Today, the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, is the 39th Anniversary of Cardinal Gerhard Müller’s Priestly Ordination. And exactly on that same day, a piece of news comes to us according to which Cardinal Müller is now under increasing pressure for having recently given an interview to the Italian journal Il Timone; in that interview, the German cardinal had made it clear that “For Catholic doctrine, it is impossible for mortal sin to coexist with sanctifying grace.” He also repeated the Catholic Church’s teaching according to which the “remarried” divorcees may not have access to the Sacraments unless they live “as brother and sister,” according to the 1981 papal document, Familaris Consortio, 84. With this interview, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has given an indirect answer to the Four Cardinals’ dubia which have been presented to Pope Francisin November of 2016.

This very interview has now provoked harsh criticism in Italy. It nearly seems as if his dismissal is being prepared by rebuking him for his disloyalty toward Pope Francis. In the following, we publish a translation of an article published today by the same man who conducted the Il Timone interview, Riccardo Cascioli. Mr. Andrew Guernsey was so kind and generous once more to provide a translation of this new article. Furthermore, Guernsey added some excerpts from a 10 February article written by the Vatican expert and close confidant of the pope, Andrea Tornielli. Tornielli’s articles are often regarded as expressing the voice of the pope. Thus his indirect criticism of Cardinal Müller might also be of greater-than-average significance. (It is Tornielli whom Cascioli refers to as “The Vatican Sniper,” for reasons explained here.)

Before going to the translations, I would add one thought. If Pope Francis were to decide to put Cardinal Müller — whose current five-year term is ending, and who would need to be re-appointed next July — out of his office, he might well offend Pope emeritus Benedict XVI, who had called Müller to that very office. Secondly, he might not realize that Müller henceforth — after his dismissal and with all of his usual respect toward Pope Francis — might become a mightier and more influential critic of his papacy than the constraints of his current office seem to allow. I have observed several Catholic conservative journalists who have wished for quite some time that Cardinal Müller would be freed from his duties so that he may be stronger in his public defense of the traditional Catholic teaching on marriage.

As we say, God’s will be done. And everything will work unto His Glory for those who love Him and obey Him.

And They Continued to Call Him the Vatican Sniper

Riccardo Cascioli

La Nuova BQ

2/11/2017

Translated by Andrew Guernsey

It took a few days to sort things out after the interview published in the monthly magazine “Il Timone”. But now the decision has been made, the word of command has been given: to eliminate Cardinal Müller. His words in defense of the doctrine – he who is the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – evidently have given much annoyance, and were judged not in line with the intentions of the Pope. In the interview, Müller points out that Amoris Laetitia cannot be interpreted in discontinuity with the previous Magisterium, according to which there is no communion for the divorced and remarried, and that it must be remembered in the ecumenical process that Luther has corroded the content of Revelation.

Two challenges were issued both to the bishops and to Pope Francis, which certainly enraged them: and the super-sniper, the Vatican Sniper, came into action. Yesterday [he published] a long article retracing, in the last 50 years, the history of disagreements between Popes and their closest collaborators, the Secretary of State or the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. We find, therefore, that differences about some decisions have always been there but were resolved in private, also with the willingness of the collaborators to resign if the Pope did not listen to reason. Today, however, the Vatican Sniper complains, these cardinals speak through newspapers. The invitation is clear: Cardinal Müller should resign. Some will object: nowhere in the article is Cardinal Müller named. This is true, but this is classic clerical style: when someone ought to be eliminated he is not challenged directly, he is made to feel a hostile atmosphere that grows around him, allusions are made, are insinuated, oblique messages are sent. Moreover, by doing so one is made to understand that it is not a personal problem, the same fate can fall upon anyone else who stands in the same way. Today it is Müller’s turn, but the message must also get to other well-known names.

But meanwhile, since the signal has been given, the crossfire has already begun: Alberto Melloni of La Repubblica had already said, ahead of time a few days ago, that for only half of what Cardinal Muller has done and said, Pius XII would have taken away the cardinal’s hat. On Panorama.it, in an article by Orazio La Rocca dedicated to the booklet put out by Cardinal Coccopalmerio, which justifies communion for divorced and remarried, a little thought for Müller is not lacking: To make the dubia public is “a gesture of blatant disrespect towards the Pope,” and it is equally disrespectful to make use of interviews: “As, for example, German Gerhard Ludwig Muller cardinal, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has done in recent days, who in a newspaper has openly criticized the admission to the sacraments of the cohabitating and the divorced and remarried because, he warned, “you do not touch” Doctrine. Curious: to defend doctrine today has become a point of accusation.

And who knows what will await us in the coming days. Surely the tones are becoming ever more violent, and Cardinal Raymond L. Burke can testify to it: after being deprived of authority as the spiritual leader of the Knights of Malta, after having suffered repeated attacks from the usual Guardians of the Revolution, yesterday, February 10, he was the target of a most violent article in the Washington Post, which demands – with a certain conceit and arrogance, it must be said – that the Pope throw him out of Rome, where he could obstruct the path of reform that Francis is carrying out with success. The author of the article, Emma-Kate Symons, is notoriously far off from Catholic views – it is indeed curious that those who care so much about the path of reform of the Church are those who hate it – but she seems to be terrified by a possible alliance between Burke and the Trump administration that (it is not clear how) could facilitate the rise of fascism in Europe.

This is a madness typical of the 1970s, but the violence of the words (even in Italy) prompts us not to underestimate the phenomenon.

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The Dossier and Undermining the Pope in the Press, All Have Been Seen Before

Continuity and discontinuity: corrosive articles and the maneuvers of prelates, the precedent of 1962. But today the curial style has changed

Andrea Tornielli

La Stampa

2/10/2017

Translated by Andrew Guernsey

[Bolding used by Tornielli]

The drama and aggravation of tone that accompany certain media polemics on the current pontificate can make one think that we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. It is not so: the posters in the streets of Rome in the faux popular Roman style (received by the Pope with a laugh), as well as newspaper articles that, well beyond legitimate criticism, attempt to undermine anything in the Successor of Peter says or does, are part of a “tradition” that sees in the media a pawn of the internal power struggles of the Curia and the Church. The recent history of the Holy See, together with the constant repetition of a few, however, also highlights the discontinuities: one of these concerns certainly the style and attitude of those who work most closely with the Pope, on the part of curial cardinals. The most authoritative and influential “ministers of the Pope” until the other day were, in fact, accustomed to talk face to face with their superior, not to distance themselves from him publicly.

[…]

One of the major novelties of the present season, however, is represented by the repeated public statements of cardinals “ministers” of the Pope and his collaborators in the Roman Curia. Critical statements, even in the press, on the part of bishops and cardinals with respect to some papal decisions are not unheard of: it would be enough here to recall certain statements following the publication of Paul VI’s “Humanae Vitae.” But in that case it had been the cardinal or resident bishops (or, as happened a few years earlier in the case of a booklet strongly opposed to the liturgical reform, by curial cardinals emeritus, no longer in office) [the Ottaviani Intervention]. An example of the style of the past is represented by Joseph Ratzinger. It is no secret, for example, that the ideas of the then-Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, did not always coincide with those of the Pope, John Paul II. […] There was some difference of opinion, for example, on the occasion of the first interreligious meeting in Assisi.  These differences of opinion, however, were presented and discussed in the context of the personal relationship between the cardinal and the Pope, in audiences at table or meetings requested ad hoc. Contrary to what happens today with the practice become commonplace, one would search in vain, when Ratzinger was Prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith, to find some public statement of his that seemed to distance himself from Pope John Paul II.

[…] Examples of the old curial style. the closest and most authoritative collaborators of the Pope, at the helm of the most important dicasteries, expressed their positions in face to face meetings with their superior – willing, in some rare cases, even to give up their posts in order to defend them – without any of this to be found at all reflected in public statements, as instead is the case today.

On 9 February, the Washington Post ran a disgraceful and bizarre opinion piece designed to join the burgeoning propaganda efforts to link Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke to U.S. presidential adviser Stephen Bannon and President Donald Trump’s White House. From that alliance, the story goes, Bannon, through Burke, is plotting to bring the Trump administration into a conflict with Pope Francis.

The Post opinion piece is linked here. There there have been several other similar “news” stories run over the last several days at major outlets, including on the NPR website.

The point of this obviously coordinated campaign is entirely unclear. The Washington Post piece is especially incoherent and mendacious. Thus, we should briefly review the charges lodged therein against Cardinal Burke.

Count 1: Cardinal Burke is a friend and partisan of Stephen Bannon because Burke serves on the board of advisers of a group, Dignitatis Humanae, run by a man who has written a few opinion pieces on Breitbart.com, a website formerly run by Bannon. Get it?

The writer fails to mention that the board of advisers consists of several cardinals, including liberals Cormac Murphy-O’Connor and Peter Turkson, a man who has run around the world promoting the pope’s climate agenda.

Bannon’s formal or informal affiliation with the group is not explained, nor is there any evidence that Burke even knows Bannon.

Count 2: Cardinal Burke supports alleged Benito Mussolini fan Matteo Silvini, an Italian politician with whom the writer claims Burke held “a long meeting.” To support the claim, the writer cites an Italian newspaper report that Silvini was at the Vatican recently and may have met with Burke, but no one confirmed that the meeting actually occurred. So, as you see, Cardinal Burke is a partisan of the Fascist Party.  {This is just too crazy!!!  The Editor of the Washington Post must have been asleep when the copy for this article came across his desk!!!  No responsible editor would let such unsubstantiated copy appear in the paper.}

Count 3: Cardinal Burke is engaged in “bellicose anti-Islam rhetoric” that may lead to the rise of a new Hitler in Europe. Evidence offered: a link to a USA Today story about Bannon’s supposed views of Muslims. Evidence of Burke’s Koran-burning rallies: zero. {There is not evidence offered, only a link to another journalist’s unsubstantiated allegation – is this journalism ???}

Count 4: Cardinal Burke said something nice about Vladimir Putin. Yes, Cardinal Burke said in an interview that he agrees with Putin’s supposed defense of traditional marriage and family life and refused to foreclose the possibility of Putin’s conversion. Let’s hear it for the Year of Mercy!  {Because Trump said something nice about Putin the Trump-haters will now smear anyone who says anything nice about Putin.}

The readers of the Washington Post should know this: Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke is a hero to thousands and thousands of Catholics around the world. In the face of constant abuse and calumny, this mild-mannered Midwesterner has stood fast by the constant and unchanging doctrinal teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. His principal crime is that he wishes to clearly express these teachings without the shamefaced obfuscation that has led so many to disregard them.

And Cardinal Burke is, of course, the most prominent and unapologetic proponent of the priceless treasure that is the Church’s traditional Sacred Liturgy. For this alone, he deserves the gratitude of the entire body of the faithful, but he has instead earned the scorn of the misguided and foolish clerics who loathe their own Tradition.

He is a shepherd to the flock, whereas so many of his brother bishops have thrown down their crooks to mill about as sheep, buffeted here and there by the modernist secular world and scattered, as the Apostles before Calvary, by a crackpot papacy.

I, a humble layman, rise to his defense on this day, the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes.

It was a statement that raised eyebrows among those who have long followed the history of Christianity under Communist regimes, of which China is certainly no exception. China, in fact, is ranked independently as one of the worst violators of religious freedom in the world. In 1951, under the leadership of Chinese Communist revolutionary and founder of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong, the Chinese government and the Vatican officially severed diplomatic ties. With the officially-sanctioned Catholic Patriotic Association following a similar line to that of the portions of the French Church that went along with the Revolutionary Government’s “Civil Constitution of the Clergy” in 1790, the formation of an underground — and persecuted — Church in China was inevitable.

In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI said that the Catholic Patriotic Association was “incompatible with Catholic doctrine,” and spoke of their interference with the ordination of bishops as a matter he could not permit if he wanted to. “The authority of the Pope to appoint bishops is given to the church by its founder Jesus Christ.” He said. “It is not the property of the Pope, neither can the Pope give it to others.”

But under Pope Francis, the Vatican has been moving toward what Cardinal Joseph Zen, bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, calls a “new Ostpolitik.” From early in his papacy, Francis has been moving toward more positive relations with Beijing, though as the outspoken Zen has warned, signing agreement with Chinese leadership “means delivering the authority to appoint bishops into the hands of an atheist government.” It was only ten years ago that the late Cardinal Kung spoke of the plight of Chinese Catholics who will not participate in the state-sanctioned analog of the Catholic Church:

I believe that most if not all of you who are here today understand that there is no religious freedom in China. Yet you may be shocked to learn that all of the approximately 40 underground bishops in China have been either arrested and are now in jail, or under house arrest, or under strict surveillance, or in hiding, or simply have disappeared.

We know for sure that six bishops are now in jail. … They are all in their 70’s or 80’s. Three of them have disappeared. (HAN, Shi and SU). Out of these three, Bishop Su has disappeared for approximately 10 years, Bishop Han has just disappeared approximately one year ago after being detained approximately 5 years, Bishop SHI has disappeared almost six years. We do not know whether they are dead or alive.

[…]

Priests, seminarians, nuns and laypersons face similar harassment. We know for sure that there are approximately 25 of them in jail or in labor camps. This list is by no means complete, because of the difficulties in obtaining details. Many cases are not reported here. My educated guess is that there are hundreds in jail. Sometimes, the government simply removes a priest or bishop and do not place them into the jail system, so that there is no official record of this religious prisoner. This is one of the new methods of persecuting the underground church.

Cardinal John Tong, the Pope Benedict-appointed successor to Carzinal Zen’s see in Hong Kong, is more sanguine about the development:

China and the Vatican have reached consensus on the appointment of bishops, which will lead to the resolution of other outstanding problems, Hong Kong Cardinal John Tong has said.

“From now on, there will be no more the crisis of a division between the open and underground communities in the Church in China,” the cardinal said.

“On the contrary, these two communities will gradually move toward reconciliation and communion on the aspects of law, pastoral care and relationships. The Church in China will work together to preach the gospel of Jesus on the soil of China.”

In a letter published on Thursday, Cardinal Tong noted that China and the Vatican have different interests, so they will prioritise remaining problems differently.

[…]

Cardinal Tong said the Sino-Vatican dialogue indicates that China now will “let the Pope play a role in the nomination and ordination of Chinese bishops.” Since, under Church law, the Pope has the final say in the appointment of bishops, this would solve several problems, he said.

“Beijing will also recognise the Pope’s right of veto and that the Pope is the highest and final authority in deciding on candidates for bishops in China,” he said.

The Catholic Patriotic Association advocates the “self-nomination and self-ordination” of bishops, but if the agreement on papal approval of bishops is reached, that principle will become history, he said.

“If the Pope has the final word about the worthiness and suitability of an episcopal candidate, the elections of local churches and the recommendations of the Bishops’ Conference of the Catholic Church in China will simply be a way to express recommendations,” Cardinal Tong said.

Thus far, Cardinal Zen has not spoken out on the most recent developments in Sino-Vatican relations. But in November of last year, he made clear, once again, his opposition to any such agreement, calling it “absolutely unacceptable”:

Rome would commit to recognize as bishops only those clerics who first win nomination from the Patriotic Association’s bishops conference. This would make the church “totally subservient to an atheist government,” says Cardinal Zen, and may require the Vatican to cut ties to the true church underground.

Though he says state-backed bishops are generally “wonderful men” and “very faithful to the church,” Cardinal Zen laments that all are nonetheless “slaves” and “puppets.” Only someone ignorant of communism, he says, could think the nominations the government sends to Rome wouldn’t be coerced. Having taught in Chinese seminaries from 1989 to 1996, he recalls that state bishops couldn’t meet or even place international calls without government bosses present.

Cardinal Zen slams Vatican diplomats who say that embracing the Patriotic Association is needed to preserve the church’s hierarchy and sacraments. “I would prefer no bishops,” he says. “With fake bishops you are destroying the church.”

That’s what nearly happened in Hungary and other Soviet satellites in the 1970s after Rome embraced an Ostpolitik (“Eastern Policy”) of cooperation with Communist authorities. “The Churches in those countries have not been saved through the Vatican diplomacy,” he wrote recently, “but thanks to the unswerving faith of the simple faithful!”

He believes the same would happen in China if the Vatican refused to bow to Beijing. “The underground church is evangelizing very well,” he notes, even as authorities have destroyed 1,000 church crosses since 2013 and kept underground bishop James Su Zhimin in secret detention for two decades. “Also in the official church there are so many good people. . . . They are not afraid. Why should you surrender?”

“Pope Francis has no real knowledge of communism,” the cardinal laments. He blames Francis’ experience in Argentina, where military dictators and rich elites did evil while actual or accused communists suffered trying to help the downtrodden. “So the Holy Father knew the persecuted communists, not the communist persecutors. He knew the communists killed by the government, not the communist governments who killed thousands and hundreds of thousands of people.” (In China it was tens of millions.)

“I’m sorry to say that in his goodwill he has done many things which are simply ridiculous,” the cardinal says of the pope. These include his approaches to both China and Cuba, the other communist state he has courted at the apparent expense of human rights. But still he’s the pope, so even if he signs a bad deal Cardinal Zen says he won’t protest once it’s done.

His message to the faithful in that case: You’re never obligated to act against conscience. “You are not bound to join the Patriotic Association. You can pray at home if you lose your churches.” An underground priest who loses his flock can go home and till the soil. “You’re still a priest anyway,” he says. “So wait for better times. But don’t rebel against the pope.”

The Cardinal’s concerns may fall on deaf ears in Rome, but his warnings will be taken to heart by Catholics around the world. “You’re never obligated to act against conscience.” “You can pray at home if you lose your churches.” As it appears more and more likely that Catholics outside of China will be facing similar choices, wisdom like this from one of the Church’s true apostles is a precious grace indeed.