Thursday, April 11, 2019

http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2019/04/papal-validity-are-franciss.html

Papal Validity: Are Francis’s “Inappropriate” Slapping as well as Kissing & “Childlike” Behaviors Signs he may be Demented or have Dementia?

– Updated January 1, 2020

Yesterday, Francis’s inappropriate angry “childlike” hand slapping episode when added to the earlier in the year ring-kissing behavior controversy where he appeared to play the immature children’s “gotcha” game that received similar headline sequences was similarly explained as “bizarre,” “awkward” and “cringeworthy.”
(CatholicCulture.org, “The bizarre ring-kissing controversy, March 28, 2019)

The many episodes of “bizarre behavior of Francis” apparently are a habit pattern, but other than when he is not angrily and dynamicly denouncing faithful Catholics or American anti-socialism he appears to be normal if somewhat dynamic or theatrical.

This “inappropriate” and “childlike” habit pattern behavior of Francis could be a sign of dementia according to dementia experts:

“[Y]our loved one’s behavior may seem inappropriate, childlike or impulsive.”
(Lewy Body Dementia Association, Ibda.org, “Understanding Behavioral Changes in Dementia,” by Tanis German Ph.D, Mayo Clinic)

Gloria.tv reported Francis apparently inappropriately kissed some embarrassed politicians feet:

“Francis knelt down and kissed the feet of several [deeply embarrassed] South Sudan leaders.”
(Gloria.tv, “Showtime: Francis Knees to Kiss Feet of South Sudan Politicians, April 11, 2019)

This inappropriate foot kissing behavior by Francis caused Bishop Rene Gracida on his website to comment in a headline:

“The Bizarre Behavior of Francis the Merciful is Beginning to cause Questions to be asked in Rome about his Behavior”
(Abyssus.org, April 11, 2019)

According to NeuroPsychiatry Online this could be a sign of dementia:

“Patients with bvFTD [frontotemporal dementia] can present with inappropriate personal comments or touching, violation of interpersonal space, and other personally intrusive behaviors such as kissing.”
(NeuroPsychiatryonline.org, “Kissing or ‘Osculation’ in Frontotemporal Dementia,” July 1, 2014)

Sadly, this isn’t the Pope’s first foot kissing behavior (Google: Images: “Pope Francis foot kissing” for other examples of this behavior). Francis’s possible fixation on foot kissing may, also, be associated with his comment and possible fixation on coprophilia:

“[I]n Psychpathia Sexualis… categorize foot fetishism [such as foot kissing] and coprophilia under the same heading… Self-Humiliation.”
(Book.google.com, “Dada and Surrealist Films,” Page 165)

Francis’s comment on poop eating is infamous. Many were outraged, but I think the proper response is pity.

Tragically, poop fixation and poop eating (coprophilia) fixation are more possible signs of dementia.
(AllNurses.com, “Coprophilia And Scatolia In Demented Elderly Residents, August 7, 2012)

Renowned papal validity theologian Arnaldo Xavier de Silverado in his book wrote that a “demented person” or person with dementia couldn’t “”occupy the charge” of “Pope”:

“The designation, as Pope, of a person who cannot occupy the charge, would constitute… a demented [dementia] person.”
(Implications of New Missae and Heretic Popes,” Page 86)

Remember that the book “Dictator Pope” by historian Henry Sire claimed that a Jesuit assessment by the then Superior General of the Jesuits Father Peter Hans Kolvenbach thought Francis was “[u]nsuitable to be a [b]ishop” and lacked “psychological balance” according to a review by Gloria.tv:

“[T]he assessment Father Bergoglio received… accused Bergoglio of a series of defects… vulgar language to deviousness, disobedience concealed under the mask of humility, and lack of psychological balance… the habit of saying diametrically opposing things from one day to the next.”
(Gloria.tv, “Unsuitable to be a Bishop,” December 3, 2017)

Finally, we’ll end with a coincidence:

Before Francis, there was never a healthy pope who repeatedly refused to kneel in front of the Holy Eucharist and who kneeled spontaneously to kiss the feet of Muslim politicians.

To put this coincidence in perspective, imagine if Pope John Paul II while he was still healthy had repeatedly refused to kneel in front of the Holy Eucharist, but meanwhile kneeled spontaneously to kiss the feet of President Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev or a Muslim politician.

Catholics and even the secular media would have probably have thought something might be a little psychologically unbalanced with the person involved with that coincidence.

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church.

Posted by Fred Martinez at 10:06 PM Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest

No-Fault Divorce, Standing for Justice

DECEMBER 28, 2019 

BY BAI MACFARLANE

https://www.hprweb.com/2019/12/no-fault-divorce-standi

29 COMMENTS

Parish Priests and Divorce

If a devastated woman approaches her pastor because she learned her husband committed adultery, the pastor might advise that she should hire a good divorce lawyer. When a faithful husband with four children tells his priest that his wife has taken their children to his mother-in-law’s and is threatening divorce, the priest might tell him to sue her in court to protect his rights.

In accord with canon law, however, the correct response is to teach spouses that their priest can never advise a spouse to approach the civil court. The Church has other solutions that are contained in our canon law. Moreover, many Americans incorrectly assume that justice is dispensed in divorce court. The civil courts are no more qualified to dispense justice in determining spouses’ obligations than Planned Parenthood is qualified to decide the rights of a baby.

With the onset of no-fault divorce, the court system became the state’s mercenary that takes children and property away from a spouse who has done nothing grave to justify separation of spouses. Divorce is an unjust lifetime sentence that forever gives scandal to children.

For Catholics, civil divorce is a case of separation of spouses in which the obligations of parties toward each other and their children are decided in accord with state law, which is contrary to divine law. Civil actions for separation or separate maintenance are also cases of separation of spouses for Catholics in which obligations are judged by the state’s morally flawed system.

For those who marry in a Catholic ceremony, both spouses are obligated to cooperate in the maintenance of one common marital home unless a legitimate (fault-based) reason for separation exists. Only in the case of an emergency (due to grave danger) is a spouse competent to temporarily separate of his or her own volition. Canon law emphasizes that none other than the bishop is competent to decide whether a spouse can file in the civil forum for divorce, civil separation, or civil annulment. The bishop may, by special mandate, delegate the exercise of this executive power to a particular diocesan staff member, who will decide whether it is tolerable for a party to file in the civil forum. The Catechism teaches in paragraph 2383 that civil divorce can be tolerated in certain cases.¹ The implementation of canon law and Church jurisprudence establishes whether a particular spouse is in one of those certain cases.

When a priest hears only the complaints of one spouse, it is unreasonable to expect him to judge whether that spouse should file for divorce. The other spouse has a right to be heard because the rights to an intact home supported by both spouses and daily access to children are threatened by divorce. Furthermore, because separation cases for Catholics involve the public good, the diocesan Promoter of Justice must participate in order to protect the rights of the faithful and the children, and to ensure that the case is decided in a just manner, with a canonical process, and with appropriate records.

Clergy often learn about a marriage crisis if a divorced Catholic in a so-called second marriage wants to regularize his situation or intends to marry a new person. When the unjust outcome of no-fault divorce hurts a dedicated Catholic spouse and his or her children, the pastor might sympathize, but he likely does not consider options for protecting future Catholics from the same misery. In the United States, we have constitutional protections for entering contracts and free exercise of religion. Some constitutional lawyers support the notion of having parties to a Catholic marriage sign a marriage covenant and arbitration agreement, whereby they specify that they do not intend to have the state divorce laws decide their obligations, but rather intend to have those who have competence to implement the Catholic Code of Canon law decide obligations.

By the same rationale that a parish priest is incompetent to adjudicate questions of nullity of marriage, he is incompetent to judge cases of separation of spouses.

Diocesan Authority in the Person of the Bishop Has Competence

The Church has never relegated to the government her responsibility to determine obligations of spouses who have ceased living together. This can be traced through the twenty-first century. In 1563, following the Protestant Reformation, the Church solidified her competence over marriage cases in the twenty-fourth session of the Council of Trent (see canons 7, 8, and 12). In 1788, Pope Pius VI issued his Epistle ‘Deessemus nobis’, wherein he corrected those who wanted the government authorities to decide matrimonial cases of separation of spouses:

It is not unknown to us that there are some, who, attributing too much to the authority of the secular princes, and captiously interpreting the words of this canon [24th Trent, c. 12], have undertaken to defend this: That, since the Tridentine Fathers did not make use of this form of speaking, “to ecclesiastical judges alone, ‘or,’ all matrimonial cases,” — they [the Tridentine Fathers] have left to lay judges the power of at least investigating matrimonial cases which are of pure fact. But we know that even this sophism and this false kind of quibbling are devoid of all foundation. For the words of the canon are so general that they embrace and comprise all cases. Moreover, the spirit or purpose of the law extends so widely that it leaves no place for exception or limitation.

For if these cases pertain to the tribunal of the Church alone for no other reason than because the marriage contract is truly and properly one of the seven sacraments of the evangelical law, then, just as this notion of the sacrament is common to all matrimonial cases, so all these cases must pertain to ecclesiastical judges alone.²

Prior to anyone ever filing in the government courts, the diocesan bishop’s exclusive authority in cases of separation of spouses was reiterated by the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in 1860, “there must be present just causes for the separation in the Judgment of the bishop.”³ The same Congregation, again in 1883, demonstrated that “In marital cases the spouses are under the power of the bishop.”⁴

In the United States, the bishop’s same authority was reiterated in the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1886 (n. 123, 126, 304).⁵ A particular penal law was included in article 126 of the Council that states that a spouse is mandated to obtain the permission of his or her bishop prior to petitioning in the civil forum, otherwise that spouse incurs grave guilt, with the consequence of being punished by the bishop. Recent documents and statements published by the USCCB are not of a legislative nature; however, when a county’s bishops’ Episcopal Conference enacts decrees in a plenary council, the decrees are binding until they are abrogated (cc. 135 §2, 439 §1, 441, 4^o, 455, 456). The 1917 Code of Canon law did not abrogate the United States Bishops’ particular penal law, nor did the 1983 Code of Canon Law do so. Penal laws issued by the Holy See, which were in effect prior to the 1983 Code, were abrogated by the 1983 Code only if the laws were not repeated by the 1983 Code (c. 6 §1, 3^o). Because the penal law regarding civil divorce was issued by the United States bishops, it was not repealed by the 1983 Code.

Moreover, for the entire world, the 1983 Code incorporated the requirement for a spouse to have one’s bishop’s permission prior to petitioning in the civil forum that emerged in the Council of Trent, and was advanced by Pope Pius VI and the Congregation of the Holy Office (c. 1692 §2). Many bishops have publicized the obligation to have one’s bishop’s permission prior to petitioning in the civil forum, and bishops have given their imprimatur to authors who restated same.⁶

Civil Courts Rule Contrary to Divine Law

Governmental no-fault divorce court judges do not weigh whether a Plaintiff has Catholic grounds for either separation or invalidity of the bond, nor do they weigh whether grounds for separation are temporary or permanent. If one party invalidly entered the marriage in which parties are separating, true justice demands that the pertinent grounds for invalidity affect spouses’ obligations and aptitudes regarding children, property, and support. Fraud, simulation, grave psychic anomalies, and mental illness should impact financial obligations and custody. For Catholics, adultery and invalidity of marriage are the only grounds for permanent separation, with invalidity always being a basis for terminating the civil marriage status. All the other Catholic grounds for separation, excluding adultery, justify only temporary separation. Catholic judgements in cases of temporary separation are to be for a determinate period of time, or indeterminate period of time which terminates when the basis for separation ceases. Only with permission of the local Ordinary can a separation continue beyond the time when the grounds for separation ceased: “In all cases, when the cause for the separation ceases, conjugal living must be restored unless ecclesiastical authority has established otherwise” (c. 1153 §2).

For example, if a husband has an unsafe temper, or if a wife becomes dangerous due to an alcohol addiction, the innocent spouse and children may need temporary relief; however, the Church’s goal is the rehabilitation and conversion of the wayward spouse. If a wife is an abandoner, the Church’s interest would be her reconciliation with her husband. On the contrary, in the civil court, an abandoning wife is most often permanently awarded half or more of the property and the children routinely lose daily access to their father, who only sees them on alternating weekends and split holidays. Additionally, the father is required to furnish mother with spousal and long-term child support. In the Church’s jurisprudence, if a woman who has broken her marriage promises was the cause of the separation of spouses, the husband would not be required to provide her spousal or child support, but rather she would be required to compensate him, and he would retain custody of the children.⁷

In the no-fault divorce courts, every petitioning plaintiff is awarded a divorce, and the courts have no interest in who reneged on the marriage promises, nor who was counting on those promises to be upheld. The courts have no interest in preventing children from being scandalized. Consequently, children are conditioned to believe that adultery and marital abandonment are morally acceptable.

One government court psychologist, for example, criticized an abandoned wife who allowed her three-year-old child to say “Daddy broke the family.” The psychologist recommended to the court that the mother should not be permitted unsupervised time with her children unless she forced her three-year-old to think that the father did not break the family:

It is problematic, however, that [the mother] continues to promulgate ideas in her children. Of great concern are her interactions with [her son] in my office. Specifically, she encouraged [her son] to state that his father was “breaking up” their family. Also, of great concern is the fact that [the mother] appeared to view this as positive. She has not demonstrated that she has an understanding of how this is potentially very damaging. While it is the Court’s purview to determine visitation, it frightens me that she seems to have learned very little about children’s adjustment to divorce based on her unwillingness to accept this divorce. I do not see any problems with [the mother] having unsupervised overnight visits with her sons, provided she ceases from promulgating negative views of their father.⁸

When one files for no-fault divorce, the government courts purport to have power over the whole family and their property. A defendant who has done nothing grave, justifying separation, will have no-fault divorce forced on him or her. For example, an abandoned wife caring for young children may be awarded a nominal sum of child support, but her abandoning husband is conversely not expected to continue contributing his full share of mutuum adiutorium (mutual help incorporated in 1983 CIC c. 1055, from 1917 CIC c. 1013). When the court relieves a husband of his obligation to continue supporting the family, which he abandoned, the court arbitrarily and injudiciously relieves him of his moral obligations that are required in accord with the canon law, under which the parties married.

In the case of an abandoned wage-earner, when the other spouse files for no-fault divorce, the wage-earner knows that the court will, by default, take half or more of the marital property from the wage-earner. For this reason, many divorce defendants are coerced into agreeing to some unconscionable type of property and child custody settlement, because to do otherwise would result in tens of thousands of dollars of attorney fees in order to prepare for a trial. If the plaintiff asks for it, the no-fault divorce judge will routinely take property from the wage-earner, evict him from the marital home, and deprive him of everyday access to his children.

Upholding Marriage

Misinformation has led Catholics to presume that any individual spouse, on his or her own authority, is permitted by the Church to file for divorce in order for the civil system to decide the obligations of spouses toward each other and their children. It is as if the faithful are to believe that the only obligation of marriage that is relevant to Church teaching is whether a spouse attempts to enter into marriage with a new person without a decree of invalidity. According to canon law, however, the civil forum is only allowed to issue judgements on the merely civil effects of marriage (cc. 1059, 1672, 1692). Anything that involves morality is not a “merely civil effect of marriage”; therefore the obligation to maintain an intact home, the obligation to contribute one’s full share of mutual help, and the right to daily access to one’s children are not effects of marriage that have ever been relegated to the civil forum.

Because separation of spouses has such grave consequences for both spouses, children, and the faithful, no parish priest is de facto permitted to judge whether a spouse has a certain case in which approaching the civil forum is tolerated. We have in our canon law and jurisprudence a process that should be undergone to ensure justice and the implementation of divine law to marriage cases. The diocesan judge’s priority in a case of separation of spouses is reconciliation: “the judge is to use pastoral means to induce the parties to be reconciled and to resume their conjugal life” (c. 1695) and the Church may use mediators to assist in the reconciliation of the parties (c. 1445). Some members of the faithful have developed insightful and effective programs to assist couples to reconcile.

For, example, Greg and Julie Alexander, who developed the Marriage Disciples Program, enjoy a 99% success rate and they also train other couples to replicate their program and become marriage disciples.⁹ Mary’s Advocates publishes a template canon law petition for any spouse who is seeking ecclesiastic intervention when the other spouse is seeking to break up the family. The diocesan authority is obligated to intervene and provide pastoral correction to the wayward spouse, prevent societal scandal, and issue judgements deciding the obligations of parties toward each other as a result of the canon law trail, in accord with canon law — both materially and spiritually.

We can strengthen marriage by keeping families away from the no-fault divorce courts as often as possible and by working toward outcomes that are in accord with canon law and divine law — which is the system under which Catholics exchange marriage promises in the first place.

1. CCC 2383: “The separation of spouses while maintaining the marriage bond can be legitimate in certain cases provided for by canon law {ref. footnote 176}. If civil divorce remains the only possible way of ensuring certain legal rights, the care of the children, or the protection of inheritance, it can be tolerated and does not constitute a moral offense.” Note 176 reads: “Cf. CIC, cann. 1151–1155.” ↩
2. Pope Pius VI, “Epistle, ‘Deessemus nobis’ 16 September 1788,” Migne, Theologiae Cursus Completus, XXV (Paris: Apud editorem, 1840): 694–700. (Pages 694–695, trans. Mary’s Advocates and Denziner: marysadvocates.org/epistle-deessemus-nobis-pope-pius-vi-1788/.) ↩
3. “S.C.S. Off., 22 Maii et 19 Dec. 1860, Southwark – Fontes, n. 2272,” Collectanea S. Congregationis de Propaganda Fide seu decreta instructiones rescripta pro apostolicis missionibus, vol. 2 (Rome: Polyglotta, 1907): 483; see marysadvocates.org/sacred-congregation-of-the-holy-office/. The Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office had competence in matters of faith. Its name was changed to Congregation of the Holy Office in 1908, and to Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1965. ↩
4. “S. C. de Prop. Fide, instr. a. 1883, Causae Matrimoniales – Fontes, n. 4901,” Codicis Iuris Canonici Fontes. Vol. VII, ed. Gasparri (Vatican: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1935): 479–92; see marysadvocates.org/s-c-de-prop-fide-inst-1883/. ↩
5. No. 123, 3rd Plen. Baltimore: “Since the contract of marriage is one of the seven sacraments of the evangelic law, it belongs only to the Church, to whom the whole care of the sacraments by Christ has been entrusted, to make judgments about the validity of the marriage, and of the rights and duties derived from the same {marriage}. As a result, the Council of Trent (Sess. XXIV, Can. 12.) defined: ‘If any one saith, that matrimonial causes do not belong to ecclesiastical judges; let him be anathema.’” (Trans. Mary’s Advocates.)No. 124, 3rd Plen. Baltimore: “Since it is established by law that by marriage two spouses become one flesh; and by God’s will the marriage bond is so intimately and strongly forged that it cannot be broken or removed by any human power: it clearly appears that a most serious guilt attaches to those who seek to dissolve their marriages by appeal to the civil authorities, or, what is worse, obtain a civil divorce and attempt a new marriage, in spite of the lawful bond which still exists in the sight of God and His Church. To punish these crimes, we decree that an excommunication be automatically incurred by those who attempt a new marriage after divorce; this excommunication being reserved to the local Bishop.” (Trans. Mary’s Advocates. Note, the automatic excommunication was derogated in 1977, though it has been thereafter taught that parties in second so-called marriages would still be denied Communion if they continue in adultery.)No. 126, 3rd Plen. Baltimore: “We lay down the precept to all those, who are married, that they not enter civil tribunals for obtaining separation from bed and table, without consulting ecclesiastical authority. But if anyone should have attempted it, let him know that he incurs grave guilt and is to be punished through the judgment of the bishop.” (Trans. Rev. Culvar Bernard Alford, Cohabitation and Separation of Married Persons A Paper read at the Conference of Priests of the Diocese of Albany {Albany: November 3, 1948}.) ↩
6. Circa 1886–2011. See “Resources Cited” at marysadvocates.org/research/catholic-divorce/. ↩
7. “Father and mother were considered as correlative in regard to the matter expenses. . . . If the husband is the cause of the separation . . . he is bound to support her {the wife} for the rest of her life if the separation is perpetual in the same manner he was supporting her before the separation took place. . . . If the mother were the cause, they {the children} were to be raised by the father at the mother’s expense, especially in a case where she was wealthy.” Rev. Eugene A. Forbes, Canonical Separation of Consorts: An Historical Synopsis and Commentary on Canons 1128–2232 (Ottawa: The University of Ottawa Press, 1948), 239, 241. See other sources at marysadvocates.org/research/catholic-divorce/#Support. ↩
8. Deborah A. Koricke, PhD, Clinical and Forensic Psychologist, November 18, 2004 Plaintiff’s Exhibit 26, Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Case No. 03 DR 294327. ↩
9. Bai MacFarlane, “Finding Candidates to Be Marriage Disciples,” MarysAdvocates.org, July 15, 2019, marysadvocates.org/research/catholic-divorce/. ↩

FILED UNDER: ARTICLES TAGGED WITH: DIVORCE, DIVORCE AND REMARRIAGE, MARRIAGE, MARRIAGE AS CONTRACT VS. MARRIAGE AS COVENANT, MARRIAGE PROBLEMS, NATURE OF MARRIAGE, NO-FAULT DIVORCE

About Bai MacFarlane

Bai Macfarlane is the founder of Mary’s Advocate, a non-profit organization working to reduce unilateral no-fault divorce and support those who are unjustly abandoned. Mary’s Advocates publicizes canon law and constitutional principles that could be used to reduce the injustice of no-fault divorce. They provide a support network for those who remain faithful to the other spouse because divorce and separation do not end a marriage.660

There is a plot to dethrone Pope Benedict

Dec31by The Editor

https://fromrome.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/there-is-a-plot-to-dethrone-pope-benedict/

by Br. Alexis Bugnolo

And no, I am not talking about the events leading up to February 11, 2013.

The Plot

I am speak about the plan moving through sections of the Roman Curia right now to “solve” the problem of a “Pope emeritus”. I have this on the word of a very highly respected member of the Roman Curia who told me of it.

The enemies of Christ realize that this title proves that the resignation was never complete and therefore that Pope Benedict never renounced the Papal Office at all, and is still the pope. That means Bergoglio’s entire reign of terror was uncanonical,  a fraud, of no value, not legally binding on the Church in anything.

They cannot tolerate that. So now they feel confident in removing “the evidence of the problem”.

I wonder whether there are different points of view here. Do some want Benedict to stop calling himself “pope”, signing as the “Pastor of Pastors, Pope Benedict XVI” (Benedictus XVI P.P.)*, wearing the white cassock and skull cap? Do others go so far as to want him out of the Vatican and no longer cared for by the Head of the Pontifical Household? Do still others want a “canonical” solution which pretends or keeps up the pretense of a valid resignation?

I believe dissent on this matter is visceral, right now, in the Vatican. The Head of the Vatican Police seems to have been a partisan of the group which holds that Bergoglio has no valid claim, since, when he tendered his resignation this fall, Bergoglio demanded of him that he mention, in his letter of resignation, that he recognizes “Pope Francis as the Successor of Saint Peter”, a textual statement which has nothing to do with a letter of resignation per se, but which proves that Bergoglio is on the war path to punish anyone who thinks otherwise. (Did Sodano’s sacking have anything to do with this? — I do not know, but he certainly does know of the controversy since there is nothing going on in the Vatican that he does not know through his many clients there).

And do not doubt it. The whole Roman Curia knows that Benedict is still the pope and that in their haste they were wrong in presuming that he resigned the office of St. Peter in February 2013. I make this claim on the basis of the human reactions I get when discussing this with learned partisans of the Bergoglian regime. It’s a topic with which they are very familiar and know precisely what to say and not to say to pretend otherwise. They also employ their most forceful anger against those facts and points-of-law-in-application which directly address the problem. It’s such a hot potato, that few are even willing to speak about it. And some even run away when they see you coming, if you have requested to speak with them on this topic.

Their hope is that most of the laity are dopes and will keep eating up the propaganda that their handlers in the press and social media keep putting out: Shut up! Do not think about it! It does not matter! You are seeing things! You are a heretic and a schismatic if you say otherwise!** The Revolution, in the minds of the Bergoglian party, must go forward. They have to have approbation of all that is evil and the utter destruction of the Church which claims to be founded by the true Jewish Messiah. That is the end game.

The Battle of 2020

Pope Benedict XVI for his part has made it quite clear that his “yes” to accept the Papal Office is a “forever” yes. There is thus going to be a battle, and it will break out in 2020.  Catholics who love and remain in communion with Pope Benedict need to go on the war path.

We need to identify and contact the 40 to 70 Cardinals, whom the Vaticanista, Edward Pentin, said in 2017,*** were inclined to call an imperfect council to remove Bergoglio on the grounds that his claim to the papacy is vitiated by some canonical problem, whether heresy, schism or invalidity.

We need to mobilize Catholics to financially support any effort which is necessary to defend the person of the Roman Pontiff, Pope Benedict.

We need to keep up the heat on the partisans of error: those devilishly bold individuals who lie in public and are willing to say anything to keep you from realizing

1. that in Canon Law the Latin word munus HAS NEVER meant MINISTERIUM,
2. that Pope Benedict NEVER SAID HE RESIGNED the petrine munus
3. that Pope Benedict NEVER AFFIRMED THAT HE INTENDED to resign the petrine munus.
4. that the Cardinals and journalists are not infallible, when they say the contrary of nn. 1, 2, or 3.
5. that the Cardinals, journalists, and Bishops have NO AUTHORITY WHATSOEVER to interpret the act of renunciation of Feb. 11, 2013 as an act of renunciation of anything other than ministerium.

Those who are telling these lies are all getting hefty salaries from someone. Those who are calling out the liars get salaries from no one. That should tell you which side is from God and which is from Mammon. As public liars and frauds, they have no right to be seen for what they are not: honest men who are intellectually respectable or reliable. For more than 6.5 years they have marshaled no arguments against the canonical invalidity. And yet they insist that they should be listened to!

Operation Portugal

We need to organize Catholics in Portugal to prepare a place or places of refuge for the Pope, if He should chose to flee Rome, since, as Our Lady hinted in BOLD LETTERS during the apparitions there, “In Portugal the dogma of the Faith will be preserved.” And all who know their Catholic theology well, know that that implies that Portugal will at the very least remain in communion with the true Pope, if not be a place of refuge for him and His valid successors, if needed.

May the Holy Saints of the Knights Templar**** in Portugal and their devotees in our own time MOBILIZE.

May we all do our duty now in the most important battle, in the Church, to come in 2000 years.

_________

* Which clearly indicates he has in his own mind never resigned or intended to resign the Papal dignity, despite what some Cardinals are conjecturing.

** This plot to dethrone Benedict is thus evidence that their propaganda has been just that. It has served to hide the evidence from public view, it never was an honest denial.

*** See the timely report by Fred Martinez at http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2019/12/is-fear-factor-keeping-francis-in-power.html

**** I mention this Order because it took refuge from an unjust suppression in Portugal and was refounded there in the 14th century. There are thus many faithful Catholics devoted to their memory, in Portugal, and I pray they become the network for helping Pope Benedict.

Settimo Cielo

di Sandro Magister 

30 dic 19

The Revolution of Francis Doesn’t Even Spare Our Lady. Here’s What He Would Make of Her

*

On the eighth day after Christmas, when Jesus was circumcised and given the name received from the angel, the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of Mary, Most Holy Mother of God.

But who is Mary in the devotion and in the preaching of Pope Francis? A recent homily of his has caused astonishment, for how he has redrawn the profile of the mother of Jesus.

Pietro De Marco has sent us this analysis of the papal homily. The author, a former professor of the sociology of religion at the University of Florence and at the Theological Faculty of Central Italy, a philosopher and historian by training, has for years been known to and appreciated by the readers of Settimo Cielo.

*

“NO NOS PERDAMOS EN TONTERAS.” MARIAN DOGMAS ACCORDING TO POPE FRANCIS

by Pietro De Marco 

Over the span of a few days we have received news both of the entrusting of the commentary for the feast of the Immaculate Conception to two Baptist pastors, husband and wife, for the parishioners of the archdiocese of Milan, and above all of Pope Francis’s astonishing homily on Mary, during the Mass at Saint Peter’s for the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

If Francis did not emulate the Protestant style in Mariological matters, he nevertheless wanted, in his fervor, to make public his restrictive personal judgment on Marian dogmas and in the negative on the title of coredemptrix, object of centuries of theological reflection. “No nos perdamos en tonteras,” let’s not get lost in absurdity, in nonsense, he said about the age-old explorations of Marian theology and spirituality.

What did the pope intend to uphold in his homily? First of all, that Mary is woman. And as woman she is the bearer of a message, she is lady, she is disciple. “It is so simple. She does not demand anything else.” The other titles, for example those of the hymn “Akathistos,” or the Loreto litanies, in any case the millenary titles of praise to Mary, for Francis “do not add anything.” Now already this much is wrong. Mary has never been “the woman,” a dangerous homology in the variety of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern female cults. Nor has she ever been the feminine as such, in one of the romantic or decadent versions, as striking as may be the devotion that generations of artists had for the Sistine Madonna by Raphael. Nor is Mary the woman of the contemporary female revolutions, whose Catholic fringes abhor the icons of Mary’s motherhood. She is not Lady, “domina,” in that she is woman, “mujer,” and not even in being mother. She is “domina” inasmuch as that motherhood, the divine motherhood, gives her royalty. The humble handmaid of Luke 1:38 is the virgin mother of God, so defined above all by the Christian traditions over the centuries, and is not interchangeable with sacred figures of Mother Earth or of the female principle.

The reader notes that the title of virgin never appears in the homily of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, while the “Nican mopohua” (“Here is recounted,” circa 1556) that he quotes, the narrative in the Nahuatl language of the apparition of Mary to Juan Diego, explicitly states this in the testimony of Juan Bernardino, uncle of Juanito: the miraculous image must be designated as “la perfecta Virgen Santa Maria de Guadalupe.” And it obviously appears in other passages of that text, for example in the invocation: “Noble queen of heaven, ever virgin, mother of God.”

The appellation of “lady,” then, is not a generic formula, as the pope seems to believe, but is a lofty title, of sovereignty, like the Byzantine “déspoina.” The absolute use of “our lady” (the old Italian “nostra donna” comes from “nostra domina”) shows that “domina” is a royal title, equivalent to queen: “Salve regina.” Thus, and on the model of Esther, Mary is “domina,” “patrona,” “advocata nostra.” When Ignatius of Loyola, quoted in the homily, also calls Mary “nuestra señora,” he is using an ancient and constant expression among Christians, beginning, it seems, with the “emè kyría,” my sovereign, of Origen, analogous to “Despoina.”

A simple reflection on “domina,” “señora” etc. thus nullifies the minimalist thesis of the homily. It is evident, in fact, that this kind of papal statement is aimed at the downgrading of the great Western and Eastern Mariology, in favor of a horizontal image of Mary, suited instead for dignifying the daily life of contemporary woman.

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So is Mary a mom who became a “disciple” following Jesus, her son? In order that the title “disciple,” rare in tradition, may not deteriorate into pastoralistic obviousness, it must be at least taken in the sense of Maximus the Confessor: “The holy Mother became a disciple of her sweet Son, true Mother of wisdom and daughter of Wisdom, because she no longer looked at Him in a human manner or as a mere man, but served Him with respect as God and accepted His words as words of God.”

The papal pairing of woman-disciple, however, if declined between the spirituality of the everyday and sociological exegesis, remains eccentric to the order of divine revelation and gives us a glimpse in the pope’s imagination of that itinerant Jesus with his followers, including women, so dear to exegetes and writers extraneous to Christology; a Jesus separated from the whole theological and sacramental history of the Church. The mom-disciple of the homily recalls too much the mother of a recent film featuring Mary Magdalene, one of the products on which the theo-sociological proponents of the “movement of Jesus” can boast they worked for free as screenwriters.

A Mary stripped of dogma to be “type” of the feminine, then, projects this same captivating simplification onto the feminized Church. Everything little bit helps against dogma. And this is exactly what has been going on for centuries, but never coming from the see of Rome, until today.

The combative tone of the homily (“no pretenden,” “no tocaba,” “tocaban para nada,” “jamas quiso” etc.) therefore appears ill-founded and poorly directed. There appears in it a sort of showy theological indifference, with contempt for the perennial Church, in order to have the hands free in practical arenas, even if this means alliances with progressive global public opinion.

To this attitude, good for mesmerizing the simple, also belongs the curious papal argument that Our Lady never wanted to take anything away from her Son (“tomar algo de su Hijo,” or again: “no robó para sí nada de su Hijo”). No coredemption, therefore, which would be theft; but also almost nothing of all Marian theology. Any Mariological treatise, in fact, presents in addition to the motherhood and by virtue of this the immaculate conception of Mary, her “immunitas” from sin and the other “privilegia” up to the glorious assumption into heaven. Classical theology continues by affirming  that the Virgin is objectively, ontologically, mediatrix of all graces, partaker of the merits of Christ “in quantum universo mundo dedit Redemptorem,” since she gave the Redeemer to the world.

The “sui generis” union with the redemptive flesh of the Son necessarily places Mary within the order of redemptive action and grace: “omnium gratiarum mediatrix.” From redemptive mediation to coredemption there is a step that many Marian theologians have taken. Being mother of God raises Mary to this height “de congruo,” as theological language would have it, meaning not by her nature nor because she is “immediate co-operans”: only Christ works “immediate,” only the Son is redeemer “de condigno,” that is as a due, just consequence of his sacrifice. In the magnificent passage of Saint Anselm attributed today to Eadmer of Canterbury (“De excellentia Virginis,” 11), often quoted by dogmatists and in the encyclical “Ad caeli Reginam” of Pius XII, we read: “Just as God, who made all thing in his power, is Father and Lord of every creature, so also the Blessed Virgin Mother of God who has repaired everything with her merits is Mother and sovereign of all things.” Elsewhere, for Eadmer, Mary is “nutrix Reparatoris totius substantiae meae,” she who nourished, took upon herself, the Regenerator of my whole being.

The “servant of the Lord par excellence,” the “disciple,” is either all that her “privilegia” as mother of God declare, or would be of little account, as she already is in the Protestant traditions and as she is becoming in Catholic preaching. An enormous part of Christian spirituality is lived and lives from the unfolding of theological riches that Mary merited and drew to herself. It will not be a populistic Mariology that will preserve these riches, much less replace them. That the “privilegia” of the mother of God, which descend theologically from her status as an eminent and unique creature, can then be downgraded, transmitting to the faithful the ridiculous suspicion that in Mary these would have been thefts, or unworthy ambitions of a mother-disciple, is equivalent to arguing for “boutade.” This and other excesses of the homily really mean, at their core, that the pope denies the entire meaning and value of Christian theological work from its origins. And he despises the wonderful food given by theology to worship, to the traditions, to the living spiritualities. And he ignores the sanctity of its deposit in the tradition of the Church. For what? To propose a Christian revelation without mystery, without transcendence, without glory, without divine-humanity, as in the reformed churches?

“Cecidere manus,” that is the arms fall in front of so much impertinence and malice, even; that reductionistic malice of the innovator theologians who previously enveloped the event of Vatican Council II, barely disguised. If there applies to the pope’s men – I dare not speak for him – the “I cannot believe it” of the liberal Anglican bishop and theologian John A. T. Robinson, they should say so. They should take refuge, if they will be accepted, in the Protestant household. But just for now I will refrain from examining the issue of the Protestantization underway. Suffice it to recall that the Protestant ambition to Christianize secularization, after having contributed to it, has failed and has overrun the reformed churches.

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Here I dwell rather on the question of the Christological “mixing,” with which Francis’s homily of December 12 ends, promptly targeted by stern commentators such as Maria Guarini, Roberto de Mattei and others of the “traditional” area; but is there elsewhere in the Church such courage and care for the faith?

I recall that “mestizaje” is the Spanish equivalent of the general category of inter-racial or inter-ethnic mixture, while “mestizos” indicates those born from the mix of Hispanics and Indians. In the miraculous image on Juan Diego’s cloak, the Virgen de Guadalupe is “morenita,” as many of us have contemplated on Tepeyac. This suggests to Bergoglio a brilliant development, which however results in another blunder.

In fact, the pope says that Mary “se mestizó para ser Madre de todos. […] ¿Por que? Porque ella mestizó a Dios.” In fact, continues the homily, this is the great mystery: “Maria mixes God, true God and true man, in her Son”. What this really means, we would like to have explained to us.

I do not dare to think – as others have legitimately done – that Francis means to say that Mary mixed God, or in her womb mixed divine and human nature, mediating in herself the divine with the human flesh of which alone she would be mother, because this would be one of the errors of the 4th-5th century against which Cyril of Alexandria fought.

Let’s imagine instead that the pope means to say that in being son of Mary, or in being born of woman, the eternal Christ was mixed like she “se mestizó” – his words again – to be the mother of all men. But then this “mixing” is a rhetorical device, a theology in situation, for the great feast of the Mexican nation in the basilica of Saint Peter. It is only the evocative emphasis of God’s becoming man, metaphorically mixing himself, as man, with humanity. But can the immense Christological theme of Cyril’s “God with us” be reduced to an example of “live together and mix?”

Or this “mestizaje” truly carries something more: the idea that in Mary God himself has mixed, against the definitions of the ancient Councils necessary to save the truth and treasure of the faith; against the Creed and what we proclaim in the liturgy. I lean toward the light version, even if it is very imprudent, but nobody can trust the pope anymore, since quite unlike the “confirmare fratres suos,” he day after day “infirmat” them.

In effect, the idea of ​​the “Theotokos” mixing God is no less foolhardy than that of the Baptist spouses of Milan, who celebrate Mary because she “accepted” an irregular pregnancy, the “most irregular” of pregnancies, and sheltered “that foreigner who came from God himself, without a residence permit!” Perhaps the fanciful theologoumenon of Christ migrating in the misery of “kenosis” (it is supposed) to hospitality in the Virgin, no less than the repudiation of dogmatic “tonteras” by Francis for a Mariology “next door,” presume to be the new frontiers of Christian proclamation.

To this it must be opposed that the very affirmation that Mary’s “esencialidad” is her being woman and mother is a betrayal of millennial Mariology. Indeed, a motherhood of Mary that does not also explicitly include, for theological awareness and spiritual life, the reality and power of the Mother’s participation in the redemptive flesh, casts relativizing shadows on the very work of the Son. The trivialization of Mary, reduced from the “omnium gratiarum mediatrix” to the virtuous subjectivity of an “ecce” and a “fiat” and of an entirely human discipleship, symmetrically wounds Christology not only in the essential dimension of redemption and grace but also in the dogmatic core of the supernatural prerogatives of Christ themselves. Are these the costs that one accepts to pay for the “new evangelization?” Good news of what?

Francis’s arguments, expressed in that sort of subjective sub-magisterium that he practices “in persona papae” but “quasi papa non esset,” as pope but as if he were not so, as if there were no such thing as petrine responsibility, are surely to the detriment of  the Church. And I believe the time has come to no longer tolerate this spasticity.Condividi:

•  30 dicembre 2019
•  English

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Faith in U.S. withers as apathy trumps religion 

America becoming ‘pagan’ as Christianity cedes to culture

BY STEPHEN DINAN 

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Monday, December 30, 2019

The Rev. Stephen M. Koeth, a Catholic priest and Ph.D. history candidate at Columbia University, was teaching a class one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermons that mentioned the road to Jericho. He found it striking that none of the students got the reference to the road, which is where the parable of the Good Samaritan takes place.

But then the Rev. Koeth realized it wasn’t just the road —the students weren’t familiar with the Good Samaritan.

That makes them pagans, in the very real sense of the word, he said.

“They have no knowledge, no practice, no anything,” he said. “It’s not that they’re antagonistic to religion. Some of them are, but often times it just has no meaning to them.” Never before in American history has religion — and in the U.S., that inherently means Christianity — been so tested. Cultural distractions abound and church attendance is dropping, andfaithleaders mired in scandal are struggling to figure out how to connect with the next generations of potential churchgoers. People of faith are still a majority, with more than 75% of the country ascribing to some religion. All combined, Christianity counts for nearly 63% of the population.

Yet all the growth is on the other side of the spectrum, the so-called “Nones,” or do not have a religious affiliation. That

First of five parts

includes atheists and agnostics, but the real stunning rise within the Nones has been those who don’t so much actively question or reject God, as much as they don’t see a reason to bother with religion.

Call them the apathetics.

The apathetics don’t attend services, don’t ascribe to any one creed, and often don’t even have much familiarity with the faith world. They account for a bigger share of the population than the agnostics and atheists combined, and their numbers are growing by millions each year.

“They’re terrifying,” said Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor. “They have very low levels of income, low levels of education. They’re sort of checked out from modern society. They’re scary. They’re the people who are isolated.”

For the first time ever this year, the Nones are the largest demographic in the U.S., with 23.1% of the population, overtaking the Catholics and the evangelicals, Mr. Burge calculates. Among those ages 18 to 22 —the vanguard of Generation Z — more than 40% belong to the Nones, according his numbers, which are based on the General Social Survey, a massive trove of sociological data.

The increasingly chaotic religious landscape is causing friction, particularly where the beliefs of the faithful clash with the culture.

In Hollywood, Christianity is portrayed somewhere between a comedy and a disease, though some other faiths fare better.

In the states, blue laws have been wiped away, delivering Sunday from God over to the NFL, shopping and youth sports.

In the nation’s courtrooms, centuries of doctrinal Christian belief, which underpinned the nation’s laws, are being challenged by a smaller but politically powerful LGBTQ community.

All of which prompts the question: Will religion wither in 2020? Or perhaps it prompts the statement: Religion will wither in 2020.

“I find what’s hardest is there is no shared foundation anymore,” the Rev. Koeth said. “Religion isn’t even in the cultural air and water that used to be breathed and drank by everyone.”

There are obvious signs of that. For centuries, the Bible was the one cultural continuum. Shakespeare’s jokes would have been recognized by anyone of learning from his day through the next three centuries.

Now, the culture is fragmented, and TV epics on HBO or Netflix are more likely to be the source of shared knowledge.

The Rev. Koeth’s experience teaching the Good Samaritan to elite college students completely unaware of it was also telling.

“This isn’t just an issue for people of faith, it’s also this is ignorance of the canon of Western culture,” he said. “We are no longer merely trying to revivify practice among people who are Catholics and who have just drifted from practice and need to be brought back to Sunday Mass. We are literally having to evangelize.”

He compared the challenge to something like that required of the church during the Age of Exploration, when missionaries spanned the globe delivering the Christian message to remote corners.

“This is the central challenge, and we are not a church that has been built for that,” he said.

It’s not clear the other Christian denominations are in any better shape.

For decades, churches counted on a cycle. Teens would go off to college, cut their attendance or perhaps stop going altogether, then drift back when they grew older, got married and had children.

That’s not happening anymore. Now, they drift away and don’t come back.

Scott McConnell, executive director of LifeWay Research, an evangelical analysis firm, compared it to moving homes.

“Sometimes you have boxes that sit in the garage that just don’t get unpacked. For a lot of young people, religion is that box that just doesn’t get unpacked,” he said.

More people just aren’t unpacking that box.

The Public Religion Research Institute said the Nones in the U.S. are growing at a stunning rate. In 2010, they accounted for 18%. By 2012 they were 20% and have grown 1% each year since. As of 2018, 26% of Americans had no affiliation.

“Most of the increase in the unaffiliated seems to be offset by the decrease in white religious traditions,” said Natalie Jackson, PRRI’s research director.

The numbers are all the more striking because they defy global trends. Those proclaiming to be unaffiliated with a religion are actually shrinking as a share of the worldwide population, says the Pew Research Center for Religion & Public Life.

Shepherds seeking flocks

Post-Christian nation 

People of faith are still the majority in the U.S., with more than 75% ascribing to some religion. Christianity counts for nearly 63% of the population. However, for the first time this year, those who don’t have a religious affiliation are the largest demographic in the U.S. with 23.1% of the population, overtaking the Catholics and the evangelicals. ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTOGRAPHS 

For generations, churches counted on a cycle. Teens would leave for college, cut their church attendance, or perhaps stop going altogether, then drift back when they grew older, got married and had children. But this cycle has stopped. 

Christianity worldwide will hold static at about 31.4% from 2010 to 2050, Pew says. Hindus will maintain their numbers, and Buddhists and folk religions will decline slightly.

But Pew says the unaffiliated will drop from 16.4% to 13.2%.

The big growth globally is in the Muslim population, which will rise from 23.2% to 29.7%, nearly reaching the number of Christians.

In the U.S., non-Christian faiths have been holding steady, with some growth in the Muslim population, though it’s geographically uneven. Some regions show no Muslim presence at all, even as school systems in Maryland and Washington state add Muslim religious holidays to their vacation calendars.

There are a host of theories about what has happened to faith in the U.S. — and to Christianity, in particular.

One is that the U.S. is following the path trod by Europe, with economic prosperity correlating with less religion. Another is that religious affiliation was always tenuous, but people are being more honest about it in surveys. A third is that Christian churches have become polarizing, Mr. Burge says, with liberals fleeing the churches and conservatives remaining.

Moderates then are put off by the increasingly conservative congregations around them.

The shrinkage is staggering. In 1976, mainline Protestants made up 30% of the country. Now they’re 10%. In a decade they’ll be 5%, Mr. Burge calculates.

“The polarization that has affected our politics has seeped into our religion. Moderate religion has been disappearing,” Mr. Burge said.

LifeWay Research, in a survey last year, asked Americans about their identity, in an open-ended question where they could list anything, and everything, they felt. Only slightly more than a third mentioned their faith.

“Culturally we’re very much in a place that’s post-Christian, and one of the signs of that is, ‘Is your religion an important part of your identity,’ only 37% actually mentioned that. That’s just another indicator of how people think about themselves,” Mr. McConnell said.

One factor is certainly part of the equation: People spend less time connected to their churches.

In the past, a congregant would show up Sunday morning for services, and maybe also come for Wednesday Bible study, or pray at the Tabernacle in a Catholic Church, or take part in a diocesan sports league. Now, churches are lucky to have them for the Sunday service.

“It used to be you didn’t have to convince people to become Christian, you had to convince them to stay Christian. Now you have to convince them to become Christian,” Mr. Burge said.

Meanwhile, those who start off without religion don’t often turn to it. About two-thirds of those who grew up in homes without a religious affiliation stay unaffiliated, Mr. Burge calculates.

Mr. McConnell at LifeWay says church leaders say that even in the last decade they’ve seen a startling drop in engagement. People are spending less time reading the Bible on their own or even praying.

“Kids’ sports and just the myriad of activities that schools are offering for kids, and media choices and things like that, that’s a lot of competition for a church and just vying for people’s time and attention. It begins to start a spiral of less time, less relationships, less knowledge,” he said.

It also puts a lot of pressure on churches to do more — provide the basics of faith, as well as deepen the ties of community — in the one hour a week where they still have congregants’ attention.

Still, it’s not that they’re rejecting God, Mr. McConnell said. Of those younger Americans who stepped away from their church, only 10% to 15% actually rejected belief in God. And a large number would still say they’re spiritual. But they’ve stopped following the rituals that make up religion.

“The understanding of the relevance of church to a lot of Americans is not something that resonates,” he said.

The Rev. Koeth says there are some pioneering attempts at outreach. Auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has drawn attention for his willingness to take to social media to answer questions and debate agnostics and atheists.

And the University of Notre Dame in 2017 started the Grotto Network, a digital platform intended to win over millennials.

“It’s a start, but they’re all nascent,” the Rev. Koeth says. “I think they’re all underfunded. And how successful they are, the jury’s still out.”

His advice to those attempting to reach the Nones: Don’t lead with the hot-button issues that have dogged the church.

“That’s not to say you don’t bring them into that eventually, or that you surrender the church’s teachings on those things,” he said. “But I think we’re at a cultural moment where there are even bigger issues.”

Latin: Language of the Church, an essay by Dr. Patrick M. Owens

Aelredus RievallensisEssays  

December 16, 2019 

Latin: Language of the Church, an essay by Dr. Patrick M. Owens

Respected Latin educator Dr. Patrick M. Owens wrote a significant introduction to a recent book of essays In Praise of the Tridentine Mass and of Latin, Language of the Church, by Fr. Roberto Spataro.

Its cogent account of the role of Latin in the life of the Church, and its appeal for the restoration of classical Latin pedagogy, deserve to be read by all parties concerned for the future of the humanities, and more specially for the reform of Catholic education.

Some excerpts below….

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At the convent of Duns Scotus College in Southfield, Michigan the sun had just begun to set as the young Franciscan novices stood in choir for Vespers. Suddenly, furtive glances and stifled chuckles interrupted the customary solemnity of the chapel as the verse “Et percussit inimicos suos in posteriora (Ps. 77:66)” was sung. The surprised novices understood the verse as “And [the Lord] struck His enemies in their backsides”.

It was 1948, and the Order of Friars Minor had recently returned to the Vulgate translation of the Psalms after an inauspicious experiment with the Bea Psalter. These twenty-three friars, who had been Franciscans for less than two years, had grown familiar with the Pian version of the same verse, “Et percussit a tergo inimicos suos” (And [the Lord] struck his enemies from their back.)

All these novices had studied Latin for at least four years before their simple profession. In the Franciscan minor seminaries – basically their equivalent of high school – students had five hours of Latin classes and at least as many hours of liturgy in Latin each week. During novitiate there were no formal academic classes; rather, it was a time devoted to formation and discernment. As such, they were obliged to recite the entire Divine Office in choir, attend Mass daily, and listen to seminars on the Holy Rule, all of which were in Latin and accounted for at least four hours each day. Latin was not a foreign language; it was the language of the Church. The novices did not study it at a distance, they lived it. Having such familiarity with the language, it was not surprising that the novices would hear the changed words of the Psalm and immediately attribute to “posteriora” its ridiculous common meaning. They were not translating the Latin. They were understanding it.

Another example of this integration of Latin into the rhythms of religious life also occurred at a seminary. Fr. Reginald Foster, OCD, once recalled that in 1954 at the minor seminary in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the novice-master admonished a Carmelite novice to wash off his grease-laden hands. In response the novice raised his blacked hands to his superior and quipped, “Nigra sum sed formosa,” a clever reference to a Vespers antiphon from taken from the Canticle of Canticles “I am black, but beautiful (Cant.1:4).” The novice-master chuckled, and the novice was able to escape further rebuke.

The deep and instinctive familiarity with Latin illustrated by these stories resulted from a comprehension and immersive education in the language. Kenneth Baker, SJ, recounts that when he was a Jesuit seminarian in the 1950s, not only were all the seminary classes taught in Latin and from Latin textbooks, but the annual oral examinations were also conducted in Latin. All recreation time in novitiate was in Latin – meaning that for much of the day, novices were expected either to speak Latin or not to speak at all. Men who intended to enter the Order without knowing Latin were required to complete a two year Juniorate, which helped them bridge the gap. By the time of ordination, most Jesuits with such a background had read a great part of the Classics and of the Church Fathers in the original and could write and speak Latin. The Jesuit education was, in fact, a liberal arts curriculum with an emphasis on the Classics.

Nevertheless, Latin was not the exclusive province of priests and religious. Within living memory, Catholic school children in both Europe and America learned their Latin prayers and grammar. Boys as young as eight years old could recite from memory the prayers at the foot of the altar. Even children (though perhaps to a lesser extent girls) from working class families could be expected to know the Mass and to have read some Vergil and Caesar by age fourteen. Before the last century, by the age of sixteen, a diligent though unexceptional student from a well-off family would have attained a level of mastery in Latin that would surpass that of many current graduate students of the Classics.

To be sure, Latin was larger than the schoolroom or the choir. The language that had served the Western world as a lingua franca for nearly two millennia was still the official language of the Church’s hierarchy, prayer, and diplomacy. Beyond sheer formalities, it fulfilled a genuine need in the Church even into the 20th century: Latin was the actual mode of international communication between priests and scholars. Catholics were not studying Latin merely as a scholastic exercise, but rather for the sake of acquiring their venerable tradition and laying foundations for an enduring intellectual and spiritual culture.

The Acta Apostolicae Sedis is only one typical example of the way clergy and laity alike used Latin as a genuine means of communication in the last century. As the official monthly gazette of the Catholic Church it contained all the news that Rome saw fit to print. The AAS brought news of ecclesial appointments, the contents and digest version of encyclical letters, and the decisions of Roman congregations in reply to dubia. When Catholics were uncertain about the validity of a certain sect’s sacraments, a particularly thorny annulment petition, whether they might enjoy a relaxation of fasting or abstinence on some account, or how to recognize a newly canonized saint in the recitation of the Divine Office, for these and numerous other queries, there was found in the AAS a repository of current responses and practical assistance to which the faithful could avail themselves. The laws contained in the AAS were considered promulgated as soon as they were published, leaving no time for translations into various languages.

With rare exception, AAS was published entirely in Latin, a practice that on account of the gravity of the subject matters and the international audience was never seriously questioned. In fact, AAS was only the latest iteration (having been preceded by the Acta Sanctae Sedis and the Acta et Decreta) of expansive international publishing for the benefit and governance of hundreds of millions of faithful. In the minds of the authors, the linguistic continuity of these publications ensured that they would be accessible to Catholics of any future generation. In 1940 a Catholic with little more than a high school degree could make sense of a literary corpus ranging from this month’s edition of the Acta Apostolicae Sedis back to the Acta Martyrum Scillitanorum (the account of the Scillitan Martyrs from 180 AD). This connection with an immutable language meant that modern people were able to be in dialogue with past generations using the same literary models, technical terminology, and allusions to scripture or liturgy. From the Vatican cloister to the high schools of Brooklyn, Catholics prayed, studied, travelled, litigated, and even joked in Latin ut sint unum.

But arguably the strongest thread holding this long fiber of Latin culture together across the centuries was the Latin liturgy. By virtue of its being the central and universal prayer of the Church, the Divine Office is the first contact for both clergy and faithful with the sublime liturgical idiom of the West. Furthermore, when the faithful pray the Divine Office, the prayer of the individual joins with that of the diocese and of the universal Church, in an act that transcends temporal and spatial boundaries Though consisting principally of Psalms, the Divine Office also contains many of the Church’s most elaborate orations, petitions, and ancient homilies. The august poetry of the psalter and meticulous diction of orations and collects provide the faithful with a common voice and universal language into which the Franciscan novices of Duns Scotus College and countless previous generations around the world assimilated their prayer. Because Latin was an essential feature of this communal liturgy, experienced by all Catholics, it ensured in turn that it remained an integral part of Catholics’ cultural memory.

Arguably one of the most important reasons that Latin education must be kept alive in the Church is to retain access to this communal experience of liturgy. Why? Because this liturgy is the repository of the Catholic tradition.

It is education which conserves and transmits the experience and wisdom of the previous generations so that such a cultural memory, identity, and common parlance can be forged and strengthened. Indeed, for most of human history, this inculturation has been a primary purpose of education. Language encapsulates the culture and the history of a society. Those elements are passed to the successive generations through the language so that future generations may benefit from the sufferings and discoveries of their forebears and enjoy the comfort of participation in a transcendent community that reaches back through the ages. Rightly conceived, culture is the conscious ideal of human perfection and the habitual vision of greatness. In the case of Catholic culture, this community originates with the Apostles and Our Lord Himself. The language that provides the Divine Office with its poetic freedom and simultaneously constrains the prose to prescriptive ancient norms, carries in its rich history an immense treasure of thought and feeling from both pre-Christian and Apostolic times. For the better part of two thousand years, it has provided the Church with a language of worship, an intellectual clarity, and a mark of catholicity.

Catholic culture – the sensus fidelium – is replete with ideas about fasting and feasting, domestic devotions, processions and pilgrimages, all expressed in one unifying idiom of Latin. But culture cannot be infused; it must be taught, absorbed, and lived. And although the accoutrements of Catholic culture are only ancillary to the Sacraments, they nonetheless provide an integral part of the identity in the Roman Church. This core identity of the Church is what is at stake in the current controversies regarding the role of Latin.

[….]

Latin was especially important for countries whose national languages were either too diverse or too different from the rest of Europe for easy communication. In Hungary, the national language remained Latin until the nineteenth century. It was the language of politics, administration, education, and the judiciary. Orations and public debates at every level were held in Latin. More than just an official language, Latin was also the language of the everyday communication of society. Of course, not every Hungarian was an eloquent speaker, and language proficiency was dependent upon one’s level of education. Nevertheless, after the elementary schools, which were conducted mostly in Hungarian, secondary school courses were taught in Latin. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Western European travelers who had visited Hungary, remarked with awe that the Latin language was in daily use by a variety of people, not only the nobility and the clergy, but oftentimes even simple folk. Latin represented for Hungarians a bond with the glorious past of the Kingdom, a direct link with classical antiquity, an intellectual connection with Western culture, and a token of national unity, which was especially critical for an empire that was comprised of Croatians, Germans, Serbs, Slovak, and Turks, all of whom had their own native languages.^[1] In this way, Hungary’s use of Latin mirrored that of the Church.

The Church’s adherence to this common practice of utilizing Latin as a lingua franca should not be surprising. Languages are intrinsically bound to cultures, and Latin for nearly two-thousand years had been the language not only of Catholic culture in the West but of Western culture itself. It is for this reason that the Church took pains to keep alive the tradition of active Latin. Catholic intellectuals knew well that since Latin was the vehicle of culture, a superficial familiarity would not be sufficient. To ensure the ability to engage with past sources and contemporary intellectuals as well as to protect the transference of Catholic culture to subsequent generations, active language use is essential. Catholic leaders, therefore, took pains to master the Catholic language not only passively through extensive reading and public lectures, but also actively by developing the ability to communicate effectively and rhetorically in written and extemporaneous spoken exchanges. This tradition persisted into modern times, producing the outstanding Catholic scholars, many of them priests and bishops, who distinguished themselves during the first half of the twentieth century. This same tradition allowed for elegant orations and spirited debates at the Second Vatican Council, where the comparably small number of prelates incapable of extemporaneous Latin conversation enjoyed personal translators. If Latin’s position, even as late as the time of Vatican II, appeared so solid, what had been the hidden fault lines that led to such a seemingly abrupt fissure between past and present over the past 50 years?

Find out by ordering the book, In Praise of the Tridentine Mass and of Latin, Language of the Church, by Fr. Roberto Spataro, Secretary of the Pontifical Academy for Latin.

Excerpts published by kind permission of Angelico Press.

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NOTES:

^[1] cf. Graham, Hugh F. “Latin in Hungary.” The Classical Journal 63, no. 4 (1968): 163-65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3296276. Vámbéry, Ármin Arminius Vambéry: His Life and Adventures London, Fisher Unwin. 1884 p.5; Capek, Thomas The Slovaks of Hungary Knickerbocker Press, New York. 1906. 176-80

HomoHeresy Oozes From Bergoglian Heresies

• Guy McClung
• December 28, 2019

If the reigning mathematicians at the best universities assert that 2+2=5, and the best scientists in the world propose that ice is now heavier than water, then all sorts of further untruths will, logically and inevitably, follow.  Other mathematicians will proclaim 2+2+2+2+2=15, and other scientists will propose the theory that the polar ice caps will sink.

And thus it is with the new heresies that have already been announced, and more that will inevitably follow as the evil spawn of the Bergolgian heresies. This now includes the homoheresy.

Bergoglianism Heresies

As are so many infernal heresies through history, Bergolgianism is named after its author, Jorge Bergoglio. A substantial number of the heresies included in Bergoglianism are based on the core principles of his exhortation, Amoris Laetitia. These include:  1. There is no mortal sin,  i.e. no sin so grievous that when the sinner is unrepentant results in the eternal loss of sanctifying grace; 2. This is true even for those aware of the demands of the divine law; 3. Divine grace does not make all mortal sins avoidable; 4. A situation’s circumstances can dismiss one from the demands of the divine law; 5. Depending on the situation and its circumstances, God sometimes wills a person to sin; and 6. For those God judges and who are then sent to hell, hell is not eternal, the fire is not everlasting; and no one is condemned forever. [see, in addition to the numerous verbatim quotations from public statements of Jorge Bergoglio, these sections of his exhortation Amoris Laetitia– 296, 297, 300-303, and 305]. Implicit in the proclamations of Bergolgianism is that God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit made mistakes, errors corrected by Jorge Bergoglio.

The HomoHeresy- No surprise!

The homoheresy is this: In certain situations men and women can voluntarally and intentionally engage in homosexual actions and not only are these actions not sinful, they are acts of loving virtue.  In these situations, this is God’s will for them.  Fully aware of what they are doing, they may continue in their sin, even publically, and be admitted to all the sacraments of the church.  God made them this way. No matter what the situation or circumstances, none of these people will ever be condemned forever for engaging in these actions. “These people” can include married people and ordained priests, bishops, and cardinals.

Clearly,  Bergoglianism is the evil parent of this heresy. Recent declarations of the homoheresy by Vatican officials and by bishops in several countries make it clear that this heresy is one specific restatement of the Bergoglian heresies.

The Vatican

Very recently, the Pontifical Biblical Commission has published a book entitled What Is Man? An Itinerary of Biblical Anthropology. In this book, the church’s true teaching on homosexual actions is given minimal voice while the text concentrates on denigrations of established church teachings which cast them  as  “archaic”, “historically conditioned”, “outdated”,  and deficient for not evidencing a “new and more adequate understanding of the human person.”

There is little or no reference to scholars and works well-grounded in current and accepted scientific knowledge and philosophical discussion that are in accord with church teaching and contrary to the presentation of the homoheresy.  In terms of church doctrine, tradition, and teaching, this book gives a platform to serious and widespread errors, but there is no explicit condemnation of them.

Germany-Again

Some German bishops have also recently proclaimed the homoheresy.  The chairman of the Marriage and Family Commission of the German bishops’ conference has already publicized the fact  that the German bishops agree and now teach as shepherds of the faithful that homosexuality is a “normal form” of human sexual identity.

These bishops have announced an upcoming study of this topic: “The Sexuality of Man – How should one discuss it scientifically-theologically and judge it ecclesiastically?” One news agency reported that their aim is  “Newly Assessing’ Catholic Doctrine on Homosexuality.” It is clear that the conclusions to be reached at the end of the German hierarchy’s two-year “Synodal Process” for addressing such issues have already been written.

Both the Vatican and the German bishops are proclaiming the homoheresy, weaseling it into the public discourse under the cover of what they allege current science establishes about a better and more sufficient understanding of the human person. The homoheretics conclude that this correct scientific understanding demands a required correction of the view that God values only heterosexual unions; and that true doctrine, as they have discovered it and as God most surely intended from the time of Adam and Eve, includes the irrefutable and intrinsic value of homosexual unions and the dogmatic acceptance of homosexuality as a worthy expression of what God intended about what it means to be human. 

There is no doubt that the homoheresy finds its foundations in the Bergoglian hersises.  German Archbishop Koch has declared that these “developments” of doctrine regarding their discoveries of God’s will have been made possible and energized by the teachings of Amoris Laetitia. Declaring that previous church teaching is not “up to date,” German bishops have stated that  homosexuality is one of the “normal forms of sexual predisposition,” that homosexuality is “not changeable” through socialization, “nor does it have to be changed.”

The Bible

The inspired words of God in both the Old and New Testaments explicitly contradict the homoheresy. Below are several excerpts which make this clear. 

Leviticus 18:22:  “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.”

Romans 1:26-27:  “For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their lust toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their perversity.”

1 Corinthians 6:9-11: “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”

1 Timothy 1:9-10:  “ . . . understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, kidnapers, liars, perjurers . . . ”

Jude 1:7:  “Likewise, Sodom, Gomorrah, and the surrounding towns, which, in the same manner as they, indulged in sexual promiscuity and practiced unnatural vice, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.”

Catechism of the Catholic Church

The catechism, in a section entitled “Chastity and homosexuality” directly contradicts the homoheresy.

“2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. . . . Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”  They are contrary to the natural law . . . Under no circumstances can they be approved.”

“2358  . . .  This inclination, which is objectively disordered, . . . ”

“2396 Among the sins gravely contrary to chastity are masturbation, fornication, pornography, and homosexual practices.”

Church Fathers

In the early church, men known as the Church Fathers wrote about Holy Scripturem church teaching and tradition. Many of their works directly contradict today’s homoheresy. Below are several excerpts of their works.

Athenagoras:   “But though such is our character (Oh! why should I speak of things unfit to be uttered?), the things said of us are an example of the proverb, ‘The harlot reproves the chaste.’ For those who have set up a market for fornication and established infamous resorts for the young for every kind of vile pleasure – who do not abstain even from males, males with males committing shocking abominations, outraging all the noblest and comeliest bodies in all sorts of ways, so dishonoring the fair workmanship of God.”

Eusebius of Caesarea:  “[God in the Law given to Moses] having forbidden all unlawful marriage, and all unseemly practice, and the union of women with women and men with men.”

Saint John Chrysostom:  “But if thou scoffest at hearing of hell and believest not that fire, remember Sodom. . .  For such is the burning of Sodom, and that conflagration! . . Consider how great is that sin, to have forced hell to appear even before its time! . . . For that rain was unwonted, for the intercourse was contrary to nature, and it deluged the land, since lust had done so with their souls.  . . . For such was also the intercourse of the men, making a body of this sort more worthless than the very land of Sodom. And what is there more detestable than a man who hath pandered himself, or what more execrable? “

Saint Augustine:  “Those offences which be contrary to nature are everywhere and at all times to be held in detestation and punished; such were those of the Sodomites, which should all nations commit, they should all be held guilty of the same crime by the divine law, which hath not so made men that they should in that way abuse one another. For even that fellowship which should be between God and us is violated, when that same nature of which He is author is polluted by the perversity of lust.”

Saint Gregory the Great:  “Sacred Scripture itself confirms that sulfur evokes the stench of the flesh, as it speaks of the rain of fire and sulfur poured upon Sodom by the Lord. He had decided to punish Sodom for the crimes of the flesh, and the very type of punishment he chose emphasized the shame of that crime. For sulfur stinks, and fire burns. So it was just that Sodomites, burning with perverse desires arising from the flesh like stench, should perish by fire and sulfur so that through this just punishment they would realize the evil they had committed, led by a perverse desire.”

Saints, Theologians and Scholars

Numerous saints, theologians, philosophers, and scholars over the centuries have explicitly denounced the homoheresy. Quotations from the work of a few of them are below.

Saint Peter Damian:  “Truly, this vice is never to be compared with any other vice because it surpasses the enormity of all vices.… It defiles everything, stains everything, pollutes everything. And as for itself, it permits nothing pure, nothing clean, nothing other than filth . . . The miserable flesh burns with the heat of lust; the cold mind trembles with the rancor of suspicion; and in the heart of the miserable man chaos boils like Tartarus [Hell . . .This plague undermines the foundation of faith, weakens the strength of hope, destroys the bond of charity; it takes away justice, subverts fortitude, banishes temperance, blunts the keenness of prudence.”

Saint Thomas Aquinas:  “If all the sins of the flesh are worthy of condemnation because by them man allows himself to be dominated by that which he has of the animal nature, much more deserving of condemnation are the sins against nature by which man degrades his own animal nature….”

Saint Catherine of Siena:  “But they act in a contrary way, for they come full of impurity to this mystery, and not only of that impurity to which, through the fragility of your weak nature, you are all naturally inclined (although reason, when free will permits, can quiet the rebellion of nature), but these wretches not only do not bridle this fragility, but do worse, committing that accursed sin against nature, and as blind and fools, with the light of their intellect darkened, they do not know the stench and misery in which they are. It is not only that this sin stinks before me, who am the Supreme and Eternal Truth, it does indeed displease me so much and I hold it in such abomination that for it alone I buried five cities by a divine judgment, my divine justice being no longer able to endure it. This sin not only displeases me as I have said, but also the devils whom these wretches have made their masters. Not that the evil displeases them because they like anything good, but because their nature was originally angelic, and their angelic nature causes them to loathe the sight of the actual commission of this enormous sin.”

Saint Bernardine of Siena:  “No sin in the world grips the soul as the accursed sodomy; this sin has always been detested by all those who live according to God.… Deviant passion is close to madness; this vice disturbs the intellect, destroys elevation and generosity of soul, brings the mind down from great thoughts to the lowliest, makes the person slothful, irascible, obstinate and obdurate, servile and soft and incapable of anything; furthermore, agitated by an insatiable craving for pleasure, the person follows not reason but frenzy.… Just as people participate in the glory of God in different degrees, so also in hell some suffer more than others. He who lived with this vice of sodomy suffers more than another, for this is the greatest sin.”

Saint Peter Canisius:  “As the Sacred Scripture says, the Sodomites were wicked and exceedingly sinful. Saint Peter and Saint Paul condemn this nefarious and depraved sin. In fact, the Scripture denounces this enormous indecency thus: ‘The scandal of Sodomites and Gomorrhans has multiplied and their sins have become grave beyond measure.’ So the angels said to just Lot, who totally abhorred the depravity of the Sodomites: ‘Let us leave this city….’ Holy Scripture does not fail to mention the causes that led the Sodomites, and can also lead others, to this most grievous sin. . . . Those unashamed of violating divine and natural law are slaves of this never sufficiently execrated depravity.”

Why ?

Why would anyone, let alone a bishop of the church, proclaim and be an advocate for the homoheresy? Two answers come to mind.

Church Powers and Princes are Homosexualist

Many of those ordained to Holy Orders who now rule in the earthly power structures of Jesus’s church are  thoroughly homosexualized. They are known publicly as the “lavender mafia.” It includes thousands of ordained homocriminals, including sodorapists, pederasts, homopredators, and perverts, who have had tens of thousands of victims worldwide. It also includes those pastors, bishops, archbishops and cardinals who have enabled these ordained homocriminals and who have, for decades, shuttled them from parish to parish, diocese to diocese, and country to country – with the full and certain knowledge that the homocriminals would again commit their crimes.  Some of these same ordained and consecrated men have authorized the payment by the church of billions of dollars to settle claims by their victims – billions of dollars of the money given by  the faithful.

Of course such men would cum laetitia accept and promulgate the homoheresy.

Doctrinal Dominoes Fall – One, Then All

Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. The Bergoglians reject this. They are pursuing a path that appears to be based on this scheme: If one, only one, of the truths proclaimed by Jesus’s church is shown to be false, then Jesus’s church is destroyed, and the heretical new church will endure.

A fifth century Church Father, Vincent of Lerins, warned about this demonic plan:

For if once this license of impious fraud be admitted, I dread to say in how great danger religion will be of being utterly destroyed and annihilated. For if any one part of Catholic truth be given up, another, and another, and another will thenceforward be given up as a matter of course, and the several individual portions having been rejected, what will follow in the end but the rejection of the whole? On the other hand, if what is new begins to be mingled with what is old, foreign with domestic, profane with sacred, the custom will of necessity creep on universally, till at last the Church will have nothing left untampered with, nothing unadulterated, nothing sound, nothing pure; but where formerly there was a sanctuary of chaste and undefiled truth, thenceforward there will be a brothel of impious and base errors. May God’s mercy avert this wickedness from the minds of his servants; be it rather the frenzy of the ungodly.

The homoheretics have tried to open wide the gates of hell to the unsuspecting faithful, not knowing that they will, if unrepentant, pass through the gates themselves.  No matter what someone wearing papal white may exhort or proclaim, the homoheresy is and will be heresy.

Save Catholic Souls

By Deacon John Lorenzo

Solving the problem of declining Sunday Mass attendance and saving souls

1. Declining Sunday Mass attendance must be seriously addressed by the Archdiocese of Miami now, because we are losing the battle of saving Catholic souls. I could remember a suggestion made by the Archdiocese Synod five years ago…. (Increase Sunday Mass attendance 10%) …. that pessimistic suggestion not only did not occur, Mass attendance declined along with the growing number of “nones”

2. From the Florida Catholic 2014…….  When Colella speaks about an ailing Church, he ls not referring to the Church in Miami in particular, but to the Catholic Church in the U.S. in general: a Church that is struggling to remain relevant in a nation saturated by secularism and populated by increasing numbers of spiritual ‘nones.’

He remembers speaking at a youth rally in England a few years ago and going to Mass the next morning. The church was “empty and dying” he said. “The U.S. runs the risk of going the way of Europe. I, for one, don’t want to go there.”

3. In Archbishop Wenski’s keynote address at the Youth Ministry Summit that took place on Saturday, March 3, 2018 at Monsignor Edward Pace High School he said:

We must all start again from Christ, recognizing that being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. 

In other words, why do young people leave the Church? Why does anyone leave the Church? The answer is simple: They have not encountered Christ and His love.

4. With these words of wisdom from Archbishop Wenski, we can now attempt to solve the problem of declining Sunday Mass attendance and the return of Catholic lost sheep to the Church and the Eucharist.

5. It is important to keep in mind that no one hasbeen able to formulate solutions to stop the decline of Sunday Mass attendance or being able to return the lost sheep to Jesus Christ, His Church and the Eucharist. Saint John Paul II in his plan of re-evangelization for the Church said, “We must come up with new ways of doing things because the old ways are not working.” Be assured that my suggestions to solve these stated problems will be spiritual, parish centered, measurable, realistic, with very little expense and providential. I’m confident these ideas will be successful because they were heavenly inspired.

6. When contemplating how to solve the problem of declining Sunday Mass attendance we must concentrate our thinking on – why does any Catholic leave the Church or deny their Catholic faith? Catholics have not been properly faith formulated during their childhood to develop a relationship with Jesus Christ and His Church. The solution to this premise will stop the decline of Sunday Mass attendance, the exodus from the Church and help many souls from denying Christ.

7. For children to experience an encounter with Christ it must begin from the day they are baptized by parents who understand their responsibility in raising their children especially in their spiritual lives. Children must be taught to love God and to love their neighbor. Catholic children especially must be taught who Jesus Christ is. This is so very important as they are growing up. Parents must be catechized about the need for their children to have a relationship with Jesus Christ. This teaching should begin when parents come to the Church to have their babies baptized. This parental instruction is a Church responsibility to help parents understand the importance of raising their children with the main purpose of getting from this life to our next life in Heaven with God. To ensure that the inheritance given to their children, by God at baptism, must never be lost.   

8. When Catholic children enter grammar school, be it Catholic or Public, their spiritual guidance will also include the Church guidelines and the Catholic School or Religious Education programs. Keeping in mind the need for the children to experience an encounter with Christ, it is imperative that they are properly faith formulated in being taught God’s Commandments, His Sacraments, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the Precepts of the Church, the importance of Mary, the Mother of God and how does a Catholic child or adult get from this earthly life to eternal life in Heaven with God when they die? 

9. Because God loves us so greatly, He does not make it difficult for us to get to Heaven. This important truth must be taught to Catholic children with great emphasis to Jesus Christ. This truth also makes it possible to believe that – The Catholic path to Heaven and eternal life is attending Sunday Mass every week and receiving the Eucharist.

10. When contemplating how to solve the problem of declining Sunday Mass attendance and saving souls, it is important that the solution not compromise God’s Commandments and the Precepts of the Catholic Church. Because, by allowing this to happen and/or without proclaiming false interpretation or misunderstanding, could be thought of as condoning what is being done wrongfully. For instance, many Catholics disobey God’s Commandment, to keep holy the Sabbath day but believe it is not a grievous sin that must be confessed to a priest when done intentionally without good cause. It is also wrong to believe that God’s mercy alone will forgive this sin, not understanding that forgiveness requires repentance. If the true meaning and consequences of not attending Sunday Mass is regularly explained to the laity more thoroughly, it will help Sunday Mass attendance and save souls.

11. The solution to stop the decline of Sunday Mass attendance and at the same time stopping the exodus from the Church, will require a change in the attitude of the Church’s authority concerning student Sunday Mass attendance. The solution also necessitates convincing parents the absolute need for their children to attend Sunday Mass every week and receive the Eucharist as often as possible. A parent’s talk titled “Your Children’s Spiritual Life” is available to help Directors of Religious Education in convincing parents this need. See Item 18 for more information.

12. For Catholics to develop a good relationship with Jesus Christ and His Church they must be properly faith formulated during their entire childhood. This premise holds the solution to the long-time problem of declining Sunday Mass attendance, Catholics leaving the Church and many more denying their Catholic faith. 

13. Proper faith formulation of children is unique in that the responsibility is shared between the Church and parents. This relationship of sharing this responsibility is where a serious conflict is occurring that must be resolved for the benefit of the children. The conflict begins with the Church telling the parents that their children must attend Sunday Mass every week. Since this necessary requirement is not made mandatory, many parents choose not to cooperate with this request causing a conflict of interest. This allowable parent choice of not having their children attend Sunday Mass every week must be resolved for the benefit of the children.

14. The requirement for Catholic children to attend Sunday Mass every week is necessary and critical in their faith formation. To deny children this experience, as they are developing their spiritual lives, will make it difficult for them to develop a relationship with Jesus Christ and His Church. This truth must be conveyed to all Catholic parents for the benefit of their children’s lives, both human and spiritual.

15. Convincing parents of their responsibility of having their school children attend Sunday Mass every week will not only resolve a conflict between them and the Church, it will also restart a new generation of young Catholics that will hopefully never leave Jesus Christ and His Church. Resulting in stopping the decline of Sunday Mass attendance.

16. Parents generally love their children unconditionally as God loves us. Because of that great love, parents will also give their life for their children if it was possible. Knowing this human parental characteristic, it tells us that a Catholic parent will do anything for their children if they truly believe it would be beneficial in their spiritual life.

17. Believing the way parents love their children and my experience with speaking to them about their spiritual lives when they come to have their babies baptized, I felt a spark of hope of being able to convince parents of their responsibility to teach their children about Jesus Christ, attend Sunday Mass every week and receive the Eucharist. 

18. Inspired by God, I prepared a parent’s talk titled “Your Children’s Spiritual Life” and presented it to the parents of 299 public school students being prepared in Catholic Faith Formation at St. Mark Catholic Church where I am a Deacon. The intent of the talk was to convince these parents the importance of having their children attend Sunday Mass every week. The 299 students represented less than half of the enrollment. It should also be noted that very few public-school students in this religious education program attend Sunday Mass on a regular basis.               

Before the presentation the parents were given a Promise card with their child’s name. At the end of the 45 minute talk, the parents were asked this question: If you believe the spiritual need for your children to be close to God and you intend to take your children to Sunday Mass every week, place your child’s Promise card in the basket being sent around. If you do not intend to take your children to Sunday Mass every week, I ask you to keep your child’s Promise card and hopefully the day will come when you will change your mind and return the card to your child’s teacher. 

The parent’s response to the presentation was grateful.  Out of 299 students – the parents of 261 students (87.3%) said Yes to taking their children to Sunday Mass every week. This very positive response proved that the parents would be willing to cooperate with the Church’s teaching because they saw the spiritual value of taking their children to Sunday Mass every week. A new convincing parent’s talk, “Your Children’s Spiritual Life”, inspired by God, became the spark of hope to end a longstanding conflict between the Church and the parents of the school children. This new relationship will now allow all Catholic school children to experience the Holy sacrifice of the Mass and receive the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, every Sunday. This missing but necessary faith formation requirement, which many school children have been denied for many years, will not only save souls but also help stop declining Sunday Mass attendance and those leaving the Church. 

The Catholic Church must strive to have all school age children (100%) attend Sunday Mass every week. This absolute is very possible because parents will do whatever they believe is an absolute need for their children. Without this spiritual exposure, for our children, nothing of significance will change what is happening in the Catholic Church today. This I guarantee. 

When the parents came into this meeting, they were given a card with their child’s name on the back. It’s a Promise card to help the children become Disciples of Jesus Christ by teaching them that “With God, nothing is impossible”. It’s a three-part promise with the intention of having all the lost sheep in a parish to return to Christ and the Eucharist. 

Promise #3 – Pray at least 10 Hail Mary’s every day. 

Promise #2 – Go before the Blessed Sacrament as often as possible to pray. 

Promise #1 – Offer your Sunday Mass and Eucharist to God our Father.  

Without new parental understanding of the need for their children to be close to God, the future generation of adults will be as it is today.

19. When contemplating how to solve the problem of the lost sheep, those who have left the Catholic Church and no longer attend Sunday Mass, I believe that for man it is impossible. I believe the solution must be providential because these lost sheep have denied Christ. Yet, I believe they still can be saved by persuading Heaven to inspire these souls to return to Christ and His Church.

20. How does a Parish persuade Heaven to inspire its lost sheep to return to Jesus Christ and the Eucharist? It sounds impossible, but we all know with God, nothing is impossible. Every Parish has a resource that is always available to help with spiritual matters. That resource is and belongs to the men, women and children who attend Sunday Mass every week and receive the Eucharist. As a unified group they will be asked to become a Disciple and Evangelizer of Jesus Christ with the intent to inspire their brothers and sisters, who do not attend Sunday Mass every week, to return to Jesus Christ and the Eucharist. 

They will be asked to make a three-part Promise directed to Heaven as follows:

Promise #1 – Offer your Sunday Mass and Eucharist to God our Father.  

Promise #2 – Go before the Blessed Sacrament as often as possible to pray.

Promise #3 – Pray at least 10 Hail Mary’s every day. 

This request will be made for a planned weekend called, Save Catholic Souls. It will be presented at all Masses with a homily describing declining Sunday Mass attendance. Even though this group of parishioners is small compared to the total number of parishioners in the Parish, they are the loyal faithful who are closest to God. Each parishioner will receive a Promise card to sign and hold to remind them of their obligation.

21. For everyone to know about Save Catholic Souls, a letter entitled, A Letter of Importance to All Parishioners will be sent to all registered parishioners, explaining what this holy project is about.  

Weekly Sunday Mass attendance must be taken to measure the results and to tell us if Heaven is helping our parish and its lost sheep.

22. After a specified time, an organized parish door to door survey will be made by the parish Disciples and Evangelizers of Jesus Christ. The purpose is to show a personal interest in meeting the parishioners face to face and inviting them to return to the Church for Sunday Mass and the Eucharist.

23. NOTE: A 50-minute parent’s talk titled “Your Children’s Spiritual Life” is available to help Directors of Religious Education in convincing parents to take their children to Sunday Mass every week. 

Settimo Cielo di Sandro Magister 

30 dic 19

The Revolution of Francis Doesn’t Even Spare Our Lady. Here’s What He Would Make of Her

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On the eighth day after Christmas, when Jesus was circumcised and given the name received from the angel, the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of Mary, Most Holy Mother of God.

But who is Mary in the devotion and in the preaching of Pope Francis? A recent homily of his has caused astonishment, for how he has redrawn the profile of the mother of Jesus.

Pietro De Marco has sent us this analysis of the papal homily. The author, a former professor of the sociology of religion at the University of Florence and at the Theological Faculty of Central Italy, a philosopher and historian by training, has for years been known to and appreciated by the readers of Settimo Cielo.

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“NO NOS PERDAMOS EN TONTERAS.” MARIAN DOGMAS ACCORDING TO POPE FRANCIS

by Pietro De Marco 

Over the span of a few days we have received news both of the entrusting of the commentary for the feast of the Immaculate Conception to two Baptist pastors, husband and wife, for the parishioners of the archdiocese of Milan, and above all of Pope Francis’s astonishing homily on Mary, during the Mass at Saint Peter’s for the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

If Francis did not emulate the Protestant style in Mariological matters, he nevertheless wanted, in his fervor, to make public his restrictive personal judgment on Marian dogmas and in the negative on the title of coredemptrix, object of centuries of theological reflection. “No nos perdamos en tonteras,” let’s not get lost in absurdity, in nonsense, he said about the age-old explorations of Marian theology and spirituality.

What did the pope intend to uphold in his homily? First of all, that Mary is woman. And as woman she is the bearer of a message, she is lady, she is disciple. “It is so simple. She does not demand anything else.” The other titles, for example those of the hymn “Akathistos,” or the Loreto litanies, in any case the millenary titles of praise to Mary, for Francis “do not add anything.” Now already this much is wrong. Mary has never been “the woman,” a dangerous homology in the variety of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern female cults. Nor has she ever been the feminine as such, in one of the romantic or decadent versions, as striking as may be the devotion that generations of artists had for the Sistine Madonna by Raphael. Nor is Mary the woman of the contemporary female revolutions, whose Catholic fringes abhor the icons of Mary’s motherhood. She is not Lady, “domina,” in that she is woman, “mujer,” and not even in being mother. She is “domina” inasmuch as that motherhood, the divine motherhood, gives her royalty. The humble handmaid of Luke 1:38 is the virgin mother of God, so defined above all by the Christian traditions over the centuries, and is not interchangeable with sacred figures of Mother Earth or of the female principle.

The reader notes that the title of virgin never appears in the homily of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, while the “Nican mopohua” (“Here is recounted,” circa 1556) that he quotes, the narrative in the Nahuatl language of the apparition of Mary to Juan Diego, explicitly states this in the testimony of Juan Bernardino, uncle of Juanito: the miraculous image must be designated as “la perfecta Virgen Santa Maria de Guadalupe.” And it obviously appears in other passages of that text, for example in the invocation: “Noble queen of heaven, ever virgin, mother of God.”

The appellation of “lady,” then, is not a generic formula, as the pope seems to believe, but is a lofty title, of sovereignty, like the Byzantine “déspoina.” The absolute use of “our lady” (the old Italian “nostra donna” comes from “nostra domina”) shows that “domina” is a royal title, equivalent to queen: “Salve regina.” Thus, and on the model of Esther, Mary is “domina,” “patrona,” “advocata nostra.” When Ignatius of Loyola, quoted in the homily, also calls Mary “nuestra señora,” he is using an ancient and constant expression among Christians, beginning, it seems, with the “emè kyría,” my sovereign, of Origen, analogous to “Despoina.”

A simple reflection on “domina,” “señora” etc. thus nullifies the minimalist thesis of the homily. It is evident, in fact, that this kind of papal statement is aimed at the downgrading of the great Western and Eastern Mariology, in favor of a horizontal image of Mary, suited instead for dignifying the daily life of contemporary woman.

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So is Mary a mom who became a “disciple” following Jesus, her son? In order that the title “disciple,” rare in tradition, may not deteriorate into pastoralistic obviousness, it must be at least taken in the sense of Maximus the Confessor: “The holy Mother became a disciple of her sweet Son, true Mother of wisdom and daughter of Wisdom, because she no longer looked at Him in a human manner or as a mere man, but served Him with respect as God and accepted His words as words of God.”

The papal pairing of woman-disciple, however, if declined between the spirituality of the everyday and sociological exegesis, remains eccentric to the order of divine revelation and gives us a glimpse in the pope’s imagination of that itinerant Jesus with his followers, including women, so dear to exegetes and writers extraneous to Christology; a Jesus separated from the whole theological and sacramental history of the Church. The mom-disciple of the homily recalls too much the mother of a recent film featuring Mary Magdalene, one of the products on which the theo-sociological proponents of the “movement of Jesus” can boast they worked for free as screenwriters.

A Mary stripped of dogma to be “type” of the feminine, then, projects this same captivating simplification onto the feminized Church. Everything little bit helps against dogma. And this is exactly what has been going on for centuries, but never coming from the see of Rome, until today.

The combative tone of the homily (“no pretenden,” “no tocaba,” “tocaban para nada,” “jamas quiso” etc.) therefore appears ill-founded and poorly directed. There appears in it a sort of showy theological indifference, with contempt for the perennial Church, in order to have the hands free in practical arenas, even if this means alliances with progressive global public opinion.

To this attitude, good for mesmerizing the simple, also belongs the curious papal argument that Our Lady never wanted to take anything away from her Son (“tomar algo de su Hijo,” or again: “no robó para sí nada de su Hijo”). No coredemption, therefore, which would be theft; but also almost nothing of all Marian theology. Any Mariological treatise, in fact, presents in addition to the motherhood and by virtue of this the immaculate conception of Mary, her “immunitas” from sin and the other “privilegia” up to the glorious assumption into heaven. Classical theology continues by affirming  that the Virgin is objectively, ontologically, mediatrix of all graces, partaker of the merits of Christ “in quantum universo mundo dedit Redemptorem,” since she gave the Redeemer to the world.

The “sui generis” union with the redemptive flesh of the Son necessarily places Mary within the order of redemptive action and grace: “omnium gratiarum mediatrix.” From redemptive mediation to coredemption there is a step that many Marian theologians have taken. Being mother of God raises Mary to this height “de congruo,” as theological language would have it, meaning not by her nature nor because she is “immediate co-operans”: only Christ works “immediate,” only the Son is redeemer “de condigno,” that is as a due, just consequence of his sacrifice. In the magnificent passage of Saint Anselm attributed today to Eadmer of Canterbury (“De excellentia Virginis,” 11), often quoted by dogmatists and in the encyclical “Ad caeli Reginam” of Pius XII, we read: “Just as God, who made all thing in his power, is Father and Lord of every creature, so also the Blessed Virgin Mother of God who has repaired everything with her merits is Mother and sovereign of all things.” Elsewhere, for Eadmer, Mary is “nutrix Reparatoris totius substantiae meae,” she who nourished, took upon herself, the Regenerator of my whole being.

The “servant of the Lord par excellence,” the “disciple,” is either all that her “privilegia” as mother of God declare, or would be of little account, as she already is in the Protestant traditions and as she is becoming in Catholic preaching. An enormous part of Christian spirituality is lived and lives from the unfolding of theological riches that Mary merited and drew to herself. It will not be a populistic Mariology that will preserve these riches, much less replace them. That the “privilegia” of the mother of God, which descend theologically from her status as an eminent and unique creature, can then be downgraded, transmitting to the faithful the ridiculous suspicion that in Mary these would have been thefts, or unworthy ambitions of a mother-disciple, is equivalent to arguing for “boutade.” This and other excesses of the homily really mean, at their core, that the pope denies the entire meaning and value of Christian theological work from its origins. And he despises the wonderful food given by theology to worship, to the traditions, to the living spiritualities. And he ignores the sanctity of its deposit in the tradition of the Church. For what? To propose a Christian revelation without mystery, without transcendence, without glory, without divine-humanity, as in the reformed churches?

“Cecidere manus,” that is the arms fall in front of so much impertinence and malice, even; that reductionistic malice of the innovator theologians who previously enveloped the event of Vatican Council II, barely disguised. If there applies to the pope’s men – I dare not speak for him – the “I cannot believe it” of the liberal Anglican bishop and theologian John A. T. Robinson, they should say so. They should take refuge, if they will be accepted, in the Protestant household. But just for now I will refrain from examining the issue of the Protestantization underway. Suffice it to recall that the Protestant ambition to Christianize secularization, after having contributed to it, has failed and has overrun the reformed churches.

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Here I dwell rather on the question of the Christological “mixing,” with which Francis’s homily of December 12 ends, promptly targeted by stern commentators such as Maria Guarini, Roberto de Mattei and others of the “traditional” area; but is there elsewhere in the Church such courage and care for the faith?

I recall that “mestizaje” is the Spanish equivalent of the general category of inter-racial or inter-ethnic mixture, while “mestizos” indicates those born from the mix of Hispanics and Indians. In the miraculous image on Juan Diego’s cloak, the Virgen de Guadalupe is “morenita,” as many of us have contemplated on Tepeyac. This suggests to Bergoglio a brilliant development, which however results in another blunder.

In fact, the pope says that Mary “se mestizó para ser Madre de todos. […] ¿Por que? Porque ella mestizó a Dios.” In fact, continues the homily, this is the great mystery: “Maria mixes God, true God and true man, in her Son”. What this really means, we would like to have explained to us.

I do not dare to think – as others have legitimately done – that Francis means to say that Mary mixed God, or in her womb mixed divine and human nature, mediating in herself the divine with the human flesh of which alone she would be mother, because this would be one of the errors of the 4th-5th century against which Cyril of Alexandria fought.

Let’s imagine instead that the pope means to say that in being son of Mary, or in being born of woman, the eternal Christ was mixed like she “se mestizó” – his words again – to be the mother of all men. But then this “mixing” is a rhetorical device, a theology in situation, for the great feast of the Mexican nation in the basilica of Saint Peter. It is only the evocative emphasis of God’s becoming man, metaphorically mixing himself, as man, with humanity. But can the immense Christological theme of Cyril’s “God with us” be reduced to an example of “live together and mix?”

Or this “mestizaje” truly carries something more: the idea that in Mary God himself has mixed, against the definitions of the ancient Councils necessary to save the truth and treasure of the faith; against the Creed and what we proclaim in the liturgy. I lean toward the light version, even if it is very imprudent, but nobody can trust the pope anymore, since quite unlike the “confirmare fratres suos,” he day after day “infirmat” them.

In effect, the idea of ​​the “Theotokos” mixing God is no less foolhardy than that of the Baptist spouses of Milan, who celebrate Mary because she “accepted” an irregular pregnancy, the “most irregular” of pregnancies, and sheltered “that foreigner who came from God himself, without a residence permit!” Perhaps the fanciful theologoumenon of Christ migrating in the misery of “kenosis” (it is supposed) to hospitality in the Virgin, no less than the repudiation of dogmatic “tonteras” by Francis for a Mariology “next door,” presume to be the new frontiers of Christian proclamation.

To this it must be opposed that the very affirmation that Mary’s “esencialidad” is her being woman and mother is a betrayal of millennial Mariology. Indeed, a motherhood of Mary that does not also explicitly include, for theological awareness and spiritual life, the reality and power of the Mother’s participation in the redemptive flesh, casts relativizing shadows on the very work of the Son. The trivialization of Mary, reduced from the “omnium gratiarum mediatrix” to the virtuous subjectivity of an “ecce” and a “fiat” and of an entirely human discipleship, symmetrically wounds Christology not only in the essential dimension of redemption and grace but also in the dogmatic core of the supernatural prerogatives of Christ themselves. Are these the costs that one accepts to pay for the “new evangelization?” Good news of what?

Francis’s arguments, expressed in that sort of subjective sub-magisterium that he practices “in persona papae” but “quasi papa non esset,” as pope but as if he were not so, as if there were no such thing as petrine responsibility, are surely to the detriment of  the Church. And I believe the time has come to no longer tolerate this spasticity.

Condividi:

•  30 dicembre 2019

MARY IMMACULATE VIRGIN MOTHER 

ACIES ORDINATA, ORA PRO NOBIS

“Is there in the heart of the Virgin Mary anything other than the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ? We too want to have only one name in our hearts: that of Jesus, like the Most Blessed Virgin.”

The tragic story of this failed pontificate advances with a pressing succession of twists and turns. Not a day passes: from the most exalted throne the Supreme Pontiff proceeds to dismantle the See of Peter, using and abusing its supreme authority, not to confess but to deny; not to confirm but to mislead; not to unite but to divide; not to build but to demolish. 

Material heresies, formal heresies, idolatry, superficiality of every kind: the Supreme Pontiff Bergoglio never ceases stubbornly to humiliate the highest authority of the Church, “demythologizing” the papacy — as perhaps his illustrious comrade Karl Rahner would say. His action seeks to violate the Sacred Deposit of Faith and to disfigure the Catholic Face of the Bride of Christ by word and action, through duplicity and lies, through those theatrical gestures of his that flaunt spontaneity but are meticulously conceived and planned, and through which he exalts himself in a continuous narcissistic self-celebration, while the figure of the Roman Pontiff is humiliated and the Sweet Christ on earth is obscured.

His action makes use of magisterial improvisation, of that off the cuff and fluid magisterium that is as insidious as quicksand, not only flying at high altitude at the mercy of journalists from all over the world, in those ethereal spaces that can highlight a pathological delirium of illusory omnipotence, but also at the most solemn religious ceremony that ought to incite holy trembling and reverent respect.

On the occasion of the liturgical memorial of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Pope Bergoglio once again gave vent to his evident Marian intolerance, recalling that of the Serpent in the account of the Fall, in that Proto-Gospel which prophesizes the radical enmity placed by God between the Woman and the Serpent, and the declared hostility of the latter, who until the consummation of time will seek to undermine the Woman’s heel and to triumph over her and her posterity. The Pontiff’s intolerance is a manifest aggression against the prerogatives and sublime attributes that make the Immaculate Ever-Virgin Mother of God the feminine complement to the mystery of the Incarnate Word, intimately associated with Him in the Economy of Redemption.

After having downgraded her to the “next door neighbor” or a runaway migrant, or a simple lay woman with the defects and crises of any woman marked by sin, or a disciple who obviously has nothing to teach us; after having trivialized and desacralized her, like those feminists who are gaining ground in Germany with their “Mary 2.0” movement which seeks to modernize Our Lady and make her a simulacrum in their image and likeness, Pope Bergoglio has further impugned the August Queen and Immaculate Mother of God, who “became mestiza with humanity… and made God mestizo.” With a couple of jokes, he struck at the heart of the Marian dogma and the Christological dogma connected to it. 

The Marian dogmas are the seal placed on the Catholic truths of our faith, defined at the Councils of Nicaea, Ephesus and Chalcedon; they are the unbreakable bulwark against Christological heresies and against the furious unleashing of the Gates of Hell. Those who “mestizo” and profane them show that they are on the side of the Enemy. To attack Mary is to venture against Christ himself; to attack the Mother is to rise up against her Son and to rebel against the very mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. The Immaculate Theotokos, “terrible as an army with banners” (Canticle 6:10) — acies ordinanata — will do battle to save the Church and destroy the Enemy’s unfettered army that has declared war on her, and with him all the demonic pachamamas will definitively return to hell.

Pope Bergoglio no longer seems to contain his impatience with the Immaculate, nor can he conceal it under that seeming and ostentatious devotion which is always in the spotlight of the cameras, while deserts the solemn celebration of the Assumption and the recitation of the Rosary with the faithful, who filled the courtyard of St. Damascene and the upper loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica under St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.

Papa Bergoglio uses the pachamama to rout the Guadalupana. The enthronement of that Amazonian idol, even at the altar of the confession in St. Peter’s Basilica, was nothing less than a declaration of war on the Lady and Patroness of all the Americas, who with her apparition to Juan Diego destroyed the demonic idols and won the indigenous peoples for Christ and the adoration of the “Most True and Only God,” through her maternal mediation. And this is not a legend!

A few weeks after the conclusion of the synodal event, which marked the investiture of pachamama in the heart of Catholicity, we learned that the conciliar disaster of the Novus Ordo Missae is undergoing further modernization, including the introduction of “Dew” in the Eucharistic Canon instead of the mention of the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity.

This is a further step in the direction of regression towards the naturalization and immanentization of Catholic worship, towards a pantheistic and idolatrous Novissimus Ordo. The “Dew,” an entity present in the “theological place” of the Amazonian tropics — as we learned from the synodal fathers — becomes the new immanent principle of fertilization of the Earth, which “transubstantiates” it into a pantheistically connected Whole to which men are assimilated and subjugated, to the glory of Pachamama. And here we are plunged back into the darkness of a new globalist and eco-tribal paganism, with its demons and perversions. From this latest liturgical upheaval, divine Revelation decays from fullness to archaism; from the hypostatic identity of the Holy Spirit we slide towards the symbolic and metaphorical evanescence proper to dew which masonic gnosis has long made its own.

But let us return for a moment to the idolatrous statues of rare ugliness, and to Pope Bergoglio’s declaration the day after their removal from the church in Traspontina and their drowning in the Tiber. Once again, the Pope’s words have the scent of a colossal lie: he made us believe that the statuettes were promptly exhumed from the filthy waters thanks to the intervention of the Carabinieri [Italian police]. One wonders why a crew from Vatican News coordinated by Tornielli, and Spadaro of Civiltà Cattolica, with reporters and cameramen from the court press, did not come to film the prowess of the divers and capture the rescue of the pachamamas. It is also unlikely that such a spectacular feat did not capture the attention of a few passers-by, equipped with a mobile phone to film and then launch the scoop on social media. We are tempted to pose the question to the person who made that statement. Certainly, this time too, he would answer us with his eloquent silence. 

For more than six years now we have been poisoned by a false magisterium, a sort of extreme synthesis of all the conciliar misconceptions and post-conciliar errors that have been relentlessly propagated, without most of us noticing. Yes, because the Second Vatican Council opened not only Pandora’s Box but also Overton’s Window, and so gradually that we did not realize the upheavals that had been carried out, the real nature of the reforms and their dramatic consequences, nor did we suspect who was really at the helm of that gigantic subversive operation, which the modernist Cardinal Suenens called “the 1789 of the Catholic Church.”

Thus, over these last decades, the Mystical Body has been slowly drained of its lifeblood through unstoppable bleeding: the Sacred Deposit of Faith has gradually been squandered, dogmas denatured, worship secularized and gradually profaned, morality sabotaged, the priesthood vilified, the Eucharistic Sacrifice protestantized and transformed into a convivial Banquet…

Now the Church is lifeless, covered with metastases and devastated. The people of God are groping, illiterate and robbed of their Faith, in the darkness of chaos and division. In these last decades, the enemies of God have progressively made scorched earth of two thousand years of Tradition. With unprecedented acceleration, thanks to the subversive drive of this pontificate, supported by the powerful Jesuit apparatus, a deadly coup de grace [death blow] is being delivered to the Church.

With Pope Bergoglio — as with all modernists — it is impossible to seek clarity, since the distinctive mark of the modernist heresy is dissimulation. Masters of error and experts in the art of deception, “they strive to make what is ambiguous universally accepted, presenting it from its harmless side which will serve as a passport to introduce the toxic side that was initially kept hidden.” (Fr. Matteo Liberatore SJ). And so the lie, obstinately and obsessively repeated, ends up becoming “true” and accepted by the majority.

Also typically modernist is the tactic of affirming what you want to destroy, using vague and imprecise terms, and promoting error without ever formulating it clearly. This is exactly what Pope Bergoglio does, with his dissolving amorphism of the Mysteries of the Faith, with his doctrinal approximation through which he “mestizos” and demolishes the most sacred dogmas, as he did with the Marian dogmas of the Ever-Virgin Mother of God.

The result of this abuse is what we now have before our eyes: a Catholic Church that is no longer Catholic; a container emptied of its authentic content and filled with borrowed goods.

The advent of the Antichrist is inevitable; it is part of the epilogue of the History of Salvation. But we know that it is the prerequisite for the universal triumph of Christ and his glorious Bride. Those of us who have not let ourselves be deceived by these enemies of the Church enfeoffed in the ecclesial Body, must unite and together face off against the Evil One, who is long defeated yet still able to harm and cause the eternal perdition of multitudes of souls, but whose head the Blessed Virgin, our Leader, will definitively crush.

Now it is our turn. Without equivocation, without letting ourselves be driven out of this Church whose legitimate children we are and in which we have the sacred right to feel at home, without the hateful horde of Christ’s enemies making us feel marginalized, schismatic and excommunicated.

Now it is our turn! The triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary — Coredemptrix and Mediatrix of all graces — passes through her “little ones,” who are certainly frail and sinners but are absolutely opposed to the members enlisted in the Enemy’s army. “Little ones” consecrated without any limit whatsoever to the Immaculate, in order to be her heel, the most humiliated and despised part, the most hated by hell, but which together with Her will crush the head of the infernal Monster.

Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort asked: “But when will this triumph take place? God knows.” Our task is to be vigilant and pray as St. Catherine of Siena ardently recommended: “Oimè! That I die and cannot die. Sleep no longer in negligence; use what you can in the present time. Comfort yourselves in Christ Jesus, sweet love. Drown yourselves in the Blood of Christ crucified, place yourselves on the cross with Christ crucified, hide yourselves in the wounds of Christ crucified, bathe yourselves in the blood of Christ crucified” (Letter 16). 

The Church is shrouded in the darkness of modernism, but the victory belongs to Our Lord and His Bride. We desire to continue to profess the perennial faith of the Church in the face of the roaring evil that besieges her. We desire to keep vigil with her and with Jesus, in this new Gethsemane of the end times; to pray and do penance in reparation for the many offenses caused to them.

+ Carlo Maria Viganò

Titular Archbishop of Ulpiana

Apostolic Nuncio

Translated by Diane Montagna of LifeSiteNews