Sometimes, it’s hard to find words. This is one such occasion.

What can be said to explain the Vatican’s decision to issue a stamp with a reverential image of one of the most notorious heretics in history, to “mark the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation”?

Note the piety. Note the “golden and timeless view.” This is a devotional work.

The Vatican goes on to insist in a Pontifical Council statement that “we are very thankful for the spiritual and theological gifts received through the Reformation.”

Really? Who is “we”?

Is “we” the Catholic martyrs of the Wars of Religion? Is “we” the Catholic faithful still pained by the rending of Christ’s Mystical Body yet continuing from Luther’s revolt? Is “we” the countless souls led into damnable errors on faith, grace, justification, and the Sacraments propagated by heresiarch Martin Luther, a man who called pope and bishops “a brothel-keeper and the devil’s daughter in hell,” penning such niceties as Against the Roman Papacy, An Institution of the Devil?

Is Holy Mother Church here made to give thanks for this matricide and “the gifts received through” his errors?

Yes, and not only must she be thankful; she is made, together with the Lutheran World Federation, to have “begged forgiveness for our failures and for the ways in which Christians have wounded the Body of the Lord and offended each other.” One could scarcely believe it, were it not for the prophetic words of Pope Pius XII in 1933:

I am concerned about the messages of the Virgin to the little Lucia of Fatima. This persistence of the Good Lady in face of the danger that threatens the Church is a divine warning against the suicide that the alteration of the Faith, in its liturgy, its theology, and its soul, would represent. I hear around me innovators who wish to dismantle the Sacred Chapel, destroy the universal flame of the Church, reject her ornaments, and make her remorseful for her historical past.

And find the Vatican speaking of Pope Francis standing with “Bishop Munib A. Younan” (except he’s not a bishop) and declaring “the commitment to continue the ecumenical journey together towards the unity that Christ prayed for” (except that unity abides in the Church alone). And perhaps most troubling:

Many members of our communities yearn to receive the Eucharist at one table, as the concrete expression of full unity. We experience the pain of those who share their whole lives, but cannot share God’s redeeming presence at the Eucharistic table. We acknowledge our joint pastoral responsibility to respond to the spiritual thirst and hunger of our people to be one in Christ. We long for this wound in the Body of Christ to be healed. This is the goal of our ecumenical endeavors, which we wish to advance, also by renewing our commitment to theological dialogue.”

Now, we know as a matter of faith that the only way for such a “concrete expression of full unity” to be realized is by the return of any separated member to Catholic faith and life. But with plans for an “Ecumenical Mass” apparently in the works, one is tempted to dread what further violence the future may hold.

And what of all the missed opportunities to evangelize? If anybody lives in a diocese where a bishop is taking the opportunity of this “500th anniversary” to do anything but the kind of things detailed above, I’d love to hear about it. It’s likely we can only imagine such a scenario these days.

But let’s do that for a moment.

Just imagine for a second what would happen if your bishop stood up at that ecumenical conference or dialogue session or joint prayer service or whatever, and rather than reflecting on what might have been or affirming all that unites us, he instead invited our erring brethren, in a charitable, heartfelt manner (you know, the kind of manner he might have if he truly loved them and was concerned for their salvation), to return to the one true Church established by Christ.

I mean, seriously, what would happen?

Insanity

Given the above nonsense and other increasingly strange and even irrational goings-on amid the hierarchy of late, I wonder if a particular preternatural enemy may be afflicting the Church at present. I am reminded of something from the writings of the Church Fathers about the spirit of insanity. 

This passage is from St. Hippolytus of Rome, preaching in the early 3rd century to invite non-Catholics of his day to abjure their errors and enter the Church:

[F]ly to the water, for this alone can extinguish the fire. He who will not come to the water still carries around with him the spirit of insanity for the sake of which he will not come to the living water for his own salvation. (Homilies 11:26)

Perhaps this is the name of a particularly nefarious agent currently at work, of a piece with that “smoke of Satan” Pope Paul VI lamented in 1972 as having penetrated the Church. It calls to mind a passage from C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra, when the protagonist faces the principal agent of Satan, and finds:

On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced … nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness[.]

Perhaps the inconceivably complex machinations of an angelic super-intelligence bent on the destruction of the Church finally reduce to a base, mindless gibbering.

Perhaps Christ the Logos, Divine Reason par excellence, is opposed by an Anti-Logos that must needs be Un-Reason itself.

Perhaps the Man of Sin is an idiot.

Originally published at Whispers of Restoration. Reprinted with permission.

Voice of the family, a coalition of twenty-five pro-life and pro-family associations, held an international conference in Rome on October 28^th, hosted by Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae. Among the speakers, His Eminence Cardinal Walter Brandmüller; Professor Roberto De Mattei and Professor Josef Seifert; Father Serafino Lanzetta from University of Lugano; Jean-Marie Le Méné from Foundation Lejeune; Dr. Thomas Ward, President of the National Association of Catholic Families in the UK; Doctor Philipphe Schepens, Secretary General of the World Federation of Doctors Who Respect Human Life, Belgium; and John-Henry Westen, editor-in-chief of Lifesitenews, Canada. The morning session was chaired by John Smeaton, chief executive of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children in the UK, while the afternoon session was chaired by Father Shenan Boquet, President of Human Life International. The closing address was delivered by His Excellency Luigi Negri, Archbishop of Ferrara.

As Dr. Smeaton emphasized, the conference intended to remind that by the infallible doctrine of the encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the Catholic “unchangeable teaching” on sexual morality; a teaching which today is facing, as Cardinal Brandmüller remarked, “unprecedented attacks” not only from without, but also from within the Church. In a sense, the effort to alter such millennial doctrine, undertaken today under the aegis of Pope Francis’s Apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, is not new. As both His Eminence and Professor De Mattei recalled, immediately before and after the Second World War, straight to the Second Vatican Council, and until the publication of Humanae Vitae in July 1968, numerous and fierce were those exponents of the ‘progressive’ Church who strove to relinquish the traditional teaching on marriage, sex, and birth control, which dated back to the earliest centuries of Christianity, too often in the name of ideologies that were sharply divergent from the Catholic faith.

In particular, Professor De Mattei insisted on the role of the nouvelle théologie, condemned by Pius XII in the encyclical Humani Generis, but prompted by the University of Leuven especially through the works of the personalist theologian Louis Janssen. The trick was to substitute the concept of ‘person’ for the concept of human nature. As De Mattei explained:

“Human nature is in fact man’s essence, what he is before being a person. Man is a subject of rights and duties because he is a person, but he is a person because of his human nature. If the person precedes nature, man is founded on his self-conscience and his own will. Moral rules are no more objective, rational, but rather affective, personal, existential. Human conscience becomes the sovereign norm of morality”.

One cannot ignore here the impressive link that ties together the approach criticized by De Mattei, Protestant ethics (the primacy of individual conscience), and the exaltation of Lutheranism we are witnessing in today’s Church.

But another, even more worrisome aspect comes through: the connections between Catholic reformism on sexual morality and the movements for sexual liberation, feminism, evolutionism, Malthusianism, Marxism, and obviously the Freemasonry, which developed in the English-speaking world, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, from the early 18th century onwards. Such tendencies were backed by wealthy financiers (like the Rockefeller Foundation) and by influential political advocates, like the Society of Nations and, later on, the UN. It is somewhat unsettling that today Pope Francis would be so acquiescent towards global institutions which hinder freedom of education, and try to impose the LGBT agenda to national legislatures and schools.

For instance, Dr. Ward alarmingly reported that the Synod of the Family explicitly contested the exclusive role of parents in the education of children, de facto justifying “indoctrination by the birth control and homosexual lobby”. He also recalled that the Vatican hosted in 2016 a workshop “to promote the Strategic Development Goals which include compulsory sex education and the universal provision of contraception and abortion”. It is as if the Church, which was formerly well equipped to counter the international influence of radicalism (e.g.: Prof. De Mattei stressed how the Vatican was constantly monitoring feminist theorist Margaret Sanger’s activities in the Twenties), is now gradually embracing its enemies’ cause.

De Mattei explained that the Commission which worked on sexual morality and contraception during the Second Vatican Council devoted major efforts not only to manipulate the decisions assumed by the Council Fathers, but also to rebuff the explicit re-instantiation of the unchanged doctrine on sexuality, contraception, and abortion by Pius XII’s Casti Connubii, and to pressure Paul VI in the years before the promulgation of Humanae Vitae, an encyclical which was vehemently contested by the dissenters. The reformers denied that a single, universal moral law could rule the faithful’s behaviour; in their view, sins like contraception and abortion could become permissible, if not advisable, depending on the circumstances. After Humanae Vitae, these ‘innovators’, who longed for the infiltration, as denounced by Cardinal Brandmüller, of “situational ethics” in “Catholic moral theology”, felt they had only lost a battle, not the war. But, as Prof. De Mattei underlined, and as it is important to keep in mind in these years, “from the viewpoint of the doctrine of the faith the case is closed, and no commission of studies, although nominated by the papacy, has the right to reopen it”.

It is due to mention here Prof. Seifert’s brilliant speech as well. As usual, indeed, his contribution stood out for its philosophical and theological profundity, and the effectiveness with which it was capable of engaging the contemporary academic debate, offering a precious source of arguments to counter the dominance of nihilism, consequentialism, and other anti-life ethical positions. That particularly a consequentialist approach may threaten the doctrine of Humanae Vitae was in fact also acknowledged by Fr. Lanzetta, who identified in the teleological background of Amoris Laetitia, which points to the intentions and the purposes of actions rather than on the rightness per se of those acts, a perilous “change of paradigm”.

Prof. Seifert’s intervention was focused on providing a set of specific reasons to account for the immorality of contraception. The first reason was the “inseparable bond between the unitive and procreative meaning of the marital act”, an inseparability which is not merely a matter of fact, but entails a moral obligation not to divide and isolate “the spousal act and procreation”. Marriage ought to be open towards conception, and the spouses are forbidden from manipulating its sacramental substance.

The second reason related to the violation of the “superabundant” finality between spousal love and procreation. Here, the key point is the gift of fruitfulness “for the purpose of procreation” with which God endowed marriage, a finality Prof. Seifert qualified as ‘superabundant’. On this view, the “immorality of contraception lies in the separation of what is or should be the expression of spousal love from its fruitfulness”.

A third argument stemmed from Pope John Paul II’s reflections on the gift of spousal love as involving the integral gift of feminity and masculinity, which includes “potential paternity and maternity”. Accordingly, Prof. Seifert contended that is not permissible to sever these components of the gift of spousal love.

The fourth reason was the inviolable ‘vertical’ bond between human and divine act in procreation. As Prof. Seifert argued, “in procreation a unique cooperation occurs between God and man in the fruitful marital community”. Therefore, retaining the self-proclaimed right to break this tie amounts to an act of hubris by the spouses, man’s pure “rebellion against his own creatureliness”.

But one of the most interesting passages of Seifert’s lecture was probably the one in which he employed an argument defended by our beloved, dearly departed Cardinal Carlo Caffarra in 1988, and lately by theologian John Finnis. The idea is that contraception is a worse attack on human life than abortion: while, in fact, the latter deprives the child of temporal life on earth, the former denies to it “existence in all eternity”. Now, one may object that we do not have moral obligations towards hypothetical future subjects. However (if I did not get it wrong), the point is that, once the “first step in the direction of the existence of the child has already been taken” (via sexual intercourse), contraception means saying ‘No’ to life not only in its biological sense, but, more gravely, in its metaphysical dimension (the immortal soul God would have infused in the baby, were He not prevented from doing this by the spouses’ opposition).

Prof. Seifert concluded by underscoring that, in Veritatis Splendor, St. John Paul II had already guarded against the errors of situational ethics, utilitarianism and consequentialism, which obscure the “fundamental truth” in virtue of which we can claim that “there can be no grounds whatever for permitting an act that is morally evil in itself”. And while Seifert did not patently expose Pope Francis’s views, it is evident that anxiety is increasing due to Amoris Laetitia’s approach. And in fact, in his closing remarks, Archbishop Negri hinted at the difficulties the Church is facing in this phase of its existence, urging Catholics to be “missionaries of the truth” on Humanae Vitae. Undoubtedly, this may entail forms of ‘filial corrections’ of the most controversial statements by the current papacy. The problem has been openly addressed by Prof. De Mattei.

One may note, indeed, that the measures undertaken by present-day traditionalists are similar to the dissenters’ in the years before and after the promulgation of Paul VI’s encyclical. The point is not to contest or endorse the authority of the Pope; the point is to remind that such authority is not absolute, in the literal sense of being free from any external bond (ab-soluta). Over and above it, there lies the authority of Tradition, the “living magisterium” which allows us to discriminate between Catholicism and papolatry. Such permanent teaching of the Church does not belong “in usufruct to the living”, to use Thomas Jefferson’s famous quotation. To the contrary, as Benedict XVI contended, what counts for the Church “is never only the currently present society. For the Church, the dead are not dead: as a Communion of Saints it oversteps the limits of present time. The past is not past, and for this reason the future is already present. In other words: in the Church there can be no majority against the saints, the great witnesses of the faith […]. They will always belong to the present, and their voice cannot be put in the minority”.