It’s the Great Apostasy, let’s stop the denial

Dec13by The Editor

https://fromrome.wordpress.com/2019/12/13/its-the-great-apostasy-lets-stop-the-denial/

A Medieval Illumination, showing the Adoration of the Beast by the false Catholics of the end times.

By Br. Alexis Bugnolo

The beloved disciple and faithful son of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Apostle Saint John warned us a little less than 2000 years ago: In the end, a Great Apostasy would sweep away many Christians.

Saint John tells of the Great Apostasy in the Twelfth Chapter of his Book of the Apocalypse, also known as the Book of Revelations. I will put in red text the interpretation of this chapter given by Franciscan Saints* and I will use the English text of the Douay Reims Bible for the scriptural citation:

12 And a great sign appeared in heaven: A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars: (Heaven here refers to the Catholic Church, which is Heaven on Earth. The appearance of the woman refers to the Dogmatic Declarations of the Magisterium about Our Lady, as Ever Virgin, Immaculate Conception, Assumed into Heaven, Queen of Heaven and Earth. The twelve stars refer to the affirmations by the Church of Our Lady’s 12 privileges)

² And being with child, she cried travailing in birth, and was in pain to be delivered. (This refers to the struggles in the Church among theologians and believers against the faithful Catholics who are true children of Mary and know that the most authentic and certain path to God is through Mary to Jesus.)

³ And there was seen another sign in heaven: and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads, and ten horns: and on his head seven diadems: (This refers to the Satanic plot of Freemasonry and other nefarious groups to establish the Mystical Body of the Antichrist in the Church and thus prepare the world for the coming of the AntiChrist)

⁴ And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to be delivered; that, when she should be delivered, he might devour her son. (This refers to the Great Apostasy which will occur after Our Lady is declared Assumed body and soul into Heaven. It will entail the near total apostasy of all the Clergy, who are as the stars in the Heaven of the Church, and it indicates that they will submit to the Father of Lies and give themselves up to the most horrible vices and errors)

⁵ And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with an iron rod: and her son was taken up to God, and to his throne. (This refers to the Rise of the true Church in war against the Anti-Christ. This true Church will be faithful Catholics consecrated to Our Lady and embracing the whole doctrine of God, and who by their fidelity will be raised up to form a renewed Sacred Hierarchy to replace the old which has apostatized)

⁶ And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she had a place prepared by God, that there they should feed her a thousand two hundred sixty days. (This refers to the true Catholic Faith which in the end times will have to take refuge in lowly and humble places, because the wealthy and powerful will give up their souls to the rule and domination of demons)

⁷ And there was a great battle in heaven, Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels: (This refers to the war between the sons of God vs the sons of the Devil, that is, the war between the true Church and the Anti-Church. The Leaders in this war will be led on each side by men inspired and devoted to Saint Michael and Lucifer, respectively)

⁸ And they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. (This refers to the victory of the true Church over the false AntiChurch).

⁹ And that great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, who seduceth the whole world; and he was cast unto the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. (This refers to the definitive excommunication of the AntiChurch and its members from the Catholic Church).

¹⁰ And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying: Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: because the accuser of our brethren is cast forth, who accused them before our God day and night. (This refers to the future pope of great virtue who will preside over the renewed Church and condemn the AntiChurch)

¹¹ And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of the testimony, and they loved not their lives unto death. (This shows that the victory will be obtained by faithful Catholics who risk everything to defend the true Faith, putting their trust in the Blood of Jesus, Who already overcame the world, flesh and the devil).

¹² Therefore rejoice, O heavens, and you that dwell therein. Woe to the earth, and to the sea, because the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, knowing that he hath but a short time. (This refers to the joy Catholics will have in those days seeing the Church delivered from this monstrous cult of satanists, pedophiles and sodomites, but warns the world, since being cast out of the Catholic Church they will seek to rule over and weaponize the world against the Faithful).

¹³ And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman, who brought forth the man child: (This refers to the ensuing attacks of the godless against the true Faith until the end of time, for the whole world led by the AntiChurch will attack Our Lady who defeated them)

Obviously, the teachings of the Franciscan Saints about these matters is not binding in faith, but so far their predictions have turned out to be very accurate. The hatred of the Catholic Faith and the plot to destroy the Church, while brewing for ages, broke out in the Church after the Dogmatic Definition of the Assumption of Our Lady, body and soul into heaven. The wicked clergy could not stomach this dogma which countered their lusts, impiety and fake religious pretensions. They engineered a Council which ushered into the Church the “smoke of Satan” (as Pope Paul VI said):

The pope, concerned, writes:

“… We would say that, through some mysterious crack—no, it’s not mysterious; through some crack, the smoke of Satan has entered the Church of God. There is doubt, uncertainty, problems, unrest, dissatisfaction, confrontation.

“The Church is no longer trusted. We trust the first pagan prophet we see who speaks to us in some newspaper, and we run behind him and ask him if he has the formula for true life. I repeat, doubt has entered our conscience. And it entered through the windows that should have been open to the light: science.”

Storm clouds

The post-conciliar wounds make themselves felt:

“… It was thought that, after the Council, sunny days would come for the history of the Church. Nevertheless, what came were days of clouds, of storms, of darkness, of searching, of uncertainty … We tried to dig abysses instead of covering them …”

(Source: “What did Paul VI mean by saying the “Smoke of Satan has entered the Church”?”, citation from Aleteia article from 2018)

This Satanic Smoke has progressively blinded the eyes of the Clergy and Sacred Hierarchy, and even of many of the religious orders, into inclining more and more away from the perennial columns of Faith and Devotion, Hope and true Charity which the Church established from of old in Her Sacred Liturgies, Canons and Disciplines. It was under this Smoke that the good were persecuted and driven out, the wicked and perverse introduced into the high places. This was a necessary preparation for the Great Apostasy, because to achieve their goal the servants of the Father of Lies needed to prepare a whole generation of clergy who either loved falsehood or who had not the manliness to fight it.

However, without a doubt this “striking out of heaven of a third of the stars” refers to a moment when nearly all the Clergy are separated from the Church (heaven). This, in my opinion, is adequately and perfectly described by the apostasy of the clergy from Christ’s true Vicar by following the lie of the MSM and wicked clergy that Benedict had resigned the office of the papacy, when in truth he never did anything of the kind. By no longer naming Benedict in the Canon of the Mass they show and seal their schism from Christ, from Benedict, and from the Church. They become fallen stars and are swooped up into the work of the great Dragon who is Satan.

Because, in the Greek, the word Apostasy means a falling away. It does not have the technical meaning we attribute to it in Canon Law today as a complete intellectual denial of the Catholic Faith.

As we are now in the full swing of the Dragons tail, we have to stop denying what is going on. All those Bishops who teach heresy and promote sacrilege by giving the Sacraments to public sinners, by condoning wickedness and teaching it, plus all those Bishops who do not oppose this, are all part of the Apostasy. There are even a few very wicked men, who agree with the apostasy but want to raise money by pretending to criticize it even as they insist you remain in communion with the leader of the Apostasy.

In this battle, we cannot afford to pretend any longer, nor to compromise. As Our Lady lamented at Akita, the Church in this battle will be filled with those willing to compromise, especially among clergy and religious.

The Pachamama worship was no accident. The adoration of the Andean Dragon Demon of the underworld is not a coincidence. This was not a political decision, it was an intentional act to involve everyone in the worship of Satan.

We must join the battle and urge the bishops and clergy to condemn the heresies of the AntiChurch and to break off communion with Bergoglio. (See the Article: Every Priest has the Right etc.) So long as the False Prophet and AntiChurch is recognized as having authority they will use it to destroy the entire Church world wide. Those who insist on recognizing their authority therefore must be presumed to be deceived by some sort of devil, because they are giving power to the Beast, who hungers to damn all souls to Hell so he can reign over and torment them for all eternity.

The wicked know what they are doing. They might try to gaslight you into not seeing what they are doing or in not doing anything to oppose them, but they know what they are doing. — I see this on a daily basis at Rome. As soon as you put a value judgement on heresy, apostasy, immorality or show canonically that the Renunciation is invalid, they lose all composure and snap at you like mad devils, a torrent of lies and abuse coming from their mouths. Their faces warp with the most nasty and biting expressions. They cannot endure your presence and run off. — Though this is not new. When I was studying at Rome 7 years ago, I found the same spirit, though confined, to certain faculties of theology in the Pontifical Institutes. But now this spirit reigns, it has captured the Vatican by guile and treachery.

Finally, I want to emphasize that, when Saint John says a third of the stars, I believe he means nearly all of them in that age, because in the night sky you can only see about a third of the visible sky on any one night.

And we have entered the night…. and it is WAR!

Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do Thou, o Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the Power of God, thrust down into Hell Satan, and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world, seeking the ruin of souls!

Saint Michael the Archangel, First Defender of the Kingdom of Christ, pray for us!

,________

* I heard this explanation from an old Franciscan priest, when I became a Franciscan. I no longer remember the Saints he cited. And he has now passed from this life.

DECEMBER 13, 2019

Tucker Carlson’s Catholic Mind

JANE CLARK SCHARL

CRISIS MAGAZINE

Lest anyone think that American politics is in any danger of receding back to pre-2016 partisan boundaries, Tucker Carlson used his Fox News segment last week to go after hedge fund manager and GOP mega-donor Paul Singer… for his free-market economics. Catholics should be thrilled by this development.

Carlson condemns what he calls “vulture capitalism,” an extreme form of capitalism in which wealthy individuals and corporations increase their wealth by preying on functioning but smaller companies and communities. Singer, Carlson says, exemplifies this vulture capitalism; he has made billions of dollars by identifying struggling economies and companies, buying up their debt under the pretense of being helpful, and then hounding them for repayment at hefty interest rates.

The Fox News segment specifically targeted a deal Singer rammed through in the little town of Sydney, Nebraska, in 2015. Even as huge swathes of the Midwest are suffering from economic collapse, Sydney was thriving. This town of just over 6,200 people used to be the headquarters of Cabela’s, a hunting, fishing, and outdoors retail store with locations around the country. Before 2015, Cabela’s was the economic center of the town, offering well-paying jobs that allowed people to stay in Sydney, move up in the company, and build stable, fulfilling lives in their small community.

Then Singer made his move. From his office in New York City, Singer bought an ownership stake in Cabela’s and pushed the company to sell out to a major competitor, Bass Pro Shops in 2016. The merger looked like a good business opportunity for stakeholders—which meant, of course, for Singer. Cabela’s stock went up, and, just days after the merger, Singer sold his stake and made $90 million dollars.

According to extreme capitalists, this is a happy ending. Value was created! Money was made! But for the residents of Sydney, Nebraska, the sale of Cabela’s was devastating. Bass Pro obviously didn’t need a national headquarters in Sydney, so many of the town’s citizens found themselves unemployed. Housing prices went into free fall. People who didn’t move immediately after the merger ended up stuck owning depreciated homes in a town with no jobs and no economic opportunities—and one of the few remaining bright spots of thriving small-town life in the economically darkening Midwest went out.

In the past few years, one of the most interesting developments in American politics has been the conservative turn against unbridled capitalism. In 2016, Paul Singer was the second-largest donor to the Republican Party. As Carlson pointed out, a number of prominent Republican politicians have benefitted greatly from Singer’s campaign donations. It seems like this should have inoculated Singer against criticism from a media outlet like Fox News—but times, they are a-changin’.

The reality is that the 2016 election forever changed the way Americans talk about economic justice. In their Cold War era fervor to avoid socialism, Republicans have drifted for decades into blind support for free market policies, even if those policies hurt American workers and communities. However, starting in 2012 when Americans roundly rejected Mitt Romney and his brand of extreme capitalism, it became clear that these policies were not working for Americans. In 2016, the presence of Donald Trump in the presidential election—regardless of what Catholics think of him as a person or candidate—led to a much-needed loosening of the chokehold extreme capitalism had on the Republican Party’s economic policies. Whatever else he has done as president, Trump’s pro-worker language and his support for tariffs as a way to protect American companies against exploitive overseas economies like China’s (which undercuts American prices by paying its employees semi-slave wages) have given conservatives space to cast a new vision of economic justice—one that is neither stridently free market nor socialist.

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Catholics should be energized and motivated by this shift. There is a long tradition of Catholic leaders warning against the dangers of making capitalism into an ideology, elevating the ideal of economic freedom above all other goods—including the goods of individual flourishing, social solidarity, and thriving communities.

Pope Saint John Paul II was a stalwart defender of the free world against socialism, but nevertheless he warned Catholics that unbridled capitalism, which he called “neoliberalism,” was an assault on human dignity. He said, “based on a purely economic conception of man, this system considers profit and the law of the market as its only parameters, to the detriment of the dignity of and the respect due to individuals and peoples.”

In his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII warned that unchecked devotion to the free market leads to economic injustice on a massive scale:

By degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition… The hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.

The Catholic alternative to unbridled capitalism is not socialism, in which the government takes upon itself the responsibility of distributing wealth. Pope Leo XIII made it clear in Rerum Novarum that socialism violates the God-given human right to private property. Instead, Catholicism advocates an economics of solidarity, in which society is organized in a way that leads as naturally as possible to the equal distribution of the means of production—not, as with socialism, the results of production. This means, in practice, that in a Catholic society as many people as possible should own their own means of production—be it land or technology or shares in the factory at which they work—and those means of production should be as closely linked to their daily life as possible.

In other words, it is preferable to work for an employer located in one’s own town, whose interests are embedded in one’s own community, than for a multi-national corporation with widely scattered interests. And within an economics of solidarity, it makes sense for the government to incentivize that kind of locally-minded business model through tax cuts and other means.

With this in mind, the outrage Carlson expressed at Singer’s destruction of an entire town for personal profit should resonate with Catholics. Sure, a huge company made a lot of money, but many people were sundered from the opportunity to have meaningful work within their own community, and a town was ruined. The benefits—i.e., someone getting richer—do not outweigh the personal and social costs.

The fact that this story ran on a major conservative news network like Fox News and specifically called out rapacious business practices on the part of a GOP mega-donor indicates that perhaps the Republican Party is beginning to exorcise the demon of unbridled capitalism and to embrace an economics of solidarity—one that appreciates the value of things that do not have price tags, like social stability, meaningful work, and robust local communities.

Photo credit: YouTube.com/Fox News

Tagged as Catholic Social Teaching, Fox News, Pope Leo XIII, Tucker Carlson0

By Jane Clark Scharl

Jane Clark Scharl is a senior contributor at Crisis. Her work has previously appeared in National Review, The American Conservative, and The Intercollegiate Review.

It was a historic night. The Conservatives recorded a landslide election victory, with seats held by Labour since 1918 turning blue as Boris Johnson smashed through the “red wall” in the Midlands and the North by winning over millions of working class voters.

The Prime Minister welcomed a “powerful new mandate to get Brexit done”, while Jeremy Corbyn said he will quit as Labour leader after a miserable night. 

It was no better for the Liberal Democrats, whose leader, Jo Swinson, endured the indignity of losing her seat and later announced her resignation. 

– THE TELEGRAPH (England)

I think this bodes well for President Trump’s landslide election in 2020. What do Brexit and the Trump impeachment mini series drama  have to do with each other? I think the common, right thinking American and British working middle class are sick and tired of the elites in Media, Academia, and lifelong big government high and mighty bureaucrats on the public payroll telling us what to think,  to control our lives as they see fit. 
Many are socialists in their hearts but would deny it … but Churchill nailed it: Socialism … philosophy of failure, creed of ignorance, gospel of envy whose inherent  virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
Populism is a good thing when we’re all being herded down the road to serfdom as Friedrich Hayek warned us.  Bravo, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump!
Let’s make 2020 a great year. 
Merry Christmas.
-PHIL SEVILLA

Brother James Miller (Courtesy of La Salle Christian Brothers via CNA/Colorized by Register Staff)BLOGS |  DEC. 10, 2019Brother James Miller, America’s Newest BlessedThe beatification of Brother James Miller is a reminder that the greatest in the kingdom of heaven are those who keep the faith and teach others to do the same.Fr. Roger Landry

Over the last few weeks, there has been considerable attention given to an American whom the Church was preparing to beatify — Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.

The attention on Sheen makes sense — even beyond the drama of the ups and downs of his cause for canonization — since he is probably the most influential American Catholic of all time, who has nourished the faith not only of millions during his lifetime but millions still today, more than 40 years after his death.

One of the unfortunate consequences of the hasty announcement and precipitate postponement of the rites raising Sheen to the altars, however, was that it took all of the attention away from the Dec. 7 beatification of another American whose cause for canonization had been getting planned ever since Pope Francis signed the decree authorizing it 13 months ago and the official date was announced in April: LaSallian Brother James Alfred Miller, a native of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, who was martyred for the faith in Guatemala in 1982.

Pope Francis, in his 2018 exhortation on holiness, Gaudete et Exsultate, wrote about the “saints next door,” and in many ways Blessed James is an all-American holy neighbor. He was born in 1944 and grew up working hard on his family’s dairy and chicken farm in Custer, Wisconsin, praying at home, and wanting to be priest. He was fascinated by other countries, reading an encyclopedia from cover to cover to get to know foreign countries and regions where he hoped to bring the faith.

When he entered Pacelli High School and met the Brothers of the Christian Schools, he quickly discerned he had a vocation to share in their educational apostolate. He entered the juniorate of the community at 15 (much like boys at that time could enter high school seminaries at 14), became a postulant and novice at 18, professed first vows at 21 and final vows at 26. He was sent by the Christian Brothers to St. Mary’s University in Winona, Minnesota, where, hoping to share in their missionary apostolates, he got Bachelors’ and Master’s degrees in Spanish.

He was described by those who knew him as likeable, sociable, simple, humble, generous, honest, kind, intelligent, ordered, courageous, prayerful, zealous and hardworking. His fellow Christian Brothers dubbed him a “common, good guy,” “very human,” “a man of union and communion,” who had the “gift of gab,” a perpetual smile, a “deep faith and love for his religious vocation,” and a contagious, boisterous guffaw.

He also, they noted, was perpetually “late to class and community prayers,” something that Cardinal José Luis Lacunza of Panama, presiding over his beatification, joked had prepared him very well for service in Latin America, “where punctuality is not numbered among our virtues!”

His first assignment was to teach Spanish, English and religion for a few years at Cretin High School in St. Paul, Minnesota. While there, he also supervised the maintenance of the school, earning the nickname “Brother Fix-It.” He also coached football — a sport at which, at 6’2” and 220 pounds, he was prone to excel.

In 1969, after a fellow Christian Brother got sick at the Brothers’ school in Bluefield, Nicaragua, “Hermano Santiago” was sent to replace him. For four-plus years, he taught sixth grade, then high school, while also repairing the residence, running a bookstore and starting a soccer team.

In 1974, Brother James was transferred to Puerto Cabezas where, as director of the school, he catalyzed an increase of enrollment from 300-800 students, built an industrial arts complex, offices, an auditorium and science building, taught, founded a volunteer fire department and served as janitor, fixing the plumbing, cleaning the bathrooms and sweeping the floor. His practical know-how won the attention of the Somoza government, who contracted him to build ten more schools in the rural area so that the children of the region would have a chance at an education.

When the Sandinistas took over the country, because of his having built schools for the Somoza government and his general work of education and care for the human dignity of people long neglected, he was put on a list of those to be “dealt with.” His superiors therefore decided to summon him back to Cretin High School in Minnesota. He feared that the people of Puerto Cabezas would see his departure as an act of cowardice and so he wrote them telling them he would return, but he never got his wish. After two years of trying to return to Latin America, he superiors sent him to their mission in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, to teach at the Indigenous House School and work at the Indian Center, training indigenous Mayans in agricultural techniques, leadership skills and basic education.

St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle had told his spiritual sons, “Your zeal must go so far that you are ready to give your life, so dear to you are the children entrusted to you,” and Hermano Santiago took his founder’s instruction very much to heart. His new assignment was as dangerous as the one in Nicaragua. The Guatemalan government regularly conscripted indigenous students into service, even though students were exempt. The government resented the Christian Brothers’ constantly appearing to present documentation to liberate their students. Word quickly spread that members of the G-2 death squad were looking for the “sub-director,” Brother James’ title at the Indigenous House School.

He well knew the danger, but responded with humor, realism and faith.

When asked if he was afraid, he replied, “Are you kidding? I never thought I could pray with such fervor when I go to bed!”

He wrote his sister a month before he died, “One of two frightening things could happen to me in Guatemala. I could be kidnapped, tortured and killed or I could simply be gunned down.” But he added, “You don’t think about that, that’s not why you’re there. There’s too much to be done. You can’t waste your energies worrying about what might happen. If it happens, it happens.”

He added, “I pray to God for the grace and strength to serve Him faithfully among the poor and oppressed in Guatemala. I place my life in His Providence. I place my trust in Him.”

On Saturday, Feb. 13, 1982, after returning with students from a picnic, Brother Fix-It mounted a ladder to repair a broken lamp on the outer wall of the school. At 4:15 p.m., four hooded men, whom the government would later call “subversive criminal elements,” sped past in a car with windows down and submachine guns loaded. They shot Hermano Santiago seven times in the neck and chest, as shocked children looked on from a window in the school.

He fell from the ladder, dead. His funeral was held first in Huehuetenango and then in St. Paul, Minnesota, before he was buried in Ellis, Wisconsin, at the cemetery on the edge of the family farm.

At his beatification on the Huehuetenango sports field, Cardinal Lacunza said he was a “martyr, an excellent educator and an evangelical defender of the poor and oppressed” who “made himself one of us and for us gave his life.”

He suggested that Hermano Santiago died in witness of Christ’s great commission, an icon of Christ the Teacher who died to give witness to the truth.

“There is nothing that bothers totalitarianisms … more than education,” Lacunza said, since the greatest way to ensure that people remain docile to their manipulation is by keeping them “ignorant, without criteria or values.” If education is subversive to tyrants, the Gospel is even more so.

One of the Christian brothers who had known Blessed James throughout his religious life said he loved to do things “very quietly, behind the scenes,” and “never asked for recognition.”

Now, what he did is in the foreground, having received the most important acknowledgment human beings can.

His beatification shows that the Lord continues to exalt the humble.

It also shows that the greatest in the kingdom of heaven remain those who keep the faith and teach others to do the same.

FR. ROGER LANDRY

Father Roger J. Landry, a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, is national chaplain for Catholic Voices USA.

FR. ROGER LANDRY

Father Roger J. Landry, a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, is national chaplain for Catholic Voices USA.

Jeff Jacoby The welfare state ‘Brezhnev Doctrine by Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe December 11, 2019 http://www.jeffjacoby.com/23570/the-welfare-state-brezhnev-doctrine      The federal government spent $68 billion last year to provide food stamps to more than 36 million people. A new rule enforcing work requirements will affect about 688,000 recipients — less than 2%. DURING THE COLD WAR, the Soviet Union enforced a policy known as the the Brezhnev Doctrine. It declared that no communist country would be permitted to voluntarily leave what Moscow called “the world socialist system.” When Czechoslovakia’s government adopted a program of democratic reforms in 1968, the Soviets sent in the tanks to quash them. Under the Brezhnev Doctrine, communism could never be rolled back. Anywhere it was imposed, it must remain forever. The Soviet Union is gone now, but the spirit of the Brezhnev Doctrine lives on among defenders of the American welfare state. When it comes to any entitlement, the attitude of the liberal Democratic establishment is that nothing can ever be reduced. Welfare handouts can only be enlarged, not restricted. Eligibility may be loosened, but never tightened. If government expands the population that qualifies for the dole, that expansion must remain forever. So when the Trump administration last week issued a new rule that will close some widely abused loopholes in the federal food stamp program, the liberal-industrial complex erupted with predictable outrage.”Just in time for Christmas,” fumed a Washington Post writer, “the Trump administration [is] requiring more people to go hungry.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer blasted the White House for its “deep and shameful cruelness.” His fellow New Yorker, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, pointed out that her family used food stamps after her father died in 2008, while she was a teenager. Had the new rules been in place then, she tweeted, “we might’ve just starved. Now many people will.” This is the sort of apocalyptic rhetoric liberals roll out whenever anyone proposes to adjust a welfare entitlement that has grown too extravagant, or is being exploited in ways that lawmakers never intended. The historic welfare reform act signed by Bill Clinton in 1996 was denounced with just the same world-is-ending hysteria. Critics at the time wailed that the new law would wreak social devastation, condemning vast numbers of people, including a million children, to poverty, malnutrition, and death. In reality, welfare reform was a signal success. The welfare caseload shrunk by two-thirds, most former recipients found jobs, and the poverty rate fell dramatically. The changes announced by the Trump administration are intended simply to plug a loophole in the longstanding requirement that able-bodied adults without dependents must work (or train) at least 20 hours a week in order to receive food stamps. Those who don’t work can collect no more than three months of benefits in any 36-month period.The problem is that states can request that the work requirement be waived for regions with high unemployment, and previous administrations went overboard in granting such waivers. Virtually the whole state of Illinois, for example, was granted a waiver. The Wall Street Journal noted the other day that “the average jobless rate in waived areas . . . was 4.5 percent.” In a modern economy, that amounts to near-full employment. There is no reason why adults in those jurisdictions should be excused from the 20-hour work requirement.The new regulations will disallow waivers in areas with jobless rates below 6 percent, and those that are granted will have a one-year limit. The administration will also ensure that each waiver applies to a legitimate local labor market, not to most of an entire state. The unemployment rate in the United States is at its lowest rate in decades. Rarely has it been easier for a motivated worker to find a job.About 36.4 million Americans receive food stamps, and under the new rule about 688,000 of them, less than 2 percent, will be required to work in order to remain eligible. The changes apply only to able-bodied adults without children. They won’t affect any recipient who is 50 or older, who has a disability, or who has dependents (like the teen-aged student AOC was in 2008).Rarely has it been easier for a motivated worker to find a job. The unemployment rate is at an all-time low. According to the Labor Department, there are just 5.8 million unemployed adults in the country, while the number of available jobs is over 7 million. There couldn’t be a better time to ensure that work requirements aren’t flouted. Federal law is clear: Healthy, unencumbered adults can collect food stamps only if they’re working. Taxpayers shouldn’t be expected to support fellow citizens who can work but won’t. The administration’s new rule will belatedly give some adults the push they need to find a job, restoring to their food stamps the purpose Congress intended: to help the needy up from dependency, not drag them further into it. On this issue, it isn’t the White House that deserves scorn, but the Brezhnev-doctrine progressives howling in protest against a modest and overdue repair to the safety net.(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).– ## —Follow Jeff Jacoby on Twitter. “Like” Jeff Jacoby’s columns on Facebook.This column is adapted from the current issue of Arguable, Jeff Jacoby’s weekly e-mail newsletter. To subscribe to Arguable, go to bitly.com/Arguable.Related Topics:  Donald Trump, Government Bureaucracy and Inefficiency, Poverty and Welfare

Settimo Cielodi Sandro Magister 11 dic 

Conclave Rehearsals. The Next Pope Will Take His Name From Sant’Egidio

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Two recent acts of Pope Francis have called attention back to the conclave that will elect his successor. And to the names of the candidates.

The first act, made known on November 25 by the director of the Vatican press office, is the pope’s acceptance of the resignation of his personal secretary, the Argentine Fabián Pedacchio Leániz, 55, since 2007 an official of the congregation for bishops.

Pedacchio, Francis’s personal secretary since 2013, will go back to working full-time at the congregation, where moreover he had continued to perform a prominent role precisely because of his proximity to the pope, where it is foreseeable that in the near future he will move up a level, with ordination as bishop.

That a pope would preventively shield his personal secretary from the repercussions of succession is a classic of the Vatican chronicles, to which Jorge Mario Bergoglio has decided to adhere without hesitation.

The second act, made public on Sunday December 8, is the calling to Rome as the new prefect of the congregation for the evangelization of peoples of Filipino cardinal Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle, 62, archbishop of Manila since 2011 and since 2015 president of Caritas Internationalis.

To make room for him at the head of “Propaganda Fide,” Francis brusquely pulled out of there his predecessor, Cardinal Fernando Filoni, in spite of the fact that he was not out of time in terms of his age, at 73, or of the duration of his position, which was to end in 2021.

To Filoni the pope has given the position, more honorary than substantial, of Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. Francis’s lack of esteem for him could be attributed both to the cardinal’s proximity to the Neocatechumenal Way, a movement to which the pope is visibly allergic, and to the reservations that Filoni expressed, in two interviews with “L’Osservatore Romano” and with Vatican News, concerning the secret accord ratified on September 22 2018 between the Holy See and China, strongly backed by the pope.

*

To these acts must also be added, still against the backdrop of a future conclave, Francis’s growing annoyance with the resistance opposed by the current president of the Italian episcopal conference, Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, to the idea – cherished instead by the pope – of convening a synod of the Church of Italy.

The latest sign of this annoyance is in the words Francis spoke off the cuff on December 6 to the Jesuits of the magazine “Aggiornamenti Sociali.” In thanking in particular the elderly Father Bartolomeo Sorge, the pope said he had “read a short time ago something of a clarity that made tremble, I do not say Italian politics, but certainly at least the Italian Church.”

To what the pope was referring was not immediately clear. But to unravel the mystery came a tweet a few minutes later from Fr. Antonio Spadaro, director of “La Civiltà Cattolica” and close to Bergoglio, who referenced the lead article of the September 21 2019 issue of his magazine, written by Sorge and entitled: “A ‘probable’ Synod of the Italian Church? From the first ecclesial Conference of 1976 to today.”

The article made a case precisely for the urgency of resuming in Italy the “journey interrupted” way back in 1976 by finally convening that national synod which Pope Francis wants at all costs – contrary to his predecessors – but to which the Italian episcopal conference continues to turn a deaf ear.

The result is that the presidency – of papal appointment – of Cardinal Bassetti is ever more in danger. Hs five-year term is set to expire in 2022. But the cardinal is also close to the age of 78, three years over the threshold of 75 beyond which every bishop remains in office only if the pope allows him to do so.

And whom will Francis place as head of the CEI, once Bassetti resigns? It is easy to foresee that it will be the current archbishop of Bologna, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi (in the photo).

And one’s thoughts run once again to the future conclave. Which today sees at least six candidates in the race, only one of whom however seems to have some “chance” of being elected.

MARC OUELLET, CHRISTOPH SCHÖNBORN

Two of the six candidates are veterans, already in the running in previous conclaves.

Marc Ouellet, 75, Canadian, prefect of the congregation for bishops, was among the most voted for in the first two ballots of the conclave of 2013, before being surpassed by Bergoglio, and today has the reputation of fidelity to the reigning pope but also as a defender of orthodoxy.

Christoph Schönborn, 74, Austrian, was instead more voted for by the media than within the Sistine Chapel, but he too has built during this pontificate a profile as a deft weaver of agreements between moderates and progressives, especially at the two synods on the family.

Both, therefore, could be voted for by a fairly broad swath of cardinal electors.

Both the one and the other, however, appear far from being able to assemble the elevated consensus – two thirds of the votes – necessary for election. Both belong to an aristocracy of cardinals who today find themselves out of place among the great number, by now the majority, of those who have received the scarlet from Pope Francis, for the most part men of the periphery, unfamiliar with one another, of modest education and limited experience in second-tier dioceses, more easily influenced by scrappy little lobbies than by the lofty discourses of cardinals of a past generation, perhaps even scarcely faithful pupils, like the young Schönborn, of Joseph Ratzinger when he was a professor of theology.

ROBERT SARAH

More chiseled, instead, is the profile of Cardinal Robert Sarah, 74, from Guinea, since 2014 prefect of the congregation for divine worship. With him one has, in the history of the Church, the first true candidate for the papacy coming from black Africa.

His biography is remarkable. An undaunted witness of the Catholic faith under the bloody Marxist regime of Sekou Touré, he was not executed only because of the tyrant’s sudden death in 1984. Raised on the savanna but with advanced studies in France and Jerusalem, he was made a bishop at the age of just 33 by Paul VI, was called to Rome by John Paul II and kept there by Benedict XVI, with whom his agreement is still total today.

Sarah was revealed to the world by three of his books that have been translated into multiple languages: “God or Nothing” of 2015, “The Power of Silence” of 2017, and “The Day Is Now Far Spent” of 2019. There is a chasm between his vision of the Church’s mission and that of the Jesuit pope, both in content and in style. For Sarah, as for Ratzinger as well, the absolute priority is to bring God into the heart of societies, especially where his presence has been obscured.

For the opponents of Pope Francis in the name of the Church’s grand tradition, he is therefore the ideal candidate. But in a college of cardinals more than half of which has been appointed by Bergoglio, it is unthinkable that he would approach the two thirds of the votes necessary for election. He would get at the most a couple dozen at the first ballot, of a demonstrative character.

PIETRO PAROLIN

Not symbolic but real is instead the candidacy of Pietro Parolin, 64, an Italian from the diocese of Vicenza, since 2013 secretary of state.

One must go back to the conclave of 1963 to find elected as pope, with Paul VI, a churchman who grew up in the heart of the Vatican curia and with recognized management abilities, after a pontificate, that of John XXIII, that had set in motion a council that however was in full tempest and had not yet produced any document whatsoever. Paul VI succeeded in the endeavor, although he undeservedly ended up in the black books of those accused of betraying the revolutions.

Today the endeavor that a certain number of cardinals would entrust to Parolin is to bring back onto the right course the ship of the Church in the squall created by Pope Francis, correcting his driftings without betraying his spirit. In him some see the temper of the diplomat united with the profile of the pastor, which Parolin himself seeks to corroborate by alternating with the tasks proper to the secretary of state those of the care for souls, in a breathtaking schedule packed with Masses, homilies, conferences, trips, visits, meetings.

It must however be said that for at least a year the support for a Parolin candidacy has not been on the rise, but on the decline. In the light of the facts, his abilities to stem and balance the state of confusion induced in the Church by the pontificate of Francs have been judged as being too modest. And also as a diplomat he is credited with more failures than successes. China is now playing against him, as a lost wager.

LUIS ANTONIO GOKIM TAGLE

On the rise instead are the “chances” of Cardinal Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle, a Filipino with a Chinese mother and one who has studied theology and Church history in the United States.

Tagle is the dauphin of Pope Francis, the successor he has “in pectore.” In calling him to preside over “Propaganda Fide,” he has entrusted to him the governance of part of Latin America, of almost all of Africa, of almost all of Asia excluding the Philippines, and of Oceania with the exception of Australia, meaning precisely that immense periphery of the Church that is so dear to Bergoglio.

But already before this Francis had acted to strengthen the international stature of this favorite of his. He called him to preside over the synod on the family. And in April of 2016, just after the release of the exhortation “Amoris Laetitia” in which the pope opened up communion for the divorced and remarried, Tagle was the first among the bishops of the whole world to give it the broadest interpretation.

To those who objected that the fluid magisterium of Pope Francis has given rise to more doubts than certainties, his response was that “it’s good to be confused once in a while. If things are always clear, then we might not be in real life anymore.”

On the path of the Church in the present times Tagle however has a very clear idea: with Vatican Council II the Church has broken with the past and has marked a new beginning. It is the historiographical thesis of what is called the “school of Bologna,” founded by Fr. Giuseppe Dossetti and today headed by Professor Alberto Melloni, of which Tagle is part. His is the byline on one of the key chapters of the most widely read history of the Council in the world – that produced by none other than the “school of Bologna” – the chapter on the “black week” of the autumn of 1964. The polar opposite of the interpretation of the Council given by Benedict XVI, who, magnanimously, in 2012 made Tagle a cardinal.

At the conclusion of the synod on young people, in 2018, Tagle was the first one elected for Asia to the preparatory council for the next synod. A sign of the widespread consensus he had already gathered. And then again Francis entrusted to him an introductory talk at the summit on sexual abuse of January 2019 at the Vatican, another event with worldwide resonance.

That Tagle would also be elected pope tomorrow, however, is anything but a foregone conclusion. Too close to Bergoglio not to end up pulverized by the many exasperations with the current pontificate that will inexorably come to the surface in a future conclave.And then there is the obstacle of age. Tagle is 62 and therefore could reign for a long time, too long for one to dare to gamble on him.

MATTEO ZUPPI

Matteo Zuppi was also elected to the post-synodal council of 2018. A sign of an already consolidated international stature, in spite of the fact that he had been archbishop of Bologna for only three years and had not yet received the scarlet, with which Francis vested him on October 5, 2019.

What has brought him renown and prestige for some time is a primary aspect of his biography. Not so much being the grandnephew of a cardinal, Carlo Confalonieri (1893-1986), who was also secretary to Pope Pius XI, but rather being a cofounder of the Community of Sant’Egidio, unquestionably the most powerful, influential, and omnipresent Catholic lobby of recent decades, at the worldwide level.

As assistant ecclesiastic general of the Community of Sant’Egidio and pastor until 2010 of the Roman basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, in addition to being auxiliary bishop of Rome as of that year, Zuppi has found himself at the center of an incomparable network of persons and events on a planetary scale, both religious and geopolitical, from the peace agreements in Mozambique of the years 1990-92 to present-day support for the secret agreement between the Holy See and China, from the interreligious meetings in Assisi to the “humanitarian corridors” for immigrants in Europe from Africa and Asia.

With consummate ability, the Community of Sant’Egidio has also succeeded in adapting itself perfectly to the governing approach of each of the recent pontiffs, from John Paul II to Benedict XVI to Francis. But it is above all with this last that it has reached its apogee, with Vincenzo Paglia at the head of the Vatican institutes for life and the family, with Matteo Bruni at the head of the press office, and above all with Cardinal Zuppi as archbishop of Bologna and on his way to becoming president of the Italian episcopal conference.

From here to his election as pope the way forward is not guaranteed, but is seriously in the order of things. All the more so with a disorganized college of cardinals, unsure in its mindset and easy to direct, at the hands of a lobby not of cardinals this time – like the legendary “mafia” of St. Gallen that fostered the election of Bergoglio – but surely more influential and decisive, which has the name, sure enough, of Community of Sant’Egidio.

There is already a documentary about him, with the title: “The Gospel according to Matteo Z.” And this is its trailer, on the one who may be the next pope:

> Zuppi, il vescovo di stradaCondividi:

“The Spirit of the Liturgy” at Twenty

David G Bonagura, Jr.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?hl=en&shva=1#inbox/FMfcgxwGCHBSsSGXZljznKfBBrWHMgzl

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2019

Of Joseph Ratzinger’s three great works – The Spirit of the Liturgy, Introduction to Christianity, and Jesus of Nazareth – the first is by far the most influential. Now in its twentieth year, we can take measure of The Spirit of the Liturgy’s impact on the life of the Church. There is much to measure.

In the book’s preface, Ratzinger announced his ambition for his work. He deliberately borrowed his title from Romano Guardini, whose book of the same name made a “decisive” contribution to Germany’s Liturgical Movement 82 years earlier. Ratzinger sought a “renewal of understanding” of the liturgy after Vatican II so as “to encourage, in a new way, something like a ‘liturgical movement,’ a movement toward the liturgy and toward the right way of celebrating the liturgy, inwardly and outwardly.”

At the time, there was no mystery why Ratzinger had this goal: for decades he had criticized the excesses of the post-conciliar liturgy, which, “by various restorations and reconstructions. . .threatened with destruction” the Mass itself. Ratzinger principally focused on abuses in the Novus Ordo Missae’s celebration rather than its theological intricacies. He began by inviting us away from debating the particulars and back to the very heart of liturgical worship, from which the particulars derive. The liturgy calls for worship in “spirit and truth,” words that “must not be taken in the subjectivist sense. . . .No, they must be seen in light of him who could say of himself, ‘I am the truth.’”

For Ratzinger, the core problem with the Novus Ordo was its subjectivist tilt away from glorifying God to glorifying His people. His first chapter, “Liturgy and Life” (which signals his broad perspective), famously located the apostasy of the Israelites around the golden calf: “Worship becomes a feast that the community gives itself, a festival of self-affirmation. Instead of being a worship of God, it becomes a circle closed in on itself.”

The comparison to the manner in which the liturgy has been celebrated since Vatican II is not subtle.

By contrast, the true spirit of the liturgy is revealed to us by God, not initiated from human creativity. Authentic human worship is cosmic; it brings the Son to us and us to God. The “goal of worship” is not self-affirmation, but “divinization,” and “all worship is a participation in this ‘Pasch’ of Christ.” The particular questions that Ratzinger subsequently addresses – active participation by the faithful, the building of churches, the altar and the direction of liturgical prayer, sacred music and art – are treated in service to this deeper purpose of liturgical worship. Or at least they are supposed to be.

The Spirit of the Liturgy received unprecedented publicity when Ratzinger became Benedict XVI in 2005. By the way he offered Mass in Christendom’s greatest basilicas, Ratzinger was able to manifest to the world the true spirit of the liturgy. Many noticed. Most important among them were the legions of young seminarians and priests devoted to God-centered liturgy, who found a new champion in Benedict.

Through the use of beautiful vestments and the recovery of discarded liturgical traditions, papal Masses became pious occasions for authentic worship of God. But Ratzinger gave the liturgical movement its greatest boost through Summorum Pontificum (2007), which lifted restrictions on the use of the traditional Latin Mass. He desired “the two forms of the Roman rite” to be “mutually enriching,” and hoped the older rite would help the newer find “sacrality” and fidelity to its rubrics.

Ratzinger couldn’t have foreseen this twenty years ago, but the traditional Latin Mass has become the primary means whereby the message of The Spirit of the Liturgy is being spread the world over. Ironically, the book does not intentionally promote this form of the Mass.

Here is a short, incomplete list of the direct fruits of The Spirit of the Liturgy:

* The New Liturgical Movement website devoted to studying and promoting the liturgy and the liturgical arts in their full, God-directed splendor.

* A growing drumbeat to return to celebrating Mass “ad orientem” – with priest and people together facing East – and away from the post-conciliar arrangement that turns the priest toward the people, a posture that especially facilitates the subjectivist, people-focused liturgy that Ratzinger decried. The chapter on this topic alone inspired one book; and the “Benedictine altar arrangement” of a crucifix and six candles on altars to begin a gradual “reorientation” while the priest still faces the people, and (of course) loads of controversy.

* An explosion of books, conferences, and sacred music institutes dedicated to aspects of the liturgy mentioned by Ratzinger.

* The founding of the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Worship, which sponsored the recent traditional Mass of the Americas at the National Shrine in Washington, D.C., something unthinkable without Ratzinger’s book and papacy.

For all these triumphs, The Spirit of the Liturgy has so far only affected a tiny pocket of the Church: the vast majority of parishes, schools, and religious orders still conduct their liturgies in the failed, people-centered manner. Moreover, numerous bishops and seminary formators still resist Ratzinger’s vision, especially the traditional Latin Mass.

Long before he wrote The Spirit of the Liturgy, Ratzinger famously predicted that the Church would shrink but eventually be purified, so that “she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.” Currently, the “smaller, purer” Church is very often found at the traditional Latin Mass, which large families and other serious Catholics seek out for a reverent, God-centered liturgy.

The Mass beautifully offered to God, as described by Ratzinger, is the soil from which the fresh blossoming will spring. If we keep The Spirit of the Liturgy as our chartering work for twenty more years, the Church’s purification will bear greater fruit still.© 2019 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.orgThe Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

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David G Bonagura, Jr.

David G. Bonagura Jr. teaches at St. Joseph’s Seminary, New York. He is the author of Steadfast in Faith: Catholicism and the Challenges of Secularism (Cluny Media).

DECEMBER 11, 2019

What We’ve Lost in Translation

ANTHONY ESOLEN

CRISIS MAGAZINE

Word is that the USCCB is going to tweak the New American Bible but leave it in place as the basis for the lectionary. Please, your excellencies, give it up. The NAB is a train wreck. It cannot be salvaged. It is, by turns, drab, ungrammatical, clumsy, and stupid. It turns good verbs into verbal nouns. Unlike Hebrew and good English, it prefers the abstract to the concrete, the general to the specific, and the vague to the precise. It twists itself into semantic pretzels to avoid the masculine in pronouns, nouns, and metaphors; but it cannot avoid them altogether, so it merely adds inconsistency to its other many faults. Get rid of it. The English Standard Version and the Revised Standard Version are available. They aren’t perfect, but they are tolerable at least, and often very good.

“Surely, Dr. Esolen,” someone will object, “you must be exaggerating. It may be drab, but it can hardly be stupid.”

“You’ve never read academic writing,” I reply. A ten-year-old boy writing about riding his bicycle around town will probably write naïvely, but he will be lively enough. He will not have acquired the academic habit of not considering what his words mean. The boy will write about real things—shops, hills, trees, dogs, bridges, brakes, and streets. The academic often must be rapped on the head with a beanbag to see things.

Let me give an example from the lectionary last week. It’s the vision of Nebuchadnezzar as recounted in the book of Daniel. The king dreamed of a man whose head was “of fine gold, its breast and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay.” This is the RSV, echoing the earlier English versions which gave us the phrase, “feet of clay,” to describe someone who cannot be relied on in a crisis, or something that seems staunch but is, in fact, ready to topple. Here is the NAB: “The head of the statue was pure gold, its chest and arms were silver, its belly and thighs bronze, the legs iron, and the feet partly iron and partly tile.” Tile? 

What’s a tile? It is clay baked into a standard shape, usually flat, sometimes rounded. What prompted the translators to write “tile”? You can’t make a statue or the foot of a statue out of tile, in English, any more than you can form its face out of brick. What might a statue made of tile look like? No image comes to my mind—unless it’s of some uncouth modernist thing, with angles sticking out everywhere—because tiles are tiles and not clay which can be formed into any shape you wish.

Another example is from the lectionary for the feast of Christ the King. One of the thieves crucified at the side of Christ is mocking him, and the other thief feels a pang of conscience. “We are receiving the due reward of our deeds,” he says, “but this man has done nothing wrong” (RSV); “And we indeed justly, for we are receiving what our deeds deserved; but this man has done nothing wrong” (Douay-Rheims-Challoner). I suppose that if you are hanging on a cross, you will come straight to the point. Now the NAB: “And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes, but this man has done nothing criminal.” Corresponds? Nothing criminal? Who talks this way? A lawyer arguing before an appellate court, maybe. A professor, probably. A thief on a cross? The translators cannot have considered the drama of the specific situation.

But then they never do. They dwell in a fog of ideas. They do not feel the passions they try to describe. They are never present to the people and the scene. Think of the moment of Jesus’s death. How would you describe it? Saint Luke winds his narrative to the climax: “It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit!’ And having said this he breathed his last. Now when the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God and said, ‘Certainly this man was innocent!’ ” (RSV).

How can you spoil a moment like this? And when you are free to take from other translations all that you wish, too! Well, you turn the lyrical into the technical; you turn verbs into verbal nouns; you eliminate the little words that lead from image to image or thought to thought; and you muffle the emphatic by tucking it away in the middle of a sentence: “It was now about noon and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon because of an eclipse of the sun. Then the veil of the temple was torn down the middle. Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”; and when he had said this he breathed his last. The centurion who witnessed what had happened glorified God and said, “This man was innocent beyond doubt” (NAB).

Notice the distracting and clumsy rhyme: noon, afternoon. Notice how the failure of the sun—this is what the Greek says—is rendered technical, just as the numbers of the hours are rendered colloquial. Does Saint Luke say that the sun was in eclipse? No, he doesn’t. He says that the sun failed; this might have been an eclipse, but it might not. He is not thinking of the relative positions of the sun and moon and earth. That, too, would be a distraction here, an anticlimax. Notice that the NAB dislocates events which Luke knits together in a dramatic whole: the passage of the hours, the darkness, the failure of the sun, and the tearing of the curtain in the temple. Notice the ham-handed relative clause in the final sentence separating the subject centurion from the verb glorified; there is no good reason for this. Notice the final words in NAB: without doubt. Why the negative construction? Why introduce a hidden verb, to doubt? It’s not in the Greek. So why end with those words? The Greek and the RSV end on what the evangelist emphasizes: dikaios en, “was innocent.”

Your excellencies, the problems are not here and there, this and that. Every time I go to Mass, I must hear something put in a way that is either stupid or awkward or misleading—every time. A week or so ago, it was Saint Paul writing to the Thessalonians: “In fact, when we were with you, we instructed you that if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat.” That one? That one what? We use that one in opposition to this one, or to specify someone in a group: “Do you see that man with the cap and bells? He translated the Bible for Catholics.” Neither use is in play here. The man has already been singled out. He’s someone who won’t work. To call him that one simply to avoid saying he, isn’t archaic English, contemporary English, formal English, or colloquial English. It isn’t any English at all. No one speaks that way, and no one has ever spoken that way. No one writes that way, and no one but the NAB translator has ever written that way.

In the Greek, and in any sensible English translation, what Paul says should sound like a proverb: “If any man will not work, neither let him eat” (Challoner); “If any one will not work, let him not eat” (RSV). Clear and crisp, and not half-smothered in a noun clause.

The whole passage was a bungle. I will place the NAB next to the Challoner. Note that even though the Challoner uses language that harks back to early modern English, it is still the more direct, the more vivid, and the clearer in its progression of thought:

We instruct you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,
And we charge you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,

to shun any brother who conducts himself in a disorderly way and not according to the tradition they [sic] received from us.
to withdraw yourselves from every brother who lives irregularly, and not according to the teaching received from us.

For you know how one must imitate us. For we did not act in a disorderly way among you,
For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us; for we were not unruly while with you,

nor did we eat food received free from anyone. On the contrary, in toil and drudgery, night and day we worked, so as not to burden any of you.
neither did we eat any man’s bread at his cost, but we worked night and day in labor and toil, so that we might not burden any of you.

Not that we do not have the right. Rather, we wanted to present ourselves as a model for you, so that you might imitate us.
Not that we did not have the right to do so, but that we might make ourselves an example for you to imitate us.

In fact, when we were with you we instructed you that if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one [sic] eat.
For indeed when we were with you we used to charge you: if any man will not work, neither let him eat.

We hear that some are conducting themselves among you in a disorderly way, by not keeping busy but minding the business of others.
For we have heard that some among you are living irregularly, doing no work but busy at meddling.

It’s no wonder we find it so hard to hear the words of Paul from the pulpit. What I have cited above is typical of the NAB when the translators are not skating near to heresy or doing their best to muffle the text. Please, bishops, put the undead to rest.

Photo credit: Shutterstock.com/Vibe Images

Tagged as New American Bible39

By Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen, a contributing editor at Crisis, is a professor and writer-in-residence at Northeast Catholic College. Dr Esolen has authored several books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization(Regnery Press, 2008), Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI Books, 2010) and Reflections on the Christian Life (Sophia Institute Press, 2013).

My Meeting with the Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts

Dec11by The Editor

By Br. Alexis Bugnolo

https://fromrome.wordpress.com/2019/12/11/my-meeting-with-the-secretary-of-the-pontifical-council-for-legislative-texts/

I write this post to publicly thank Mons. Juan Ignacio Arrieta Ochoa de Chinchetru, Titular Bishop of Civitate, who was appointed by His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI as Secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts.

I met with him this morning at 9:45. The meeting lasted about 75 minutes. I did not record the meeting, but want to share with everyone what I remember of it, because of its great importance to the life of the Catholic Church.

I began by saying that I had come to discuss the interpretation of law (interpretatio iuris) or more specifically the right to interpret canonical acts (ius interpretandi). Bishop Arrieta is an expert on this matter, having served in the capacity of a Professor of Canon Law since 1984 at the Pontifical University of Santa Croce, and from 2003 to 2008 at the Preside of the “St Pius X” Institute of Canon Law at Venice, and as Canonist to the Apostolic Penitentiary. Since February of 2007, he has served in the Pontifical Council as its Secretary. This title does not mean he is a secretary, but rather, the Vice President as it were to the Council.

I want to remark on the gentleness and noble demeanor of the Bishop, who never used any hominems, never lost his patience and showed himself willing to discuss the most impolitic issues, from the point of view of canon law, in the Church.

I began my questions with a preface, and with the Bishop’s permission read to him my entire article, entitled, ¡Viva Guadalajara! which was published, here, at the From Rome Blog, this morning.

During the reading, the Bishop could not hide his amusement at the fictitious story, but as I moved to my comments on how this story applies not only to the first moments of a papacy but also to the last, that is, to a Papal renunciation, the amusement on his face disappeared instantly. — Nevertheless, he continued to be polite.

He confirmed for me the following facts:

1. To his knowledge, there was no meeting of canonists in February of 2013 which discussed the validity of the Act of Renunciation, nor whether a renunciation of ministerium effected a renunciation of munus.
2. To his knowledge, Pope Benedict XVI never explained himself to any Cardinal or canonists in private as to whether his act effected a renunciation of the petrine munus or office.
3. To his knowledge, no act of interpretation of the Renunciation was ever promulgated by Pope Benedict XVI.
4. Bishop Arrieta did admit that he was asked questions regarding the Renunciation, on Feb. 11, 2013, but no question regarded the use of the term ministerium instead of munus.

He also confirmed for me these points of law:

1. If anyone heard Pope Benedict XVI in February of 2013 explain or officially interpret his Act of Renunciation as an act of renouncing the munus, and left a sworn testimony to the fact, this would have no juridical value whatsoever. That is it would not make or alter the signification other than it is.
2. An act of papal Renunciation is not subject to the interpretation of anyone in the Church. That is, no one has the right to interpret it.
3. An act of papal Renunciation, therefore, must be certain in itself. If it is not certain, it is invalid.
4. There is no Canon in the Code of Canon Law which predicates the term ministerium of an ecclesiastical office.
5. What Ganswein said at the Gregorian University — he admitted he had not read the text of Ganswein in full or in the original — is impossible, since the Papal Office is theologically incapable of being held by more than one man at a time.
6. It is canonically impossible that two persons hold he Petrine Munus at the same time.
7. The Roman Curia shares in the Petrine Ministerium, but not the Petrine Munus.
8. There can only be one pope.
9. The Pope is subject to Divine Law and cannot split the office.
10. Canon 1331 §2, n. 4 does allow an excommunicated person to hold a ministry in the Church, but that there is a reform of the Penal Code in the works and that this is something that will be addressed.
11. Canon 332 §2 requires a verbal renunciation, not a renunciation which is signified by gestures or after the fact statements.
12. The supreme theological and legal principle for interpretation of canonical acts is the teaching of Jesus Christ, where He said, “Let your yes be Yes, and your no, No, anything else comes from the Devil” (Mt. 5:37)

Now Bishop Arrieta did not agree with me in everything. He made it clear to me that he holds the following positions:

1. The Renunciation of Pope Benedict was certain and clear.
2. The Renunciation clearly signified the renunciation of the office of the papacy.
3. It is morally impossible in the judgement of Bishop Arrieta, based on his knowledge of the man, Ratzinger, that Pope Benedict intended to deceive anyone by pretending to resign one thing instead of the other.
4. Canon 332 §2, as regards the requirements of liberty and due manifestation, is not talking about a renunciation of the petrine munus.
5. The necessity in a papal renunciation is a renunciation of the papal office, not of the petrine munus, which is a canonical term which does not adequately reflect the theological reality.
6. In the Code of Canon Law there is no clear distinction between munus and ministerium.

Regarding this 4th position of the Bishop, I must say I tried to get a word in edgewise to object to such a patently false statement, as if conditions for validity for an act of renunciation of munus only regard the act of renouncing and not the object which is to be renounced. I think the Bishop just said this out of desperation because it is logically absurd on the face of it, as you cannot read part of a sentence which regards conditions for validity and ignore what was said as the fundamental condition for the occurrence or discernment of the occurrence of the act in question!

Regarding the 5th position, I disagree, because Pope John Paul II, the Vicar of Christ, by promulgating the Code imposed upon the whole Church the canonical obligation of understanding it in accord with Canon 17, not as defective in anything. Therefore, an interpretation of canon 332 §2 which implies a defect, cannot be authentic.

I won’t respond here to n. 6, since I have devastatingly refuted it in the recent Academic Conference at Rome, the excerpt of which I published on this very topic, here.

What left me unsatisfied about our conversation is that I asked a lot of questions, but Mons. Arrieta could not give me answers. Here are some of my question, not verbatim, but according to their sense, that the Bishop did not or could not answer:

1. If it is clear that Pope Benedict resigned his office, can you explain to me canonically how he did that if he never mentioned the office or the Petrine Munus?
2. If Canon 41 gives to every priest the discretion and right to evaluate the Papal Act of Renunciation before deciding to stop naming Benedict in the Canon of the Mass, as the Pope, why it is canonically wrong if he exercise this discretion, judge the act nullus and continue to name Benedict?
3. If no one has the right to interpret the Papal Act, how can you explain why nearly everyone in the Hierarchy holds that it effected a renunciation of the Papal Office, if nowhere in the Act did Pope Benedict say I renounce the office or the munus? Is that not an interpretation?
4. While I am willing to concede out of respect for Pope Benedict that he did not maliciously intend to deceive, is it not possible he was in substantial error when he resigned one thing and not the other?
5. Does not our loyalty to Jesus Christ, Who bound Himself to observe Canon Law, require us to consider as possible that the Pope be in error in thinking he can resign part of the papal prerogatives and keep the rest? or was wrong in desiring to bifurcate the papacy?
6. Does not the historical facts that 1) Pope Benedict XVI before his elevation to the Papacy knew of the desires of many German theologians to split the papal office along the lines of the petrine munus and the petrine ministry, and 2) the strange way of renouncing the ministry, but not the munus, coupled with 3) the testimony of Ganswein his personal secretary, who should know the mind of the Holy Father, produce the most sound forensic testimony that the Pope did intend to bifurcate the Papal Office and should be corrected by the Church, even if we personally hold that he had no such intention by way of supposition and respect for his person?

The Bishop closed by remarking that my approach to the reading of the Act of Renunciation was strange to him, that he has never considered this problem before, that he has never read about this controversy, but that I had given him “much to think about”.

CONCLUSION

The sum of what Mons. Arrieta told me leads me to conclude the following:

1. The Act of Renunciation was presumed from the start to be a renunciation of the Papacy, without any consideration of the discrepancy of renouncing the ministerium instead of the munus, as if the Code of 1917 were operative, and not the Code of 1983.
2. There has never been any canonical reflection on the canonical value of the Act of Renunciation by anyone known to Bishop Arrieta.
3. There is no canonical arguments for the validity of the renunciation to effect a loss of the Papal Office, because the interpretation is simply a presumption based on an extrinsic method of reading the act (as I point out in my previous article), which is the most unauthentic and error prone method of interpretation.
4. The opinion of No Cardinal or Bishop or Priest on this matter constrains anyone in the Church to accept it, because no one has the right to say that the Papal Act means something other than it expressly says.
5. The Renunciation of Pope Benedict DID NOT effect the loss of the Papal Office. He remains the Pope, the Successor of Saint Peter, the Vicar of Christ, the Supreme Pontiff and the Roman Pontiff with all rights and privileges, all prerogatives and powers, graces and carisms, BECAUSE IF YOU DO NOT RENOUNCE THE PAPACY BY WORDS, YOU HAVE NOT RENOUNCED THE PAPACY!

Finally, I do want to thank the Bishop for his patience. Several times in the 75 minutes we spent discussing this most important matter, he remarked he had other duties, but stayed anyhow when what I said was substantial and presented a line of argumentation which he felt necessary to respond to.

New post on Rosary to the Interior: For the Purification of the Church 1866-2by admin  The Signs of the Times:And the Blindness of Traditional Catholics http://rosarytotheinterior.com/1866-2/ “When it is evening, you say, It will be fair weather, for the sky is red. And in the morning: Today there will be a storm, for the sky is red and lowering. You know then how to discern the face of the sky: and can you not know the signs of the times?” (Mt. 16:3).“The men of Nineve shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it; because they did penance at the preaching of Jonas. And behold a greater than Jonas is here.” (Mt. 12:41, Luke 11: 32).“And as in the days of Noe, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, even till that day in which Noe entered into the ark. And they knew not till the flood came, and took them all away; so also shall be coming of the Son of man be.” (Mt. 24: 37-39). An extraordinary blindness and superficiality now reigns in the world of traditional Catholic media, and thus presumably, in the minds and hearts of virtually all of those who wish to be considered traditional Catholics. This superficiality reigns in regard to four  areas: 1) understanding the depths and threat of the current crisis within the Church; 2) a virtual total absence of the question as to why God is allowing this chastisement upon us; 3) an equally extensive failure by those who consider themselves orthodox and traditional Catholics to look to their own adulteries with this world as also being responsible for this chastisement; 4) the virtual universal failure to understand the “one thing necessary” for deliverance from the apocalyptic evil that is descending upon us.  The Depths of the Crisis Having witnessed the words and actions of Pope Francis and his many collaborators and apologists in recent years, it was not difficult for the traditional Catholic media to predict that the Amazonian Synod was being prepared to overturn, or at least severely compromise, many traditional Catholic beliefs and praxis. Much was written in the weeks and months preceding the Synod about agendas for such things as a married priesthood, female deacons and priests, inculteration of pagan belief and practices (including worship), liberation theology, etc.Since the closing of the Synod, most of this media attention has focused on the pagan events in regard to the Pachamama statues, venerated (and worshipped) in the Vatican Gardens (with the personal blessing of Pope Francis) and other places in Rome. The primary focus of the traditional Catholic media has thus come to focus on the horror of inclusion within the Church (especially with the blessing and justifications rendered by Pope Francis and other members of the hierarchy) of pagan worship and idolatry, especially associated with the secular agenda of an “integral ecology” which is to be identified with a worship of “Mother Earth”. All of this, in conjunction with Pope Francis’ embrace of the statement of the Abu Dhabi Declaration that “the diversity of religions is willed by God”, has of course also added fuel to belief that the ultimate goal of these efforts is the Masonic dream of one-world government and one-world religion.The question, however, presents itself: What is the ultimate object of this idolatry and blasphemous unity? We would certainly be naïve to believe that, in justifying and blessing the Pachamama statues and the accompanying worship of it as some sort of Mother-Earth goddess, Pope Francis and his supporters are identifying such pagan worship as the end-point of their agenda. Nor do we reach the depths of this agenda by seeing it only as the Church surrendering to one-world Masonic ideals. Something much more perverse and occult has established itself deep within what Pope Pius X called the vital energy of the Church in order to explain this prostitution.As explored in a number of our articles (individually linked below in our Course of Study), this something is the establishment of the Cosmic Evolutionary Theology of Teilhard de Chardin as the new theology within the Church. It should have been obvious, especially as analyzed in our recently published article, A Love That Maketh A Lie: Amoris Laetitia and the Teilhardian Agenda, that theimmediate target of all the horrific errors promoted by Pope Francis and his supporters is the well-defined Catholic doctrine concerning charity as applying to that state of the soul which is established in the friendship of God (sanctifying grace). It is of course totally illogical and self-contradictory to believe that there are conditions which would allow divorced and remarried persons to receive Holy Communion (thus committing the objective sin of sacrilege) if one believes in such a concept of the soul and its necessary possession of charity (sanctifying grace) for the reception of Holy Communion. The same is also true of such grave sins as homosexuality, so-called gay marriage, any inclusion of pagan idolatry and practices into the Catholic Church, the promotion of any objectively grave errors in regard to Catholic dogma, or of any objectively grave moral sins. Any pastoral policies promoting inclusiveness towards individual persons or religions living in such grave errors and mortal sin could only be embraced if the possession of charity has ceased to be viewed as a state of the soul, and instead has become identified with a universal unmerited and unconditional mercy considered as being necessary for inclusion of all human beings in an evolutionary ascent towards the Omega Point of Godhead. This is the fundamental heresy expressed in Amoris Laetitia. And it is the necessary conclusion of Teilhardian Cosmic Evolutionary Theology: a theology through which all Catholic philosophy, theology, and praxis must be transformed into evolutionary becoming at the total expense of the concepts of real being and fixed nature.  In other words, while the immediate target for destruction is the concept of the human soul possessing a fixed nature which requires the possession of sanctifying grace in order for it to be in the friendship of God, the ultimate target is the immutable nature of God and His immutable Revelation. As Teilhard de Chardin wrote:“What, on the other hand, do we find if our minds can embrace simultaneously both contemporary neo-Christianity and contemporary neo-Humanism, and so first suspect and then accept as proved that the Christ of Revelation is none other than the Omega of Evolution?”“It is Christ, in very truth, who saves, – but should we not immediately add that at the same time it is Christ who is saved by Evolution?” (The Heart of Matter, p. 92)Such is the dynamic of what now descends upon us. It is the only possible explanation for the inversion of the Catholic Faith which now is being promoted at the highest levels of the Church. In being blind to this depth, traditional Catholic media, and members of the hierarchy and the Catholic intelligentsia whom they go to for wisdom on this crisis, are wading in the shallows while a tsunami is on the horizon.But we have not yet penetrated to the depths of the present blindness, simply because we have yet to understand its causes.  Why Has God Done This? If we truly believe that God loves the Church as His own Bride, and that Christ truly loves the Church as his own Mystical Body; if we truly believe that Christ is still being faithful to His promise “”Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world” (Mt. 28: 20); and, especially, if we also truly believe in Christ’s words to Peter (and by necessary inference, to his successors in the Papacy) “Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”, then we are faced with what should be the totally obvious question: “Why has God done this to us?” Any serious study of the Church’s history reveals that the Church has traveled a road in constant tension between blessing and curse, renewal and decay, strength and weakness. God’s extraordinary gifts are received at certain periods of this history through saints, great Popes, Church Councils, grace-filled movements among the laity, etc. For a short while a renewal of the Church seems to be accomplished, and then decay rapidly sets in. Corruption of belief and morals set their teeth into the Church’s life, and God no longer seems to answer our prayers. St. James offers a very succinct explanation for this phenomenon: “You seek and receive not; because you ask amiss: that you may consume it on your concupiscences.” (James 4: 3). We tend to think of this as being true of worldly goods and blessings. But it must be even more true of spiritual blessings, all of which are gifts of God – the Church, and all that it teaches and practices, including the particular forms of the Mass and the other sacraments. And, of course, probably the most effective means which God has of either blessing or chastising us through the Church is the Papacy. As St. Gregory the Great is reputed to have said, “Divine justice provides shepherds according to the just deserts of the faithful.” If we take such a statement at all seriously, then there should be no point in the entire history of the Church, as does the present moment and Papacy, when even those who wish to consider themselves faithful Catholics should feel the call of the Holy Spirit to profound self-examination. Such self-examination among those who now consider themselves to be the most faithful of Catholics seems astonishingly absent.In the Gospel of St. John, Our Lord makes the following promise in regard to the Holy Spirit:“But when he, the spirit of Truth, is come, he will teach you all truth. For he shall not speak of himself; but what things soever he shall hear, he shall speak; and the things that are to come he shall shew you.” (John 16:13). It should be clear that it is the will of Our Lord that the Holy Spirit should always be with His Church, guiding and protecting it from invasion by the spirit of Antichrist. The very fact that these graces now seem to be so impotently received and lived in the face of this spirit of Antichrist, emanating from both within and without the Church and bent upon destroying her, should automatically turn us inward seeking the source of the blockage which is producing this impotency. The very fact that the question “Why is God doing this to us?” is not seriously being asked and examined within traditional Catholic circles is in itself the most powerful evidence of a blindness which is now almost universal.*  The “Languor of Nature” “No man can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one, and love the other: or he will sustain the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. (Mt. 6: 24)Recently, in discussing the lukewarmness which has largely characterized the lack of response to the effort Rosary to the Interior: For the Purification of the Church, a close friend offered the following profound observation: “I think that the heart of lukewarmness is the cozy dwelling in double- thinking, generated from avoiding the drive to the end of a thought.”We have already explored this “avoiding the drive to the end of a thought” in relation to both understanding the depths of our present crisis, and also the failure to ask the absolutely vital and obvious question as to why God is doing this to us. This in turn leads to a final question: “Wherein lies that “double-thinking” which immerses us in that fog of lukewarmness which prevents us from possessing the intellectual light necessary to achieve this understanding or ask this question?” The effort which we have entitled Rosary to the Interior: For the Purification of the Church is entirely devoted towards eliciting a united cry from all of us for whatever it takes for Our Lady’s Victory to be accomplished for the Purification of the Church, and in order that the Light of Christ might once again become visible and radiant within His Church. It is in the very nature of such a “single-minded” cry, however, that it must proceed from the depths of personal self-knowledge of our own sinfulness and helplessness.It is the lack of such self-knowledge, and the hypocrisy which is its natural fruit, which prevents such a cry from arising in our hearts because it establishes us in the luxury of being comfortable in saying “They have sinned”, rather than “We have sinned”.This double-thinking in the intellectual realm is rooted in all the violations of the living of the Beatitudes (especially as manifested in possession of, and attachment to, the goods of this world), which is nourished, sustained, and has now entered into an exponential state of growth through the power of money, science and technology. As we have pointed out in our article St. Francis of Assisi: They Pretended to Love You So That They Might Leave You, the betrayal of the great gift of St. Francis and his ideal of poverty (not only as applied very literally to his own Order, but also in its less-strict, but very real, application to Christian civilization as a whole) preceded the betrayal of the philosophy and theology of St. Thomas, and its absolute necessity for confronting the intellectual and scientific errors of the modern world. The profoundly vitiated collective heart of a still apparently Christian civilization, immersed in the world and poisoned in its depths by the betrayal of the Beatitudes of Christ, was the soil in which the darkness of man’s “scientific” ascent to Godhead was cultured, and which now finds its completed formulation in Teilhardian Cosmic Evolutionary Theology.Everything is now saturated and being kept afloat on a sea of money. Even among Traditional and Conservative Catholics, their “work” is almost completely dependent upon the flow of money, and the connections and power which are gained through money – the realms of commercialism, influential contacts, Benefits, Galas, diplomacy, building efforts, and of course right down to that level of power in this world which now seems the most powerful vehicle and weapon upon which Mammon now depends: the Media. And, ironically, we are total amateurs at all this worldly business in comparison to Satan and his minions. We should be able to hear him laughing at such things as “Cruise-Ship Retreats”, all the much-touted Catholic Conferences, an unending array of petitions, “”Open Letters”, and all the efforts of “traditional media giants” to stop this plunge into darkness. All of this comes down to the term which both St. Augustine and St. Thomas used to characterize the primary effect of original sin: the languor of nature. Adam’s Original Sin itself was not such a languor, because the very word itself speaks of a state of disordered nature which was not present in the state of integrity which existed before the Fall. The act of original sin in itself had to therefore consist in a very deliberate act of intellectual pride (the intellectual will) seeking an excellence above man’s nature which detracted from God (“you shall be as Gods, knowing Good and evil”).But it is the “fallen nature” (and its threefold concupiscence), established in man as a consequence of this sin, which constitutes such languor of nature, and which down through history has created the web of material acquisitions, science, technology, and all the complexities of modern civilization which continually, and ever more deeply, lower the minds and hearts of even the “faithful” into this world, and consequently into duplicity, hypocrisy, and their ultimate fruit: lukewarmness and the eventual denial of God. It is this languor of nature, which has produced the pharisaical hypocrisy of traditional Catholics, and which leaves us relatively cozy in identifying the sources of the present crisis in the Church with the beliefs and actions of anyone other than ourselves.It is precisely here where the necessary “end of the thought” is aborted, where duplicity roots us in the comfort of self-righteousness, and we fail to unite as did the Ninevites in a cry to Our Lady for that self-purification which is a pre-requisite for the purification of the whole Church. Lately, our thoughts keep returning to that marvelous scripture in Deut. 6: 4-8:Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole strength. And these words which I command thee this day, shall be in thy heart: And thou shalt tell them to thy children, and thou shalt meditate upon them sitting in thy house, and walking on thy journey, sleeping and rising. And thou shalt bind them as a sign on thy hand, and they shall be and shall move between thy eyes.”The extraordinary thing is that this instruction was given by God long before Christ’s Sacrifice, and the restoration of man to the possibility of sanctifying grace and friendship with God. This speaks to the fact that such purifying fire of desire (the very opposite of double-mindedness and lukewarmness) is something which should be fully natural, and especially present and natural to the human heart in the midst of its fallen state. In other words, just the fact that man (the very light of whose mind and consciousness is a created participation in the Life of Christ) lives in this fallen world should generate the cry which God requires for healing us. And if we look at all the various facets of human intelligence, we should be able to see this naturalness.For instance, we desire perfect happiness, and experience endless sorrows. We conceive of the Infinite, and are fettered in finitude. We conceive of Eternity, and are ravaged by time, which culminates in our subjection to death. We long for Peace, both interior and exterior, and are immersed in conflict and war both within and without. All of this, and much more, should naturally and fully generate that cry to God which purges all lukewarmness and hypocrisy. But we abort our thought, divide the heart, and make God an appendage of a lukewarm or dead faith which, because of self-deceit and the attempt to serve two masters, is not accompanied by the passion of an undivided heart.In other words, the human heart and mind are natural wellsprings of concepts, ideas, and passions which in any person who possesses a “heart of flesh ”should break forth in cries to God for knowledge and deliverance – “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Rom. 7:24).As we have pointed out, There is nothing more clearly evidential of the “half-way”, duplicitous thinking of traditional and conservative Catholics than the apparent total absence of the question “Why is this happening to us?” – “Why is God chastising us like this?” This question should be the totally logical “end-thought” in all the discussions and analysis concerning the present crisis, and yet it is absent. In other words, the traditional Catholic world, while possessing much knowledge of what is wrong “out there”, displays profound deficiency in that interior intelligence necessary for any solution to the present crisis: “For the heart of this people is grown gross, and with their ears they have been dull of hearing, and their eyes they have shut: lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them.” (Mt. 13:15)It has been said that, “The death of martyrs is the seed of Christians”. It can equally be said that “The duplicity of Christians is the seed of heresy, and ultimately of the coming of Antichrist.” It is theoretically possible that everyone in the world could possess the Faith, and yet be dead in charity. Similarly, it is equally possible that we could possess all understanding of the machinations of those both within and without the Church who are bent upon her destruction, and yet be dead in that understanding with the heart which fully acknowledges that these evils have grown and been nourished in our own friendship with this world. And, as insulting and horrific as this may sound to many, it is also theoretically possible that everyone in the whole world could possess and attend the Traditional Latin Mass, and yet be numbered among those whom Our Lord would “vomit out of His mouth” (Apoc. 3;16).  After all, Latin Rite Catholics universally possessed this Mass before Vatican II, and this did not prevent the vast majority of Catholics from passively surrendering to all the banalities and explicit or implicit heresies imposed upon them in the “New-Church”, and the eventual massive slide into Catholic apostasy which we now have with us. We who are directly involved with the Rosary to the Interior: For the Purification of the Church do not consider ourselves as some sort of Remnant, secure in our faith and the promise of eternal salvation. We fear the depths of our own duplicity in trying to live the Catholic Faith in this world. And although we may indeed be free from the gross and mortal sins which now seem common fare, we cannot claim freedom from immersion in the same world that now spins its threefold web of concupiscence at an exponentially increasing rate around all of our hearts and minds.It is the lesson of original sin and its dire consequences that we are all in this together. It is the lesson of Christ’s Redemptive Sacrifice, and His founding of the Church to be the mediator of the graces won through the Cross, that the salvation of each one is intimately connected to all. This is why a united effort in penance and prayer is absolutely central for deliverance from the disaster that is now upon us. And first and foremost, it requires that we begin with “We have sinned”, rather than “They have sinned”. As explained in our Original Proposal , we believe that it is the will of God that this collective purification can only be accomplished in the depths of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and through her Rosary. And we believe that the Feast of the Purification and Presentation on February 2, 2020 is singularly appropriate for this united Cry for Deliverance. It is necessary that in the depths of Our Lady’s merciful Heart each one of us seek our own personal light of purification in order that the Light of Christ might once again radiate forth from His Temple the Church for the conversion of the world. This year the Feast of the Purification and Presentation providentially occurs on a Sunday. All Churches will be open. We ask everyone who sincerely seeks this purification both in their own lives and the life of the Church to approach other Catholics for a united effort in implementing what is in our Proposal. We then ask them to approach their pastors and bishops with the request to implement what is in this Proposal – after Mass, or whenever possible during the day. If this request is refused, and permission is refused to use the Church, we ask that it be done at the entrance to the Church.  If ordered to leave, then we ask that it be done in the public domain (a public sidewalk for instance) as near to the Church as possible. Wherever it can be done, we fully believe that the sincere and united cry of the faithful for deliverance will be blessed by God. No one has the right to suppress such a Cry from the depths of the human soul. We also believe that in order to achieve that integrity of heart and mind necessary in order to passionately desire to participate in such a Nineve-like cry, each one of us must personally be plunged more deeply into the purifying grace and light of understanding which is to be found through an increasingly attentive and non-duplicitous praying of the Rosary, and especially the Hail Mary. This is why, in terms of our own personal purification, and for achieving that singleness of intention towards God which is the source of all true growth in both Catholic intelligence and holiness, we believe our article The Rosary: The Way of Perfection to be the most important of all the articles on this website. We ask that each reader give it very serious attention and consideration._____________________________________ *We fully realize that in asserting that what is now happening within the Church is a Divine chastisement, we are risking accusations of having committed multiple heresies – all the way from claiming that every Pope is directly chosen by God, to denying human freedom and responsibility, and to claiming that God positively wills evil. We flatly deny any such accusations, but do not intend to enter into polemics with anyone. We leave it to the readers to search into the depths of their own minds, hearts, and lives to determine if what has been written above is true.admin | December 10, 2019 at 10:14 pm | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: https://wp.me/p9t9Xu-u6