St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City. (Shutterstock) |  JUL. 3, 2019Analysis: New Vatican Constitution to Centralize Power in State SecretariatThe most dramatic reform proposed in the current draft of Praedicate Evangelium is the effective ending of any curial department’s ability to exercise papal governing authority on a stably delegated basis.Ed Condon/CNA

VATICAN CITY – Last week, Bishop Marcello Semeraro, secretary of the pope’s C6 Council of Cardinal Advisors announced that the group hoped to present Francis with a final draft of a new Vatican constitution in September.

Praedicate Evangelium, as the new governing document for the Roman curia is to be called, completes the reforming work already begun of combining various smaller Vatican departments into a more streamlined structure.

Focus on the forthcoming changes has largely fixed on the perception that a reformed and enlarged Dicastery for Evangelization will be “ranked above” the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, with the change said to imply a shift in priorities for the universal Church.

In fact, a recent draft of Praedicate Evangelium obtained by CNA proposes a far more significant change in the governing structure of the Church, one which represents a consolidation of power in Rome unprecedented in the modern era.

With a single exception, all of the Vatican departments – currently styled as Secretariats, Congregations, or Pontifical Councils, depending on their size and scope – are renamed “dicasteries.” While the reformed Dicastery for the Evangelization is listed first, there is no legal order of precedence or priority attached to it or its work, and all dicasteries are, in the words of the draft text, “juridically equal among themselves.”

The single exception to this new uniform designation is the Secretariat of State, which retains its traditional name and is unquestionably the “first” Vatican department under the new constitution.

The most dramatic reform proposed in the current draft of Praedicate Evangelium is the effective ending of any curial department’s ability to exercise papal governing authority on a stably delegated basis. 

The draft text lays down that a curial department “cannot issue laws or general decrees having the force of law, nor can it deviate from the prescriptions of the universal law” except on a case-by-case basis “approved specifically by the Supreme Pontiff.” It further provides that any “important, rare, and extraordinary affairs” cannot be treated by the prefect of the dicastery unless and until he has cleared the matter with the pope and received his approval.

Legally, this means that the pope must personally approve every authoritative decision to emerge from a curial department – an historic recentralization of Roman power into the person of the pope.

Closely related to the end of curial departments’ ability to exercise the power of governance is another historic proposed reform: that lay people can serve as the head of any dicastery. 

Canon law defines ordination as a necessary qualification for the exercise of the power of governance. Lay people – according to the Code of Canon Law – can “cooperate” in the exercise, but not exercise it in their own right. Removing the stable exercise of delegated governing authority from all dicasteries is a legal necessity, either as cause or effect, for allowing lay prefects to lead a given department.

Many canonists and curial officials who have seen the draft privately warn it could prove a recipe for administrative gridlock.

“Imagine if the American president said that every binding decision taken by an executive department had to cross his desk and receive his personal approval – it is impossible, there is not time, nothing will get done,” one serving curial archbishop told CNA.

Deciding which matters arrive on the papal desk to receive the pope’s time, attention, and approval – and which do not – would, under the new constitution, effectively determine which areas of Church governance Rome chooses to control. Here again, the singular status of the Secretariat of State is underlined.

Unlike a “dicastery,” which can be headed by a lay person, Praedicate Evangeliumprovides that the Secretariat of State must be led by a cardinal, currently Cardinal Pietro Parolin. This department is placed in charge of coordinating the work of the dicasteries and, through meetings with the heads of those departments, “making decisions that will be proposed to the Supreme Pontiff.”

The Secretariat of State’s section for general affairs is also given charge of drafting governing legal documents, including apostolic constitutions, letters of decree, and apostolic letters, and of processing those acts which have been presented for personal papal approval.

“The [new constitution’s] preamble says a lot about collegiality and subsidiarity,” one long-serving curial official told CNA, “but this is just the total centralization of power in the office of the Secretary of State.”

“Nothing can be done without the pope’s approval, and nothing gets to the pope except through [Cardinal Parolin] – it’s the creation of a vice-regency.”

Praedicate Evangelium’s blueprint for the new curia places considerable emphasis on regular meetings among the heads of dicasteries and the need for “collegiality, transparency and concerted action.”

One archbishop, currently serving in a senior curial role said that while these were “noble principles,” the result could be “inefficiency by design.”

“It is an essentially Soviet model. Lots of meetings, lots of discussion, but in the end the Secretary [of State] decides what will happen.”

Asked about the difficulty in securing papal approval for every authoritative decision, the archbishop told CNA “that is the design.”

“The pope cannot decide everything, that is why we have a curia to begin with. This pope above all hates meetings and this was understood [by the drafting committee]. It creates a filter, what it is decided he should approve he can approve, what is not, he will simply not receive.”

Curial officials familiar with the drafting process told CNA that the apparent centralization of admirative power in the Secretariat of State was deliberately counterbalanced with new, expanded recognition of national bishops’ conferences.

In the section describing the reformed Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Praedicate Evangelium refers to the “primary responsibility” of bishops and bishops’ conferences for the particular Churches and makes specific reference to the “genuine doctrinal authority” enjoyed by them.

On measures related to “protecting the faith,” the reformed CDF is to work in close cooperation with local bishops’ conferences, “above all [on] the issue of authorization for teaching in the Church, where the Dicastery will apply the principle of subsidiarity.”

One senior official told CNA that “This idea of episcopal conferences having genuine doctrinal authority is very dangerous. We have seen so much confusion just on Communion for the divorced and remarried, now we say what? The Germans can decide what they like with a vote and that is genuine teaching authority?”

One archbishop given sight of the draft told CNA that the plan amounted to “a blueprint for federalism.” 

“If you want to see one authentic teaching in Germany and another in Poland, this is how you achieve it.”

The document is still in the process of revision. Pope Francis met with the C6 in June to discuss the comments and suggestions received on the draft text, after it was circulated among the presidents of national bishops’ conferences, dicasteries of the Roman Curia, Synods of the Eastern Churches, conferences of major superiors, and select pontifical universities. 

Bishop Semeraro called it “an intense process of listening,” though the feedback has been stinging in some quarters.

Several curial staffers from different departments told CNA that their congregations had returned “pages of suggested revisions,” and expressed deep concerns about the document’s proposed centralization of curial operations and the doctrinal latitude it appeared to give episcopal conferences.

One curial bishop told CNA that “Everyone is talking about the effects for the CDF, and I suppose those are the most dramatic, but this touches everything – the Church’s teaching underpins all parts of ecclesiastical life, liturgy, clerical discipline, how we evangelize. Now, we have a new system designed to create exactly the sort of problems the curia exists to resolve.”

“Everything touching power and money goes to State. Everything else is thrown to the wind.”

It remains to be seen how closely the final version of Praedicate Evangelium will resemble the current draft, and significant changes could well be implemented in the coming months. In the meantime, many are concerned that if Rome becomes unable to speak clearly, it is the Church’s essential mission to preach the Gospel that would suffer.

1. THE INCONVENIENT CONSCIENCE
4. by George Cardinal Pell
6. May 2005

Part of the pleasure in reading John Henry Newman is the huge range of topics he covered and the variety of styles he brought to them. As well as the great philosophical and theological treatises, he left us sermons, essays, poems, letters—a vast treasury that makes anything like systematic exposition difficult. 

Still, among the topics that regularly caught Newman’s attention through the years, conscience ranks high. Nearly every theologian would agree with Newman that conscience is “a connecting principle between the creature and his Creator.” But while some see conscience as God’s invitation to embrace His law as free subjects, others see it as a radical call to personal freedom. Indeed, for many people today, the word “conscience” suggests not law at all, but the freedom to judge by our own personal resources and the right to act as we each think best—a rejection, in other words, of the need for morality and creed; a claim that I should be allowed to live as I choose. 

Of course, this view is often dressed up with the claim that conscience is a special faculty that speaks to us, rather like an oracle, and it may even be elevated to the status of a doctrine: the “primacy of conscience.” But however it is presented, it stands in contrast to the view that conscience is instead simply the mind thinking practically and morally. We think well when we understand moral principles and apply them in clear and reasonable ways; we think badly when we ignore or reinvent moral principles, or apply them in ambiguous and unreasonable ways. “Good conscience,” in this way of understanding, means a good grasp and a good application of moral truth—for it is the truth that remains primary, the truth that is grasped and applied by the practical mind. 

John Henry Newman was well aware of this position, which represents the best of Catholic thinking on the topic (for instance, the thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas in  De Veritate). Newman carefully distinguishes himself from those who equate conscience with integrity, sincerity, or preference. In a passage in the  Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (quoted in the  Catechism of the Catholic Church), he writes: “Conscience is not a long-sighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself; but it is a messenger from Him, Who, both in nature and grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by His representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.” 

This metaphor of “messenger” is key. When we receive messages, we do not make them up or rephrase them in order to make them say what we wish had been said. And thus, if we disagree with the Church’s message so seriously that we cannot follow its terms, we cannot reinvent that message to make it easier or more palatable. Rather, we enter into a period of prayer, study, and enquiry to try to understand the message and to understand why we find ourselves opposed to it. And if the matter that puzzles us is one of a binding Church teaching or a central moral teaching, then this may prove a lifetime’s work. 

In other words, a Catholic conscience cannot accept a settled position against the Church, at least on a central moral teaching. Any difficulty with Church teaching should be not the  end of the matter but the  beginning of a process of conversion, education, and quite possibly repentance. Where a Catholic disagrees with the Church on some serious matter, the response should not be “that’s that—I can’t follow the Church here.” Instead we should kneel and pray that God will lead our weak steps and enlighten our fragile minds, as Newman recommends in his Sermon 17, “The Testimony of Conscience.” 

Of course, this view of conscience seems profoundly counterintuitive to modern readers. For Newman, conscience is a hard, objective thing—a challenge to self, a call to conversion, and a sign of humility. And this sits uncomfortably with those who see conscience as a sign of freedom, and freedom as the right to reject what is unpalatable. 

When we imagine that conscience is primarily a mark of individual autonomy, we have to pay certain costs; among these is the decay of the idea of moral truth—even when that truth is something we agree with. More than twenty years ago I used to teach the rudiments of morality to trainee nurses in a hospital-based Catholic course. Many in the class were hostile to the idea of moral truth, sometimes asserting that moral opinions were entirely relative, a function merely of the culture in which they happened to appear. 

To explain the weakness of such a position I used to ask them whether the British authorities in India were justified in banning the practice of suttee, where a widow was immolated on the funeral pyre of her husband. None of the nurses had any enthusiasm for the practice, but what was extraordinary was the variety of arguments they used to explain their objections—all desperate, convoluted attempts to dodge the general idea of moral truth, to avoid saying that suttee was simply  wrong. 

One master defender of moral truth in our lifetime has been Pope John Paul II. He is also a man learned in modern thought and passionate about freedom and the responsibility that arises from the possession of freedom. And what the pope has aimed at is a path between those who assert moral truth but ignore personal freedom, and those who assert freedom but ignore moral truth. 

More, he has charted this path using coordinates established by the Scholastics, developed by Newman, and confirmed by the Second Vatican Council. The pope argues that in their consciences human persons encounter moral truth, freely embrace it, and personally commit themselves to its enactment. This account (in the pope’s 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor , sections 54-64, for instance) builds upon John Henry Newman’s theory of conscience as man’s free adoption of God’s law. Conscience, in this view, is neither the apprehending of an alien law nor the devising of our own laws. Rather, conscience is the free acceptance of the objective moral law as the basis of all our choices. The formation of a Christian conscience is thus a dignifying and liberating experience; it does not mean a resentful submission to God’s law but a free choosing of that law as our life’s ideal. 

This specifically Catholic view rejects the mistaken doctrine of the primacy of conscience and clearly asserts the primacy of truth. “It is always from the truth that the dignity of conscience derives,” the pope writes. “In the case of the correct conscience, it is a question of the  objective truth received by man; in the case of the erroneous conscience, it is a question of what man, mistakenly,  subjectively considers to be true. It is never acceptable to confuse a ‘subjective’ error about moral good with the ‘objective’ truth rationally proposed to man in virtue of his end, or to make the moral value of an act performed with a true and correct conscience equivalent to the moral value of an act performed by following the judgment of an erroneous conscience.” 

Of course, one might agree with much of this and still reject the strong conclusion; one might say, “Yes, I accept the idea of moral truth. I just reject the particular set of moral truths the Church proposes.” This approach has been tried many times. The endorsement of law as “form” which allows us to reject any determinate “content” and to construct our own content is common to various subjectivists, intuitionists, and Kantians. It is found, for instance, in the still-influential writings of Lawrence Kohlberg. 

For the earlier Kohlberg at least, morality is simply certain rational constraints upon freedom; morality is the content-free requirement of form upon our reason. Kohlberg himself equivocated over whether morality is truly empty of content or gives us a little guidance. It is certainly hard to take seriously the notion of morality as contentless logic—a kind of color-in-the-picture-for-yourself ethics. Anyone in a real-life situation that requires moral strength, honesty, and accuracy would surely be repelled by the advice that “morality has nothing to say about the details of your choice; it’s all up to you.” To say this is to abandon people when they most need and expect guidance. 

Morality matters to all of us. This central fact of human experience is often missed by those who put forward some modern, liberal version of conscience. When approached for moral advice, the reply “just go with your conscience” has the effect of further isolating people, driving them back into themselves just when they have courageously stretched out to find answers. The replacement of Newman’s view of conscience with the liberal version has been a disaster in key areas of human life. 

One place to measure that disaster is in technical thought about moral and religious practice. No one—at least, no Christian—believes conscience simply asserts the first thing that comes into our heads. Conscience looks for real answers to our questions, and where can it look except to the truth? But then the value of conscience surely lies not in conscience itself but in the truth to which conscience looks for answers. It is the truth that is primary, and it is from the truth that conscience takes its value—for the bare fact that something is  my private belief has no moral significance whatsoever. 

So why would anyone try to oppose conscience to objective truth? Part of the answer lies in a distorted attitude towards the virtue of tolerance. “Tolerance” is often something of a weasel word. Of course, all human beings should tolerate the foibles and weaknesses of their fellows. But by “tolerance” many now mean “never judging.” And this is a much more debatable proposition. In fact, believers in tolerance themselves usually acknowledge unspoken limits. Tolerance rarely means refraining from judging racists, or sexists, or pedophiles, or political cheats—naturally enough: these are morally wrong and should be judged so. But the contemporary love of tolerance is severely limited. In effect, the only things we must be tolerant of are people’s sexual choices, or perhaps their choices about such life issues as abortion or euthanasia. 

Why do people strain to accommodate absolute sexual freedom as a matter of conscience? Why does no one plead for the right to racism or sexism as a matter of conscience? Could it be because the liberal concept of conscience has been specially formulated in order to facilitate the sexual indiscipline that our culture upholds? 

Much of the debate over conscience in Catholic circles focuses on the possibility of a conscience set against the Church’s teaching. This seems to me a peculiar notion. For a start, it seems to mean that dissenters believe that following the Church on, say, contraception or same-sex relationships, would actually give them a guilty conscience. Yet it seems clear that most dissenters do not fear guilt if they obey the Church. What they fear is precisely the frustration of their unsatisfied desires. 

There are many motivations for believing in a conscience against the Church. For example, people often project their personal dilemmas onto external bodies. So someone reared a Catholic might say, “I have a problem with the Church,” when his real problem is a contradiction within himself. In truth, most real-life dilemmas are not between the inner person and external authority but between competing desires and reasons that the person has trouble reconciling. As a way of sidestepping the terrible tension a moral dilemma can create, people may identify one side of the dilemma with their own conscience and the other with an external power such as the Church. 

It hardly needs saying that this may not be the most accurate way to represent our situation. What conscience actually asks of us is that we make our best moral effort. This is difficult; it has costs and it may well require us to give up what we most want. An informed conscience does not mean finishing up with the judgment that happens to be most convenient or most gratifying to our immediate desires. In fact, when our judgments are highly convenient and gratifying, this is likely a sign that they are the product not of conscience but of wishful thinking. It is unusual in our time to hear or read someone declare that conscience tells them to change their strongest beliefs and sacrifice their most pressing desires. Yet why should conscience always tell us what we want to hear? Why should it never contradict us? 

“Perhaps it can,” one might respond, “but surely it can also contradict the Church.” Catholics should not be content when they find themselves at odds with the Church; we cannot simply “agree to disagree” with the Magisterium, despite the popularity in some quarters of “loyal dissent.” A troubled conscience is the  beginning—the beginning of an encounter with the teaching that will require patience, humility, time, self-scrutiny, conversion. 

If individual conscience has primacy—if it is the  end of each story—then we are bound to have clashes that are utterly irresolvable. Take a Catholic supporter of abortion and euthanasia whose conscience tells him he has the right to receive Holy Communion. Add a priest whose conscience tells him to refuse such Communion. How shall we decide between them if conscience is merely the inner oracle that admits no contradiction? 

Some will reject the need for patience and conversion in such circumstances. They will speak of the Church’s teaching as if it were something through which they could pick for acceptable items. Once again, this construes the moral life as a matter of personal taste. But no person can guide his conduct purely by taste—for the simple reason that there are no infallible tastes. Everyone is affected by sin. Even non-believers must accept the human propensity to self-deceit, selfishness, and evil. We cannot rely on our tastes in moral matters because we are all vulnerable to acquiring the taste for immorality and egoism. This means that while we should follow a well-formed conscience, a well-formed conscience is hard to achieve. And if we suspect—as surely we all sometimes must—that our conscience is under-formed or malformed in some area, then we should follow a reliable authority until such time as we can correct our consciences. And for Catholics, the most reliable authority is the Church. 

I suspect that much of the contemporary debate over conscience is driven by a pseudo-Christian impulse towards individual autonomy. Where the world once valued autonomy as the recognition that we are bound by moral laws, it now understands autonomy as the existential liberty to compose our lives, and even reality, for ourselves. It is as though modern and postmodern man is staging a rerun of the primeval fault of our first parents. We stand on the brink, seeking a way forward, accepting no moral guidance in advance of the choice. Yet, as with the first parents, moral guidance is there. A law has been given, and the choice we are faced with is the ancient one: Do I freely obey, or disobey? 

False views of conscience cause havoc not only in the moral life. They have also had an enormous impact on the practice of the faith. In many countries the understanding and practice of the Sacrament of Penance has sadly declined. If people believe in a conscience against Church teaching, then their consciousness of sin will almost certainly decrease. This generally happens in two stages: First, certain sins are reclassified as “not sinful for me, because they don’t offend my conscience”; second, a vagueness about the nature and limits of personal conscience lessens the overall sense of sin’s seriousness. 

The result is that there is less to confess and to be contrite about. Indeed, the whole idea of confession and contrition can be rationalized as a relic of the “old days” before we discovered the primacy of conscience. And so fewer people turn to the Sacrament of Penance as a normal part of their lives. The pardon and peace offered in the encounter with Christ are felt to be unnecessary. Many have the sense that  if there is still such a thing as sin, it is not too serious, and feeling sad about one’s sins, particularly during the  Confiteor at Mass, is sufficient for forgiveness. 

With the decline in confession we have also seen a decline in the understanding and discipline of the Sacrament of Holy Communion. Some people believe that the only condition for receiving Holy Communion is that one be present at Mass. That those who go to Communion should be in full communion with the pope, reconciled with their brothers and sisters, and in a state of grace—such an idea would seem strange to many Catholics today. Many would be surprised by the suggestion, let alone the requirement, that they should be regular churchgoers before receiving Communion at, for example, Christmas or a family funeral. As the Sacrament of Penance becomes less visible, there is a danger that people will misunderstand the connection between repentance and Communion—a danger that they will assume that the unrepentant sinner is as welcome at the altar as the repentant sinner. 

Of course, our Lord wants everyone to be in church, and He wants all sinners to repent and to return to Him in Holy Communion. But we must recall that in approaching the altar we receive our Lord, body and blood, soul and divinity. To receive Christ whole and entire while rejecting “in conscience” parts of his Church’s solemn teaching is to contradict the truth about one’s relationship to the Church. 

As mistaken views of conscience weaken our understanding of penance and Communion, they begin to cause wider confusion about other sacraments. If morality is determined purely by conscience, then it becomes more difficult to accept baptism as the bringing about of an objective change that is necessary because of original sin. Instead, baptism will be understood as some sort of naming ceremony—or as an entry-into-the-community ceremony. 

I suspect a belief in the primacy of conscience has had some even deeper effects on Catholic life and identity. Any religion develops a sense of belonging among its adherents. This is partly the consolation of believing we have seen some of the truth concerning our origins and our destinies, and partly the knowledge of belonging to an ancient tradition and a geographically extended community. Believers know where they are situated within time and space; their lives have meaning because of their beliefs about their origin and their destiny. This is particularly so for Christi ans. Christianity is historical both because of its longevity and because we believe God Himself entered into history in the Incarnation. Also, Christianity is perhaps the only truly universal religion: it embraces every part of the earth and is compatible with every true culture. 

But now this sense of belonging has been diminished by the elevation of conscience to moral primacy. If we believe we should live not by the objective truths safeguarded by the Church but by our own impulses and tastes as they are disclosed to us by conscience, we reject, or at least downplay, the community and the tradition. We are left vulnerable to the temptations of egotism and self-deception. We are shut off from the sense of being part of a sacred society that is worldwide, ancient, and guaranteed by Christ to teach the truth. 

Primacy of conscience has not been the sole cause of this change, but it is like a prism through which the many confused beliefs of the modern world are filtered. Suspicion of religion and distaste for moral norms, the refusal to accept any doctrine that is personally inconvenient, religious indifference and sexual indiscipline—all of these are reflected in the modern dogma of the primacy of conscience. 

Is it too much to suggest that John Henry Newman would have been disappointed by the uses to which his work on Christian conscience has been put? On many occasions Newman explained that true conscience recognizes an external Being, who obliges us to perform certain actions and avoid others. The mind is carried beyond itself to the idea of a future tribunal, where reward and punishment will be assigned. From our inadequacies we envision the need for redemption and atonement. 

Newman distinguishes this true conscience from obedience to the law of the land or to the principle of expediency. True conscience will often be felt as an inconvenience: it acts as a brake upon our vanities and disordered desires. Newman believes that conscience, understood in this way, is the foundation of religion—indeed of the fundamental doctrine of theism: “Conscience too teaches us not only that God is, but what He is.” 

For some decades after the Second Vatican Council, the more popular theologians overestimated, in their enthusiasm for  aggiornamento, the ability of Catholic culture to survive outside the ghettos that were rapidly being abandoned and dismantled. Those same theologians typically underestimated the malignancy of many streams of thought in the contemporary West. This naïveté, this artless simplicity, still survives among older Catholics, but it has almost vanished among younger committed Catholics. 

Nonetheless, a false notion of conscience still carries many away from Catholic practice and Catholic faith. This is the obverse of Newman’s claim that true conscience helps us to recognize the one true God. A debased notion of conscience—a barely concealed enthusiasm for autonomy disguised as an appeal to the primacy of conscience—weakens our sense of obligation, damages our purity of heart, and makes it harder to see God. 

BLOGS |  JUL. 7, 2019Trump Just Gave a Shoutout to Sister Deirdre Byrne. Who is She?Three Uniforms: A Surgeon’s Scrubs, a Soldier’s Camouflage, and Now, a Sister’s HabitKathy Schiffer

One of the heartwarming features of President Trump’s address at the “Salute to America” July 4 was his tributes to citizens, past and present, who by their service have helped to make America a better place. He praised Clara Barton, who founded the American Red Cross in 1881. He thanked Tina “Angel” Belcher, known as “Ms. Angel” to the people she serves, for generously volunteering during Hurricane Michael and in the years that followed. He praised “the heroes that serve our communities,” including “firefighters, first responders, police, sheriffs, ICE, Border Patrol, and the brave men and women of law enforcement.”

But the name that caught my attention was Sister Deirdre Byrne. Sister Deirdre (or “Dede,” as she is called by her friends) is a medical doctor whose long career has been marked by extraordinary service. She served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, in active duty in Afghanistan and later as a reservist, eventually rising to the rank of colonel. She served for 13 months in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. As a missionary surgeon, she devoted herself to helping the sick in Kenya, Haiti, Sudan and Iraq.

Sometimes her medical skills opened doors for her to meet Catholic leaders who helped to influence her vocation. When Cardinal James Hickey, Archbishop of Washington, had open-heart surgery in 1996, it was Deirdre who cared for him during his post-op period. And in 1997, as a senior resident, she delivered medical care to Mother Teresa during the missionary’s five-day visit to Washington, D.C.

Sister Deirdre’s accomplishments don’t end there. As a young doctor in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, after the planes flew into the World Trade Center, she and her friend made their way to Ground Zero, then spent the next two days delivering supplies and support to firefighters.

She was board certified in family medicine and general surgery. She has earned the title of Fellow in the American College of Surgeons.

A Call to Serve in Another Way

But while serving as a medical officer was rewarding, Deirdre felt called to serve God in yet another way. After a period of discernment, she entered the Little Workers of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, a traditional religious order whose life is centered on prayer and Eucharistic adoration. Founded in Italy, the order attracts teachers and health care professionals to their mission of service. Sister Deirdre had found her way home! She entered the community in 2002 and professed her first vows in 2004.

But during those years, the U.S. military again called on her to help in the U.S. and Afghanistan. “I had one foot in the religious life and one foot in with Uncle Sam,” she told the Georgetown Medicine Magazine. She finally retired from the U.S. military in 2009, and two years later, she professed her final vows.

The President’s Praise for Sister Deirdre’s Service

Sister Deirdre talked with the Register about the experience of attending the “Salute to America” at the Lincoln Memorial. “I don’t know how I was selected,” she admitted. “The President already had this idea of who he wanted to honor.” She speculated that President Trump may have learned about her service through someone who knew her youngest brother, Fr. Bill Byrne, a Catholic priest in the Archdiocese of Washington.

She insisted that despite the President’s kind words, she wasn’t the real hero. “I was sitting around some real heroes!” she said. Among the honorees seated near Sister Deirdre in the stands was an older man who received a medal for his heroism in Japan, a Navy Seal who rescued a doctor in Afghanistan, a serviceman who had been involved in the bombing at Fallujah, Iraq. “They are the people I get to help take care of,” she said. She is able to sleep at night because they are not sleeping at night – they are on watch, looking out for the bad guys.

Asked what she does now, Sister Deirdre explained, “I am a general surgeon. I do free surgery for the poor and refugees.” She works through Sibley Hospital, a nonprofit hospital (managed by Johns Hopkins) in the Palisades neighborhood of Washington, D.C. In the District of Columbia, hospitals are required by law to perform a certain number of surgeries for uninsured and low-income patients, but in the wealthy community in which the hospital is located, there are few homeless or indigent patients. Sibley Hospital turned to the Little Workers of the Sacred Hearts, inviting them to perform surgery in the hospital at no cost; so the Sisters have been able to offer free or low-cost services to indigent patients.

Sister Deirdre, now over 60, has had to simplify her schedule to balance her responsibilities. In her younger years, she performed a wide range of surgeries, but today she has additional commitments as head of the household of religious, and so she restricts her medical work to outpatient surgeries (gall bladder, hernia, and sometimes thyroid surgeries). In years past, she served with the U.S. Military in Sudan; but that requires a two-month commitment, and while she still travels overseas two or three times a year, she helps instead in Haiti. She is a board member of Archangel Airborne, a nonprofit humanitarian special operations organization that brings together nurses, doctors and airline pilots to serve men, women and children living in conditions of extreme poverty and situations of disaster, social injustice and oppression.

Asked if she had a message for readers of the National Catholic Register, Sister Deirdre quoted what Mother Teresa had once told her: “Keep your eyes on the Cross.”

“In every way,” said Sister Deirdre, “and in every part of your life, embrace all that comes your way and embrace Our Lord on the Cross.” She shared her personal mantra, which is especially relevant for young people: Life is not as complicated as I think it is. We have only two goals:

1. To do all we can to keep in the state of grace. As Catholics, that means participating in confession, Holy Communion and, if possible, adoration.
2. Bring as many with you as you can. That means telling the truth to people, even when it’s difficult.

“So when I am in the clinic with a patient who cohabits or who uses contraception,” she explained, “I try to talk honestly with that person about God’s will.” Sister Deirdre tries to be positive in her conversations with her patients, but she will often remind a person before surgery that he or she is about to undergo anesthesia – and that while they expect a full recovery, there is a small chance of death, and a chance that the patient will find himself or herself standing before God. “You ought to reconsider your life,” she warns, “as far as those habits.” Her patients, she reports, tend to take her admonition and are not offended. “I’m not saying that because I’m judging,” she explains, “I am saying that because I love them.”

Saving the Unborn and Their Mothers

Another area in which Sister Deirdre has enjoyed success in her medical clinic is with abortion reversal. She helps women who have taken the abortion pill, but who regret that action. If they come to her within 72 hours of taking the pill, she can take action to reverse the pill’s trajectory and potentially save the life of the developing child. Sister Deirdre reports that she has an ultrasound machine in her convent, and that using available medical technology, they are able to save about 50% of the babies whose mothers come to the clinic for help in reversing the abortion. Sister Deirdre is optimistic as she discusses her team’s efforts, quoting Mother Teresa who said simply, “One baby at a time.”

Sister Deirdre explained that she tries to comfort the pregnant women, assuring them that regardless of the outcome as the clinic attempts to save their child’s life, Jesus is very pleased with what they are doing now. “No matter what happens,” she says, “if you baby dies or if your baby survives,” Christ is pleased with the attempt to save the child.

Often, patients who are expecting have visited Planned Parenthood, where they have been told that the pregnancy is “just a clump of cells.” They’re told that “You’re black, you’re unmarried, you need the money. You need to kill your baby.” It’s not unusual, Sister Deirdre said, for a woman to tell her that she walked into the Planned Parenthood office pro-choice and left pro-life, because of the unkind treatment she received there.

Phil Lawler

OPINIONThu Jul 4, 2019 – 6:44 pm EST

Our first front in the fight against LGBT propaganda is inside the Church

 Abortion, Barack Obama, Bishops, Catholic, James Martin, John Stowe, Joseph Sciambra, Lgbtq, Pride Masses, Pride Month, Priests, Transgenderism

July 4, 2019 (Catholic Culture) — “Pride Month” has come to an end. And for the first two days of July, the first readings at Mass told the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I’d call that a coincidence — if I believed in coincidences.

Just after the middle of the month, Joseph Sciambra posted a very provocative comment on his Facebook page. Sciambra knows whereof he speaks; having once been caught up in the homosexual underworld, since experiencing a conversion he has made it his special mission to reach out to homosexuals, helping to heal their wounds. And they are wounded. The grotesque excesses on display at “Gay Pride” events are evidence that these people need help. Sciambra observes:

“But there is a far greater evil (than any ‘Pride’ Parade) that goes largely unchecked and mostly unchallenged in the Catholic Church: the ongoing problem of priests and prelates and their lay underlings who openly disseminate their own spin on LGBT propaganda. What makes their actions grossly evil — is that they do so in the name of God.”

Building on Sciambra’s argument, let me suggest that when Catholics complain about the “Pride” activists, they are aiming at the wrong target. Not because the complaints are unjustified — they are not — but because we have a more pressing problem on our hands. Before we lament what is happening on the city streets, let’s address what is happening in our own churches. We Catholics cannot restore sanity to society until we have restored integrity in our Church. We cannot continue fighting a two-front war.

In Hoboken, New Jersey, a Catholic parish capped the month with a “Pride Mass,” encouraging members of the congregation to join the parade in New York. In Lexington, Kentucky, Bishop John Stowe offered a “celebration of Pride” prayer card, featuring a crucifix bathed in rainbow-colored light. How can we expect to gain a hearing for Catholic moral teachings, when the Church issues such confusing messages?

Unfortunately, those examples in Hoboken and Lexington can no longer be considered exceptional. If you think your own diocese is free of such problems, you should probably think again. Are there one or two parishes that welcome and encourage LGBT activists? Has Father James Martin come to speak to a parish or college group? Are there gay-straight alliances in parochial schools? If so, then you should address that situation before you begin to worry about the secular activists. We must speak with clarity. We must show unity in support of Christian morality. We must display the integrity that comes only when we practice what we preach.

Liberal Catholics scoff at bishops and priests — yes, and internet pundits — who they dismiss as “culture warriors.” But that characterization begs the question. Is there a culture war going on: a battle for the soul of our society? If you answer that question with a No, I probably can’t convince you otherwise. But if you say Yes, then don’t criticize the “culture warrior” Catholics. On the contrary, you should criticize those who do not earn that sobriquet.

The battle is real, and the conflict is escalating. As a presidential candidate, just a bit more than a decade ago, Barack Obama opposed legal recognition of same-sex “marriage.” Today, that stand would disqualify him as a Democratic candidate. A decade ago, a frat boy might have earned guffaws from his classmates by suggesting (in jest) that biological men should have legal access to abortion; this year, a Democratic presidential hopeful made that point in all seriousness.

And while the sexual revolutionaries continue to rack up victories, the middle ground is shrinking. Anyone who dares to oppose the LGBT agenda is subject to public denunciation for “hate speech,” perhaps barred from social media, or even “doxed” and harassed at home.

“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,” wrote Yeats in what is probably his most-quoted line. Look down just a couple of lines in that poem (“The Second Coming”) and the Irish poet seems to be speaking of our own time:

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

We adults will survive these culture wars, one way or another. But think of the children; think of “ceremony of innocence.” We owe it to our children to preserve their innocence, to preserve a culture in which they can find stability, serenity, and strength.

Do you want to know why I am a culture warrior? The Left will tell you that I’m consumed by fear. In a way, that is true. I am afraid that if I remain silent, I shall have no defense when I am asked, “What did you do during the culture wars, Grandpa?”

Don’t ask whether or not there is a war going on: a war for the soul of our society, a war for the integrity of our Church. There is. The right question to ask — first of yourself, then of your pastor and your bishop and your Catholic friends — is: Which side are you on?

Reprinted with permission from Catholic Culture.

JULY 3, 2019

Katherine Eban on Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry 

by RUSSELL MOKHIBER
Katherine Eban would like to write about something other than the pharmaceutical industry.

But she just can’t let go.

“I keep on trying to stop writing about pharmaceuticals,” Eban told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “In many ways, it’s like covering organized crime. There is so much money, so much greed, such a profit motive, that the stories keep coming. I will do my best to not write about this industry anymore. But I somehow feel that this industry may have other plans for me.”

Eban is out with her latest, Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Industry (HarperCollins, 2019).

In it, we learn some basics: Generics comprise nearly 90 percent of the drug supply in the United States and over 40 percent of those generics are made in India. In addition, nearly 80 percent of the active ingredients in all drugs, whether brand name or generic, as well as virtually all antibiotics taken in the United States, are made overseas.

If the book were to be made into a movie, there would be two central characters – Peter Baker and Dinesh Thakur.

Baker is a former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspector assigned to inspect overseas drug manufacturers.

After inspecting these overseas plants, he comes to a startling conclusion – we can’t trust any of these drugs coming in from overseas.

“Baker and a number of other inspectors who are inside these plants day in and day out will not take the drugs manufactured in these plants because they don’t think they are safe,” Eban said.

But it is affecting all active ingredients. Is he saying – I don’t take any drugs?

“He is not saying that. Here is the part of it which is essentially impossible to quantify. We are all at the mercy of the vigilance of the company making the finished dose. Companies whether they are brand or generic, they are buying up these active ingredients. They are required to test those active ingredients and insure their quality before they put them into a finished drug. We are relying on the vigilance of the companies that are inspecting their suppliers, testing their materials and presumably running a clean ship in their own manufacturing plants.”

“What Peter Baker is saying is that he has less confidence in companies he inspected – these low cost manufacturers overseas – and less confidence in their commitment to patient safety.”

“Peter Baker was a young FDA investigator who volunteered to relocate to India and inspect Indian drug plants that had been either approved or were waiting approval by the FDA –  to export their drugs into the United States.”

“These companies have to generate data based on the tests they are doing on these drugs. And that data can be about the impurities in the drugs, about the bioequivalence in patients, about their dissolution and stability. The data they are generating is fundamental to the question of the drug’s quality.”

“All of the data has to be transparently generated and maintained and made available to regulators. You can’t have any secret data in a compliant manufacturing plant. Instead of just asking for documents and getting printouts, Peter Baker started looking in the computer systems of these plants. And once he did that, he began to see that the plants were running hidden laboratory operations that were based on pre-testing drugs in offline laboratory equipment. He was getting a sense of whether they would pass or fail specifications. And then they would figure out how to manipulate those tests and move the testing to the ‘transparent’ system that the FDA was going to look at. That’s how he discovered widespread data fraud in these plants.”

“Some of the ways that these drugs fail specifications is that they had far higher impurities than are permitted. And what he found was that the plants either failed to inspect or investigate these impurities, which they are required to do, or somehow manipulated the testing data so that the impurities didn’t show up.”

“The fraud that he found was aimed at taking either failing or borderline drugs and making them pass with data that would be submitted to the FDA for approval or for continued approval.”

“I’ve been using the word widespread. Over the course of five years, he inspected 86 plants in India or China. And he found some element of data fraud or data deceptive manufacturing practices in four fifths of those plants.”

“Peter Baker ended up leaving the FDA in March.”

One of the key points in your book is that FDA inspectors show up at plants in the United States unannounced. Overseas, they show up at a scheduled time.

“There is no FDA rule that says they have to give advance notice to overseas plants. The FDA has decided to do this because they are confronting complex logistics overseas. They have said they want to make sure that the right people are at the facility when they show up and they send people over. Because of globalization, overnight the FDA became a global agency. They really are just a domestic regulatory agency. They have struggled to think through their policies and how they should function overseas. They basically decided that the easiest thing to do or best thing to do was to announce these inspections in advance. “

“But people I have interviewed and spoken with and from what I have observed, that allows companies to stage these inspections.”

If there is widespread fraud, you would suspect that there would be victims, that people would be getting hurt by drug impurities or by drugs that don’t work.

“And they are. Just now, millions of Americans have had their blood pressure drugs recalled because of toxic impurities in the active ingredients that were manufactured in India and China. The impurity is a carcinogen that is used in the production of liquid rocket fuel. And there have been unacceptably high levels in Valsartan and Losartan, which are two generic blood pressure medications. There are massive recalls of this drug.”

Peter Baker is one hero of your book. The other is Dinesh Thakur.

“Dinesh Thakur was a young engineer who worked for Bristol Myers Squibb in New Jersey. He was recruited to go to Ranbaxy. He moved his whole family back to India, where he was originally from, with the thought that he would be doing something good for the development of his native country. He got to Ranbaxy and found chaos and standards that were lower than what he would expect for a multinational company. He interpreted that his services were needed there. His team at Ranbaxy was trying to map all the data in the company’s quickly expanding global portfolio. He had been there for about a year when his boss flagged his concerns about the quality of the company’s data and asked him to take his team and do a company wide retrospective on the quality of the data that had been submitted to regulators around the world. He wanted to know — was the data real, was it accurate?”

“As Thakur and his team dug into this assignment, they uncovered Ranbaxy’s secret. The company had fabricated the data it had submitted to regulators for more than 200 drug products in more than 40 countries around the world. Sometimes they had just been deceptive in falsifying data by using data from one country to submit to regulators in another. For other countries, they just invented all the data — wholesale invention of data.”

“Thakur’s boss presented these findings to a subcommittee of the board of directors who just proposed that they bury the information. Thakur’s boss ended up leaving the company. Thakur himself was forced out. He couldn’t let it go because he was so concerned about the welfare of patients around the world. He ended up becoming a whistleblower.”

And he sued under the False Claims Act. What was Thakur’s take on the False Claims Act settlement?

“I think he got about $48 million.”

And what was the result of the criminal prosecution?

“On one level it was highly successful. Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to seven felonies. The company doesn’t exist anymore today. But one of the big problems with the prosecution is that no individuals were held accountable. Many of the executives at Ranbaxy who were complicit in this ended up fanning out throughout the generic drug industry. There is a question about what was actually accomplished.”

“If Thakur had not blown the whistle, everything we know today about the fabrications within the generic drug industry would still be under wraps.”

Are you saying you would not have been able to write your book had Thakur not come forward?

“For certain I would not have been able to write this book. I wouldn’t have gotten into the story of it.”

Where is Thakur now?

“He goes back and forth between the United States and India. He has a foundation that he runs. He is an activist. He is trying to overhaul the quality of drug manufacturing in India, which is a difficult project. He has brought lawsuits against the Indian regulatory system to try to improve drug quality. He is out there fighting for patients.”

[For the complete q/a format Interview with Katherine Eban, see 33 Corporate Crime Reporter 25(11), June 24, 2019, print edition only. ]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/07/03/katherine-eban-on-corporate-crime-in-the-pharmaceutical-industry/
More articles by:RUSSELL MOKHIBER

Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter..

Dorothy Cummings McLeanFollow Dorothy

NEWSCATHOLIC CHURCHThu Jul 4, 2019 – 3:57 pm EST

No evidence Pope Benedict said ‘the Pope is one; it is Francis’

 Catholic, Corriere Della Sera, Massimo Franco, Pope Benedict, Pope Francis

ROME, Italy, July 4, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) ― Several media outlets around the world have reported that Benedict XVI asserted in a recent interview that Pope Francis “is the one pope,” but there is no evidence for this in the actual interview. 

Thanks to reader Fr. Alfredo Morselli, LifeSiteNews has obtained a PDF of Massimo Franco’s interview with Benedict XVI for the Corriere della Sera’s Sunday supplement, “Sette [7]” magazine.

The interview, which first appeared in the print edition of the magazine on June 30, is also available online. 

Although articles about the interview, including one produced by the Catholic News Agency, stated that the Pope Emeritus had said in this interview that “the Pope is one; it is Francis,” evidence cannot be found in the interview itself. LifeSiteNews published a report on this matter on June 29 drawing on material from the Catholic News Agency report.  

The actual paragraph in which the phrases can be found does not seem to be a direct quotation from Benedict XVI but a suggestion by the interviewer of what the Pope Emeritus says to Francis’ critics. 

Found on page 28, the paragraph has been recently translated for LifeSiteNews by Diane Montagna. Purporting to describe the six years of Benedict’s retirement in Vatican City, Franco wrote: 

“When the history of these hidden years in Mater Ecclesia is written, it must not leave out the confidential visits from cardinals and bishops who knocked at the door looking for reassurance and voiced their criticisms and perplexity about the current pontificate. And one will discover how much was done to avoid lacerations. Bergoglio’s adversaries, who are often conservatives desperately searching for a word from Benedict that sounds like a criticism of Bergoglio, have invariably heard the response that ‘the Pope is one, it is Francis.’”

A trusted source told LifeSiteNews yesterday that Franco is refusing to confirm that the Pope Emeritus really did say those words. 

In April 2019, following Benedict’s surprise statement about the clerical sex abuse crisis, Cardinal Gerhardt Müller made an assertion very close to the one Franco claimed for Benedict. Müller, a former prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said that it was not possible for a “true Catholic” to oppose Benedict XVI and Francis. 

“I must refuse absolutely this false game of opposing the two people: we have now only one Pope who is Francis, and Benedict is not the pope anymore,” the Cardinaltold television interviewer Fabio Marchese Ragona on April 13, 2019 (at 13:24).  

The Corriere della Sera ran an advertising campaign for Franco’s interview with Benedict XVI prior to its publication in Sette magazine. However, in reality, expectations were dashed as Franco provided very little by way of direct quotations from the retired pontiff. It is unclear from the text that Benedict knew that he was participating in an interview; the pontiff’s most revelatory statement is that he prefers Italian holidays to Italian politics. Most of the article describes the visual details the journalist noticed in his outdoor meeting with Benedict, the retired pontiff’s day-to-day life, and Benedict’s amusement when given a cartoon of himself by cartoonist Emilio Giannelli, whom Franco said accompanied him to the interview.

On June 27, the Italian version of Vatican News, anticipating Franco’s interview, seemed to suggest that the Pope Emeritus had said “the pope is one, Francis” to the Corriere della Sera reporter.  

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò

NEWSCATHOLIC CHURCH, HOMOSEXUALITYWed Jul 3, 2019 – 8:26 pm EST

LIFESITE NEWS

New Viganò testimony: Vatican covered up allegations of sexual abuse of Pope’s altar boys

 André Dupuy, Cardinal Angelo Comastri, Carlo Maria Viganò, Carlo Vigano, Catholic, Edgar Peña Parra, Francesco Coccopalmerio, Gabriele Martinelli, Gastón Guisandes López, Kamil Jarzembowski, Pietro Parolin, Pope Francis, Sex Abuse Crisis In Catholic Church, Vatican Cover-Up

July 3, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Editor’s Note: Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s interview with the Washington Post, published June 10, contained an answer that the Post decided to expurgate from the interview. This answer contained important information regarding unaddressed accusations of sex abuse against a high official of the Holy See, as well as the coverup of a former seminarian, now a priest, accused of the sexual abuse of pre-seminarian adolescents who acted as the Pope’s altar boys. The full text of Viganò’s unpublished answers to the Washington Post follows. The text has been slightly modified to include capitalizations normally used in English. The name of one individual has been removed by LifeSite because LifeSite was unable to find sufficient support for the accusation against him at this point.

I.b.  Do you see any signs that the Vatican, under Pope Francis, is taking proper steps to address the serious issues of abuse? If not, what is missing?

The signs I see are truly ominous.  Not only is Pope Francis doing close to nothing to punish those who have committed abuse, he is doing absolutely nothing to expose and bring to justice those who have, for decades, facilitated and covered up the abusers.  Just to cite one example:  Cardinal Wuerl, who covered up the abuses of McCarrick and others for decades, and whose repeated and blatant lies have been made manifest to everyone who has been paying attention (for those who have not been paying attention, see washingtonpost.com/opinions/cardinal-wuerl-knew-about-theodore-mccarrick-and-he-lied-about-it), had to resign in disgrace due to popular outrage. Yet, in accepting his resignation, Pope Francis praised him for his “nobility.”  What credibility has the pope left after this kind of statement?

But such behavior is by no means the worst.  Going back to the summit and its focus on the abuse of minors, I now wish to bring to your attention two recent and truly horrifying cases involving allegations of offenses against minors during Pope Francis’ tenure.  The pope and many prelates in the Curia are well aware of these allegations, but in neither case was an open and thorough investigation permitted. An objective observer cannot help but suspect that horrible deeds are being covered up.

1.  The first is said to have occurred inside the very walls of the Vatican, at the Pre-Seminary Pius X, which is located just a short walk from the Domus Sanctae Marthae, where Pope Francis lives.  That seminary trains minors who serve as altar boys in St. Peter’s Basilica and at papal ceremonies.

One of the seminarians, Kamil Jarzembowski, a roommate of one of the victims, claims to have witnessed dozens of incidents of sexual aggression.  Along with two other seminarians, he denounced the aggressor, first in person to his pre-seminary superiors, then in writing to cardinals, and finally in 2014, again in writing, to Pope Francis himself. One of the victims was a boy, allegedly abused for five consecutive years, starting at age 13. The alleged aggressor was a 21-year- old seminarian, Gabriele Martinelli.

That pre-seminary is under the responsibility of the diocese of Como, and is run by the Don Folci Association.  A preliminary investigation was entrusted to the judicial vicar of Como, don Andrea Stabellini, who found elements of evidence that warranted further investigation. I received firsthand information indicating that his superiors prohibited his continuing the investigation.  He can testify for himself, and I urge you to go and interview him.  I pray that he will find the courage to share with you what he so courageously shared with me.

Along with the above, I learned how the authorities of the Holy See dealt with this case.  After evidence was collected by Don Stabellini, the case was immediately covered up by the then-bishop of Como, Diego Coletti, together with Cardinal Angelo Comastri, Vicar General of Pope Francis for Vatican City.  In addition, Cardinal Coccopalmerio, then president of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, who was consulted by Don Stabellini, strongly admonished him to stop the investigation.

You might wonder how this horrible case was closed.  The Bishop of Como removed Don Stabellini from the post of Judicial Vicar; the whistleblower, the seminarian Kamil Jarzembowski, was expelled from the seminary; the two fellow seminarians who had joined him in the denunciation left the seminary; and the alleged abuser, Gabriele Martinelli, was ordained priest in July 2017.  All this happened within the Vatican walls, and not a word of it came out during the summit.

The summit was therefore terribly disappointing, for it is hypocrisy to condemn abuses against minors and claim to sympathize with the victims while refusing to face up to the facts honestly. A spiritual revitalization of the clergy is most urgent, but it will ultimately be ineffectual if there is no willingness to address the real problem.

2.  The second case involves Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, whom Pope Francis has chosen to be the new Substitute at the Secretariat of State, making him the third most powerful person in the curia.  In doing so, the pope essentially ignored a terrifying dossier sent to him by a group of faithful from Maracaibo, entitled “¿Quién es verdaderamente Monseñor Edgar Robinson Peña Parra, Nuevo Sustituto de la Secretarîa de Estado del Vaticano?” (“Who really is Msgr. Edgar Robinson Peña Parra, the new Substitute at the Secretariat of State of the Vatican” – LifeSite) The dossier is signed by Dr. Enrique W. Lagunillas Machado, in the name of the “Grupo de Laicos de la Arquidiócesis de Maracaibo por una Iglesia y un Clero según el Corazón de Cristo” (“Group of Laity of the Archdiocese of Maracaibo for a Church and a Clergy in accordance with the Heart of Christ” – LifeSite). These faithful accused Peña Parra of terrible immorality, describing in detail his alleged crimes.  This might even be a scandal surpassing that of McCarrick, and it must not be allowed to be covered by silence.

Some facts have already been published in the media, notably in the Italian weekly L’Espresso (see espresso.repubblica.it/inchieste/2018/10/18/news/buio-in-vaticano-ecco-l-ultimo-scandalo-1.327923).  I will now add facts known by the Secretariat of State in the Vatican since 2002, which I learned when I served as the Delegate for Pontifical Representations.

• In January 2000, Maracaibo journalist Gastón Guisandes López made serious accusations against some priests from the diocese of Maracaibo, including Msgr. Peña Parra, involving sexual abuse of minors and other possibly criminal activity.
• In 2001, Gastón Guisandes López twice asked to be received by the apostolic nuncio (the Pope’s ambassador) in Venezuela, archbishop André Dupuy, to discuss these matters, but the archbishop inexplicably refused to receive him. He did, however, report to the Secretariat of State that the journalist had accused Msgr. Peña Parra of two very serious crimes, describing the circumstances.
  • First, Edgar Peña Parra was accused of having seduced, on September 24, 1990, two minor seminarians from the parish of San Pablo, who were to enter the Major Seminary of Maracaibo that same year. The event is said to have taken place in the Church of Nuestra Señora del Rosario, where the Rev. José Severeyn was parish priest.  Rev. Severeyn was later removed from the parish by the then archbishop Msgr. Roa Pérez. The case was reported to the police by the parents of the two young men and was dealt with by the then-rector of the major seminary, Rev. Enrique Pérez, and by the then spiritual director, Rev. Emilio Melchor.  Rev. Pérez, when questioned by the Secretariat of State, confirmed in writing the episode of September 24, 1990.  I have seen these documents with my own eyes.
  • Second, Edgar Peña Parra was allegedly involved, together with [NAME REMOVED], in the death of two people, a doctor and a certain Jairo Pérez, which took place in August 1992, on the island of San Carlos in Lake Maracaibo.  They were killed by an electric discharge, and it is not clear whether or not the deaths were accidental. This same accusation is also contained in the aforementioned dossier sent by a group of lay people from Maracaibo, with the additional detail that the two corpses were found naked, with evidence of macabre homosexual lewd encounters. These accusations are, to say the least, extremely grave. Yet not only was Peña Parra not required to face them, he was allowed to continue in the diplomatic service of the Holy See.
• These two accusations were reported to the Secretariat of State in 2002 by the then apostolic nuncio in Venezuela, archbishop André Dupuy. The relevant documentation, if it has not been destroyed, can be found both in the archives of the diplomatic personnel of the Secretariat of State where I held the position of Delegate for the Pontifical Representations, and in the archives of the apostolic nunciature in Venezuela, where the following archbishops have served as nuncios since: Giacinto Berloco, from 2005 to 2009; Pietro Parolin, from 2009 to 2013; and Aldo Giordano, from 2013 to the present.  They all had access to the documents reporting these accusations against the future Substitute, as did the cardinals Secretaries of State Sodano, Bertone, and Parolin and the Substitutes Sandri, Filoni, and Becciu.
• Particularly egregious is the behavior of Cardinal Parolin who, as Secretary of State, did not oppose the recent appointment of Peña Parra as Substitute, making him his closest collaborator.  Even more: years earlier, in January 2011, as apostolic nuncio in Caracas, Parolin did not oppose the appointment of Peña Parra as archbishop and apostolic nuncio to Pakistan. Before such important appointments, a rigorous informative process is made to verify the suitability of the candidate, so these accusations were surely brought to the attention of Cardinal Parolin.

Furthermore, Cardinal Parolin knows the names of a number of priests in the Curia who are sexually unchaste, violating the laws of God that they solemnly committed themselves to teach and practice, and he continues to look the other way.

If Cardinal Parolin’s responsibilities are grave, even more so are those of Pope Francis for having chosen for an extremely important position in the Church a man accused of such serious crimes, without first insisting on an open and thorough investigation.  There is one more scandalous aspect to this horrific story.  Peña Parra is closely connected with Honduras, and more precisely with Cardinal Maradiaga and Bishop Juan José Pineda.  Between 2003 and 2007, Peña Parra served in the nunciature in Tegucigalpa, and while there he was very close to Juan José Pineda, who in 2005 was ordained auxiliary bishop of Tegucigalpa, becoming the right-hand man of Cardinal Maradiaga.  Juan José Pineda resigned from his post of auxiliary bishop in July 2018, without any reason given to the faithful of Tegucicalpa.  Pope Francis has not released the results of the report that the Apostolic Visitor, the Argentine bishop Alcides Casaretto, delivered directly and only to him more than a year ago.  How can one interpret Pope Francis’ firm decision not to talk about or answer any question about this matter except as a cover up of the facts and protection of a homosexual network?  Such decisions reveal a terrible truth: rather than allowing open and serious investigations of those accused of grave offenses against the Church, the pope is allowing the Church herself to suffer.

Coming back to your question.  You ask me if I see any signs that the Vatican, under Pope Francis, is taking proper steps to address the serious issues of abuse. My answer is simple: Pope Francis himself is covering up abuse right now, as he did for McCarrick.  I say this with great sorrow.  When King David pronounced the greedy rich man in Nathan’s parable worthy of death, the prophet told him bluntly, “You are the man” (2 Sam 12:1-7).  I had hoped my testimony might be received like Nathan’s, but it was instead received like that of Micaiah (1Kings 22:15-27).  I pray that this will change.

Liberal, As It Was

Anthony Esolen

THE CATHOLIC THING

WEDNESDAY, JULY 3, 2019

If you want to know what a culture is like, it helps to look not only at the masterpieces but at the best of the “popular.”  That will include many a fine work whose appeal is not in the same category as the appeal of Goethe or Milton.  You sing the hymns of John Newton and William Cowper.  You recite the poetry of Longfellow.  You watch the films of Frank Capra.

What was liberal Catholicism like before the second Vatican Council?  The question is too broad to admit of one answer, but I think that some of its features appear in The Keys of the Kingdom by the Catholic novelist and physician A.J. Cronin.  It’s not a great novel.  It’s a very good novel of the kind I am talking about.  It is solidly of its provenance; like a well-wrought Victorian armoire.

Those who remember the book or the film made from it will recall the principal figure: Father Chisholm (played by Gregory Peck), an un-clerical Scottish priest who is placed in charge of a mission in the interior of China.  He had been expecting a thriving church and school, according to the statistics sent home by the previous pastor.  Instead there is mud, a stable hardly fit for horses, and a pair of avaricious “rice Christians,” eager to assist the new Shang-Fu for money and influence.

Father Chisholm sends the hypocrites away with a manly begone, Satan.  None of that trimming for him.  Instead, he first wins the people over by his elementary skills in medicine, and slowly, with his back and shoulders, and the help of a few true Christians, he builds up a real church.

His first breakthrough occurs when he treats a little boy dying of an infected arm, lancing it, squeezing out the pus, and wrapping it with bandages steeped in antiseptic.  The boy is the son of a rich Chinese landowner, Mr. Chia, who in gratitude gives to Father Chisholm some prime territory in the Hills of the Brilliant Jade.

No man could do this job alone, so Father Chisholm appeals to his superiors and they send him three nuns, to cook, wash, mend clothes, and teach the children in the parish school.

He and the Mother Superior, for a long time, do not get along.  She is severe, he is lenient.  She is doctrinal, he is something of a freethinker.  He is like an overgrown boy, and she is all woman and no girl.  She is the daughter of German aristocrats, while he is the son of poor fishermen and shepherds.

She is scandalized when Father Chisholm’s old friend, Willie Culloch, a medical doctor and an avowed atheist, comes to help him.  Culloch dies from the plague, after having tended to hundreds.  There is no deathbed conversion, but Father Chisholm seems confident that Culloch is in the arms of God.  His confidence shakes the staid old nun.

Chisholm is not much like other priests, particularly one whom he knew as a lad, the ostentatiously pious, social-climbing, institution-founding, comfort-pursuing Anselm Mealey.  When Mealey comes to China to visit, he can see only failure, much of which he attributes to Chisholm’s unorthodox ways.  Chisholm has, for instance, no paid Chinese catechists to help pad the baptismal statistics.

Monsignor (later Bishop) Mealey patronizes the Chinese without knowing that he does so.  They are to him a quaint race in darkness.  His example brings the Mother Superior around: a “gross, worldly priest,” she says to herself.  She and Father Chisholm become friends.

One motto for the novel might be, Extra ecclesiam plena salus.  Father Chisholm makes his most important convert almost unwillingly: it is the elderly Mr. Chia, who after decades of mutual benevolence and friendship wishes to join Father Chisholm in the faith, because the courage of the old priest has persuaded him.  Doctrine seems not to matter.

Indeed, when Chisholm returns to Scotland, a bent old man whom the other priests think little of, he is fond of making Chinese kites for a boy in his care, and he fastens sayings to them, one of which is that tolerance is the greatest of virtues, and humility is second.  He also gets in trouble for saying in the pulpit that although Jesus was wiser than Confucius, the Chinese sage had a better sense of humor.

Cronin had lost his Catholic faith when he was a medical student, regaining it later in what appears to have been a theistic and universalist form.  He was remarkable for his charitable work.  You might say that Father Chisholm and Doctor Culloch were the two sides of his character, or his character in two wished-for manifestations: both amiable, impatient of ceremony, unambitious, diligent, broad-minded, but one a believer and the other an unbeliever.

As I say, it’s a good book, and Chisholm is a true hero and an immensely attractive figure.  If this was liberal Catholicism, it had a lot to say for itself: care for the poor, real engagement with another culture, and the heart of Christ in humility, uprightness, and love.

Noticeable by their absence are political ideology, the sexual revolution, sacramental carelessness, and modern idols.  Chisholm is a man’s man and a genuine father.  And his favorite hobby is fishing.

Well, that can’t survive without the foundation of orthodox faith and a conservative, even ascetic, moral discipline.  Most of the Mealeys of our day have been clerical pole-climbers and blandly heterodox; socialite unitarians with a dollop of Jesus.  They don’t keep the faith.  The faith – the institution – keeps them, in clover.

Meanwhile, we need to remember that for most people the best witness of our faith – not the best gift, but the best witness of its scandalous truth – will be what Father Chisholm gives to the Chinese.  That, ultimately, is more than one man’s generosity and courage and his willingness to toil beside them.

It is the crucified and risen Christ.  He it is, whether Cronin grasped it clearly or not, who opens the door.

*Image: Gregory Peck as Fr. Chisholm, Rose Stradner as Rev. Mother Maria-Veronica, and Vincent Price as Bishop Mealey in the 1944 film.

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Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. Among his books are Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, and Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World. He directs the Center for the Restoration of Catholic Culture at Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts.

ANTI-AMERICAN BISHOPS

A greedy, self-serving bunch if there ever was one.

July 3, 2019 

TRANSCRIPT

It’s time once again for the Fourth of July celebrations in America to get rolling and we thought we’d take the opportunity to point out a little something, a two-headed hydra, the Democratic Party and the U.S. bishops’ conference.

First, let’s look at the Democrats and this guaranteed losing stance.

Yep, all 10 Dem candidates on stage last week promised that their plan is to take your tax dollars and pay health care costs for illegal immigrants, and some of those tax dollars coming from actual citizens who don’t have health insurance themselves.

Turning to the second head of the hydra, the U.S. bishops have more than a dozen times issued pronouncements against Trump’s enforcement of current immigration laws, some of the exact same laws that Obama used to enforce.

Curiously, when Democrat Obama would make speeches or give interviews about illegal immigrants, the U.S. bishops just let it slide.

And why would the bishops not thunder against Obama, you might ask. That’s a good question. A question for the record that the Catholic establishment media never asks, because they can’t tick off their meal ticket.

There are really two reasons the bishops are down with open borders and staging photo ops at the border, and running off a flood of press releases damning Trump.

One reason is their miserable track record of running the Church has resulted in a depressing demographic reality.

For decades, Catholics were about 25% of the total U.S. population — for decades.

But as the Church of Nice, modernist homoheretics slowly tipped the scales and got control of the levers of power, the population of Catholics relative to the total population began to shrink.

Today, it’s down to about 21% of the population. And here’s the truth under those numbers, white European-descent Catholics, in relation to the total population, comprise only about 13 percent.

That is a falling off the cliff — without Hispanic Catholics, many of whom are here illegally, Catholics, who used to be about one out of every four Americans, are now only about one out of every eight or nine.

Most illegal immigrants in the United States come across that southern border and are majority Catholic, so the bishops have latched onto that reality and are using it to shore up their flagging numbers in the pews.

But more than that, money is the overwhelming factor.  

Look at these financial numbers from 2016 for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and Catholic Charities.

Catholic Relief Services received a staggering $426,943,000 in U.S. federal tax dollars. Those federal monies accounted for 65% of the agency’s total 2016 budget.

And Catholic Charities received a not too shabby $202,000,000. 

The bishops are getting literally hundreds of millions of dollars from Uncle Sam, and much of this money is earmarked specifically for coping with illegal immigration and refugee resettlement efforts.

The government is really equipped to administer programs of this size, so they contract the work out — in this case, a half-billion dollars worth of contracts to the bishops.

Interesting to note, the U.S. bishops get as much money from Washington as Planned Parenthood gets.

And here’s another deception by silence on the part of the bishops, they never tell people in the pews when they take up the annual collection for CRS and Catholic Charities that, presuming you are legal and a taxpayer, that you have already contributed to these collections through your taxes.

When Obama first came to office, the USCCB was directly paid a whopping $91 million dollars for Syrian refugee resettlement programs.

As a result, one out of every three dioceses in the country suddenly opened up a refugee resettlement office to cash in.

In fact, another $30-plus million also poured directly into the bishops coffers from Obama’s White House for other programs.

The child killer in chief must have been very grateful to the mitered class for having delivered him the majority Catholic vote in ’08.

But for the supreme show of hypocrisy from the bishops who are always so chest-thumping about welcoming the stranger and so forth — look at the places most of them live.

You couldn’t get past the gates or over the walls with a small army, and of course, Church HQ itself is completely surrounded with a gigantic wall built specifically to keep out potential Muslim invaders, along with others.

And that’s because walls work, which is why so many of the hierarchy have themselves safely ensconced behind them, including the Pope.

And oh yeah, if you somehow manage to get around or over those walls, you’ll get shot and killed — so much for the death penalty being “inadmissable,” to quote Bishop Robert Barron.

The U.S. bishops are simply opposed, flat-out, to border security in complete lockstep with their Democratic sugar-daddies.

They make the irrational argument that the “first duty” of government is to welcome the foreigner and the stranger, specifically as the Immigration Office at USCCB HQ says “to welcome the foreigner out of charity and respect for the human person. Persons have the right to immigrate and thus government must accommodate this right to the greatest extent possible, especially financially blessed nation.”

This is a total perversion of Catholic teaching; it’s Democratic Party talking points made to sound like Church teaching.

The bishops say the “second duty (of government)is to secure one’s border and enforce the law for the sake of the common good.”

So let’s think about this. The first duty of government is to let everybody in who wants to migrate, and the second duty is to enforce the borders.

Well, if you are letting everybody in, then what need does America have for borders and if anyone who want to migrate to the United States gets to come in, how long before the government no longer exists?

A nation is defined by its borders in the most fundamental reality.

But all of this would actually be an argument worth having if the bishops were not getting cumulatively billions of dollars from the government, much of which has been severely cut back by President Trump, and they themselves were actually not living behind walls and or had immigrants sleeping in their palaces.

Those swanky digs up in the woods of New York that Cardinal Dolan commandeered for himself — remember, that $4 million pad — it sure looks like you cram a few dozen immigrant families in there, Your Eminence.

Hypocrisy, money, privilege, sucking at the teats of the Democrats — what a dastardly lot.

Exactly how does a hierarchy maintain any independence when its very infrastructure is supported by federal tax dollars?

Want to know why pro-abort Catholic Democrats are never denounced? Just look at the issue of illegal immigration, the wall and the money handed to them and you have your answer.

When the basket gets passed next time in your parish to contribute to any of this, drop in a note saying, “No thanks, I already paid you with my taxes.”

JULY 3, 2019

The Amazon Synod Goes Native

WILLIAM KILPATRICK

CRISIS MAGAZINE

Every now and then, the utopians in our midst dust off Rousseau’s Noble Savage thesis and try to convince us that life in the jungle beats life in the air-conditioned suburbs.

The general idea is that people who live close to the state of nature are spiritually superior to “civilized” people who have lost touch with the wisdom of nature. Rousseau’s idea was tested during the French Revolution, and it did lead to a lot of savagery, though not the noble kind. Then it was revived by various Romantic poets such as Wordsworth who encouraged his readers to “quit your books” and “Let Nature be your Teacher.”

Irving Babbitt’s 1919 book Rousseau and Romanticism should have been the death knell for the Noble Savage hypothesis, but the idea was hard to kill. It popped up again with anthropologist Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, a book which argued that Samoans were free of neurotic “hang-ups” because they enjoyed greater sexual freedom. Then, in the 1960s, due in part to the influence of Mead, came the Woodstock generation, hippie communes, and the Sexual Revolution. In a sense the children of that era really were the children of Rousseau. Although he idealized the child in his book Emile, Rousseau had no use for real children, and sent all of his own off to orphanages as soon as they were born. As the Woodstock generation grew up and married, many discovered that children were an inconvenience when it came to the pursuit of sex and self-actualization. As divorce and out-of-wedlock births skyrocketed, increasing numbers of children were in effect “orphaned.” In short, they were left to grow up on their own without much adult guidance. Marinated in neo-Rousseauian nostrums, the adults assumed that children would just naturally find the right path in life.

The Sexual Revolution never really went away, but in subsequent decades there was some recognition that “going native” was not conducive to a healthy society. Now, however, we seem to be poised on the brink of a new experiment in Rousseauian living. I was in Miami Beach recently, and a great many of the colorfully tattooed young and not so young crowding the streets and the boardwalks looked like they had come straight out of Haight-Ashbury circa 1970.  Except that the term “straight” doesn’t quite do justice to the gender fluidity that was on display. Moreover, many of the Miami natives strolling through the shopping areas were wearing considerably less clothing than an Amazonian strolling through the rain forest.

Which brings me to the point of this essay. The most ironic thing about this new venture into the primitive is that some of the prime movers are the leaders of the Catholic Church. Take the upcoming Amazon Synod. The working document for the Synod does makes some valid observations about the biological and climatological importance of the Amazonian region and about the exploitation of the Amazonian people. But when it comes to describing the peoples, the “Voice of the Amazon” sounds suspiciously like the voice of Rousseau. Or better, the voice of Rousseau harmonized with the voice of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and elevated to the cosmic level. Thus:

• A fundamental aspect of the root of human sin is to detach oneself from nature… (99)
• A cosmic dimension of experience (cosmovivencia) palpitates within the families. (75)
• It is necessary to grasp what the Spirit of the Lord has taught these people throughout the centuries: faith in the God Father-Mother Creator; communion and harmony with the earth; solidarity with one’s companions … the living relationship with nature and “Mother Earth.” (121)

In its celebration of the rain forest, the wise old elders, and the Amazonian “cosmo-vision,” the document reads like a cross between Green Mansions, The Divine Milieu, and Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan. The document also calls to mind certain themes from Mutiny on the Bounty. That’s because its authors seem to be counseling a mutiny against those traditional Church practices and teachings that might impede the development of an Amazonian brand of Catholicism. If we’re smart, they seem to say, we’ll jump ship (the Barque of Peter) and go live with the welcoming natives on the tropic Island (Amazonia).

So when the document speaks of “inculturation,” which it often does, it means that we should abandon our own culture and adopt that of the Amazonians. Why?  Because they have much to teach us about spirituality, eco-theology, “lived reality,” and communing with the trees, the animals, and “the spirits.” Like the working document from last fall’s Youth Synod, this one is all about listening. The earlier document said that the Church must listen to youth because youth are in touch with what’s happening now. The current document says that the Church must listen to the wise elders of the tribes because they’re in touch with the ancient wisdom of the ancestors. Do the two documents contradict each other? Don’t be silly. That’s linear thinking. As Walt Whitman, one of the earlier advocates of cosmic consciousness, wrote: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself; I am large, I contain multitudes.” So just shut up and listen to your elders.

According to the document, another thing the Amazonians can teach us is buen vivir—“good living.” In other words, they can show us how to live in poverty and be happy. This is a talent that will prove quite handy because if the socialist, anti-free market economics subscribed to by the document’s authors are put into practice, poverty will spread like wildfire.

These are just a few of the supposed benefits that the Amazonians will confer upon the Church. But what does the Church have to offer to the indigenous people of the Amazon? Well, basically nothing. Remember that they live closer to Nature than we do, and in the Rousseauian thought world that makes them more virtuous than us. The authors of the working document really do seem to subscribe to Rousseau’s belief in natural goodness. In a commentary on the document, Fr. Raymond D’Sousa puts it this way:

The peoples of the Amazon themselves seem curiously exempt from original sin… And without sin, why would there be a need for redemption?

Or conversion? If the spiritually advanced people of the Amazon are OK the way they are, then there’s no need to convert them to Christianity. Indeed, one gets the impression that the Amazon Synod is not intended to convert indigenous people to the Church, but to convert the Church to the Indians’ eco-friendly, pantheistic form of spirituality, with the result that Catholicism becomes a new Church with “an Amazonian face.” Whether this will be a happy face remains to be seen.

It all sounds a little crazy, but if you’ve been paying attention, you will notice that all sorts of bizarre things are happening in the Church these days. Thankfully, we needn’t get into all that here because the Amazonian experiment has enough bizarreness to fill volumes.

One of the odd ironies of this New Age spirituality is that it’s being foisted on the Church by old men. Many of the key players in the Amazonian project are getting along in years, yet they are still enamored of ideas that became popular 60 years ago—a time when many young people thought that the “Age of Aquarius”—whatever that means—was about to dawn.

Bishop Erwin Krautler, a member of the preparatory committee of the Amazon Synod is 80; Cardinal Claudio Hummes, 85, is president of the Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network; and Cardinal Walter Kasper, who is very much involved in the planning for the Synod, is 86.

Facing off against them is another elderly prelate, Cardinal Walter Brandmuller, who is 90. Brandmuller calls the working document for the Synod “heretical” and an “apostasy” from Divine Revelation, and he says it should be rejected. But, then, how can a nonagenarian cardinal possibly understand the youthful, New Age-y vision of the octogenarian cardinals?

One of the hazards of reading highly unusual documents is that one begins to think unusual thoughts. Somehow, this standoff between the octogenarians and the nonagenarian reminded me of a scene from The Boys from Brazil. Toward the end of the film, a bloody fight erupts between a sexagenarian (Gregory Peck as Dr. Mengele) and a septuagenarian (Laurence Oliver as the Nazi hunter). Well, that’s only a slight connection to the elderly bishops. But then, as often happens when one stays up late writing, I began to notice other connections. The Boys from Brazil is about a Nazi doctor who has come to Brazil after the war with a plan to implant surrogate mothers with zygotes carrying samples of Hitler’s DNA in the hope of creating Hitler clones who will re-establish the Reich.

It’s a crazy plot, but then so is the plan to recast the Church in the image of the Amazon jungle. So maybe it’s time for a remake of the story. Let’s title it The Boyish Bishops from Brazil.  If you’re a conspiracy theorist, you will see the connection right away. One curiosity of the Amazon synod is that a suspiciously large percentage of the participants are bishops from German-speaking countries. Could it be that a group of aging German bishops, still boyish in their own minds, have hatched a plot to carry the spiritual DNA of Teilhard de Chardin, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, Cardinal Carlo Martini, and other New Age prelates to the Amazon with the hope that in the warm moist jungle climate their ideas will germinate and spread throughout the planet, eventually causing all of us to evolve into the Cosmic Christ? The Cosmic Christ, mind you, is not anything like the Christ of the Gospels, but more like a pantheistic spirit that inhabits you and me and the trees and the river and the grass.

But I digress. In fact, I see that I am wandering. But isn’t that the point of it all:  to be able to wander freely and fluidly from one lived experience to the next; to enter the great stream of consciousness and be re-baptized in the waters of the Amazon? Such free association is fully justified by the document itself, which tells us that “we must relearn how to weave the links that connect all the dimensions of life” (102). Besides, Fr. George Rutler frequently employs the free association method, so it must be okay. Could he have learned this technique from an elderly shaman in the rain forest? It seems unlikely, but in Amazonland anything is possible. For example, the document keeps insisting that the liturgical and doctrinal innovations it proposes are in perfect continuity with Church tradition.

Hmm. Maybe. For example, one of the high-level synod participants seems the very embodiment of the “old” Church’s authoritarian approach. Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck of Essen, Germany said the synod will lead the Church to a “point of no return.” And after that “nothing will be the same as it was.” Reichsbishop Ubermensch, er, Overbeck, is also reputed to have said: “We have ways of making you comply.”

As we all know by now, God wills a diversity of religions. And the neo-Rousseauian bishops seem happy to comply by ordering up a whole menu of diversities: one form of Christianity for the Amazon Basin with an Amazonian face; another, we presume, for the Australian outback with an Aborigine face; and still another, no doubt, for the South Seas with a Polynesian face. As for the Church in Europe and North America, it needs to put on a happy face—most likely some fluid blend of the Amazonian, Aboriginal, and Polynesian face.

The trouble is, all this mixing up of Christianity with other traditions and spiritualities is bound to result in a dilution of Christianity. When you filter the Christian faith through 50 trillion gallons of Amazon rain water and then submerge it in a giant vat of bubbling psycho-socio-eco babble, you end up with a faith that is no longer recognizable.

In the process, Christ loses his unique identity as the one way to the Father. Instead he is forced to take his place alongside other founders such as Buddha and Muhammad, and with other assorted deities such as Brahma, Vishnu, and Quetzalcoatl.

The declaration Dominus Jesus declared that “Jesus Christ has a significance and a value for the human race and its history, which is unique and singular, proper to him alone, exclusive, universal, and absolute.” The Gospel message, in short, does exclude many competing practices and spiritualities. And it is universal—accessible to all.

But for some reason, the New Age bishops seem to think that the farmers, fishermen, and herders of the Amazon couldn’t possibly understand the message that was addressed to farmers, fishermen, and herders in first-century Judea without first having it translated into a language that only German theologians understand. On the other hand, they are quite sure that the Amazonians, perhaps guided by some Yoda-like elder, will quickly grasp the fine points of Teilhard de Chardin’s mystical musings about “Christogenesis,” “cosmogenesis,” “ultrahominization,” “biosphere,” “noosphere,” and “Omega point.”

In places, the document borders on unintentional self-parody. Here are a couple of samples:

Thus a Church called to be even more synodal begins by listening to the peoples and to the earth by coming into contact with the abundant reality of an Amazon full of life and wisdom but also of contrasts. It continues with the cry that is provoked by destructive deforestation and extractivist activities and that demands an integral ecological conversion. (5)

Such an understanding of life is characterized by the connectivity and harmony of relationships between water, territory, and nature, community life and culture, God and the various spiritual forces. (13)

Reading through this pseudo-profundity, especially the part about “various spiritual forces,” I was reminded of the banquet scene near the end of C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. The members of the N.I.C.E. Institute have gathered to congratulate themselves on their program to remake human nature along more scientific lines. But they have made the mistake of enlisting dark spiritual forces in their endeavor, and eventually they find that they are no longer in control.

As the directors of the Institute rise to speak in turn, their talk is turned into gibberish. Thus, the Deputy Director thinks he is making sense, but the audience hears him saying:

Tidies and fuglemen—I sheel foor that we all—er—most steeply rebut the defensible, though, I trust, lavatory Aspasia which gleams to have selected our redeemed inspector this deceiving. It would—ah—be shark, very shark, from anyone’s debenture…

The stream of babble nicely exposes the essential nuttiness behind the high-sounding proposals of the N.I.C.E. project. Eventually, one hopes, the Amazon project will be seen in the same light—as a “very shark” enterprise.

Editor’s note: Pictured above, Pope Francis poses with a performer from Mexico during his weekly general audience on St.Peter’s square on August 29, 2018, at the Vatican. (Photo credit: ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP/Getty Images)

Tagged as Amazon Synod (2019), Environmentalism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, New Age, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Progressive Catholics87

By William Kilpatrick

William Kilpatrick taught for many years at Boston College. He is the author of several books about cultural and religious issues, including Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong; and Christianity, Islam and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Jihad. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Catholic World Report, National Catholic Register, Aleteia, Saint Austin Review, Investor’s Business Daily,and First Things. His work is supported in part by the Shillman Foundation. For more on his work and writings, visit his website, turningpointproject.com