt XVI — Ein Leben (“Benedict XVI — A Life), the Pope Emeritus tells Seewald that the greatest threat facing the Church is a “worldwide dictatorship of seemingly humanistic ideologies.” In the phrase “worldwide dictatorship of seemingly humanistic ideologies,” the key word is “seemingly.” Benedict is saying that the worldwide dictatorship now “the greatest threat facing the Church” is a group of ideologies (which we may perhaps understand as “powers and principalities,” that is, spiritual forces, not mere “flesh and blood”) which are “seemingly” “humanistic,” but are not, in fact, humanistic at all, that is, not interested in the good of human beings, the good of mankind, at all…
Note re our website: A friend has put me in touch with a web site programmer who is now working steadily to discover the cause of the recent “hack” of our website, resulting in the breaking of many links to articles posted at InsidetheVatican.com. He is making real progress, and is giving us great hope that all issues will soon be resolved. (We do need support to ensure that we may continue to keep our site secure.) —RM
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI./ Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk. Benedict XVI turns 94 years old (link) By Hannah Brockhaus Vatican City, Apr 16, 2021 / 10:13 am America/Denver (CNA). Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI was born 94 years ago today in the town of Marktl, Bavaria. More than eight years after he announced his retirement from the papacy in 2013, Benedict continues to live a retired life in the Mater Ecclesiae monastery on Vatican grounds. Despite growing feebleness, the retired pope is in good health, and has marked his April 16 birthday each year, sometimes in the presence of family and friends. This is Benedict’s first birthday since the death of his older brother Georg Ratzinger on July 1, 2020 in Bavaria. The pope emeritus was able to say a last goodbye to his brother during a four-day trip to Germany at the end of June. Benedict’s birthday in 2020 was marked quietly, as Italy was under lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic. His personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Ganswein, told Vatican News Benedict XVI’s 93rd birthday began with Mass in the monastery chapel, and included prayer and reading. The pope emeritus also listened to a few traditional songs from his homeland of Bavaria. Since he could not have visitors, Benedict received many emails, letters, and phone calls wishing him a happy birthday. In 2018, Benedict was treated to a private concert by the Swiss Guard band. The day after the retired pope’s 90th birthday in 2017, he was thrown a Bavarian-style party, complete with pretzels and German beer. The Schützen association, which re-enacts a 19th-century Tyrol military, played music for the party; guests included Georg Ratzingerand the Bavarian Prime Minister Horst Seehofer. This party is the origin of iconic photos of Benedict XVI holding a large stein of beer, though the manager of an Austrian restaurant near the Vatican said Benedict usually preferred to drink orange soda, known by the brand name Fanta, on his frequent visits to the eatery as a cardinal. Benedict XVI resigned from the papacy in 2013, citing advanced age and declining strength that made it difficult to carry out his ministry. He was the first pope to resign in nearly 600 years. Since his retirement, Benedict’s birthday celebrations have sometimes included visits or messages from Pope Francis. In 2008, in a speech to the participants in the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Council for the Family, Benedict XVI reflected on the place of grandparents in society and warned that an individualistic mindset is injuring the elderly. “In the past, grandparents had an important role in the life and growth of the family,” he said. “Even with their advancing age they continued to be present with their children, their grandchildren and even their great-grandchildren, giving a living witness of caring, sacrifice and a daily gift of themselves without reserve. They were witnesses of a personal and community history that continued to live on in their memories and in their wisdom.” Today, he continued, “the elderly, including many grandparents, find themselves in a sort of ‘parking area:’ some realize they are a burden to their family and prefer to live alone or in retirement homes with all the consequences that such decisions entail.” “Unfortunately, it seems that the ‘culture of death’ is advancing on many fronts and is also threatening the season of old-age,” Benedict said. “With growing insistence, people are even proposing euthanasia as a solution for resolving certain difficult situations.” The pope encouraged Catholics to join together to defeat “all forms of marginalization, for it is not only they — grandfathers, grandmothers, senior citizens — who are being injured by the individualistic mindset, but everyone.” “If grandparents, as is said often and on many sides, are a precious resource, it is necessary to put into practice coherent choices that allow them to be better valued,” he said. Pope Benedict XVI in 2013 (Photo: Vatican Media) Pope Benedict XVI, the Anchor That Kept Germany Rooted in Christ (link)By Father Raymond de Souza COMMENTARY: In the late evening of his life, Ratzinger/Benedict can be understood as the Catholic Church’s singular, multi-generational response to the reforming agenda of German theology. Did the Church place too many of her theological eggs in one Bavarian Easter basket? The question occurs as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI — born on Holy Saturday and baptized the same day in the newly-blessed Easter water — celebrates his 94th birthday tomorrow, April 16. With the death of Father Hans Küng, 93, during the Easter Octave, the generation to which Joseph Ratzinger belongs is passing away. Ratzinger, the Bavarian, and the Swiss Küng were 30-something theological wunderkinds, both part of what Ratzinger called the “Rhine alliance” of northern European theologians who would definitively shape the work of the Second Vatican Council. The Rhine Flows Into the Tiberwas the title of one of the more famous books on Vatican II, and Cardinal Ratzinger flowed farther than anyone, becoming, as it were, the Tiber itself upon his election as supreme pontiff in 2005. The current theological chaos in Germany, where the “binding synodal path” raises the possibility of schism, invites renewed attention to German theology, one of the most influential forces in ecclesial life in the past century. For 60 years, from his ordination in 1951 to his abdication in 2013, Joseph Ratzinger was at the center of it. Indeed, he became something of an anchor in stormy seas. After his abdication, the boat began to drift. In the late evening of his life, Ratzinger/Benedict can be understood as the Church’s singular, multi-generational response to the reforming agenda of German theology. Would that reform be Catholic, returning to the great and wide tradition, or Protestant, diverging from it? For generations a great number of German bishops have been on the Protestant side of many questions. Ratzinger/Benedict kept them Catholic. Since he departed in 2013, the Protestantizing wing has been in ascendance. Peter Seewald, who was Ratzinger’s privileged interlocutor for four interview books, published last year Volume I of his definitive biography, Benedict XVI: A Life (1927-1965). Volume II will be published later this year. The splendid Seewald biography admirably captures the theological ferment in which the young Father Ratzinger was immersed. The Counter-Reformation theology dominant in Rome had become sluggish and complacent. The challenges of modernity posed new questions that Roman officialdom was ill-equipped to engage. The bold reforms that Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) had launched in recovering the originality of Thomistic philosophy and supporting an authentic renewal in biblical studies were bearing fruit. All of this was awaiting the mature judgment and encouragement of an ecumenical council, the first really since the 16th-century Council of Trent, given that Vatican I (1869-1870) had to be prematurely abandoned due to political strife. If his friends in the Cracovian Rhapsodic Theatre would tease their friend as “Karol Wojtyla, future saint,” the classmates of Joseph Ratzinger, ordained in 1951, knew that he was a future scholar, destined to take his place sooner rather than later in the theological firmament. Within a year of ordination, he was appointed a seminary professor; he would also take his turn hearing confessions in the cathedral. “It was mostly seminarians who came,” the Pope Emeritus told Seewald. “I was especially popular with them because I was so broad-minded.” With other broad-minded scholars, Father Ratzinger rocketed up the theological circles in Germany and, by the time of the Council, emerged as a key adviser (peritus) to Cardinal Joseph Frings of Cologne. In advance of the Council, Cardinal Frings gave a landmark address in Genoa, setting out a framework. Pope St. John XXIII summoned Frings to the Vatican to tell him that he had said what the Pope had wanted to say, but had not found the right words. Father Ratzinger had written the entire Genoa speech. Not yet 35 years old, he was key in shaping the thought of one of the most influential Council fathers. Along with others in the “Rhine alliance,” Father Ratzinger brought zeal and zest to the reforming wing of the Council, finding allies among other intellectuals, including Bishop Wojtyla from Krakow, who sought to update the expression of the ancient deposit of faith, bringing it into a conversation with modern thinking. The mission was to encounter the modern world in order to convert it. In 1965, the “Rhine alliance” launched a new theological journal (Concilium) to promote the implementation of Vatican II, and its founders included the theological giants of the day, all priests: Johann Baptist Metz, Dominicans Yves Congar and Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesuits Henri de Lubac and Karl Rahner, and Servant of God Hans Urs von Balthasar. Father Küng, a brilliant scholar who was more a spin doctor than a theological contributor to the Council itself, was also a founder. Father Ratzinger’s skepticism, meanwhile, grew about the Conciliumdirection of reform, which appeared to breach the limits of Catholic orthodoxy. In 1971, Father Küng would publish his book denying Catholic teaching on papal infallibility. In 1972, de Lubac and Congar would leave Concilium to found a new journal, Communio, to be faithful to Catholic tradition and the true teaching of the council. Joseph Ratzinger would be a co-founder with them. Ratzinger and Küng were thus established as the great avatars of their generation of German-speaking theology. Ratzinger advocated breathing new life into the Catholic tradition; Küng preferred to change it. For the next several generations, Küng would carry much of the theological and institutional consensus in the German world. Ratzinger would become Rome’s man to contain German theology within the Catholic tradition. In 1977, Pope St. Paul VI would make Professor Ratzinger the new archbishop of Munich and create him a cardinal. In 1979, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would remove Father Küng’s license to teach Catholic theology. Munich’s Cardinal Ratzinger sided with Rome on the Küng affair, and further intervened to block Father Metz’s appointment to a theology chair in Munich. Cardinal Ratzinger was the most credible and articulate expositor of Catholic tradition, then apparently a minority position in German theology. In 1981, St. John Paul II appointed Cardinal Ratzinger as prefect of the CDF. The battle between Rome and the German party — both in the academy and among the bishops — would be led in Rome by the preeminent German theologian-bishop faithful to Tradition. For the next 24 years, Cardinal Ratzinger would be the Vatican’s answer to preserve the goodness in the “Rhine alliance” while correcting its errors. This would be done from inside that theological movement, as Cardinal Ratzinger was one of its leading proponents. And for more than two decades of deliberations about an immense variety of challenges, the Polish pope and the CDF prefect would speak in German. Cardinal Ratzinger would be at the heart of disputes with the “Rhine alliance” over an extended period: —liberation theology (1984 and 1986) —the appointment of a new archbishop in Cologne (1988) and subsequent “Cologne Declaration” of non-confidence in John Paul and Ratzinger (1989) —the instruction on the vocation and mission of the theologian, Donum Veritatis (1990) —the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) —the encyclical on moral theology Veritatis Splendor (1993) —the dispute over Holy Communion for the civilly divorced-and-remarried with German Bishops Karl Lehmann and Walter Kasper (1994) —abortion counseling in Germany (1998) —the Joint Declaration on Justification with the Lutherans (1999) —the declaration Dominus Iesus, on the uniqueness of salvation in Jesus Christ (2000) —the debate over the primacy of the universal Church over the local Churches with Cardinal Kasper (2001) Cardinal Ratzinger was in his person the Vatican response to the German challenge, backed up by the formidable St. John Paul II, who himself had done his doctoral work on the German philosopher Max Scheler. John Paul’s approach was not to exile the German alternatives; he made both Karl Lehmann and Walter Kasper cardinals. Yet with Cardinal Ratzinger as his chief lieutenant, he was confident that the ship would continue on course. His election as Pope Benedict XVI put Ratzinger at the absolute center of the ongoing German challenges. In his third and final visit to Germany in 2011, 18 months before his abdication, Benedict delivered this devastating assessment to the Central Committee of German Catholics, the driving force behind the current “synodal path”: The Church in Germany is superbly organized. But behind the structures, is there also a corresponding spiritual strength, the strength of faith in the living God? We must honestly admit that we have more than enough by way of structure but not enough by way of Spirit. I would add: the real crisis facing the Church in the western world is a crisis of faith. If we do not find a way of genuinely renewing our faith, all structural reform will remain ineffective. In 2012, having already taken the decision to abdicate, Pope Benedict sought to replace himself in the role he had played since the 1970s. In July 2012, he appointed Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the German bishop in charge of publishing the Ratzinger collected works, prefect of the CDF. Who better from the German world to take over his role? After February 2013, Benedict would withdraw from being at the center of ecclesial affairs for 35 years. The anchor had been lifted, and the German Catholic world would begin to drift. Cardinal Müller would do his best, but unlike the Wojtyla-Ratzinger alliance of world-class scholars and courageous pastors, Pope Francis paid less attention to Cardinal Müller’s efforts, unceremoniously sacking him in 2017. With Cardinal Müller in retirement, the leading cardinal theologian from the German world became Vienna’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the Ratzinger protégé who served as general editorial secretary for the most important project of Ratzinger’s long career, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The transformation of Cardinal Schönborn from stalwart defender of an affirmative Catholic orthodoxy to cheerleader for the initiatives of the German Central Committee is the most remarkable demonstration of what happens when the Ratzinger anchor is lifted. Pope Francis has made repeated and dramatic efforts to stop the runaway train of the German “synodal path.” To date, the Central Committee apparatus and its sympathetic bishops have paid him no need. The future of the Francis pontificate, and the future of the Church in Europe, depends upon whether the Holy Father manages to stave off a putative schism, to stop the Protestantizing of the Catholic faith. How, though, will he do it without Joseph Ratzinger, the Church’s answer to the German question for 60 years? Pope Benedict XVI Holds His Final General Audience, Feb 27, 2013 Credit: Mazur www.thepapalvisit.org.uk In new biography, Benedict XVI laments modern ‘anti-Christian creed’ (link) CNA Staff, May 4, 2020 / 10:45 am America/Denver (CNA). Modern society is formulating an “anti-Christian creed” and punishing those who resist it with “social excommunication,” Benedict XVI has said in a new biography, published in Germany May 4. In a wide-ranging interview at the end of the 1,184-page book, written by German author Peter Seewald, the pope emeritus said the greatest threat facing the Church was a “worldwide dictatorship of seemingly humanistic ideologies.” Benedict XVI, who resigned as pope in 2013, made the comment in response to a question about what he had meant at his 2005 inauguration, when he urged Catholics to pray for him “that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.” He told Seewald that he was not referring to internal Church matters, such as the “Vatileaks” scandal, which led to the conviction of his personal butler, Paolo Gabriele, for stealing confidential Vatican documents. In an advanced copy of Benedikt XVI — Ein Leben (A Life), seen by CNA, the pope emeritus said: “Of course, issues such as ‘Vatileaks’ are exasperating and, above all, incomprehensible and highly disturbing to people in the world at large.” “But the real threat to the Church and thus to the ministry of St. Peter consists not in these things, but in the worldwide dictatorship of seemingly humanistic ideologies, and to contradict them constitutes exclusion from the basic social consensus.” He continued: “A hundred years ago, everyone would have thought it absurd to speak of homosexual marriage. Today whoever opposes it is socially excommunicated. The same applies to abortion and the production of human beings in the laboratory.” “Modern society is in the process of formulating an ‘anti-Christian creed,’ and resisting it is punishable by social excommunication. The fear of this spiritual power of the Antichrist is therefore only too natural, and it truly takes the prayers of a whole diocese and the universal Church to resist it.” The biography, issued by Munich-based publisher Droemer Knaur, is available only in German. An English translation, Benedict XVI, The Biography: Volume One, will be published in the U.S. on Nov. 17. In the interview, the 93-year-old former pope confirmed that he had written a spiritual testament, which could be published after his death, as did Pope St. John Paul II. Benedict said that he had fast-tracked the cause of John Paul II because of “the obvious desire of the faithful” as well as the example of the Polish pope, with whom he had worked closely for more than two decades in Rome. He insisted that his resignation had “absolutely nothing” to do with the episode involving Paolo Gabriele, and explained that his 2010 visit to the tomb of Celestine V, the last pope to resign before Benedict XVI, was “rather coincidental.” He also defended the title “emeritus” for a retired pope. Benedict XVI lamented the reaction to his various public comments since his resignation, citing criticism of his tribute read at the funeral of Cardinal Joachim Meisner in 2017, in which he said that God would prevent the ship of the Church from capsizing. He explained that his words were “taken almost literally from the sermons of St. Gregory the Great.” Seewald asked the pope emeritus to comment on the “dubia” submitted by four cardinals, including Cardinal Meisner, to Pope Francis in 2016 regarding the interpretation of his apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia. Benedict said that he did not want to comment directly, but referred to his last general audience, on Feb. 27, 2013. Summing up his message that day, he said: “In the Church, amid all the toils of humanity and the confusing power of the evil spirit, one will always be able to discern the subtle power of God’s goodness.” “But the darkness of successive historical periods will never allow the unadulterated joy of being a Christian … There are always moments in the Church and in the life of the individual Christian in which one feels profoundly that the Lord loves us, and this love is joy, is ‘happiness’.” Benedict said that he treasured the memory of his first meeting with the newly elected Pope Francis at Castel Gandolfo and that his personal friendship with his successor has continued to grow. Author Peter Seewald has conducted four book-length interviews with Benedict XVI. The first, Salt of the Earth, was published in 1997, when the future pope was prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It was followed by God and the World in 2002, and Light of the World in 2010. In 2016, Seewald published Last Testament, in which Benedict XVI reflected on his decision to step down as pope. Publisher Droemer Knaur said that Seewald had spent many hours talking to Benedict for the new book, as well as speaking to his brother, Msgr. Georg Ratzinger and his personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein. In an interview with Die Tagespost April 30 [2020], Seewald said that he had shown the Pope Emeritus a few chapters of the book before publication. Benedict XVI, he added, had praised the chapter on Pope Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge.…
Can the Great ‘Awokening’ Succeed?Wokeism is creating a future group of politically incorrect Trotskyites on a proverbial rendezvous with a Mexican ice ax, given that by birth they will never be woke enough for the new Stalinism. By: Victor Davis HansonApril 11, 2021 We all know that we are living in revolutionary times. The origins, ascendence, values, laws, and future of the United States are all under assault by self-described, though accurately described, revolutionaries. It is a Jacobin, Bolshevik, or Maoist moment. All aspects of life, well beyond politics, are now to be ideologically conditioned. Everything from kindergarten messaging, cartoons, workplace reeducation, and television commercials to college admissions, baseball games, and the airlines are to be “fundamentally transformed” along racial lines. Long gone is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society. Gone, at least at the state level, is confidence in the melting pot of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage (although mixed marriages and multiracial children are at an all-time high). Gone are even the affirmative-action doctrines of proportional representation and disparate impact. (Yet the two mandates were always arbitrarily applied, in the sense that the U.S. Postal Service and the professional football and basketball leagues never paid much attention to racial quotas based on demographic percentages, which apparently only applied to white and Asian “overrepresentation”elsewhere). Wokeism, however, is essentially tribal. It seeks to identify particular nonwhite constituencies, unite them not by identical class, not by similar skin color, not by collective similar history, not by shared experience, not by mutual cultural affinities, not by longstanding historical alliances, but simply by two premises: 1) Those of the woke collective are either claimants to being “nonwhite,” and thus victims of racism, or they are architects and supporters of the wokeist agenda, and: 2) they can thereby all either directly leverage reparatory concessions in hiring, admissions, careers, compensation, and general influence or ensure the revolutionary guillotine exempts themselves. A cynic might add that much of this new racialism is a product of globalteering, and seeks to cater to huge foreign markets—China especially—by both “looking more like the world,” and delighting America’s critics, while appeasing far less moral audiences and consumers abroad than a perceived shrinking market at home.Still for the woke revolution to succeed, a number of experiments will have to go their way. Merit Was Always a Sham?Wokeism assumes that merit was mostly an arbitrary white construct. Its use was to insist on ethnocentric and culturally exclusionary criteria to ostracize the Other. Otherwise, “merit” had not much relation with real competency. Is that allegation true? We shall soon see. But note first that few are saying to keep bar-exam grading static, or SAT minimum scores for admission the same, and thereby instead create a Marshall Plan effort in the inner-city to stop the violence, turn failed schools into stellar academies, and honestly critique single-parent households, illegitimacy, and inordinate criminality—as an effort to ensure African American youth are not just qualified, but better qualified meritocratically than those who are deemed to hold these monopolies. Instead, take the United Airlines idea that it won’t necessarily train the most qualified would-be pilot candidates. Now it will target applicants by racial groupings and, by fiat, limit white males to 2,500 of 5,000 slots in its pilot-training schools. If a non-white applicant has less prior experience with flight, scores lower on a test, or compiled a less than competitive high school or college record, it won’t matter then. These were all always useless benchmarks apparently. In today’s age of computer-driven avionics, the prerequisite ability to do math, to know something about navigation, to understand computers, or to have the proper temperament to fly a plane doesn’t really matter. The fact that thousands will enter pilot training, and soon aircraft controlling, in part on the basis of their gender or race, will not in any way affect the safety or efficacy of travel. We will know fairly soon the answers to this woke experiment by two criteria: Will pilot error, whether fatal or incidental, increase? And will our elites, whether in Air Force One, or in their own Gulfstreams, follow suit and hire pilots on the basis of their diversity first, and avionics record second. We can ditto race-based criteria now used at the corporate and financial level, in high-tech, the military, entertainment, education, and in likely everything from movie roles to book contracts to national awards. Again, such emphases assume that our current managers, professionals, and directors of the last 50 years were heretofore racists or were hired by racists. Or at least they satisfied artificially constructed high standards that bore little relation to actual skills required on the job. Or, they must no longer enjoy percentages in the workplace simply representative of their demographic percentages, but rather in reparatory fashion become underrepresented rather than just demographically correct. To sum up, in other words, if there were similar race-based/diversity criteria applied to the current meritocratic NBA, would it matter all that much? If African American athletes were by protocol and statute kept to between, say, 12-20 percent of the NBA player roster, to reflect the black 12-13 percent of the U.S. population, would it make that much difference? Would the starting L.A. Lakers five, with one African American forward, one white player, a Latino guard, an Asian center, and a Punjabi shooter be all that less exciting, skilled, or successful a team? Are the current standards that accept or reject an NBA player constructed or weighed to favor African Americans that can be judged by their “overrepresentation”? In the logic of wokeness, would the resulting appeal of a team—that “looks more like” a multiracial America—makeup in diversity, unity, cohesion, equity, inclusion, and appeal what it lost in sheer abilities to make plays, dribble, shoot, rebound, dunk, or block? Were the all-white racialist and exclusionary teams of the 1940s really no different in skill and ability than the purely meritocratic 2021 teams? Of course not. Again, we are going to find out, and in a number of professions, what happens when traditional meritocratic standards are replaced by woke guidelines. Some Racism Is Not RacismWokeism assumes asymmetry. That is, it assumes, for recompensatory purposes, that the spirit of slavery remains, that the hatreds propelling Jim Crow from 1879 to 2021 are very much alive, that the civil rights movement of “equality of opportunity” of the last 55 years was more or less a noble dud. And the result is wokeism’s doctrine that reparatory bias is not bias. Or if it is, the people will understand, Animal Farm-style, why some discrimination is good and different from other discrimination that is bad or why some prejudice is more tolerable than other prejudices. If asymmetrical wokeism then operates with a necessary and correct imbalance accepted by most, then there will be nothing wrong. There will follow no backlash, no social chaos, in using race to denigrate others collectively. There will be nothing wrong in ad nauseam using “whiteness,” “white privilege,” “white supremacy,” and “white terrorists’” in pejoratively stereotypical terms—collectively to apply to all 230 million deemed whites‚ whether the unemployed welder or the part-time junior college instructor or Bill Gates—in a way that it would be terribly wrong to talk pejoratively and collectively in terms of any other group. If one collates all the things that have been said over the years about whites in general by Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, or Maxine Waters, and yet more recently in more sophisticated fashion by the new generation of racialist-obsessed intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Damon Young, or Elie Mystal, and then switched the terms white to black, would there be any outcry that it was becoming wrong to deductively extrapolate from individuals collective values and beliefs, and then, in circular fashion, reapply them to individuals as an innate trait? We shall soon discover whether this tenet of wokeism—asymmetrical use of collective stereotyping—is widely accepted by 330 million Americans. We will soon see one of three consequences from this unapologetic woke racial generalizing: 1) The American people are so inured to their hateful origins and history, that they do not mind at all when whites are collectively demonized as enjoying positions they never earned and thus logically should not continue to enjoy.Or,2) Given that no one objects to stereotyping 230 million people, no one objects to anyone stereotyping others on the basis of race, in the manner that once fostered the civil rights movement.Or,3) We will all for survival, as Rwanda, the Balkans, and Iraq teach us, group together by first-cousin affinities and tribes. Recalling Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes, we will freely stereotype, denigrate, and separate from other groups on the premises that our particular generalizations and deductions are the one and only true and accurate typecasting. Dr. Frankenstein and His Woke MonsterWhat made a 90 percent white population of the late 1950s and 1960s finally sicken of racial bias? Many things—protests, boycotts, the force of moral persuasion. But three things stand out. One, segregation and bias were always contrary to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Two, these assumptions of racial prejudice were not predicated on any discernible science, logic, or coherent basis other than tribal bias, hatred, and ignorance. Three, racial unfairness robbed the United States of critical talent by ignoring merit and substituting pseudo-scientific tribal affinities. Yet by the emerging 1960s did anyone really believe that Perry Como de facto had a better voice than Harry Belafonte or Sammy Davis, Jr., that Sidney Poitier must be a less gifted actor than Frank Sinatra, that Hank Aaron was innately less impressive than Roger Maris, or that Senator Edward Brooke was less competent an American senator than Senator Herman Talmadge? Again, no. Wokeness is returning to such tribal separation and crackpot categorization on the one assumption that its arbitrary rules will not alienate Americans as they finally did in the past. So, how are we to believe that non-whites can pick the race of their future roommates in colleges without audit or complaint? Farm aid shall be doled out to all except whites? Welfare in Oakland must exclude poor white recipients? Vaccinations will be targeted to non-white groups first? Will 330 million Americans grow to accept that racial typology will govern all state policy—in following a noble and successful historical precedent? In each mass shooting, we shall broadcast the horror only if the shooter is white and his victims not so, but mute the story if the opposite should be true? For noble purposes, criminal suspects shall not be identified by race unless they are white? It will be fine in advance to announce the gender and race of a vice-presidential candidate that mostly alone will determine the selection? We will massage data, and suppress or publicize statistics depending on their usefulness to the woke movement? If blacks are disproportionately responsible for hate crimes against Asian Americans, we will keep still, or better yet nobly lie that whites are. Such wokeness assumes that the Eastern Europeans never tired of their ministry-of-truth propaganda, that the cynical Soviet citizen never ignored Pravda’s assertions, or that Cubans really believe the Castro communique. Wokeness is either unaware of, or unconcerned with, the seething religious, caste, and racial tensions that plague India, or wrecked Lebanon, or unwound Yugoslavia. That is, the woke believe their Byzantine books of race-based exceptions, exemptions, and absolutions will convince 330 million Americans that segregation, or official untruth, are permitted, given historical circumstances and the common good. But they will not. Finally, wokeness takes for granted that its elite white Dr. Frankenstein architects will always control the prejudicial woke monster they created—on the assumption that one will never devour its creators. But history suggests ideologies often do just that. Over the last two weeks, many of America’s most elite colleges seem to have deliberately restricted white admissions to around 30-40 percent of their incoming classes—on the altar of diversity and post-George Floyd wokeness. Yet, not every high-earning, bicoastal white liberal can give $10 million to Yale or Stanford or sire a likely future Major League Baseball star. For the woke white elite, then, it will be hard to find some exemption from the rules that 70 percent of the population will be artificially recalibrated to 30 percent of the successful admissions. A white liberal may have said “Who cares?” when hard-working Asians who represent six percent of the U.S. population were deliberately restricted to no more than 30-40 percent of the nation’s “best” colleges. But now? Will he really preen, “Bravo, my super-prepped, hyper-achieving prodigy got rejected at all the good schools and I’m so proud he took one for the woke team?” Or what happens to the wannabe woke CEO who offered every sort of humiliating “unearned” confession, but nevertheless was still of the wrong color? Or what will be the mindset of the progressive, white male lieutenant colonel who found that his loud wokeness was mostly useful in preparing him to better understand why he should not be promoted to brigadier general? It is OK for woke whites to be constantly accused of “unearned privilege” as long as their bicoastal billets were tolerably reduced by just 20 percent due to racial gerrymandering. But does their magnanimity extend to a 30-40 percent white jizyah, that cuts so close to progressive homes? Will the brilliant actress in a blockbuster classic mumble, if even just privately, that she was the wrong color to be nominated as best actress? Sure, some may feel that these are elite psychodramas. But for that reason, they will become mostly the angsts of the Left. The liberal white elite class engineered a system of woke racialism that they assumed rested on some sort of unspoken 70 percent White/12 percent Black/10 percent Latino/six percent Asian, and two percent “other” formula that would always still leave them plenty of spoils while the unhappy consequences fell instead on Dotty the Deplorable, Charlie Chump, Cliff the Clinger, and Irene Irredeemable. They did not sign up for a 30-40 percent white allotment that cuts into the white woke; that is, the good and the morally superior whites. So this, too, will be another of wokeism’s greatest tests, when elite writers, professors, actors, lawyers, newsroom grandees, and CEO magnificoes learn that they, too, can be of the wrong color under the new tribal prejudice they fostered. Wokeism is creating a future group of politically incorrect Trotskyites on a proverbial rendezvous with a Mexican ice ax, given that by birth they will never be woke enough for the new Stalinism.
Rip McIntosh
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As a continuation of some thoughts and perspectives I believe are important, and with deference and respect to the unparalleled Charles Krauthammer the author of Things That Matter, I’d like to share these with you: 1. Can you think of a time in our history when we the people have had more of our freedoms hijacked by politicians before? Over the last year we have witnessed first- hand our right to worship as we choose, speak freely without fear of censorship, our children forced into isolation with limited education delivered through a computer, government restrictions on dining out, entertainment, and even curtailment in medical testing for conditions such as cancer, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorders all drastically curtailed because of a virus from China? Hell, we can’t even call it what it is….the Wuhan Virus, without recrimination from the cancel culture crowd. 2. Don’t you think it is such a creative idea, a stroke of democratic genius, to add four Justices to the Supreme Court? What could possibly go wrong? When the Republicans assume control again, they can, in turn, add four more, and this process can be continued to the point when we could have 29 Justices on the Supreme Court…hell, the more the merrier. I may be wrong, but I thought our government was built on the principle of checks and balances with three co-equal branches…the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial. 3. President Biden and Vice President Harris have yet to visit the U.S. Southern Border where we have a crisis of monumental proportion due to the influx of illegal aliens into our country…at the invitation of President Biden. The Biden White House is actually considering paying citizens in Honduras, Ecuador, Mexico, Columbia to stay in their countries rather than come to the U.S. In other words, pay to stay away! What could possibly go wrong? If you believe these payments will actually reach the citizens of these countries, I own an island off the coast of Sardinia I’d like to sell you! 4. Just spitballing a bit, but taking away guns from law-abiding citizens, or restricting access to them and assessing tax penalties seems to me to be closely akin to castrating your neighbor because you think he has too many children. Surely, Biden and his acolytes cannot be that dumb, although today, speaking in the Rose Garden with the Japanese Prime Minister, Biden said “there is no reason why anyone should have access to assault weapons with magazines containing 100 bullets”. Well, someone needs to inform our President that an AR-15 is not an assault weapon and uses a clip with only ten rounds, and I am not aware of any commercially available rifle or handgun that contains a clip with 100 bullets….stop exaggerating Mr. Biden. Do they really feel that if people abandoned their weapons or sold them back to the government, that criminals will do the same thing and everyone will live happily ever after in a newly created utopia? Dianne Feinstein said as much just a few years back. Maybe I am giving them too much credit and they are really a special kind of stupid. 5. I am genuinely looking forward to listening to President Biden…or anyone in his Administration…explain how spending $2.3 Trillion on a new Infrastructure Plan in addition to the already approved $1.9 Trillion American Rescue Plan is going to “cut poverty in the black community by over 37% and create 19 million new jobs!” Keep in mind the economic forecast for the U.S. Economy prior to Joe Biden taking office was for the creation of 16.3 million jobs in 2021…without spending one cent! 6. Just the other day, Vladimir Putin turned up the heat on the Biden Administration by barring foreign warships from the Kerch Strait that connects Russia and Crimea amid escalating tensions on the Russian-Ukrainian border. There are now over 40,000 Russian troops massed at the Ukrainian border with Russian artillery boats and landing craft transferred from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea. Biden’s response was to immediately recall the two American warships he had dispatched to the Black sea and call for a face-to-face parlay with Vladimir Putin. In other words, Putin and Biden briefly stared at each other and Biden blinked. Strong leadership. I will say it here: Putin would not have taken such a posture with Donald Trump nor would he have escalated tensions in Ukraine. Biden, of course, cut back foreign aid and weapons to Ukraine. 7. Biden’s ineptness doesn’t stop there. Iran announces it is turning up its efforts to reach weapons-grade uranium. Biden’s answer to that: pump more U.S. dollars…your tax dollars…into Iran and resume negotiations towards a new Nuclear Agreement. Strong leadership. Israel, which has been palpably ignored by Biden, will not stand by and watch Iran build a nuclear weapon. 8. I was fascinated to read the announcement from Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. The Vermont-based company tweeted the other day this remarkable comment: “the murder of Daunte Wright is rooted in white supremacy, and results from the intentional criminalization of Black and Brown communities”. Perhaps Ben & Jerry’s ought to stick to producing ice cream because their qualifications as psychologists and historians are suspect. 9. Have you noticed that when democrats speak, everything seems to be a crisis? Take Climate Change as an example. It is referred to by democrats as a Climate Crisis of monumental proportions. Indeed, Barack Hussein Obama has said it is an existential threat to the world! But, have you ever heard an honest to goodness debate among scientists representing both sides of this argument…and there are, in fact, two sides diametrically opposed to each other…to determine just how real this “threat” is? I have not seen or heard such a debate, but I have read both sides of the argument on my own and I can say without equivocation that the issue of climate change is clearly unsettled science. You notice that democrats and liberals no longer use the phrase “global warming”any longer and the reason for this is because the earth has cooled some 0.7 degrees over the last decade! Like Casey Stengel, the old New York Yankee Manager said, “you can look it up”. 10. President Biden boldly announced that all troops stationed in Afghanistan will be returning home on September 11, 2021. What strong leadership! Leadership cut in the mold of Barack Hussein Obama…let your enemy know your plans ahead of time so they can plan their next moves. Do you think Al Queda is watching this? Keep in mind that Biden is our Commander-in-Chief….not theirs. 11. Did you hear Maxine Waters telling Rep Jim Jordan of Ohio to “shut your mouth” during questioning of his holiness Anthony Fauci, MD. What a disgrace! Where is the outrage over this, from democrats and republicans? How does this crass, unintelligent, belligerent, racist woman get away with her ridiculous outbursts? Someone needs to take her to task and I mean right now, without delay. Her attitude, vindictiveness, and arrogance cannot be tolerated. 12. Have you checked the price of gasoline at the pump recently? In New Jersey where I live gasoline prices have risen $1.00 to over $3.00 per gallon. They will rise further in the coming summer months. So will food costs and other products. And wait ‘till you see the new taxes we will be faced with thanks to the Biden Executive Orders. 13. Finally, I was watching a movie earlier today and had a novel thought. Don’t you think there would be less crime in our streets and far fewer accusations of police brutality and confrontations with police if we taught our children to respect their elders, the police, and people in authority and emphasized this in our schools and in our homes? Don’t you think, as I do, that by reinforcing the principle of ‘do unto others as you would have others do unto you…the “golden rule”…should be resurrected and made a part of everyday life. Wouldn’t that go a long way towards reducing crime and the mob mentality we see in the media every day? Just a passing thought.
Eeyore’s Cabinet: DroughtTo balance Optimism, Inc., I offer occasional gloomy reflections on these revolutionary times.
By: Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers Hat Tip: Rip McIntosh
April 11, 2021
California did OK in March with rain and snow. It seemed for a brief moment as if the ongoing drought might end. Temperatures were below normal. The 6-7 feet of new snow in the Sierra offered hope. We thought there would be more storms, more of such “March miracles”. Then nada. Not a cloud followed during the last month. Temperatures returned to normal. The snow is all but melted. The rain never returned. There are rarely “April miracle” storms. A new administration in Washington greenlighted rather than resisted Gavin Newsom’s radically green agenda of envisioning snowmelt as a way to restore 19th-century California rivers and the delta—and not so much as water for irrigation, lake recreation, and hydroelectric power. So farmers will pump 24/7 for the next year. Their costs will soar. The water table will continue to drop. The public will ignore the slight increase in food prices—small compared to the gas and housing inflation. And we will get one year closer to The Reckoning. That day to come is when millions of farmed acres below Stockton will go out of production. The water deliveries of the California Water Project will be assigned solely to suburban sprawl. And the West Side will return to that of my youth, where tumble weeds, coyotes, sparse grazing, and Valley Fever were its trademarks. The central Eastern Side where I live persists due to its proximity to the Sierra, the 19th-century delivery systems from the San Joaquin and Kings Rivers, and its centuries of stored water in natural aquifers. But increased population, diversions of river water to the sea, and the end to third-tier reservoir construction to trap flood waters in wet years have conspired to curtail deliveries. So everyone here now pumps too. The curious 4-inch well in the yard—140 years old—went dry 5 years ago at 50 feet. The “new” house well my grandfather drilled in the 1960s at 120 feet began sputtering and pumping sand 4 years ago, as I had kept dropping the bowls to 60, 80, and finally 100 feet. Four years ago I said “no mas”, and drilled a 440-foot, gravel-pack, 8-inch well overkill, and set the bowls at 150 feet. The water table is somewhere around 100 feet and dropping 3-5 feet a year. You get the picture: A growing California. More claims on its water. More green restrictions of the use of mountain run-off. Refusals to build reservoirs. We are reaching the limits of water conservation with computerized new water-saving drip systems. Something has to give. The state believes it doesn’t need the middle classes. Farming is passé. Silicon Valley and its 5-trillion-dollars in market capitalization and the upper, upper professional classes will pay the necessary taxes. Family farmers have mostly disappeared in the state. Farms themselves will too in 20 years, at least in the western Central Valley. The population knows nothing about how it gets its food or why it is so cheap—in the manner of its ignorance of where its gasoline and heating and air conditioning derive. The progressive classes are going to have a Rendezvous soon with reality. The enemy is not “conservatives” but truth, nature, and the age of old struggle to live one more day.
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New records:People, Criminals, and Fentanyl crossing the border&BLM declares victory over cops while black murder rate soars By Kathleen Brush, Ph.D.April 7, 2021(emphasis added)Rip’s expression of bewilderment People. How many people are actually crossing the border? Transparency such at is, leaves us guessing. In March, apprehensions at the southern border were the highest in 20 years: 171,000. This includes 18,800 unaccompanied minors. The previous record was 11,434. The rule of thumb is that 20% or more of border crossers aren’t apprehended, which means our illegal population is soaring. The number of crossers seeking asylum has not been reported and is not included in apprehensions. A senator from Oklahoma, James Lankford, provided a video showing a swarm of prospective asylees being paroled on the spot. Later they were dropped off at a bus station in McAllen, Texas. There are more than 60 stations on the southern border processing parolees. How many people will be granted asylum? Who knows, but once asylum is granted, they are eligible for a host of welfare benefits and under the proposed immigration law it’s feasible to become an American citizen in 3 years. It used to take a minimum of 6. Criminals. In January and February border patrol apprehensions included 4,140 criminals. This number is relatively low. Are there fewer criminals entering in 2021? Maybe not. The border patrol is no longer apprehending people if they have criminal records for “drug crimes (less serious offenses), simple assault, DUI, money laundering, property crimes, fraud, tax crimes, solicitation, or charges without convictions.” I guess, team Biden independently decided it was optional for immigrants to have good moral character. More criminals are on the way. Per the proposed new immigration law all people that lived in the US for 3 years prior to being deported for any reason while Donald Trump was president can apply to be a lawful permanent resident from outside the United States. Ninety percent of the 936,000 deported were undocumented, and about half were deported for crimes. Why would the US tempt people deported for crimes to apply to be a lawful permanent resident? Per ICE, 30-80 percent of released criminal illegals are reoffenders, and the severity of crimes often escalates. Between 2010 and 2016 re-offenders committed 130 murders. Fentanyl. It originates in China, but most fentanyl in America is trafficked across the US southern border.In 2019, ICE seized enough fentanyl to poison every American. In 2020, border patrol seizures for fentanyl doubled. Through March 3, 2021 there have been more fentanyl seizures than all of 2020. How much gets through? Enough to keep the cartels interested and enough to kill an increasing number of Americans. In 2019, there were 35,000 fentanyl related deaths. In 2020, it was 44,000. Preliminary data for 2021 suggests another record. Human smuggling. According to the Survey of Migration at Mexico’s Southern Border, 60-65% of migrants from Central America are smuggled into the United States. On March 31 and April 1, one of the 20 border patrol sector stations interrupted 5 human smuggling operations. Looks like the US is on track for a record here too. The Biden Administration looks like a machine for generating undesirable records. BLM declares victory over cops while black murder rate soars Amidst escalating crime in Los Angeles (LA), On March 31, LA DA George Gascon announced he was downsizing the gang unit. Leaders of Black Lives Matter (BLM) immediately applauded the move. Per BLM, the unit disproportionately targeted blacks and Latinos. It was racist. But crime is disproportionately committed by blacks and Latinos. According to LAPD, 70-80% of homicides are gang related, and gang membership is estimated to be 85% black and Latino (39% black and 46% Latino). Criminal racial/ethnic disproportionality, however, is now officially irrelevant. Under California’s new (1/1/21) Racial Justice Act, AB 2542, it is prohibited to charge a person with a crime (even if certifiably guilty) “if there is statistical evidence that people of one race are disproportionately charged or convicted of a specific crime or enhancement.” What numbskull dreamed up this nonsense? If for no other reason, AB2542 would force me to move out of California. In Los Angeles, according to the US Census, the population was 26% Latino and 8.1% black. This data is though flawed. LA has an estimated 1 million undocumenteds (about 25% of the population) and apparently most don’t complete the census. LA’s Latino populations, per other sources is 49%. In the first two months of 2021, 52 out of 64 people (81%) murdered in Los Angeles were black. Who were the murderers? Without knowing, we might surmise because nationally 89% of blacks are killed by blacks, 46 are probably black. LA may be different. The race war between black and Latino gangs is known and it was initiated and perpetuated by the Mexican Mafia. In 2007, 2011, 2016, and 2018 there were documented incidents of Latino gangs in Los Angeles engaging in ethnic cleansing and fire-bombing black communities. We have another reality. We may never know who many or most murderers are. With a limited pool of detectives, who is going to vigorously investigate a crime that is likely to be tossed out by criminal prosecutors? AB 2542 and Gascon’s decision may be BLM’s greatest victory. Let’s call it social justice for criminal gang bangers including undocumented Latino gang bangers. And for the victims? For most, justice will be legally denied. In past years, homicide victims were 86% black and Latino.
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The Devil travels to Chinaby Edward J. BarrApril 19, 2021 (Edward J. Barr) – Sources inform us that while the Devil had an enjoyable time visiting the US in January (see “The Devil came to Mass this weekend”), he returned home to find hell even more tumultuous than normal. A fierce battle was raging between the guardian demon of China and the guardian demon of the United States (some theologians believe that just as each country has a guardian angel, the Devil has assigned guardian demons to tempt nations to defy the good offered by God). Each tried to tear and rip the putrid flesh from each other while lower-ranking demons chose sides and joined the fray. The Devil smiled at the chaos as the smell of sulfur filled his black lungs. This was what he hoped to accomplish on earth. Yet he had to be sure his minions were working toward the same goal – the destruction of souls. “Why are you maggots fighting among yourselves? There is still much good on earth to expunge!” The guardian demon of China spoke first. “This fool is taking credit for the destruction of the Church in the United States, claiming it is the greatest victory we have achieved in recent years.” He scowled in the direction of the guardian demon of the United States. “It is nothing to what I accomplished in China. I have the largest country in the world under the thumb of an officially atheistic government. Their abortion numbers dominate the globe! The guardian demon of the United States quickly interjected. “That’s right, you already had a government that was so stupid it doesn’t even believe that we exist. They think this place doesn’t exist. Any clown could steal such dense souls! I had a country that claimed it was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and look how they love us!” He puffed out his half-decomposed chest in pride at scoffed. “What has he done?”“I’ll show you,” said the guardian demon of China. In a blink of an eye, the three demons were at Victoria Park in Hong Kong. “Look at this. No protests. All the prominent Christians are thrown in jail. I guided the government to crush all dissent, with barely any opposition from other governments or so-called faith leaders. Plus, look what they’re doing to the Uighurs. Beautiful.” The Devil beamed. “Outstanding work.” The guardian demon of the United States pointed a bent finger at his counterpart from China. “Of course, as you said, there was barely any opposition.” The Devil frowned. “What about that babbling Cardinal, Zen? He knew what was going on.” The demon smiled. “He’s been marginalized. I guided the Chinese to cut a deal with the Vatican. They haven’t said anything about the persecution. The Chinese are good at throwing money around,” said the guardian demon of China. “The Church barely gives Zen the time of day. I even heard one of his brother bishops at the Vatican said that the Chinese “best realize the social doctrine” of the Church.” The Devil was pleased. If persecution of believers was the social doctrine of the Church, hell had better prepare for a massive influx of new residents. He relished the hate that could invigorate his dark domain. “Ha. Who said you can’t serve God and Mammon,” he chuckled?The guardian demon of the United States could hold in his fury no longer. “You idiot. You are given an easy assignment and brag about policies that would have been enacted without you. The Chinese have not believed in us for decades. I had to turn a once Christian nation into a nation of unbelievers. You have a government that controls everything in the country and won’t allow any freedom.” The Devil watched as the two demons pared off. Teeth grinding, foul drops of sweat fell from their bodies. The Devil laughed as they tore into each other, hurling insults and curses. Time to feed the fire. “China does seem to be further along in the destruction of its soul than the United States. Even those former Christian countries are Europe are more lost than America.” It’s always good to kick a demon when he’s down, he thought. The guardian demon of the United States’ head spun around.“What?” he yelled. “I did more in my time as the guardian demon of the United States than all the others before me. Remember how the US was before I took over in the 1960s? The Devil glared at him. The demon of the United States was his most cunning underling. That’s why he gave him the prize country to destroy. He has been very effective. Jealousy and envy were good; he was glad to see the demon’s disgust. The guardian demon of China piled on. “Great job, fool. I heard you even allowed a Catholic to get elected president.” All sound ceased. An eerie silence permeated Victoria Park. It seemed as if time froze. The ground shook violently and shadows fell over Kowloon Bay. The Devil shot lasers of fire into the demon of the United States. “A Catholic is president. To hell with you!” he thundered. The demon fell back and didn’t stop. A faint cry emanated from the abyss. “Let me explain…” Edward J Barr is a Catechist, an attorney, an intelligence officer, a Marine, and a university faculty member. He earned a Master’s degree in theology from the Augustine Institute. Mr. Barr is a contributing writer for the Roma Locuta Est blog (www.RomaLocutaEst.com)Edward J. Barr | April 19, 2021 at 8:42 pm | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: https://wp.me/p7YMML-6M1
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Pope Benedict XVI in 2013 (Photo: Vatican Media) Pope Benedict XVI, the Anchor That Kept Germany Rooted in Christ (
Pope Benedict XVI Holds His Final General Audience, Feb 27, 2013 Credit: Mazur 
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ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
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