LOOK AROUND YOU, DO YOU SEE ANY DINOSAURS? MAYBE YOU ARE RUNNING WITH THE WRONG CROWD.

Posted on April 13, 2018 by abyssum

Dinosaurs on the Move

FRIDAY, APRIL 13, 2018

We have all seen the latest Gallup poll. . . .

What? You missed it, gentle reader? Don’t worry, you’ve heard it all before: attendance is falling in Catholic churches across the USA. It was a huge fall, corresponding temporally to the “Spirit of Vatican II,” but it was steadying out under the restorative pontificates of St John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Now, for some reason, we are sliding again.

From what I can see, in anecdotes from innumerable reports, the numbers conceal a significant detail. More-or-less all the “New Mass,” adaptive, modernist congregations are declining, with churches closing every day. And more-or-less all the “Old Mass,” rigid, traditionalist churches are growing, in congregations and vocations both. Those “dinosaurs” out there are also having lots of children. It seems to me that the Holy Spirit is sorting us out, after all.

A Jewish friend, who long lived in New York, provides an analogy. Only a small minority of Jews were Orthodox in the 1950s, and pretty much everyone else agreed they would soon be extinct. Today, they may be a slight majority, because lo and behold, the liberal, modernizing Jews are disappearing. They don’t go to synagogue, so the synagogues close. They intermarry with the goyim, and neglect to generate children.

In my humble but unanswerable opinion, Modernism is on the shoals.

My modernist friends disagree, however. One who forwarded the Gallup poll to me yesterday morning (which I had already seen) rejected the sidelight I have offered above. He said the traditionalist types are simply switching parishes. And yes, there is a lot of that, judging from my own first-hand experience. And lots of three-year-olds must be doing that, or moving to South Dakota.

They were rather shocked in France, recently, when the Guvmint proposed gay marriage, and the old-school backward Catholics with all these kids put a couple million on the road to Paris, to express their disapproval. The media in Paris were having conniptions: “We had no idea so many dinosaurs were still walking the earth.”

I’m an old dinosaur myself but – Vivat! – the young ones multiply around me. Our total numbers are perhaps no less than they were in the thirteenth century, but our proportion of the general population in the Christian West shrank. Modernism had its moments.

God made fairly plain in Scripture that He isn’t much interested in number crunching; He looks at His people one at a time. I am, myself, especially not interested in statistical projections. We do not know what is coming. God may not be into surprises – He never said He would change with the times – but events can be surprising.

For we are the ones capable of moving, towards or away from fundamental truths. The one I wish to adduce this morning is on the efficacy of prayer.

*

“I’m praying for you!” can be an irritating remark, in my recollection. I can remember thinking, “What fat use is that?” in my pre-Catholic days. And today, we are constantly reminded not only by secular society but by many of our own priests that we should, “Not just pray but do something.” It is a well-meaning instruction, I am sure, but it reveals a terrible loss of faith. For prayer is, in fact, doing something.

Some years ago, an old Catholic was driving me around Ottawa, pointing to all the old Catholic buildings – so many of them monastic establishments – that were now converted to “other uses,” such as condominiums, and parking lots.

This was easy to explain, in terms of abandonment and betrayal. A once fairly Catholic town had “moved on” to other interests. One thing leads to another, and at some point the wrecking balls arrive. We may consult the economists on supply and demand.

But my friend made a point that went the other way. He mentioned the principal work done in all those old monastic establishments. The inmates were praying for us.

And as they ceased to pray, there was an effect on us, which could almost be demonstrated statistically. We, who ceased to be prayed for, also ceased to pray. The bonds that had held us to the Church were being broken, and the most significant of those had been sacramental prayer. The sustaining prayers of all those invisible religious continued behind the institutional walls.

What happens when your own mother doesn’t care for you anymore? For you are after all just a statistic, and you’re on your own now. It’s not as if you depended on her for money. Really, you only depended on her for prayer. What if the monks and nuns themselves – I think of the nuns, most tearfully – can no longer be bothered? Does it make the slightest difference?

Yes. Or so I say, being a notoriously backward Catholic, who actually believes what the Church always taught, and still teaches in a few places. I pray for others, and I need their prayers, in the mysterious workings of the Divine Economy.

And by all this I do not mean prayer as an attractive form of packaging, rather as the medium of exchange. My vulgar analogy is to a point, and might be enhanced by the observation that, “you get what you pay for.” But this, within an economy of Love.

I have nothing to say about the most recent apostolic exhortation, that tells us among many other things that holiness must be expressed in action, and demeans the silence of monastic retreat, taking little digs at Cardinal Sarah. The pope says what he says, and we hear him.

What I want to say is about monastic prayer, in its utterly specific, traditional form; but also about the silences, and monastic prayers, within each Catholic. Either it is believed to be efficacious, or it is not. If not, the whole Church must continue to empty, except an eccentric remnant who believe.

 

*Image: Carthusian Monks at prayer, St. Hugh’s Chaterhouse, Parkminster – the only post-Reformation Carthusian monastery in the U.K., located in Cowfold parish, West Sussex [Photo by Roger Bamber]

© 2018 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.orgThe Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.
David Warren

David Warren

David Warren is a former editor of the Idler magazine and columnist in Canadian newspapers. He has extensive experience in the Near and Far East. His blog, Essays in Idleness, is now to be found at: davidwarrenonline.com.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

WHEN HUMANS RESEMBLE OSTRICHES!!!

Posted on April 13, 2018 by abyssum

Jeremiahs or Jerks  ?

THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC –   
by Guy McClung

 

In the last few weeks some things have happened that have stunned me – and caused me to think and rethink writing about and discussing what I see as a the devastating crisis in Jesus’s Church.

A priest was introduced to me, ordained fifteen years, who is very active in parish work, not Judas social justice work, but real parish work, bringing the sacraments to the faithful. I mentioned the exhortation Amoris Laetitia and he said he had heard of it, but he had not read it.

In speaking with a close relative, she referred to the saintly man now wearing papal white and how she loves to hear the words he speaks to the faithful. She has only heard the “words” recounted from the pulpit at her local parish and as repeated to her by her fellow parishioners.

Another close relative told me he knows about all the corruption, wickedness, heresy and depravity of the priests, bishops, cardinals, and man wearing papal white, but he ignores it all, and would prefer I not speak of these things to him. He has a master’s degree in theology and teaches extensively in parish programs.

When I told both the priest and the one close relative that Jorge Bergolgio wrote and published the statement that “No one is condemned forever,” at first they did not believe me. I said that those were his actual, printed, proclaimed words. The priest said “that could be understood to lack clarity.”

I then asked the close relative had she heard of the homosexual cocaine orgies in the Vatican with male prostitutes or the pervert addicted to child pornography whisked away from the authorities in Canada, to the diplomatic safety of Vatican City,  and now recently arrested in the Vatican. She asked me never again to tell her about such things and to send her no emails with any such information, or with anything derogatory about Jorge Bergoglio.

These are not three folks in outer Mongolia who have never heard the name, “Jesus.” These were cradle Catholics, one ordained who daily acts in persona Christi,  all of whom, many times since the age of reason and literacy, have heard that Jesus said there is a hell and there is everlasting fire

So. This has made me think. Do I keep on keepin’ on ? Do I continue to say, when the occasion presents itself, I believe Jorge Bergoglio is a heretic and, while wearing the papal white,  he has proclaimed his heresy? Do I go on in telling people the bishops and cardinals, some of whom themselves are perverts, pederasts, pedophiles and the abusers and assaulters of women, girls and boys, that these men have stolen billions of the widows’ mites and the faithful’s  dollars, some  to live a life of perverted luxury or to  pay off those victims and their lawyers who speak out? Insuring that the details of their perfidy and the actions of the wicked are kept secret under the seals of the many, many courts who are dealing with these crimes?

I am thinking about the apostles, arrested by the church hierarchy of the time, and told you may not henceforth speak publicly in  the name of Jesus of Nazareth. I am thinking about St. Peter’s response, the response of the Rock Jesus chose for His Church, the first pope, when the hierarchy told him to shut up: we can obey you  or we can obey God.

I am praying.

I am also thinking about St. Dismas who, from his own cross, himself tortured and dying, ignored the crowd, ignored the ruling Romans, ignored the (so-called) “high” priests, and gave no heed to the soldiers of power gathered around celebrating Jesus’s suffering and crucifixion. St. Dismas, unlike his brother hanging nearby who was ridiculing Jesus in his agony. St. Dismas, the first and in some ways the most knowledegable evangelist of the passion, death and crucifixion of Jesus, who said, for all the world to hear, that Jesus is “Lord.”

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Much has been written in sketching an appraisal of the first five years of the pontificate of Francis and of his real or imaginary “revolution.” But rarely, if ever, with the acuteness and extensive scope of the analysis published below.

Posted on April 13, 2018 by abyssum

Settimo Cielodi Sandro Magister

{Abyssum}

Bergoglio’s Reform Was Written Before. By Martin Luther

Luterani

> Ita

*

Much has been written in sketching an appraisal of the first five years of the pontificate of Francis and of his real or imaginary “revolution.”

But rarely, if ever, with the acuteness and extensive scope of the analysis published below.

The author, Roberto Pertici, 66, is a professor of contemporary history at the university of Bergamo and has focused his studies on Italian culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to relations between Church and state.

His essay is being issued for the very first time on Settimo Cielo.

*

THE END OF “ROMAN CATHOLICISM?”

by Roberto Pertici

1. At this point in the pontificate of Francis, I believe it can be reasonably maintained that this marks the twilight of that imposing historical reality which can be defined as “Roman Catholicism.”

This does not mean, properly understood, that the Catholic Church is coming to an end, but that what is fading is the way in which it has historically structured and represented itself in recent centuries.

It seems evident to me, in fact, that this is the plan being deliberately pursued by the “brain trust” that has clustered around Francis: a plan understood both as an extreme response to the crisis in relations between the Church and the modern world, and as a precondition for a renewed ecumenical course together with the other Christian confessions, especially the Protestant.

*

2. By “Roman Catholicism” I mean that grand historical, theological, and juridical construction which has its origin in the Hellenization (in terms of the philosophical aspect” and Romanization (in terms of the political-juridical aspect) of primitive Christianity and is based on the primacy of the successors of Peter, as emerges from the crisis of the late ancient world and from the theoretical systematization of the Gregorian age (“Dictatus Papae”).

Over the subsequent centuries, the Church also established its own internal legal system, canon law, looking to Roman law as its model. And this juridical element contributed to gradually shaping a complex hierarchical organization with precise internal norms that regulate the life both of the “bureaucracy of celibates” (an expression of Carl Schmitt) that manages it and of the laity who are part of it.

The other decisive moment of formation of “Roman Catholicism” is, finally, the ecclesiology elaborated by the council of Trent, which reiterates the centrality of ecclesiastical mediation in view of salvation, in contrast with the Lutheran theses of the “universal priesthood,” and therefore establishes the hierarchical, united, and centralized character of the Church; its right to supervise and, if need be, to condemn positions that are in contrast with the orthodox formulation of the truths of faith; its role in the administration of the sacraments.

This ecclesiology finds its seal in the dogma of pontifical infallibility proclaimed by Vatican Council I, put to the test eighty years later in the dogmatic affirmation of the Assumption of Mary into heaven (1950), which together with the previous dogmatic proclamation of her Immaculate Conception (1854) also reiterates the centrality of Marian devotion.

It would be reductive, however, if we were to limit ourselves to what has been said so far. Because there also exists – or better, existed – a widespread “Catholic mindset,” made up of the following:

– a cultural attitude based on a realism with regard to human nature that is sometimes disenchanted and willing to “understand all” as a precondition for “forgiving all”;
– a non-ascetic spirituality that is understanding toward certain material aspects of life, and not inclined to disdain them;
– engagement in everyday charity toward the humble and needy, without the need to idealize them or almost make new idols of them;
– a willingness also to represent itself in its own magnificence, and therefore not deaf to the evidence of beauty and of the arts, as testimony to a supreme Beauty toward which the Christian must tend;
– a subtle examination of the most inward movements of the heart, of the interior struggle between good and evil, of the dialectic between “temptations” and the response of conscience.

It could therefore be said that in what I call “Roman Catholicism” there are interwoven three aspects, obviously in addition to that of religion: the aesthetical, the juridical, the political. This is a matter of a rational vision of the world that makes itself a visible and solid institution and fatally enters into conflict with the idea of representation that emerged in modernity, based on individualism and on a conception of power that, rising from the bottom up, ends up bringing into question the principle of authority.

*

3. This conflict has been considered in different ways, often opposing, by those who have analyzed it. Carl Schmitt looked with admiration to the “resistance” of “Roman Catholicism,” considered the last force capable of reining in the dissipatory forces of modernity. Others have made tough criticisms of him: in this struggle, the Catholic Church is seen as having ruinously emphasized its juridical-hierarchical, authoritarian, external traits.

Beyond these opposing evaluations, it is certain that in recent centuries “Roman Catholicism” has been pushed onto the defensive. What has gradually brought its social presence into question has been above all the birth of industrial society and the consequent process of modernization, which has opened a series of anthropological mutations that are still underway. Almost as if “Roman Catholicism” were “organic” (to say it the old Marxist way) to a society that is agrarian, hierarchical, static, based on penury and fear and instead could not find relevance in a society that is “affluent,” dynamic, characterized by social mobility.

A first response to this situation of crisis was given by the ecumenical council Vatican II (1962-1965), which according to the intentions of Pope John XXIII, who had convened it, was to effect a “pastoral updating,” looking with new optimism at the modern world, which meant finally letting the guard down: no longer carrying on with an age-old duel, but opening a dialogue and effecting an encounter.

The world was swept up during those years in extraordinary changes and in an unprecedented economic development: probably the most sensational, rapid, and profound revolution in the human condition of which there is any trace in history (Eric J. Hobsbawm). The event of the council contributed to this mutation, but was in its turn engulfed by it: the rhythm of the “updatings” – fostered also by the dizzying transformations in the surroundings and by the general conviction, sung by Bob Dylan, that “the times they are a-changin’” – got out of hand for the hierarchy, or at least for that part of it which wanted to effect a reform, not a revolution.

Thus between 1967 and 1968 one witnessed the “watershed” of Paul VI, which expressed itself in the preoccupied analysis of the turbulence of ’68 and then of the “sexual revolution” contained in the encyclical “Humanae Vitae” of July 1968. So great was the pessimism to which that great pontiff came in the 1970’s that, conversing with the philosopher Jean Guitton, he wondered to himself and asked him, echoing a disquieting passage from the Gospel of Luke: “When the Son of Man returns, will he still find faith upon the earth?” And he added: “What strikes me, when I consider the Catholic world, is that within Catholicism there sometimes seems to predominate a type of thinking that is not Catholic, and it could happen that this non-Catholic thinking within Catholicism could tomorrow become the stronger one.”

*

4. It is well known how the successors of Paul VI responded to this situation: by combining change and continuity; effecting – on certain questions – the appropriate corrections (memorable, from this point of view, was the condemnation of “liberation theology”); by seeking a dialogue with modernity that would be at the same time a challenge: on the issues of life, the rationality of man, religious freedom.

Benedict XVI, in what was the true agenda-setting text of his pontificate (the address to the pontifical curia of December 22, 2005), then reiterated a firm point: that the great decisions of Vatican II were to be read and interpreted in the light of the preceding tradition of the Church, and therefore also of the ecclesiology that emerged from the council of Trent and from Vatican II. Even for the simple reason that one cannot effect a formal recantation of the faith believed and lived by generations and generations, without introducing an irreparable “vulnus” in the self-representation and widespread perception of an institution like the Catholic Church.

It is also known how this stance caused a widespread rejection not only “extra ecclesiam,” where it manifested itself in an aggression against Benedict XVI in the media and in intellectual circles that was absolutely unprecedented, but – in the manner of Nicodemus and the murmuring that are congenital in the clerical world – also in the ecclesiastical body, which essentially left that pope alone in the most critical moments of his pontificate. This led, I believe, to his resignation in February of 2013, which – apart from the reassuring interpretations – appears as an epochal event, the reasons and long-term implications of which still remain entirely to be explored.

*

5. This was the situation inherited by Pope Francis. I limit myself only to pointing out the biographical and cultural aspects that in part made Jorge Mario Bergoglio “ab initio” an outsider to what I have called “Roman Catholicism”:

– the peripheral character of his formation, profoundly rooted in the Latin American world, which makes it difficult for him to embody the universality of the Church, or at least drives him to live it in a new way, pushing to the side European and North American civilization;
– his membership in an order, like the Society of Jesus, that over the past half century has effected one of the most sensational political-cultural repositionings ever heard of in recent history, moving from a “reactionary” position to one that is variously “revolutionary” and therefore giving proof of a pragmatism that in many of its aspects is worthy of reflection;
– his estrangement from the aesthetic dimension that is proper to “Roman Catholicism,” his showy renunciation of any representation of dignity of office (the pontifical apartments, the red mozzetta and the usual pontifical trappings, the residence in Castel Gandolfo) and what he calls “customs of a Renaissance prince” (starting with being late for and then absent from a concert of classical music in his honor at the beginning of the pontificate).

I would rather seek to emphasize what could be in my opinion the unifying element of the many mutations that Pope Francis is introducing in Catholic tradition.

I do so basing myself on a little book by an eminent churchman, who is generally considered the theologian of reference for the current pontificate, eloquently cited by Francis as early as his first Angelus, on March 17, 2013, when he said: “In the past few days I have been reading a book by a Cardinal — Cardinal Kasper, a clever theologian, a good theologian — on mercy. And that book did me a lot of good, but do not think I am promoting my cardinals’ books! Not at all! Yet it has done me so much good, so much good.”

The book by Walter Kasper to which I am referring is entitled: “Martin Luther. An ecumenical perspective,” and it is the reworked and expanded version of a conference that the cardinal held on January 18, 2016, in Berlin. The chapter to which I would like to call attention is the sixth: “The ecumenical relevance of Martin Luther.”

The whole chapter is built on a binary argumentation, according to which Luther was led to deepen the rupture with Rome primarily  because of the refusal of the popes and the bishops to proceed with a reform. It was only in the face of Rome’s deafness – Kasper writes – that the German reformer, “on the basis of his understanding of the universal priesthood, had to content himself with an emergency organization. He continued, however, to trust in the fact that the truth of the Gospel would assert itself on its own, and he therefore left the door fundamentally open for a possible future agreement.”

But also on the Catholic side, at the beginning of the 16th century, many doors remained open, and in short there was a fluid situation. Kasper writes: “There was no harmoniously structured Catholic ecclesiology, but only approaches that were more a doctrine on the hierarchy than a real and proper ecclesiology. The systematic elaboration of ecclesiology would take place only in controversial theology, as an antithesis to the polemics of the Reformation against the papacy. The papacy thus became, in a way unknown until then, the distinguishing mark of Catholicism. The respective confessional theses and antitheses influenced and impeded each other.”

One must therefore proceed today – according to the overall meaning of Kasper’s argumentation – with a “deconfessionalization” of both the Reformed confessions and of the Catholic Church, in spite of the fact that this never portrayed itself as a “confession,” but as the universal  Church. One must return to something like the situation that preceded the outbreak of the religious conflicts in the 16th century.

While in the Lutheran camp this “deconfessionalization” has already been widely achieved (with the aggressive secularization of those societies, for which the problems that were at the foundation of the confessional controversies became irrelevant for the overwhelming majority of “Reformed” Christians), in the Catholic camp instead there is still much to be done, precisely because of the survival of aspects and structures of what I have called “Roman Catholicism.” It is therefore above all to the Catholic world that the invitation to “deconfessionalization” is addressed. Kasper invokes this as a “rediscovery of original catholicity, not restricted to a confessional point of view.”

To this end, it would therefore be necessary to bring to completion the surmounting of Tridentine ecclesiology and that of Vatican I. According to Kasper, Vatican II opened the way, but its reception has been controversial and anything but straightforward. This brings us to the role of the current pontiff: “Pope Francis has inaugurated a new phase in this process of reception. He emphasizes the ecclesiology of the people of God, the people of God on the journey, the sense of faith of the people of God, the synodal structure of the Church, and for the comprehension of unity is putting an interesting new approach into play. He no longer describes ecumenical unity with the image of concentric circles around the center, but with the image of the polyhedron, a multifaceted reality, not a ‘puzzle’ put together from the outside, but a whole and, since this is a matter of a precious stone, a whole that reflects the light that strikes it in a marvelously multiple way. Reconnecting with Oscar Cullmann, Pope Francis borrows the concept of diversity reconciled.”

*

6. if we briefly reconsider in this light the behaviors of Francis that have raised the biggest sensation, we better understand their unifying logic:

– his emphasis, right from the day of the election, of his office as bishop of Rome, rather than as pontiff of the universal Church;
– his destructuring of the canonical figure of the Roman pontiff (the famous “who am I to judge?”), at the basis of which – therefore – are not only the factors of character mentioned above, but a deeper reason, of a theological nature;
– the practical downgrading of some of the most characteristic sacraments of the “Catholic mindset” (auricular confession, indissoluble marriage, the Eucharist), realized for pastoral reasons of “mercy” and “welcome”;
– the exaltation of “parrhesìa” within the Church, of presumedly creative confusion, to which is added a vision of the Church almost as a federation of local Churches, endowed with extensive disciplinary, liturgical and even doctrinal powers.

There are those who feel scandalized over the fact that in Poland an interpretation of “Amoris Laetitia” will go into effect that is different from the one that will be realized in Germany or in Argentina, concerning communion for the divorced and remarried. But Francis could respond that this is a matter of different sides of that polyhedron which is the Catholic Church, to which could also be added sooner or later – why not? – the post-Lutheran Reformed Churches, precisely in a spirit of “diversity reconciled.”

On this path, it is easy to foresee that the next steps will be a rethinking of catechesis and of the liturgy in an ecumenical sense, here too with the journey facing the Catholic side being much more demanding than the one facing the “Protestant” side, considering the different points of departure, as also a downgrading of the sacred order in its most “Catholic” aspect, meaning in ecclesiastical celibacy, with the result that the Catholic hierarchy will even cease to be the Schmittian “bureaucracy of celibates.”

One understands better, then, the genuine exaltation of the figure and work of Luther that was produced at the top of the Catholic Church on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of 1517, all the way to the controversial stamp dedicated to him by the Vatican post office, with him and Melanchthon at the feet of Jesus on the cross.

Personally I have no doubt that Luther is one of the giants of “universal history,” as it used to be commonly called, but “est modus in rebus”: above all the institutions must have a sort of modesty in carrying out upheavals in these dimensions, on pain of ridicule: the same sort with which we were assailed in the twentieth century, when we saw the communists back then rehabilitating in unison and by command the “heretics” that they had strenuously condemned and fought until the day before: the “Counterorder, comrades!” of the cartoons by Giovannino Guareschi.

*

7. So if yesterday “Roman Catholicism” was perceived as a foreign body by modernity, a foreignness for which it was not pardoned, it is natural that its twilight should now be hailed with joy by the “modern world” in its political, media, and cultural institutions, and that therefore the current pontiff should be seen as the one who is healing that fracture between the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the world of information, of international organizations and “think tanks,” which – opened in 1968 with “Humanae Vitae” – had become deeper during the subsequent pontificates.

And it is also natural that ecclesiastical groups and circles that already in the 1970’s were hoping for the surpassing of the Tridentine Church and interpreted Vatican II in this perspective, after having lived under wraps over the past forty years, have today come out into the open and with their lay and ecclesiastical heirs should figure among the components of that “brain trust” which was mentioned at the beginning.

There remain open, however, several questions that would impose further reflections that are not easy.

Will the operation carried forward by Pope Francis and by his “entourage” see lasting success, or will it end up encountering resistance within the hierarchy and what remains of the Catholic people, greater than the decidedly marginal forms that have emerged so far?

And more in general: what consequences could this have on the overall cultural, political, religious cohesion of the Western world, which, in spite of having reached an elevated level of secularization, has long had one of its load-bearing structures precisely in “Roman Catholicism”?

But it is preferable that historians would not make prophecies and would content themselves with understanding something, if they are able, about the processes underway.

(English translation by Matthew Sherry, Ballwin, Missouri, U.S.A.)

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

In Ontario, where pro-trans legislation has been passing swiftly, the state has the right to seize children from families that do not support the child’s wish to live as transgendered.

Posted on April 12, 2018 by abyssum

Rod Dreher

How To Tell If Your Baby Is Trans

By ROD DREHER • April 12, 2018, 9:52 AM
https://player.vimeo.com/video/185149379

Barrettes: Diane Ehrensaft from 4th Wavenow on Vimeo.

That is Diane Ehrensaft, one of the nation’s top pediatric gender specialists, advising a medical conference on how to tell if one’s baby is transgender.

I found that clip via the must-read website 4th Wave Now, a community of people — often parents of supposedly trans kids — who are skeptical of transgender ideology. 4th Wave Now is not religious or politically partisan. I strongly urge you to spend some time there. It will make you think hard about how this incredibly destructive ideology is being marketed in the medical establishment, and in (and by) the mass media.

I’m reading now Ryan T. Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally, which is a great primer on the transgender phenomenon for the lay reader. It may shock you to discover in detail the degree to which the “science” of transgenderism is driven not by science, but by cultural politics. I mean, you probably suspected it, but to get into the weeds, as Anderson does, is to be hip deep in true madness.

And yet, they’re making public policy, even legal decisions, based on this (a federal court recently ruled that transgenders are a protected class under Title VII). Here’s a story from the Arizona Republic about how in a divorce, judges today tend to award custody of gender-confused children to the parent who does not favor the child transitioning. It’s a fairly long story, with several pro-trans experts quoted. Not once does the reporter cite a single expert with a point of view supportive of the reluctant parent’s position. You don’t learn from this story that the overwhelming majority of gender-dysphoric children ultimately resolve their dysphoria in favor of their birth gender (they usually end up identifying as gay as well). The story only features prejudiced judges ignorant of science — but the reporter is not telling the whole scientific story!

Whether the journalist knows what she’s doing or not, she is construing reality in such a way as to get ordinary people to accept a lie. This passage from an essay from the American College of Pediatrics website explains how this kind of thing works. Excerpt:

Professor of social work, Dr. William Brennan, has written that “[t]he power of language to color one’s view of reality is profound.” It is for this reason that linguistic engineering always precedes social engineering — even in medicine. Many hold the mistaken belief that gender once meant biological sex. Though the terms are often used interchangeably they were never truly synonymous. Feminists of the late 1960’s and 1970’s used gender to refer to a “social sex” that could differ from one’s “biological sex” in order to overcome unjust discrimination against women rooted in sex stereotypes. These feminists are largely responsible for mainstreaming the use of the word gender in place of sex. More recently, in an attempt to eliminate heteronormativity, queer theorists have expanded gender into an excess of 50 categories by merging the concept of a social sex with sexual attractions.9 However, neither usage reflects the original meaning of the term.

Prior to the 1950s, gender applied only to grammar not to persons. Latin based languages categorize nouns and their modifiers as masculine or feminine and for this reason are still referred to as having a gender. This changed during the 1950s and 1960s as sexologists realized that their sex reassignment agenda could not be sufficiently defended using the words sex and transsexual. From a purely scientific standpoint, human beings possess a biologically determined sex and innate sex differences. No sexologist could actually change a person’s genes through hormones and surgery. Sex change is objectively impossible. Their solution was to hijack the word gender and infuse it with a new meaning that applied to persons. John Money, PhD was among the most prominent of these sexologists who redefined gender to mean ‘the social performance indicative of an internal sexed identity. In essence, these sexologists invented the ideological foundation necessary to justify their treatment of transsexualism with sex reassignment surgery and called it gender. It is this man-made ideology of an ‘internal sexed identity’ that now dominates mainstream medicine, psychiatry and academia. This linguistic history makes it clear that gender is not and never has been a biological or scientific entity. Rather, gender is a socially and politically constructed concept.

You absolutely cannot trust the media on this issue.

Reader, you might think that this is a fringe phenomenon that has nothing to do with you. You are wrong. In Ontario, where pro-trans legislation has been passing swiftly, the state has the right to seize children from families that do not support the child’s wish to live as transgendered.

You will not hear politicians here talking about this. They are afraid to — afraid of being tarred in the media as bigots. But it’s happening. Read 4th Wave Now to see what parents across the ideological spectrum are dealing with.

Posted in , , . Tagged , , , , , .
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on In Ontario, where pro-trans legislation has been passing swiftly, the state has the right to seize children from families that do not support the child’s wish to live as transgendered.

HERE IS YOUR DAILY DOSE OF SATIRE TO HELP YOU COPE WITH THE SPREADING INSANITY

Posted on April 12, 2018 by abyssum

Eccles and Bosco is saved
Ealing Council wins prestigious Heinrich Himmler award

Posted: 11 Apr 2018 04:19 PM PDT

Following its decision to impose a “safe” zone round its flagship baby-slaughtering facility, Ealing Council has been enthusiastically awarded the prestigious Heinrich Himmler award by the Himmler Foundation for Mass Murder, Genocide and Holocausts. Previous winners have included Amnesty International, Planned Parenthood and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service.black

Sorry, today’s news is not a subject for laughs.

Apparently some good and honourable Ealing Councillors felt it very important to prevent desperate pregnant women from receiving any help, for they considered that they had a quota of little corpses to fulfil if they were to keep up their reputation as the most Sadistic Bastards in London. Doubtless, some troubled ladies were feeling harassed by aggressive cries of “Can we help you?” and “Don’t worry, dear,” not to mention being deafened by silent prayer.

Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan, Mayor of London (or is it George Galloway?)

Mayor Genghis Khan, rumoured to be a descendant of the great Mongol Emperor Sadiq Khan, sent his congratulations to Ealing. “This is the way London is going,” he said, “and I hope that this will bring me lots of invitations from such wonderful people as Justin Trudeau and Leo Varadkar. Anything to get away from this poxy city, which is so violent that I have banned lethal weapons such as spoons and egg-cups, not to mention dangerous acids such as lemon juice and vinegar. And don’t get me started on the subject of foreign immigrants!” Other felicitations came in from Ripper Jaq, the local MP, who has been campaigning for “safe” spaces around death zones for some time.

It is now expected that Ealing’s triumph will be recognised worldwide, and that luminaries from ISIS and North Korea will be hoping to arrange visits “to see how killing can be made safe, efficient, and above all uninterrupted, so that a good time can be had by all.”

“We soon got rid of prayer vigils outside Auschwitz, I can tell you!” 
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on HERE IS YOUR DAILY DOSE OF SATIRE TO HELP YOU COPE WITH THE SPREADING INSANITY

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE BISHOPS OF AUSTRALIA {and the United States}

Posted on April 12, 2018 by abyssum
n
Dear Australian Bishops
Back in 1974, the Australian Bishops issued a statement on Humanae Vitae, containing the following paragraph.
The encyclical On Human Life is an authentic and authoritative document of the Church, and as such, it calls for a religious submission of will and of mind (Lumen Gentium n.25). . . It is not impossible, however, that an individual may fully accept the teaching authority of the Pope in general, may be aware of his teaching in this matter and yet reach a position after honest study and prayer that is at variance with papal teaching. Such a person could be without blame; he would certainly not have cut himself off from the Church; and in acting in accordance with his conscience he could be without subjective fault.
 
It is difficult to see how a Catholic can submit mind and will, and yet vary his behaviour from papal teaching.
 
However, this statement, along with the noise created by dissenting media priests, ensured that there would be a dramatic drop in the numbers of children God intended to send to Catholic married couples in this country.
 
Since that statement, apart from a brief (largely ignored) document issued a couple of years later, I have not heard from the pulpit or media any Catholic statement which might warn Australian Catholics of the terrible danger to their souls from following this faulty advice.
 
The example of Russia may help us turn the tide of contraception.
 
 
The Russian government is reported to be offering to pay married couples the equivalent of $8 000 for each child, along with other incentives such as apartments.
 
At present we abort something like 80 000 Australian babies each year.  These children are sentenced to death for the crime of coming into existence, an act planned by God.
 
The twin evils of contraception and abortion seem to be banned from the pulpit and the Catholic media.  And we are now in an aging society with few young people to support our tax base.  
 
Perhaps support of ideas like those of the Russians might help raise awareness among our citizens of the problems arising from underpopulation, such as being overwhelmed by Muslim fertility, as happened to formerly-Christian Lebanon in the seventies.
 
But the real issue is the great and continued offence against God of our apparent lack of enthusiasm to deal with these great evils.
 
Please tell me if I have said anything unfair or incorrect.  And if pursuing the Russian efforts might be a good idea.
Richard Stokes
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

AN OPEN LETTER TO ABYSSUM FROM ROME

Posted on April 12, 2018 by abyssum
Bookmark the permalink.

Open Letter to Bishop Gracida

https://fromrome.wordpress.com/2018/04/12/open-letter-to-bishop-gracida/

by The Editor

A few days ago, a Catholic Bishop in Texas, USA, proposed that the Cardinals meet to discuss the invalidity of the election of Bergoglio to the papacy.

You can read his blog post on that here:

As editor of the From Rome Blog, I have written the following open Letter to Bishop Gracida, which I have posted to his blog, as a comment, but which I republish here for the sake of all the Cardinals and Bishops and clergy of the Church:

Your Excellency,

As the blogger who covered the “Team Bergoglio” scandal (from Nov. 2014 onwards) regarding the irregularities of the Conclave of 2013, I would like to comment on your proposal, if I may.

Surely one of the habitual graces of office of the Roman Pontiff is that of infallibility. And I grant that if an occupant of the Holy See show himself not to enjoy such a habit of grace, this is facti species admissible to consideration.

But I submit there are objective canonical reasons, more weighty, to make this consideration.

First of all, we have the written and oral testimony of Bergoglio’s own supporters, who are unanimous in asserting that there was a conspiracy to have him elected by means of the solicitation of vote promises to obtain 25 votes in the first ballot. This is a formal violation of UDG 81, which imposes an excommunication latae sententiae on such offendors, and all who participated in obtaining those votes are also ipso facto excommunicated in virtue of Canon 1329 § 2.

Thus,, if Bergoglio participated formally in this conspiracy he would also be excommunciated and thus in virtue of Canon 1331 incapable of validly assuming the office to which he is elected.

However, even if he did not, Canon 171 §2 would make his election invalid, since it forbids the counting of votes of those who are excommunicate at the time of voting, and thus presumably at least 25 of the 78 votes which he received in the final decisive vote, by which he appeared to be elected, must be struck from the record, leaving the Conclave unconsummated and a sede vacante.

I wrote about all of this more than 4 years ago, and its extremely disappointing that no Cardinal or Bishop has taken any action on these matters. I also proposed a way to encourage Bergoglio and the Cardinals to discuss this in proper canonical form.

I am therefore gratified that you have raised the issue, once again. I hope the number of those who believe Canon Law should be followed grows, as it does provide a solution to the present problem, even if an imperfect Synod is not called.

One could also bring to bear the terms of Pope Paul IV’s Bull “Cum ex apostolatus officio” (never abrogated), which expressly invalidates the election of a heretic, or of anyone who transgressed the decrees of any previous ecumenical council (Trent for example), as Bergoglio is known to have done, by approving the giving of communion to public heretics while Archbishop of Buenas Aires.

For more information about these charges see: A Chronology of Reports on Team Bergoglio.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

BRAVO ARCHBISHOP CHAPUT

Posted on April 12, 2018 by abyssum

Archbishop Chaput creates ‘quasi-parish’ for Traditional Mass

by
posted

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia (Photo: AP)

The parish will be run by the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia has created a new ‘quasi-parish’ for Catholics interested in the Traditional Latin Mass.

From August 1, the former St Mary parish in Conshohocken – which was subject to a merger in 2014 – will be handed to the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter (FSSP). Under canon law, a quasi-parish is equivalent to a full parish but with certain exceptions. If the venture is deemed a success, Archbishop Chaput can turn it into a permanent parish.

“In response to a growing interest, it has become timely to provide additional pastoral care for those wishing to participate in Divine Worship in the Extraordinary Form,” Archbishop Chaput said.

“While it remains to be seen if this community will flourish so as to become a parish, the establishment of a quasi-parish to provide this spiritual care appears to be most fitting at this time,” he added.

The FSSP is an international fraternity of priests who celebrate exclusively according to the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. It is currently active in 39 dioceses in the US, and has 96 priests working in 54 apostolates throughout the country.

This year, the Vatican also granted it a special indult to celebrate Holy Week liturgy according to the pre-1955 rubrics.

After St Mary’s ceased to be an independent parish in 2014, a local group formed to keep the church open as a centre for the Polish community. David Swedkowski, executive director of the Saint Mary Polish American Society, welcomed the new quasi-parish.

“The Society will continue to exist and focus on promoting Polish heritage in Montgomery County and continuing to raise money so the Fraternity can successfully care for St Mary’s,” he said.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

We, all of us, need truth as we need light and air. And equally, to avoid lies, as we would avoid the “Father of Lies,” the devil . “When he lies,” Jesus says of the devil, “he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).

Posted on April 12, 2018 by abyssum

Dr. Robert Moynihan MoynihanReport@gmail.com via icontactmail4.com 

11:42 AM (4 minutes ago)
to +rhg

 

 

 
Thursday, April 12, 2018
“As for my own responsibility, I acknowledge… that I have made serious mistakes in the assessment and perception of the situation, especially because of the lack of truthful and balanced information.”—Pope Francis, Letter to the Bishops of Chile, signed on April 8, Divine Mercy Sunday, but released in Rome and Chile yesterday, April 11. The “serious mistakes” the Pope mentions have to do with accusations of negligence and covering up sexual abuse made against a priest in Chile. The Pope was persuaded that the accusations, made against Father Juan Barros, were untrue, and in 2015, despite criticism, made Barros a bishop. However, following an investigation carried out in February by Archbishop Charles Scicluna, the Pope has come to believe the accusations of negligence were in fact valid. Hence this letter

 

“When they delivered to me the report… they acknowledged before me having felt overwhelmed with the pain of so many victims of grave abuses of conscience and power and, in particular, of the acts of sexual abuse committed by various consecrated men of your country against minors.” —Ibid.

 

==================

 

A Need for Truth

 

Yesterday, the Vatican made public a remarkable letter Pope Francis has written to the bishops of Chile.

 

In the letter, Francis admits making “serious mistakes” in handling Chile’s scandalous sexual abuse crisis, and asked for forgiveness.

 

Below is the actual text of the Pope’s letter, and a useful Catholic News Agency (CNA) article by Elise Harris, which lays out the background of this case.

 

But what is striking about all of this is the light it sheds on a pathology of decision-making which can lead to poor, or certainly less than optimal, decisions in governments from Washington D.C. to Moscow to Beijing to Berlin to Brussels, and everywhere in between  — and not least, in Vatican City itself — due to lack of truth-telling.

 

=====================

 

Dr. Robert Moynihan MoynihanReport@gmail.com via icontactmail4.com 

11:42 AM (4 minutes ago)
to me

 

 

 
Thursday, April 12, 2018
“As for my own responsibility, I acknowledge… that I have made serious mistakes in the assessment and perception of the situation, especially because of the lack of truthful and balanced information.”—Pope Francis, Letter to the Bishops of Chile, signed on April 8, Divine Mercy Sunday, but released in Rome and Chile yesterday, April 11. The “serious mistakes” the Pope mentions have to do with accusations of negligence and covering up sexual abuse made against a priest in Chile. The Pope was persuaded that the accusations, made against Father Juan Barros, were untrue, and in 2015, despite criticism, made Barros a bishop. However, following an investigation carried out in February by Archbishop Charles Scicluna, the Pope has come to believe the accusations of negligence were in fact valid. Hence this letter

 

“When they delivered to me the report… they acknowledged before me having felt overwhelmed with the pain of so many victims of grave abuses of conscience and power and, in particular, of the acts of sexual abuse committed by various consecrated men of your country against minors.” —Ibid.

 

==================

 

A Need for Truth

 

Yesterday, the Vatican made public a remarkable letter Pope Francis has written to the bishops of Chile.

 

In the letter, Francis admits making “serious mistakes” in handling Chile’s scandalous sexual abuse crisis, and asked for forgiveness.

 

Below is the actual text of the Pope’s letter, and a useful Catholic News Agency (CNA) article by Elise Harris, which lays out the background of this case.

 

But what is striking about all of this is the light it sheds on a pathology of decision-making which can lead to poor, or certainly less than optimal, decisions in governments from Washington D.C. to Moscow to Beijing to Berlin to Brussels, and everywhere in between  — and not least, in Vatican City itself — due to lack of truth-telling.

 

=====================

 

We, all of us, need truth as we need light and air. And equally, to avoid lies, as we would avoid the “Father of Lies,” the devil — about whom Pope Francis speaks at such length toward the end of his latest Apostolic Exhortation. “When he lies,” Jesus says of the devil, “he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).

 

Truth is the source of freedom, as Christ taught: “The truth shall set you free” (John 8:32). And freedom is the happy condition, not of the imprisoned or enslaved, longing to be set free, but of free sons and daughters. So the truth not only sets us free, but brings us happiness, blessedness.

 

In all human institutions, due to human imperfection, individuals fear to speak the complete truth. The fear stems from an understandable, but ultimately corrosive, counter-productive, desire to avoid “hard truths” that will require confession, repentance, and the need to make reforms, to change direction — all hard things.

 

This desire to avoid the seemingly bitter consequences of truth is the source of cover-ups.

 

And in the case that the Pope speaks of in this letter, there ws a cover-up. A cover-up which included not telling the truth to the Pope himself.

 

How could this have happened? How could priests and bishops have covered for each other, misleading even the Pope?

 

Because of a departure from the truth; because of an embrace of lies. “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive” (from the poem Marmion, published by Sir Walter Scott in 1808).

 

Why did this happen in the Vatican, under Francis?

 

The answer, in part, has to do with how all courts function, and in part, with how this particular “court” under Francis functions.

 

Courts are particularly subject to the pathology of “cutting corners” with the truth, of covering up the truth, in order not to worry the king or ruler, often viewed as semi-divine.

 

The Vatican, at least up until Francis — but also since the arrival of Francis — is one of the world’s great courts, perhaps the greatest, since it is the court of the successor of Peter and of the Vicar of Christ.

 

The Vatican of St. John Paul II was not free from this pathology — we all know of some cases where John Paul was “protected” from being told “hard truths.” The case of the founder of the Legionaries is an example.

 

Nor was the Vatican of Benedict XVI free of this pathology. The publication of the “Vati-leaks” papers was justified by the Pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, who stole the papers from the Pope’s desk, by the argument that the Pope was not being told many things he needed to know, so those things needed to be brought into the light. Not long after, Pope Benedict resigned his post.

 

Under Pope Francis, a culture has grown up in the Pope’s inner circles which claim to present the truth of all matters to the Pope, but which in fact — as this case proves — effectively shields him from many “hard truths.” One of those “hard truths” was that a bishop he was appointing to a diocese in Chile had been accused many times, rightly, of covering up the sexual molesting of young men.

 

This lack of telling the truth has in recent years caused great harm in the Church.

 

And in the Vatican itself.

 

So what is to be done?

 

It is time that a culture of “truth-telling” should replace the understandable but ultimately pathological culture of not speaking the truth in order to “protect the Church” or to “protect the Pope.”

 

We need a healthy “culture of truth-telling” in our universities, businesses, dioceses, governments, military units, monasteries and convents and families, and we need it in the Vatican, too, or we will fall, in all of these institutions, into the black holes of lies and coverups.

 

This is the true reform in the court that is the Vatican that Pope Francis can still make, and should make.

 

Francis can institute procedures to hear the various arguments, the pros and cons, on various contested matters, and so come to a more complete knowledge of the truth on many issues regarding which, up to now, he has  listened primarily to a relatively small group of like-minded men whose views seem to exclude a whole series of views not now in favor in Rome.

 

Such procedures could be instituted almost immediately. They would help the papal court to avoid this type of scandal in the future.

 

=========================

 

=========================

 

Pope Francis admits ‘serious mistakes’ in Chile sexual abuse case
By Elise Harris (link)

 

Vatican City, Apr 11, 2018 / 01:11 pm (CNA/EWTN News).– In a letter addressed to Chile’s bishops, Pope Francis admitted to making “serious mistakes” in handling the nation’s massive sexual abuse crisis and asked for forgiveness. The Pope summoned Chile’s bishops to Rome to address the issue, and invited victims to meet with him as well.

 

Referring to a recent investigation of abuse cover-up in Chile carried out by Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna, Pope Francis said that after a “slow reading” of the report, “I can affirm that all the testimonies collected speak in a stark manner, without additives or sweeteners, of many crucified lives and I confess that this has caused me pain and shame.”

 

Francis admitted to misjudging the severity of the affair, telling Chile’s bishops that “I have made serious mistakes in the judgement and perception of the situation, especially due to a lack of truthful and balanced information.”

 

He asked the bishops to “faithfully communicate” this recognition, and he apologized to all those he might have offended.

 

In addition, he summoned all of Chile’s 32 bishops to Rome to discuss the conclusions of Scicluna’s report in the third week of May, where they will discussion the conclusions of the report as well the pope’s own conclusions on the matter.

 

In his letter, signed April 8, Divine Mercy Sunday, Francis said he wants the meeting to be “a fraternal moment, without prejudices or preconceived ideas, with the sole objective of making the truth shine in our lives.”

 

The decision to summon an entire bishops’ conference to Rome is remarkably significant. Nothing of the nature has happened since April 2002, when John Paul II met with 12 of 13 U.S. Cardinals, eight of whom headed major dioceses, and two high-level representatives of the USCCB at the Vatican to address the abuse crisis in the United States, and told them they had handled the situation wrong.

 

In a tweet after an April 11 press conference on the letter in Chile, Jaime Coiro, spokesman for the Chilean bishops conference, said that in the coming weeks Pope Francis will also meet with some victims of abuse carried out by Chilean clergy, asking each one personally for forgiveness.

 

In comments to the media, Coiro recognized the damage done to minors who were abused, saying “we were not able to care for them adequately.” The coming weeks, he said, will be “an intense renewal of our vocation and mission” for the Church in Chile.

 

The Pope’s letter comes after Scicluna made a Feb. 19-25 visit to the United States and Chile to investigate accusations of negligence on the part of Bishop Juan Barros of Osorno, who has been accused of covering up abuse of his long-time friend Fernando Karadima.

 

While on the ground, Scicluna interviewed some 64 people related to the accusations and compiled an report that is some 2,300 pages long, which he delivered to Pope Francis March 20.

 

In 2011, Karadima was found guilty by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of sexually abusing several minors during the 1980s and 1990s, and sentenced to a life of prayer and solitude.

 

Opponents of Barros have been vocal since his 2015 appointment to lead the Diocese of Osorno, with many, including a number of Karadima’s victims, accusing the bishop of covering up the abuse, and also also at times participating.

 

In addition to Barros, Karadima’s victims have also accused three other Chilean bishops who had been close to Karadima – Andrés Arteaga, Tomislav Koljatic and Horacio Valenzuela – of cover-up.

 

Despite the protests, Barros has maintained his innocence, saying he didn’t know the abuse was happening.

 

Pope Francis has backed him, and has refused to allow Barros to step down from his post, though the bishop has submitted a letter of resignation multiple times.

 

Francis’ decision to send Scicluna to Santiago to investigate the accusations came after controversy flared during the Pope’s Jan. 15-18 visit to Chile, during which he responded to a Chilean journalist who asked about the Barros issue, saying the accusations were “calumny,” because there was no proof.

 

The comment prompted uproar from Barros’ critics, several of whom are victims of Karadima’s abuse.

 

It also prompted Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, one of the Pope’s nine cardinal advisors and head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, to release a statement saying the words were painful to victims.

 

In a conversation with journalists on the way back to Rome, Pope Francis apologized, but said there was no evidence condemning Barros, and that so far, no victims had come forward.

 

However, less than one week after the decision to send Scicluna to Chile was announced, one of Karadima’s victims, Juan Carlos Cruz, said in an interview with the Associated Press that in 2015 he had sent a letter to the Pope through the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, alleging that Barros had seen Karadima’s abuse and had at times participated.

 

Members of the commission confirmed the news, and said the commission’s head, Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, had indeed handed the letter to Pope Francis, raising the question of whether the Pope actually read the letter.

 

Before going to Santiago Feb. 19 to interview witnesses related to the Barros accusations, Scicluna stopped in New York to interview Cruz.

 

He then went to Santiago to interview additional witnesses related to the Barros case.

 

Scicluna is a well-regarded Vatican expert on sexual abuse appeals cases. In addition to heading the Archdiocese of Malta, in 2015 he was named by the pope to oversee a team in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith charged with handling appeals filed by clergy accused of abuse. He served as the congregation’s Promoter of Justice for 17 years, and is widely known for his expertise in the canonical norms governing allegations of sexual abuse.

 

In addition to his interviews on Barros, Scicluna also met with alleged victims of abuse by the Marist Brothers, a move which seemingly broadened the scope of his mandate in the country.

 

In August 2017, the Marist Brothers reported that a member of the congregation had admitted to abusing 14 boys in Chile. Earlier this year, the Marist Brothers began a canonical investigation of allegations of sexual abuse in Chile by some of its members.

 

In his letter to Chile’s bishops, Pope Francis said now is an “opportune” time to “put the Church of Chile in a state of prayer.”

 

“Now more than ever we cannot fall back into the temptation of verbiage or dwell in generalities,” he said, and told the bishops to look to Christ in the coming days and weeks.

 

“Let us look at his life and gestures, especially when he shows compassion and mercy to those who have erred. Let us love in the truth, let us ask for wisdom of heart and allow ourselves to be converted.”

 

=================

 

Full text of Pope Francis’ letter to Chilean bishops
Vatican City, Apr 11, 2018 / 04:16 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- In a letter addressed to Chile’s bishops, Pope Francis admitted to making “serious mistakes” in handling the nation’s massive sexual abuse crisis and asked for forgiveness. The pope summoned Chile’s bishops to Rome to address the issue, and invited victims to meet with him as well.

 

Referring to a recent investigation of abuse cover-up in Chile carried out by Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, Pope Francis said that after a “slow reading” of the report, “I can affirm that all the testimonies collected speak in a stark manner, without additives or sweeteners, of many crucified lives and I confess that this has caused me pain and shame.”

 

Francis admitted to misjudging the severity of the affair, telling Chile’s bishops that “I have made serious mistakes in the judgement and perception of the situation, especially due to a lack of truthful and balanced information.”

 

Please find below CNA’s translation of the full text of Pope Francis’ April 8 letter:

 

April 8, 2018

 

By Pope Francis

 

Dear brothers in the episcopate:

 

The reception last week of the final documents which complete the report delivered to me by my two special envoys to Chile on March 20, 2018, with a total of more than 2,300 pages, moves me to write this letter.

 

I assure you of my prayers and I want to share with you the conviction that the present difficulties are also an occasion to re-establish trust in the Church, a trust broken by our errors and sins and in order to heal the wounds that do not cease to bleed in the whole of Chilean society.

 

Without faith and without prayer, fraternity is impossible. Thus, on this second Sunday of Easter, on the day of mercy, I offer you this reflection with the desire that each one of you accompany me on the inner journey that I have been traveling in recent weeks, so that it would be the Spirit who would guide us with his gift, and not our interests, or even worse, our wounded pride.

 

Sometimes when so many evils frighten the soul and throw us listlessly into the world buttoned up in our comfortable “winter palaces,” the love of God comes out to meet us and purifies our intentions in order to love as free, mature, and judicious men.

 

When the media shames us, presenting a Church almost always in the darkness of the new moon, deprived of the Sun of justice, we have the temptation of doubting the Paschal victory of the Risen One.

 

I believe that like St. Thomas the Apostle we must not fear doubt but rather fear the pretension of wanting to see without trusting the testimony of those who heard from the lips of the Lord the most beautiful promise.

 

Today I want to speak to you not of assurances, but rather of the one thing that the Lord offers us to experience every day: the joy, the peace of forgiveness of our sins and the action of his grace.

 

In that regard I wish to express my gratitude to His Excellency Charles Scicluna, the Archbishop of Malta and to Rev. Jordi Bertomeu Farnós, official of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, for his prodigious work in considerately and empathetically listening to the 64 testimonies he recently gathered both in New York and Santiago de Chile.

 

I sent them to listen from the heart and with humility.

 

Later on, when they delivered to me the report and, in particular, its juridical and pastoral assessment of the gathered information, they acknowledged before me of having felt overwhelmed with the pain of so many victims of grave abuses of conscience and power and, in particular, of the acts of sexual abuse committed by various consecrated men of your country against minors, those who were not taken seriously then and were even robbed of their innocence.

 

The most heartfelt and cordial gratitude we must express as pastors to those who with honesty, courage and the sense of the Church requested a meeting with my envoys and showed them the wounds of their souls.

 

Bishop Scicluna and Rev. Bertomeu have told me how some bishops, priests and deacons, lay men and women of Santiago and Osorno came to Holy Name parish in New York or to the office of Sotero Sanz, in Providencia, with a maturity, respect and kindness that was overwhelming.

 

In addition, the days following that special mission, have witnessed another meritorious fact that we should keep very much in mind for other occasions, because not only has the climate of confidentiality achieved during the visit been maintained, but at no time has the temptation been yielded to to turn this delicate mission into a media circus.

 

In that regard, I wish to thank the different organizations and media for their professionalism in treating such a delicate case, respecting the right of citizens to the information and the good reputation of the declarants.

 

Now, after a careful reading of the proceedings of this “special mission,” I believe I can affirm that the collected testimonies speak in a stark way, without additives or sweeteners, of many crucified lives and I confess to you that that causes me pain and shame.

 

Taking all this into account, I am writing to you, meeting together in the 115th Plenary Assembly, to humbly request your collaboration and assistance in discerning the short, mid and long term measures that must be adopted to re-establish ecclesial communion in Chile, with the goal of repairing as much as possible the scandal and re-establishing justice.

 

I plan to call you to Rome to discuss the conclusions and the aforementioned visit and my conclusions.

 

I have thought of that meeting has a fraternal moment, without prejudices or preconceived ideas, with the only goal of making the truth shine forth in our lives. Regarding the date, I entrust it to the Secretary of the Bishops’ Conference to show me the possibilities.

 

As for my own responsibility, I acknowledge, and I want you to faithfully convey it that way, that I have made serious mistakes in the assessment and perception of the situation, especially because of the lack of truthful and balanced information.

 

Right now I ask forgiveness from all those I offended and I hope to be able to do so personally, in the coming weeks, in the meetings I will have with representatives of the people who were interviewed.

 

Abide in me: these words of the Lord resound again and again in these day.

 

They speak of personal relationships, of communion, of fraternity which attracts and summons.

 

United to Christ as the branches are to the vine, I invite you graft into your prayers in the coming days a magnanimity that prepares us for the aforementioned meeting and will then allow what we will have reflected on to be translated into concrete actions.

 

It maybe even be opportune to have the Church in Chile be in ongoing prayer.

 

Now more than ever we cannot fall back into the temptation of verbiage or dwell in “generalities.”

 

These days, let us look at Christ. Let us look at his life and his gestures, especially when he shows compassion and mercy to those who have erred.

 

Let us love in truth, let us ask for wisdom of heart and let us be converted.

Waiting for news from you and asking His Excellency Santiago Silva Retamales, President of the Chilean Conference of Bishops, to publish this letter as quickly as possible, I impart my blessing and ask you to please keep praying for me.

 

(to be continued)

 
The Moynihan Letters are posted here.

 

Note: The Moynihan Letters go to more than 21,000 people around the world. If you would like to subscribe, simply email me an email address, and I will add you to the list. Also, if you would like to subscribe to our print magazine, Inside the Vatican, please do so! We appreciate all new subscribers very much. You might even consider purchasing a gift subscription for a friend, a student, a grandchild, a parish priest. Thank you. To subscribe, click here.

Dr. Robert Moynihan MoynihanReport@gmail.com via icontactmail4.com 

11:42 AM (4 minutes ago)
to me

 

 

 
Thursday, April 12, 2018
“As for my own responsibility, I acknowledge… that I have made serious mistakes in the assessment and perception of the situation, especially because of the lack of truthful and balanced information.”—Pope Francis, Letter to the Bishops of Chile, signed on April 8, Divine Mercy Sunday, but released in Rome and Chile yesterday, April 11. The “serious mistakes” the Pope mentions have to do with accusations of negligence and covering up sexual abuse made against a priest in Chile. The Pope was persuaded that the accusations, made against Father Juan Barros, were untrue, and in 2015, despite criticism, made Barros a bishop. However, following an investigation carried out in February by Archbishop Charles Scicluna, the Pope has come to believe the accusations of negligence were in fact valid. Hence this letter

 

“When they delivered to me the report… they acknowledged before me having felt overwhelmed with the pain of so many victims of grave abuses of conscience and power and, in particular, of the acts of sexual abuse committed by various consecrated men of your country against minors.” —Ibid.

 

==================

 

A Need for Truth

 

Yesterday, the Vatican made public a remarkable letter Pope Francis has written to the bishops of Chile.

 

In the letter, Francis admits making “serious mistakes” in handling Chile’s scandalous sexual abuse crisis, and asked for forgiveness.

 

Below is the actual text of the Pope’s letter, and a useful Catholic News Agency (CNA) article by Elise Harris, which lays out the background of this case.

 

But what is striking about all of this is the light it sheds on a pathology of decision-making which can lead to poor, or certainly less than optimal, decisions in governments from Washington D.C. to Moscow to Beijing to Berlin to Brussels, and everywhere in between  — and not least, in Vatican City itself — due to lack of truth-telling.

 

=====================

 

We, all of us, need truth as we need light and air. And equally, to avoid lies, as we would avoid the “Father of Lies,” the devil — about whom Pope Francis speaks at such length toward the end of his latest Apostolic Exhortation. “When he lies,” Jesus says of the devil, “he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).

 

Truth is the source of freedom, as Christ taught: “The truth shall set you free” (John 8:32). And freedom is the happy condition, not of the imprisoned or enslaved, longing to be set free, but of free sons and daughters. So the truth not only sets us free, but brings us happiness, blessedness.

 

In all human institutions, due to human imperfection, individuals fear to speak the complete truth. The fear stems from an understandable, but ultimately corrosive, counter-productive, desire to avoid “hard truths” that will require confession, repentance, and the need to make reforms, to change direction — all hard things.

 

This desire to avoid the seemingly bitter consequences of truth is the source of cover-ups.

 

And in the case that the Pope speaks of in this letter, there ws a cover-up. A cover-up which included not telling the truth to the Pope himself.

 

How could this have happened? How could priests and bishops have covered for each other, misleading even the Pope?

 

Because of a departure from the truth; because of an embrace of lies. “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive” (from the poem Marmion, published by Sir Walter Scott in 1808).

 

Why did this happen in the Vatican, under Francis?

 

The answer, in part, has to do with how all courts function, and in part, with how this particular “court” under Francis functions.

 

Courts are particularly subject to the pathology of “cutting corners” with the truth, of covering up the truth, in order not to worry the king or ruler, often viewed as semi-divine.

 

The Vatican, at least up until Francis — but also since the arrival of Francis — is one of the world’s great courts, perhaps the greatest, since it is the court of the successor of Peter and of the Vicar of Christ.

 

The Vatican of St. John Paul II was not free from this pathology — we all know of some cases where John Paul was “protected” from being told “hard truths.” The case of the founder of the Legionaries is an example.

 

Nor was the Vatican of Benedict XVI free of this pathology. The publication of the “Vati-leaks” papers was justified by the Pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, who stole the papers from the Pope’s desk, by the argument that the Pope was not being told many things he needed to know, so those things needed to be brought into the light. Not long after, Pope Benedict resigned his post.

 

Under Pope Francis, a culture has grown up in the Pope’s inner circles which claim to present the truth of all matters to the Pope, but which in fact — as this case proves — effectively shields him from many “hard truths.” One of those “hard truths” was that a bishop he was appointing to a diocese in Chile had been accused many times, rightly, of covering up the sexual molesting of young men.

 

This lack of telling the truth has in recent years caused great harm in the Church.

 

And in the Vatican itself.

 

So what is to be done?

 

It is time that a culture of “truth-telling” should replace the understandable but ultimately pathological culture of not speaking the truth in order to “protect the Church” or to “protect the Pope.”

 

We need a healthy “culture of truth-telling” in our universities, businesses, dioceses, governments, military units, monasteries and convents and families, and we need it in the Vatican, too, or we will fall, in all of these institutions, into the black holes of lies and coverups.

 

This is the true reform in the court that is the Vatican that Pope Francis can still make, and should make.

 

Francis can institute procedures to hear the various arguments, the pros and cons, on various contested matters, and so come to a more complete knowledge of the truth on many issues regarding which, up to now, he has  listened primarily to a relatively small group of like-minded men whose views seem to exclude a whole series of views not now in favor in Rome.

 

Such procedures could be instituted almost immediately. They would help the papal court to avoid this type of scandal in the future.

 

=========================

 

=========================

 

Pope Francis admits ‘serious mistakes’ in Chile sexual abuse case
By Elise Harris (link)

 

Vatican City, Apr 11, 2018 / 01:11 pm (CNA/EWTN News).– In a letter addressed to Chile’s bishops, Pope Francis admitted to making “serious mistakes” in handling the nation’s massive sexual abuse crisis and asked for forgiveness. The Pope summoned Chile’s bishops to Rome to address the issue, and invited victims to meet with him as well.

 

Referring to a recent investigation of abuse cover-up in Chile carried out by Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna, Pope Francis said that after a “slow reading” of the report, “I can affirm that all the testimonies collected speak in a stark manner, without additives or sweeteners, of many crucified lives and I confess that this has caused me pain and shame.”

 

Francis admitted to misjudging the severity of the affair, telling Chile’s bishops that “I have made serious mistakes in the judgement and perception of the situation, especially due to a lack of truthful and balanced information.”

 

He asked the bishops to “faithfully communicate” this recognition, and he apologized to all those he might have offended.

 

In addition, he summoned all of Chile’s 32 bishops to Rome to discuss the conclusions of Scicluna’s report in the third week of May, where they will discussion the conclusions of the report as well the pope’s own conclusions on the matter.

 

In his letter, signed April 8, Divine Mercy Sunday, Francis said he wants the meeting to be “a fraternal moment, without prejudices or preconceived ideas, with the sole objective of making the truth shine in our lives.”

 

The decision to summon an entire bishops’ conference to Rome is remarkably significant. Nothing of the nature has happened since April 2002, when John Paul II met with 12 of 13 U.S. Cardinals, eight of whom headed major dioceses, and two high-level representatives of the USCCB at the Vatican to address the abuse crisis in the United States, and told them they had handled the situation wrong.

 

In a tweet after an April 11 press conference on the letter in Chile, Jaime Coiro, spokesman for the Chilean bishops conference, said that in the coming weeks Pope Francis will also meet with some victims of abuse carried out by Chilean clergy, asking each one personally for forgiveness.

 

In comments to the media, Coiro recognized the damage done to minors who were abused, saying “we were not able to care for them adequately.” The coming weeks, he said, will be “an intense renewal of our vocation and mission” for the Church in Chile.

 

The Pope’s letter comes after Scicluna made a Feb. 19-25 visit to the United States and Chile to investigate accusations of negligence on the part of Bishop Juan Barros of Osorno, who has been accused of covering up abuse of his long-time friend Fernando Karadima.

 

While on the ground, Scicluna interviewed some 64 people related to the accusations and compiled an report that is some 2,300 pages long, which he delivered to Pope Francis March 20.

 

In 2011, Karadima was found guilty by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of sexually abusing several minors during the 1980s and 1990s, and sentenced to a life of prayer and solitude.

 

Opponents of Barros have been vocal since his 2015 appointment to lead the Diocese of Osorno, with many, including a number of Karadima’s victims, accusing the bishop of covering up the abuse, and also also at times participating.

 

In addition to Barros, Karadima’s victims have also accused three other Chilean bishops who had been close to Karadima – Andrés Arteaga, Tomislav Koljatic and Horacio Valenzuela – of cover-up.

 

Despite the protests, Barros has maintained his innocence, saying he didn’t know the abuse was happening.

 

Pope Francis has backed him, and has refused to allow Barros to step down from his post, though the bishop has submitted a letter of resignation multiple times.

 

Francis’ decision to send Scicluna to Santiago to investigate the accusations came after controversy flared during the Pope’s Jan. 15-18 visit to Chile, during which he responded to a Chilean journalist who asked about the Barros issue, saying the accusations were “calumny,” because there was no proof.

 

The comment prompted uproar from Barros’ critics, several of whom are victims of Karadima’s abuse.

 

It also prompted Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, one of the Pope’s nine cardinal advisors and head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, to release a statement saying the words were painful to victims.

 

In a conversation with journalists on the way back to Rome, Pope Francis apologized, but said there was no evidence condemning Barros, and that so far, no victims had come forward.

 

However, less than one week after the decision to send Scicluna to Chile was announced, one of Karadima’s victims, Juan Carlos Cruz, said in an interview with the Associated Press that in 2015 he had sent a letter to the Pope through the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, alleging that Barros had seen Karadima’s abuse and had at times participated.

 

Members of the commission confirmed the news, and said the commission’s head, Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, had indeed handed the letter to Pope Francis, raising the question of whether the Pope actually read the letter.

 

Before going to Santiago Feb. 19 to interview witnesses related to the Barros accusations, Scicluna stopped in New York to interview Cruz.

 

He then went to Santiago to interview additional witnesses related to the Barros case.

 

Scicluna is a well-regarded Vatican expert on sexual abuse appeals cases. In addition to heading the Archdiocese of Malta, in 2015 he was named by the pope to oversee a team in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith charged with handling appeals filed by clergy accused of abuse. He served as the congregation’s Promoter of Justice for 17 years, and is widely known for his expertise in the canonical norms governing allegations of sexual abuse.

 

In addition to his interviews on Barros, Scicluna also met with alleged victims of abuse by the Marist Brothers, a move which seemingly broadened the scope of his mandate in the country.

 

In August 2017, the Marist Brothers reported that a member of the congregation had admitted to abusing 14 boys in Chile. Earlier this year, the Marist Brothers began a canonical investigation of allegations of sexual abuse in Chile by some of its members.

 

In his letter to Chile’s bishops, Pope Francis said now is an “opportune” time to “put the Church of Chile in a state of prayer.”

 

“Now more than ever we cannot fall back into the temptation of verbiage or dwell in generalities,” he said, and told the bishops to look to Christ in the coming days and weeks.

 

“Let us look at his life and gestures, especially when he shows compassion and mercy to those who have erred. Let us love in the truth, let us ask for wisdom of heart and allow ourselves to be converted.”

 

=================

 

Full text of Pope Francis’ letter to Chilean bishops
Vatican City, Apr 11, 2018 / 04:16 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- In a letter addressed to Chile’s bishops, Pope Francis admitted to making “serious mistakes” in handling the nation’s massive sexual abuse crisis and asked for forgiveness. The pope summoned Chile’s bishops to Rome to address the issue, and invited victims to meet with him as well.

 

Referring to a recent investigation of abuse cover-up in Chile carried out by Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, Pope Francis said that after a “slow reading” of the report, “I can affirm that all the testimonies collected speak in a stark manner, without additives or sweeteners, of many crucified lives and I confess that this has caused me pain and shame.”

 

Francis admitted to misjudging the severity of the affair, telling Chile’s bishops that “I have made serious mistakes in the judgement and perception of the situation, especially due to a lack of truthful and balanced information.”

 

Please find below CNA’s translation of the full text of Pope Francis’ April 8 letter:

 

April 8, 2018

 

By Pope Francis

 

Dear brothers in the episcopate:

 

The reception last week of the final documents which complete the report delivered to me by my two special envoys to Chile on March 20, 2018, with a total of more than 2,300 pages, moves me to write this letter.

 

I assure you of my prayers and I want to share with you the conviction that the present difficulties are also an occasion to re-establish trust in the Church, a trust broken by our errors and sins and in order to heal the wounds that do not cease to bleed in the whole of Chilean society.

 

Without faith and without prayer, fraternity is impossible. Thus, on this second Sunday of Easter, on the day of mercy, I offer you this reflection with the desire that each one of you accompany me on the inner journey that I have been traveling in recent weeks, so that it would be the Spirit who would guide us with his gift, and not our interests, or even worse, our wounded pride.

 

Sometimes when so many evils frighten the soul and throw us listlessly into the world buttoned up in our comfortable “winter palaces,” the love of God comes out to meet us and purifies our intentions in order to love as free, mature, and judicious men.

 

When the media shames us, presenting a Church almost always in the darkness of the new moon, deprived of the Sun of justice, we have the temptation of doubting the Paschal victory of the Risen One.

 

I believe that like St. Thomas the Apostle we must not fear doubt but rather fear the pretension of wanting to see without trusting the testimony of those who heard from the lips of the Lord the most beautiful promise.

 

Today I want to speak to you not of assurances, but rather of the one thing that the Lord offers us to experience every day: the joy, the peace of forgiveness of our sins and the action of his grace.

 

In that regard I wish to express my gratitude to His Excellency Charles Scicluna, the Archbishop of Malta and to Rev. Jordi Bertomeu Farnós, official of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, for his prodigious work in considerately and empathetically listening to the 64 testimonies he recently gathered both in New York and Santiago de Chile.

 

I sent them to listen from the heart and with humility.

 

Later on, when they delivered to me the report and, in particular, its juridical and pastoral assessment of the gathered information, they acknowledged before me of having felt overwhelmed with the pain of so many victims of grave abuses of conscience and power and, in particular, of the acts of sexual abuse committed by various consecrated men of your country against minors, those who were not taken seriously then and were even robbed of their innocence.

 

The most heartfelt and cordial gratitude we must express as pastors to those who with honesty, courage and the sense of the Church requested a meeting with my envoys and showed them the wounds of their souls.

 

Bishop Scicluna and Rev. Bertomeu have told me how some bishops, priests and deacons, lay men and women of Santiago and Osorno came to Holy Name parish in New York or to the office of Sotero Sanz, in Providencia, with a maturity, respect and kindness that was overwhelming.

 

In addition, the days following that special mission, have witnessed another meritorious fact that we should keep very much in mind for other occasions, because not only has the climate of confidentiality achieved during the visit been maintained, but at no time has the temptation been yielded to to turn this delicate mission into a media circus.

 

In that regard, I wish to thank the different organizations and media for their professionalism in treating such a delicate case, respecting the right of citizens to the information and the good reputation of the declarants.

 

Now, after a careful reading of the proceedings of this “special mission,” I believe I can affirm that the collected testimonies speak in a stark way, without additives or sweeteners, of many crucified lives and I confess to you that that causes me pain and shame.

 

Taking all this into account, I am writing to you, meeting together in the 115th Plenary Assembly, to humbly request your collaboration and assistance in discerning the short, mid and long term measures that must be adopted to re-establish ecclesial communion in Chile, with the goal of repairing as much as possible the scandal and re-establishing justice.

 

I plan to call you to Rome to discuss the conclusions and the aforementioned visit and my conclusions.

 

I have thought of that meeting has a fraternal moment, without prejudices or preconceived ideas, with the only goal of making the truth shine forth in our lives. Regarding the date, I entrust it to the Secretary of the Bishops’ Conference to show me the possibilities.

 

As for my own responsibility, I acknowledge, and I want you to faithfully convey it that way, that I have made serious mistakes in the assessment and perception of the situation, especially because of the lack of truthful and balanced information.

 

Right now I ask forgiveness from all those I offended and I hope to be able to do so personally, in the coming weeks, in the meetings I will have with representatives of the people who were interviewed.

 

Abide in me: these words of the Lord resound again and again in these day.

 

They speak of personal relationships, of communion, of fraternity which attracts and summons.

 

United to Christ as the branches are to the vine, I invite you graft into your prayers in the coming days a magnanimity that prepares us for the aforementioned meeting and will then allow what we will have reflected on to be translated into concrete actions.

 

It maybe even be opportune to have the Church in Chile be in ongoing prayer.

 

Now more than ever we cannot fall back into the temptation of verbiage or dwell in “generalities.”

 

These days, let us look at Christ. Let us look at his life and his gestures, especially when he shows compassion and mercy to those who have erred.

 

Let us love in truth, let us ask for wisdom of heart and let us be converted.

Waiting for news from you and asking His Excellency Santiago Silva Retamales, President of the Chilean Conference of Bishops, to publish this letter as quickly as possible, I impart my blessing and ask you to please keep praying for me.

 

(to be continued)

 
The Moynihan Letters are posted here.

 

Note: The Moynihan Letters go to more than 21,000 people around the world. If you would like to subscribe, simply email me an email address, and I will add you to the list. Also, if you would like to subscribe to our print magazine, Inside the Vatican, please do so! We appreciate all new subscribers very much. You might even consider purchasing a gift subscription for a friend, a student, a grandchild, a parish priest. Thank you. To subscribe, click here.

 

Truth is the source of freedom, as Christ taught: “The truth shall set you free” (John 8:32). And freedom is the happy condition, not of the imprisoned or enslaved, longing to be set free, but of free sons and daughters. So the truth not only sets us free, but brings us happiness, blessedness.

 

In all human institutions, due to human imperfection, individuals fear to speak the complete truth. The fear stems from an understandable, but ultimately corrosive, counter-productive, desire to avoid “hard truths” that will require confession, repentance, and the need to make reforms, to change direction — all hard things.

 

This desire to avoid the seemingly bitter consequences of truth is the source of cover-ups.

 

And in the case that the Pope speaks of in this letter, there ws a cover-up. A cover-up which included not telling the truth to the Pope himself.

 

How could this have happened? How could priests and bishops have covered for each other, misleading even the Pope?

 

Because of a departure from the truth; because of an embrace of lies. “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive” (from the poem Marmion, published by Sir Walter Scott in 1808).

 

Why did this happen in the Vatican, under Francis?

 

The answer, in part, has to do with how all courts function, and in part, with how this particular “court” under Francis functions.

 

Courts are particularly subject to the pathology of “cutting corners” with the truth, of covering up the truth, in order not to worry the king or ruler, often viewed as semi-divine.

 

The Vatican, at least up until Francis — but also since the arrival of Francis — is one of the world’s great courts, perhaps the greatest, since it is the court of the successor of Peter and of the Vicar of Christ.

 

The Vatican of St. John Paul II was not free from this pathology — we all know of some cases where John Paul was “protected” from being told “hard truths.” The case of the founder of the Legionaries is an example.

 

Nor was the Vatican of Benedict XVI free of this pathology. The publication of the “Vati-leaks” papers was justified by the Pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, who stole the papers from the Pope’s desk, by the argument that the Pope was not being told many things he needed to know, so those things needed to be brought into the light. Not long after, Pope Benedict resigned his post.

 

Under Pope Francis, a culture has grown up in the Pope’s inner circles which claim to present the truth of all matters to the Pope, but which in fact — as this case proves — effectively shields him from many “hard truths.” One of those “hard truths” was that a bishop he was appointing to a diocese in Chile had been accused many times, rightly, of covering up the sexual molesting of young men.

 

This lack of telling the truth has in recent years caused great harm in the Church.

 

And in the Vatican itself.

 

So what is to be done?

 

It is time that a culture of “truth-telling” should replace the understandable but ultimately pathological culture of not speaking the truth in order to “protect the Church” or to “protect the Pope.”

 

We need a healthy “culture of truth-telling” in our universities, businesses, dioceses, governments, military units, monasteries and convents and families, and we need it in the Vatican, too, or we will fall, in all of these institutions, into the black holes of lies and coverups.

 

This is the true reform in the court that is the Vatican that Pope Francis can still make, and should make.

 

Francis can institute procedures to hear the various arguments, the pros and cons, on various contested matters, and so come to a more complete knowledge of the truth on many issues regarding which, up to now, he has  listened primarily to a relatively small group of like-minded men whose views seem to exclude a whole series of views not now in favor in Rome.

 

Such procedures could be instituted almost immediately. They would help the papal court to avoid this type of scandal in the future.

 

=========================

 

=========================

 

Pope Francis admits ‘serious mistakes’ in Chile sexual abuse case
By Elise Harris (link)

 

Vatican City, Apr 11, 2018 / 01:11 pm (CNA/EWTN News).– In a letter addressed to Chile’s bishops, Pope Francis admitted to making “serious mistakes” in handling the nation’s massive sexual abuse crisis and asked for forgiveness. The Pope summoned Chile’s bishops to Rome to address the issue, and invited victims to meet with him as well.

 

Referring to a recent investigation of abuse cover-up in Chile carried out by Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna, Pope Francis said that after a “slow reading” of the report, “I can affirm that all the testimonies collected speak in a stark manner, without additives or sweeteners, of many crucified lives and I confess that this has caused me pain and shame.”

 

Francis admitted to misjudging the severity of the affair, telling Chile’s bishops that “I have made serious mistakes in the judgement and perception of the situation, especially due to a lack of truthful and balanced information.”

 

He asked the bishops to “faithfully communicate” this recognition, and he apologized to all those he might have offended.

 

In addition, he summoned all of Chile’s 32 bishops to Rome to discuss the conclusions of Scicluna’s report in the third week of May, where they will discussion the conclusions of the report as well the pope’s own conclusions on the matter.

 

In his letter, signed April 8, Divine Mercy Sunday, Francis said he wants the meeting to be “a fraternal moment, without prejudices or preconceived ideas, with the sole objective of making the truth shine in our lives.”

 

The decision to summon an entire bishops’ conference to Rome is remarkably significant. Nothing of the nature has happened since April 2002, when John Paul II met with 12 of 13 U.S. Cardinals, eight of whom headed major dioceses, and two high-level representatives of the USCCB at the Vatican to address the abuse crisis in the United States, and told them they had handled the situation wrong.

 

In a tweet after an April 11 press conference on the letter in Chile, Jaime Coiro, spokesman for the Chilean bishops conference, said that in the coming weeks Pope Francis will also meet with some victims of abuse carried out by Chilean clergy, asking each one personally for forgiveness.

 

In comments to the media, Coiro recognized the damage done to minors who were abused, saying “we were not able to care for them adequately.” The coming weeks, he said, will be “an intense renewal of our vocation and mission” for the Church in Chile.

 

The Pope’s letter comes after Scicluna made a Feb. 19-25 visit to the United States and Chile to investigate accusations of negligence on the part of Bishop Juan Barros of Osorno, who has been accused of covering up abuse of his long-time friend Fernando Karadima.

 

While on the ground, Scicluna interviewed some 64 people related to the accusations and compiled an report that is some 2,300 pages long, which he delivered to Pope Francis March 20.

 

In 2011, Karadima was found guilty by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of sexually abusing several minors during the 1980s and 1990s, and sentenced to a life of prayer and solitude.

 

Opponents of Barros have been vocal since his 2015 appointment to lead the Diocese of Osorno, with many, including a number of Karadima’s victims, accusing the bishop of covering up the abuse, and also also at times participating.

 

In addition to Barros, Karadima’s victims have also accused three other Chilean bishops who had been close to Karadima – Andrés Arteaga, Tomislav Koljatic and Horacio Valenzuela – of cover-up.

 

Despite the protests, Barros has maintained his innocence, saying he didn’t know the abuse was happening.

 

Pope Francis has backed him, and has refused to allow Barros to step down from his post, though the bishop has submitted a letter of resignation multiple times.

 

Francis’ decision to send Scicluna to Santiago to investigate the accusations came after controversy flared during the Pope’s Jan. 15-18 visit to Chile, during which he responded to a Chilean journalist who asked about the Barros issue, saying the accusations were “calumny,” because there was no proof.

 

The comment prompted uproar from Barros’ critics, several of whom are victims of Karadima’s abuse.

 

It also prompted Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, one of the Pope’s nine cardinal advisors and head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, to release a statement saying the words were painful to victims.

 

In a conversation with journalists on the way back to Rome, Pope Francis apologized, but said there was no evidence condemning Barros, and that so far, no victims had come forward.

 

However, less than one week after the decision to send Scicluna to Chile was announced, one of Karadima’s victims, Juan Carlos Cruz, said in an interview with the Associated Press that in 2015 he had sent a letter to the Pope through the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, alleging that Barros had seen Karadima’s abuse and had at times participated.

 

Members of the commission confirmed the news, and said the commission’s head, Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, had indeed handed the letter to Pope Francis, raising the question of whether the Pope actually read the letter.

 

Before going to Santiago Feb. 19 to interview witnesses related to the Barros accusations, Scicluna stopped in New York to interview Cruz.

 

He then went to Santiago to interview additional witnesses related to the Barros case.

 

Scicluna is a well-regarded Vatican expert on sexual abuse appeals cases. In addition to heading the Archdiocese of Malta, in 2015 he was named by the pope to oversee a team in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith charged with handling appeals filed by clergy accused of abuse. He served as the congregation’s Promoter of Justice for 17 years, and is widely known for his expertise in the canonical norms governing allegations of sexual abuse.

 

In addition to his interviews on Barros, Scicluna also met with alleged victims of abuse by the Marist Brothers, a move which seemingly broadened the scope of his mandate in the country.

 

In August 2017, the Marist Brothers reported that a member of the congregation had admitted to abusing 14 boys in Chile. Earlier this year, the Marist Brothers began a canonical investigation of allegations of sexual abuse in Chile by some of its members.

 

In his letter to Chile’s bishops, Pope Francis said now is an “opportune” time to “put the Church of Chile in a state of prayer.”

 

“Now more than ever we cannot fall back into the temptation of verbiage or dwell in generalities,” he said, and told the bishops to look to Christ in the coming days and weeks.

 

“Let us look at his life and gestures, especially when he shows compassion and mercy to those who have erred. Let us love in the truth, let us ask for wisdom of heart and allow ourselves to be converted.”

 

=================

 

Full text of Pope Francis’ letter to Chilean bishops
Vatican City, Apr 11, 2018 / 04:16 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- In a letter addressed to Chile’s bishops, Pope Francis admitted to making “serious mistakes” in handling the nation’s massive sexual abuse crisis and asked for forgiveness. The pope summoned Chile’s bishops to Rome to address the issue, and invited victims to meet with him as well.

 

Referring to a recent investigation of abuse cover-up in Chile carried out by Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, Pope Francis said that after a “slow reading” of the report, “I can affirm that all the testimonies collected speak in a stark manner, without additives or sweeteners, of many crucified lives and I confess that this has caused me pain and shame.”

 

Francis admitted to misjudging the severity of the affair, telling Chile’s bishops that “I have made serious mistakes in the judgement and perception of the situation, especially due to a lack of truthful and balanced information.”

 

Please find below CNA’s translation of the full text of Pope Francis’ April 8 letter:

 

April 8, 2018

 

By Pope Francis

 

Dear brothers in the episcopate:

 

The reception last week of the final documents which complete the report delivered to me by my two special envoys to Chile on March 20, 2018, with a total of more than 2,300 pages, moves me to write this letter.

 

I assure you of my prayers and I want to share with you the conviction that the present difficulties are also an occasion to re-establish trust in the Church, a trust broken by our errors and sins and in order to heal the wounds that do not cease to bleed in the whole of Chilean society.

 

Without faith and without prayer, fraternity is impossible. Thus, on this second Sunday of Easter, on the day of mercy, I offer you this reflection with the desire that each one of you accompany me on the inner journey that I have been traveling in recent weeks, so that it would be the Spirit who would guide us with his gift, and not our interests, or even worse, our wounded pride.

 

Sometimes when so many evils frighten the soul and throw us listlessly into the world buttoned up in our comfortable “winter palaces,” the love of God comes out to meet us and purifies our intentions in order to love as free, mature, and judicious men.

 

When the media shames us, presenting a Church almost always in the darkness of the new moon, deprived of the Sun of justice, we have the temptation of doubting the Paschal victory of the Risen One.

 

I believe that like St. Thomas the Apostle we must not fear doubt but rather fear the pretension of wanting to see without trusting the testimony of those who heard from the lips of the Lord the most beautiful promise.

 

Today I want to speak to you not of assurances, but rather of the one thing that the Lord offers us to experience every day: the joy, the peace of forgiveness of our sins and the action of his grace.

 

In that regard I wish to express my gratitude to His Excellency Charles Scicluna, the Archbishop of Malta and to Rev. Jordi Bertomeu Farnós, official of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, for his prodigious work in considerately and empathetically listening to the 64 testimonies he recently gathered both in New York and Santiago de Chile.

 

I sent them to listen from the heart and with humility.

 

Later on, when they delivered to me the report and, in particular, its juridical and pastoral assessment of the gathered information, they acknowledged before me of having felt overwhelmed with the pain of so many victims of grave abuses of conscience and power and, in particular, of the acts of sexual abuse committed by various consecrated men of your country against minors, those who were not taken seriously then and were even robbed of their innocence.

 

The most heartfelt and cordial gratitude we must express as pastors to those who with honesty, courage and the sense of the Church requested a meeting with my envoys and showed them the wounds of their souls.

 

Bishop Scicluna and Rev. Bertomeu have told me how some bishops, priests and deacons, lay men and women of Santiago and Osorno came to Holy Name parish in New York or to the office of Sotero Sanz, in Providencia, with a maturity, respect and kindness that was overwhelming.

 

In addition, the days following that special mission, have witnessed another meritorious fact that we should keep very much in mind for other occasions, because not only has the climate of confidentiality achieved during the visit been maintained, but at no time has the temptation been yielded to to turn this delicate mission into a media circus.

 

In that regard, I wish to thank the different organizations and media for their professionalism in treating such a delicate case, respecting the right of citizens to the information and the good reputation of the declarants.

 

Now, after a careful reading of the proceedings of this “special mission,” I believe I can affirm that the collected testimonies speak in a stark way, without additives or sweeteners, of many crucified lives and I confess to you that that causes me pain and shame.

 

Taking all this into account, I am writing to you, meeting together in the 115th Plenary Assembly, to humbly request your collaboration and assistance in discerning the short, mid and long term measures that must be adopted to re-establish ecclesial communion in Chile, with the goal of repairing as much as possible the scandal and re-establishing justice.

 

I plan to call you to Rome to discuss the conclusions and the aforementioned visit and my conclusions.

 

I have thought of that meeting has a fraternal moment, without prejudices or preconceived ideas, with the only goal of making the truth shine forth in our lives. Regarding the date, I entrust it to the Secretary of the Bishops’ Conference to show me the possibilities.

 

As for my own responsibility, I acknowledge, and I want you to faithfully convey it that way, that I have made serious mistakes in the assessment and perception of the situation, especially because of the lack of truthful and balanced information.

 

Right now I ask forgiveness from all those I offended and I hope to be able to do so personally, in the coming weeks, in the meetings I will have with representatives of the people who were interviewed.

 

Abide in me: these words of the Lord resound again and again in these day.

 

They speak of personal relationships, of communion, of fraternity which attracts and summons.

 

United to Christ as the branches are to the vine, I invite you graft into your prayers in the coming days a magnanimity that prepares us for the aforementioned meeting and will then allow what we will have reflected on to be translated into concrete actions.

 

It maybe even be opportune to have the Church in Chile be in ongoing prayer.

 

Now more than ever we cannot fall back into the temptation of verbiage or dwell in “generalities.”

 

These days, let us look at Christ. Let us look at his life and his gestures, especially when he shows compassion and mercy to those who have erred.

 

Let us love in truth, let us ask for wisdom of heart and let us be converted.

Waiting for news from you and asking His Excellency Santiago Silva Retamales, President of the Chilean Conference of Bishops, to publish this letter as quickly as possible, I impart my blessing and ask you to please keep praying for me.

 

(to be continued)

 
The Moynihan Letters are posted here.

 

Note: The Moynihan Letters go to more than 21,000 people around the world. If you would like to subscribe, simply email me an email address, and I will add you to the list. Also, if you would like to subscribe to our print magazine, Inside the Vatican, please do so! We appreciate all new subscribers very much. You might even consider purchasing a gift subscription for a friend, a student, a grandchild, a parish priest. Thank you. To subscribe, click here.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on We, all of us, need truth as we need light and air. And equally, to avoid lies, as we would avoid the “Father of Lies,” the devil . “When he lies,” Jesus says of the devil, “he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).

WATCH DINESH D’SOUZA TONIGHT

Posted on April 12, 2018 by abyssum

I recommend that you watch Dinesh D’Souza tonight.  I have watched his other speeches at other universities and have found that I am almost in 100% agreement with what he said.

 

Dinesh D’Souza via aweber.com 
10:18 AM (1 hour ago)

The gloves come off at the University of Florida tonight as Dinesh D’Souza takes on the Left’s biggest lies of all, and you can watch from home!

LIVE TONIGHT: D’SOUZA TAKES ON LEFTISTS @ UF

The gloves come off at the University of Florida tonight as Dinesh D’Souza takes on the Left’s biggest lies of all—and you can watch from home! Who are the REAL fascists in America today? Everything you’ve been told by academia and the media is one “big lie,” but Dinesh D’Souza has the truth.

D’Souza heads to UF tonight as a part of Young America’s Foundation D’Souza Unchained Lecture Series with a politically incorrect message about the deeply rooted Democrat tradition of fascism.

There will be a lengthy Q&A session after the D’Souza lecture, allowing students and professors to spar with D’Souza in an open dialogue. Don’t miss it!

Google Map embed of Carleton Auditorium

D’Souza will pull no punches when it comes to the hypocrisy of the Left. You need to watch to find out what will happen! The talk begins at 6:00 PM ET, and you can sign up to watch live right here. After you sign up, we’ll send you a reminder when the event goes live!

SIGN UP TO WATCH LIVE

See you tonight! To find out how to bring Dinesh D’Souza to your campus, click here.

D’Souza Media Corporation © 2018
1140 Wall Street, #2157
La Jolla CA 92038
USA

Email sent to rhg1923@gmail.com on April 12, 2018.
View In Browser   |   Change Subscriber Options   |   Unsubscribe
           
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment