I admit I deliberately ignored the minor furor stirred up last November about this Pact of the Catacombs, because I find its contents sanctimoniously ridiculous (or ridiculously sanctimonious), but a recent blogpost by Fr. Scalese shows me how wrong I was to ignore it completely...
About that "Pact of the Catacombs'
Translated from
July 18, 2016
Yesterday I casually came across an article on ‘the Pact of the Catacombs’. I had to rub my eyes and asked myself,
alla toscana (this oak can never forget his roots), “Oh,
icchiglie?” (And what is this???) I started reading the article, and as I read on, I felt increasingly disoriented.
I discovered that on November 16, 1965, a few days before the formal closing of the Second Vatican Council (on Dec, 7, 1965), 40 conciliar fathers met at the Catacombs of St. Domitilla and signed the said pact. And I had never heard about it in the past 50 years.
I did a fast search on Google and found an infinity of links, mostly dating back to last year (November 2015) on the 50th anniversary of said pact. For that occasion, there was even a seminar at the Pontifical Urbanian University, at which the speakers were Mons. Luigi Bettazzi, emeritus bishop of Ivrea and said to be the only surviving signatory; the Jesuit Jon Sobrino
[object of a formal notification and admonishment by the CDF in March 2007 because his writings placed too great an emphasis on the human nature of Jesus Christ, downplaying Christ's divine nature, affirming that the 'Church of the poor' is the ecclesial 'setting' of Christology and offers it its fundamental orientation", whereas Benedict XVI teaches that "the first poverty among people is not to know Christ"]; and Prof. Alberto Melloni. (All this, while the rest of us in the Catholic world were thinking only of the 50th anniversary of the conclusion of Vatican II!)
Many articles were written to mark the pact’s anniversary. I cite only a few titles:
“With Pope Francis, the Pact of the Catacombs lives again after 50 years” (SIR, the news agency of the Italian bishops’ conference);
“Catacombs: The pact for a ‘poor Church’” (Avvenire);
“The Pact of the Catacombs was the seed of the church of Pope Francis” (Aleteia);
“On the 50th anniversary of the Pact of the Catacombs: Aiming for a servant church and a poor church” (Zenit). And in fact, on the anniversary day, in Naples, at the Catacombs of San Gennaro, 300 prelates (the crème de la crème of the Italian ‘church of the poor’) renewed the pact.
Google also led me to an article in Wikipedia. I asked people I know, who are usually well-informed about the Church, if they knew about this Pact, and they said: “Of course, even Prof. [Roberto] De Mattei wrote about it in his history of Vatican II”. Which is a book I had read when it first came out, but obviously, what he wrote about the Pact didn’t register in my mind. We were in the midst of Benedict XVI’s Pontificate, and certain facts had seemed to be consigned to the historical archives. Clearly, the perception of an event varies according to the situation one is experiencing.
Imagine my state of mind after discovering all this. I felt like the world had fallen down on me: Where had I been living in the past 50 years?
I had thought that the great event in the Church during the 20th century was Vatican II. Now, I find – from current reporting – that no, it was the Pact of the Catacombs.
[It would be interesting, of course, to analyze why this pact, which in November 2015 became a cause celebre, was not given the publicity it ought to have had – at the time it was signed and in the 50 years that followed. Or why JMB, who seems to have lifted the initial moves of his Pontificate from the Pact, has not acknowledged it as his inspiration! (Maybe it's just that he wants everything 'new' to have started with him.)]
It had always been said that the renewal of the Church began with Vatican II. But now, I am told that the seed of the ‘church of Pope Francis’ was the Pact of the Catacombs. Then, have I been wrong all along? Tell me what I am supposed to do, considering that from childhood, I had decided that my program of life was to “embody the Council), that because of this, I was marginalized and had to suffer epithets like ‘Lefebvrian’ (from the left) and ‘modernist priest’ (from the right), but accepted all that because I was convinced that I had made the right choice: I was persuaded that “Vatican II expressed what God wants of us today”.
And now that I am 60, I am told:
“Look, you must have misunderstood. The seed for the true church, the evangelical church (according to the gospel), the poor Church for the poor, was not in Vatican II, but in the Pact of the Catacombs.”
You may say I am exaggerating. But I assure that I have been truly discombobulated.
Nonetheless, let us proceed in orderly fashion. Let us start by reading the pact:
We, bishops assembled in the Second Vatican Council, are conscious of the deficiencies of our lifestyle in terms of evangelical poverty. Motivated by one another in an initiative in which each of us has tried avoid ambition and presumption, we unite with all our brothers in the episcopacy and rely above all on the grace and strength of Our Lord Jesus Christ and on the prayer of the faithful and the priests in our respective dioceses.
Placing ourselves in thought and in prayer before the Trinity, the Church of Christ, and all the priests and faithful of our dioceses, with humility and awareness of our weakness, but also with all the determination and all the strength that God desires to grant us by his grace, we commit ourselves to the following:
1. We will try to live according to the ordinary manner of our people in all that concerns housing, food, means of transport, and related matters. (See Matthew 5,3; 6,33ff; 8,20)
2. We renounce forever the appearance and the substance of wealth, especially in clothing (rich vestments, loud colors) and symbols made of precious metals (these signs should certainly be evangelical). (See Mark 6,9; Matthew 10,9-10; Acts 3.6 (Neither silver nor gold)
3. We will not possess in our own names any properties or other goods, nor will we have bank accounts or the like. If it is necessary to possess something, we will place everything in the name of the diocese or of social or charitable works. (See Matthew 6,19-21; Luke 12,33-34)
4. As far as possible we will entrust the financial and material running of our diocese to a commission of competent lay persons who are aware of their apostolic role, so that we can be less administrators and more pastors and apostles. (See Matthew 10,8; Acts 6,1-7)
5. We do not want to be addressed verbally or in writing with names and titles that express prominence and power (such as Eminence, Excellency, Lordship). We prefer to be called by the evangelical name of “Father.” (See Matthew 20,25-28; 23,6-11; John 13,12-15)
6. In our communications and social relations we will avoid everything that may appear as a concession of privilege, prominence, or even preference to the wealthy and the powerful (for example, in religious services or by way of banquet invitations offered or accepted). (See Luke 13,12- 14; 1 Corinthians 9,14-19)
7. Likewise we will avoid favoring or fostering the vanity of anyone at the moment of seeking or acknowledging aid or for any other reason. We will invite our faithful to consider their donations as a normal way of participating in worship, in the apostolate, and in social action. (See Matthew 6,2-4; Luke 15,9-13; 2 Corinthians 12,4)
8. We will give whatever is needed in terms of our time, our reflection, our heart, our means, etc., to the apostolic and pastoral service of workers and labor groups and to those who are economically weak and disadvantaged, without allowing that to detract from the welfare of other persons or groups of the diocese.
We will support lay people, religious, deacons, and priests whom the Lord calls to evangelize the poor and the workers by sharing their lives and their labors. (See Luke 4,18-19; Mark 6,4; Matthew 11,4-5; Acts 18,3-4; 20,33-35; 1 Corinthians 4,12; 9,1-27)
9. Conscious of the requirements of justice and charity and of their mutual relatedness, we will seek to transform our works of welfare into social works based on charity and justice, so that they take all persons into account, as a humble service to the responsible public agencies. (See Matthew 25,31-46; Luke 13,12-14; 13,33-34)
10. We will do everything possible so that those responsible for our governments and our public services establish and enforce the laws, social structures, and institutions that are necessary for justice, equality, and the integral, harmonious development of the whole person and of all persons, and thus for the advent of a new social order, worthy of the children of God. (See Acts 2,44-45; 4;32- 35; 5,4; 2 Corinthians 8 and 9; 1 Timothy 5,16)
11. Since the collegiality of the bishops finds its supreme evangelical realization in jointly serving the two-thirds of humanity who live in physical, cultural, and moral misery, we commit ourselves:
a) to support as far as possible the most urgent projects of the episcopacies of the poor nations;
b) to request jointly, at the level of international organisms, the adoption of economic and cultural structures which, instead of producing poor nations in an ever richer world, make it possible for the poor majorities to free themselves from their wretchedness. We will do all this even as we bear witness to the gospel, after the example of Pope Paul VI at the United Nations.
12. We commit ourselves to sharing our lives in pastoral charity with our brothers and sisters in Christ, priests, religious, and laity, so that our ministry constitutes a true service. Accordingly,
o we will make an effort to “review our lives” with them;
o we will seek collaborators in ministry so that we can be animators according to the Spirit rather than dominators according to the world;
o we will try be make ourselves as humanly present and welcoming as possible; and
o we will show ourselves to be open to all, no matter what their beliefs. (See Mark 8,34-35; Acts 6,1-7; 1 Timothy 3,8-10)
13. When we return to our dioceses, we will make these resolutions known to our diocesan priests and ask them to assist us with their comprehension, their collaboration, and their prayers.
May God help us to be faithful.
Well, you might say, what is wrong in that declaration?
It is a text that oozes the Gospel (just look at the citations for each article in the pact!).
A text that only saintly prelates could sign.
I am sorry, but to me, these statements are not Gospel – they are merely an ideological interpretation of the Gospel. Which is something else totally. Let’s see why.
• I concede that at first reading, one might be fascinated with so much love for poverty, such detachment, such simplicity, such generosity. In effect, only saints would be able to realize such a program. And I do not exclude that some of the signatories may well have been saints. But that does not rid the text of its ideological baggage.
• One must appreciate the humility and modesty that transpire through the text: “an initiative in which each of us has tried avoid ambition and presumption “… “with humility and awareness of our weakness”… “may God help us to be faithful”.
But one cannot ignore, nonetheless, a point of presumption: “We unite with all our brothers in the episcopacy…”. But in that time, union with their brothers in the episcopacy was taking place in the Council Hall, not in the catacombs of Domitilla.
• I acknowledge that we can all fully share the points on the agenda – if they were not infected by ideology.
Consider, for example Nos. 1-3: It doesn’t take much to realize that they have to do with simple utopia. Sometimes, the traditional virtues (detachment, simplicity, honesty, correctness, etc) suffice to avoid falling into the abuses about which this pact tells us we could remedy through the vain propositions it makes. A bit of healthy realism would be more helpful!
• Not to mention the pseudo-problems brought up: garments, titles, (Nos. 2-5). Since when have ‘loud colors’ been anti-evangelical? “We do not want to be addressed… as Eminence, Excellency, Lordship). We prefer to be called by the evangelical name of “Father.” But isn’t it written in the Gospel that Jesus said, “Call no one on earth your father; you have but one Father in heaven”
(Mt 23,9)? But they claim they are faithful to the Gospel!
• The influence of Marxism is very clear – it was very much the fashion in those days.
- “We will support lay people, religious, deacons, and priests whom the Lord calls to evangelize the poor and the workers by sharing their lives and their labors” (No. 8)
- “the adoption of economic and cultural structures which, instead of producing poor nations in an ever richer world, make it possible for the poor majorities to free themselves from their wretchedness” (No. 11)
• The mentality that emerges is one that would be subordinate to public institutions, seemingly considered to be the only legitimate institutions:
- We seek to transform our works of welfare into social works based on charity and justice, so that they take all persons into account, as a humble service to the responsible public agencies” (No. 9).
Why this a priori rejection of welfare work? What harm has it done? Evidently, the pact gives priority – which is totally ideological – to the social and political context of such work, instead of being merely ‘assistential’.
• The pact contains propositions that smell of freemasonry: “the advent of another social order, a new one” (No. 10),’ that is to say, ‘a new world order’.
• The pact contains correct statements that risk remaining merely slogans:
- “less administrators, more pastors and apostles” (No. 4).
- “animators according to the Spirit rather than dominators according to the world” (No. 12)
• Some statements are not clear at all:
- “the collegiality of the bishops finds its supreme evangelical realization in jointly serving the two-thirds of humanity who live in physical, cultural, and moral misery
- “to support as far as possible the most urgent projects of the episcopacies of the poor nations” (No.11)
What do they mean by these?
But, leaving aside the contents of the document,
what has troubled be most is the existence of the document itself. It was signed on November 16, 1965, about three weeks before the end of Vatican-II.
Why? What need was there for such a document?
- The signatories were all conciliar fathers (“We bishops united in the Second Vatican Council…”)
- They took part in all the Council sessions.
- Certainly, they must have brought their agenda points to the attention of the other Fathers, but obviously, the others did not
think it appropriate to share these points [for inclusion in the formal Vatican II documents].
- If we consider that there were 2500 participating bishops at Vatican II, and there were only 40 who signed the Pact
[though it is claimed they got 500 more signatures afterwards], humility and common sense would have dictated that these 540 bishops would acknowledge the will of the majority.
The Constitutions of my Order, approved in the 16th century, provide with regard to major decisions:
“It must be avoided, when something is decided against one’s own personal opinion, to continue to oppose it or to repeat that one does not share the decision; in fact, one must persuade oneself that what the majority approved is correct” I.IV, c.7).
It seems however that the more spiritual
[and ‘saintly’] of the Conciliar Fathers could not resign themselves to the will of the majority, that they did not consider the decisions of the majority the ‘discernment’ of the Council - “what the Spirit is saying to the Church”.
What the Council had approved was not good enough for them. Evidently, they considered themselves to be the bearers of a special, exclusive inspiration, which they felt they had to propose in their own way, in a pact reserved to a few ‘elect’ bishops - the Pact of the Catacombs.
But this pact obviously did not remain as a private agreement among its signatories – it became the inspiration for all those who in the past 50 years felt that the ‘institutional Church’ was not for them. One has the impression that, once again, there had been two councils: one being exoteric – addressed to the greater public – in the 16 lengthy Council documents approved by the Fathers; and the other esoteric, reserved to the few ‘enlightened’ ones, composed of just 12 short paragraphs (written rather approximatively) which, however, conditioned the Church in the decades to come.
It would seem from the hindsight accounts that the official Council simply served as a screen to cover the ‘real’ Council, buried under ashes for five decades to finally manifest itself in our day.
It was well known that there were lobbies at Vatican II
[lobbies consisting of the Conciliar Fathers themselves who had a specific agenda to push, e.g., the German-speaking bishops], that these lobbies, before and during the Council, held frequent meetings to decide and organize how best they should carry out their interventions in the Council. These maneuverings may well have been inappropriate, but it is understandable and can even be considered normal.
But I find it inconceivable that 40 bishops, just before the formal conclusion of the Council, would have felt compelled to sign a ‘Pact of the Catacombs’ - as a supplement to the Council, and in the eyes of the participants, its supreme moment. It gives the impression of some sort of a Carboneria [a secret Freemasonry-like revolutionary society in early 19th-century Italy that promoted patriotic and liberal values].
As if we did not already have the Sankt-Gallen Mafia. Now we have the Catacombs Pact surfacing (at least for me, who have been apparently quite ingenuous and distracted in the past 50 years).
A new church, it would seem, born under the mark of a conspiracy. But in the current new springtime of the Church, were the windows not thrown wide open to let in fresh air? Should we not smell the perfumes of spring? At the moment, I can only smell the stink of sulfur.
For context, here is how reflex progressivist David Gibson reported on the Pact Last November in typical after-the-fact revisionist hagiography:
Secret ‘Catacombs Pact’ emerges after 50 years,
and Pope Francis gives it new life
By David Gibson
November 3, 2015
ROME — On the evening of Nov. 16, 1965, quietly alerted to the event by word-of-mouth, some 40 Roman Catholic bishops made their way to celebrate Mass in an ancient, underground basilica in the Catacombs of Domitilla on the outskirts of the Eternal City.
Both the place, and the timing, of the liturgy had a profound resonance: The church marked the spot where tradition said two Roman soldiers were executed for converting to Christianity. And beneath the feet of the bishops, and extending through more than 10 miles of tunnels, were the tombs of more than 100,000 Christians from the earliest centuries of the church.
In addition, this Mass was celebrated at the catacombs shortly before the end of the Second Vatican Council, the historic gathering of all the world’s bishops that over three years set the church on the path of reform and an unprecedented engagement with the modern world — launching dialogue with other Christians and other religions, endorsing religious freedom and moving the Mass from Latin to the vernacular, among other things.
But another concern among many of the 2,200 churchmen at Vatican II was to truly make Catholicism a “church of the poor,” as Pope John XXIII put it shortly before convening the council.
[This is hindsightspeak.If it was such a concern, why was it not articulated in the formal documents in the manner that the Catacomb Pacts did?] The bishops who gathered for Mass at the catacombs that November evening were devoted to seeing that commitment become a reality.
So as the liturgy concluded in the dim light of the vaulted fourth-century chamber, each of the prelates came up to the altar and affixed his name to a brief but passionate manifesto that pledged them all to “try to live according to the ordinary manner of our people in all that concerns housing, food, means of transport, and related matters.”
The signatories vowed to renounce personal possessions, fancy vestments and “names and titles that express prominence and power,” and they said they would make advocating for the poor and powerless the focus of their ministry.
In all this, they said, “we will seek collaborators in ministry so that we can be animators according to the Spirit rather than dominators according to the world; we will try to make ourselves as humanly present and welcoming as possible; and we will show ourselves to be open to all, no matter what their beliefs.”
The document would become known as the Pact of the Catacombs, and
the signers hoped it would mark a turning point in church history. [How presumptuous to think that, when they had just taken part in the largest Church council in history that had produced 16 conciliar documents, four of them in the form of Apostolic Constitutions for the Church! Was not the Council itself supposed to be the turning point, the only main event, to which their their dramatic meeting in the catacombs - 40 out of 2500 Conciliar fathers - was really just a small sideshow that was not even deemed newsworthy at the time and is virtually ignored in all the Vatican II histories!]
Instead, the Pact of the Catacombs disappeared, for all intents and purposes. It is barely mentioned the extensive histories of Vatican II, and while copies of the text are in circulation, no one knows what happened to the original document.
[For all that revisionist romanticizing hindsight would now make of the Pact a major event 'supplementing' the Council, it couldn't have been considered that 'major' at the time! The 'council of the media' had its hands full enough with the four conciliar constitutions and the 12 other V-II documents, that apparently no one in the media took notice of this evidently fringe document by a small minority.
- If the original signatories of the pact had indeed gathered 500 more signatures, presumably in the subsequent three weeks before Vatican II ended, why did they not call a news conference thereafter to claim that they had a significant document signed by 20% of the Conciliar Fathers that the world should know about?
- Did anyone ask Alberto Melloni at the November 2015 seminar why his 'School of Bologna' historians neglected the pact in their six-volume history of Vatican II? How could that radically progressivist group overlook something as 'radical' as the pact?]
In addition, the exact number and names of the original signers is in dispute, though it is believed that only one still survives: Luigi Bettazzi, nearly 92 years old now, bishop emeritus of the Italian diocese of Ivrea.
With its Dan Brown setting and murky evidence, the pact seemed fated to become another Vatican mystery — an urban legend to those who had heard rumors about it, or at best a curious footnote to church history rather than a new chapter.
Yet in the last few years, as the 50th anniversary of both the Catacombs Pact and Vatican II approached, this remarkable episode has finally begun to emerge from the shadows.
That’s
thanks in part to a circle of theologians and historians, especially in Germany, who began talking and writing more publicly about the pact — an effort that will take a major step forward later this month when the Pontifical Urban University, overlooking the Vatican, hosts a daylong seminar on the document’s legacy.
But perhaps nothing has revived and legitimated the Pact of the Catacombs as much as the surprise election, in March 2013, of Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio — Pope Francis.
While never citing the Catacombs Pact specifically, Francis has evoked its language and principles, telling journalists within days of his election that he wished for a “poor church, for the poor,” and from the start shunning the finery and perks of his office, preferring to live in the Vatican guesthouse rather than the apostolic palace.
He stressed that all bishops should also live simply and humbly, and the pontiff has continually exhorted pastors to “have the smell of the sheep,” staying close to those most in need and being welcoming and inclusive at every turn.
“His program is to a high degree what the Catacomb Pact was,” Cardinal Walter Kasper, a retired German theologian who is close to the pope, said in an interview earlier this year at his apartment next to the Vatican.
The Pact of the Catacombs “was forgotten,” said Kasper, who mentioned the document in his recent book on the thought and theology of Francis. “But now he (Francis) brings it back.”
For a while there was even talk in Rome that Francis would travel to the Domitilla Catacombs to mark the anniversary. While that’s apparently not in the cards, “the Catacomb Pact is everywhere now in discussion,” as Kasper put it.
“With Pope Francis, you cannot ignore the Catacomb Pact,” agreed Massimo Faggioli, a professor of church history at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. “It’s a key to understanding him, so it’s no mystery that it has come back to us today.”
But why did the Pact of the Catacombs disappear in the first place?
In reality it didn’t, at least for the church in Latin America.
[But as a physical piece of evidence, apparently, the signed document is not available for now. And nobody finds that strange? That no one even has a list of the signatories, at least of the original 40? So 'important' a document, and no one took proper custody of it? It's not worth the time and effort for any serious journalist reporting on the Church to find out exactly why such a document could have 'disappeared'? C'mon, it's just noit plausible.]
The chief presider at the catacombs Mass 50 years ago was a Belgian bishop, Charles-Marie Himmer, and a number of other progressive Europeans took part as well.
[Betcha they were all the Belgian/French prelates who initially thought up LT and foisted it on their Lat-Am colleagues!] But the bulk of the celebrants were Latin American prelates, such as the famous Brazilian archbishop and champion of the poor, Dom Helder Camara, who kept the spirit of the Catacombs Pact alive — as best they could.
The problem was that the social upheavals of 1968, plus the drama of the Cold War against communism and the rise of liberation theology — which stressed the gospel’s priority on the poor, but was seen as too close too Marxism by its conservative foes —
made a document such as the Catacombs Pact radioactive. [That makes no sense at all! 1968 confirmed the dominance of Marxist ideas and ideology among the intellectuals of the world, a dominance which had been such a post World War II phenomenon. The Catacombs Pact was no more radical than, for instance, the occupation of the Sorbonne in May 1968 by rampaging student mobs screaming Marxist slogans. The Pact ought to have been brandished then and enshrined along with the inflammatory texts of Che Geuvara, Regis Debray and Frantz Fanon that punctuated the rhetoric of the generation of 1968.]
“It had the odor of communism,”
[So? Everything then had the odor of communism] said Brother Uwe Heisterhoff, a member of the Society of the Divine Word, the missionary community that is in charge of the Domitilla Catacombs.
Even in Latin America the pact wasn’t publicized too widely,
lest it poison other efforts to promote justice for the poor. [More nonsense reasoning! In what way could it possibly 'poison' any such attempts when it appears prima facie to commit the Church, as it were, to attempting utopia through the commonly held utopian ideology of the day?]
Heisterhoff noted that he worked with the indigenous peoples of Bolivia for 15 years but only learned about the Catacombs Pact when he came to Rome to oversee the Domitilla Catacombs four years ago.
“This stuff was a bit dangerous until Francis came along,” said Faggioli.
[Dangerous for whom? Wasn't it merely the episcopal expression - by 540 out of 2500 - of the liberation theology that soon engulfed Latin America and would be its bane for the next three decades? Against which the Church could only counter with the CDF's instructions regarding LT and why it was not just anti-Catholic but anti-Christ as well in reducing Jesus from God-man to a mere glorified social activist?]
Indeed, some reports say that up to 500 bishops, mainly Latin Americans, eventually added their names to the pact, and
one of them, Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, was gunned down by military-backed assassins for speaking out against human rights abuses and on behalf of the poor — in the view of many, for preaching the message of the Catacombs Pact.
[Gibson should have checked his facts quickly on Wikipedia. Romero did not become a bishop until 1970, five years after Vatican II ended, so he could not have taken part in Vatican II.]
Francis, too, seems to have imbibed the spirit of the Catacombs Pact, though there’s no evidence he ever signed it.
[How could he? He was not even ordained a priest until 1969! Moreover, if the Pact signatories themselves, for some reason, chose to downplay if not altogether omit any references to the Pact in the decades when LT ran rampant in Latin America, would they have been circulating it to get more signatures? C'mon, Mr. Gibson, take off your dunce's cap!]
As a Jesuit priest and then bishop in Argentina during the turbulent decades of the 1970s and ‘80s, Francis became increasingly devoted to the cause of the poor, as did much of the Latin American church. It was no great surprise, then, that this year he pushed ahead with the beatification of Romero, which had been stalled for decades; just last week Francis used remarkably sharp language to denounce those who had “slandered” Romero’s reputation.
Francis was also familiar with the case of his fellow Argentine churchman Bishop Enrique Angelelli, an outspoken advocate for the poor who was killed in 1976 in what appeared to be a traffic accident but which was later shown to be an assassination by the military dictatorship that ruled the country at the time.
Angelelli was also a signer of the Catacombs Pact, and Francis last April approved a process that could lead to sainthood for the slain bishop.
For many in the U.S., on the other hand, the catacombs have chiefly been deployed as a symbol of persecution, and often by
conservative apologists who argue that secularizing trends are heralding a return to the days when Christians huddled in the tunnels for fear of the Romans.
Heisterhoff smiles at that notion. “Here in the catacombs, it was not a place to hide,” he explained. “It was a place to pray, not so much a refuge.”
That’s a point Francis himself has made — the Roman authorities knew where the catacombs, and the Christians, were. It was no secret hideaway. The catacombs even grew as a place to bury the dead after the empire legalized Christianity in 313, as believers came to honor and pray for them in the hope of the resurrection.
What the catacombs really represented, Heisterhoff said, was “a church without power,” a church that featured what Francis has praised as a “convincing witness” — a radical vision of simplicity and service that the pope says is needed for today’s church.
So has the Pact of the Catacombs — and the true message of the catacombs themselves — re-emerged for good?
Much may depend on how long Francis, who turns 79 in December, remains pope and can promote his vision of a “church for the poor.”
Moreover, the economic message at the heart of the Catacombs Pact is just as controversial today as it was when it was signed 50 years ago. Capitalism may have won the Cold War over communism, but income inequality and economic injustice remain, or are worse than before.
[No, Mr. Gibson. Read the United Nations' own statistics about all that! Besides, as a responsible journalist, you cannot make a blanket statement like you just did without at least citing reliable data to prove your point. But you don't because you can't.]
“We cannot absolutize our Western system,” Kasper said in explaining the theme of the Catacombs Pact. “It’s a system that creates so much poverty, that’s not just. The resources of the world belong to everyone. To all mankind. That is what it is saying.” [Really, Mr. Know-It-All-#2 (after JMB, that is)? Like Gibson, you cannot support your sweeping statements with data.]
I had originally delayed posting Fr. Scalese's commentary on the Pact simply because I had not found time to translate it. But what sent me back to it was a recent article by Sandro Magister in which he highlights arguments against the Bergoglian ideas about poverty written up in a recent book by an Italian professor....
Poverty according to Pope Francis: Virtue as well as evil
A cornerstone of the Bergoglian magisterium which he exalts as a salvific virtue
while condemning its existence as an enemy to be fought
A philosopher analyzes this unresolved contradiction of the pontificate
by Sandro Magister
[There is no actual contradiction, really. JMB considers poverty a virtue that seemingly makes the materially poor person sinless or even incapable of sin, whereas he believes that poverty itself must be eliminated - never mind that Jesus himself did not try to do that ("You will always have the poor") for the simple reason that it is one of the many ills that are the consequences of the Fall. God did not become man in order to eliminate those earthly consequences of the Fall but to help man avoid the eternal consequences of continuing to sin against God. No amount of citing the Gospel partially and tendentiously will change that.]
ROME, July 11, 2016 – The reception of the major magisterial acts of Pope Francis ranges between two extremes.
- The almost universal chorus of applause that his environmentalist encyclical
Laudato Si enjoys, especially outside the Catholic world.
[Then does it really matter what they say?]
- And the ever more conflictual dispute, in this case within the Church, stirred up by the post-synodal apostolic exhortation
Amoris Laetitia.
In the middle there is
the tranquil acceptance, without excesses for or against, of that other cornerstone of the pontificate of Francis presented in the exhortation
Evangelii Gaudium condensed in the formula of the “Church that is poor and for the poor.”
A couple of months ago, however, a book was released that, without making a splash but while garnering growing attention for the clarity and acumen of its analysis, puts this very question in the spotlight:
> F. Cuniberto, "Madonna povertà. Papa Francesco e la rifondazione del cristianesimo" [Lady Poverty: Pope Francis and
the re-foundation of Christianity], Neri Pozza Editore, Vicenza, 2016
[And why does Magister not recoil at the title??? 'Re-foundation of Christianity' indeed! What is Bergoglio, the new Christ? Obviously not, but his evident 're-foundation', which I call 'wreckovation', of the Church of Christ, is really his foundation or institution of Bergoglianism, analogous to Lutheranism, as his improved version of Christianity.]
The author, Flavio Cuniberto, teaches esthetics at the university of Perugia. His studies range from philosophy to modern and contemporary literature, especially German, with forays into Platonism, into Judaism, into Islamic thought, and with particular interest in the questions of modernity.
In the poverty exalted by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Professor Cuniberto sees a twofold contradiction, the first of a theological nature, the second of a practical character.
In the first case he observes that Francis, at the very same time as he elevates poverty to a theological category, on the model of the “kenosis” of the Son of God made man, he treats it, in reality, as a material more than spiritual condition
[when the Gospel verses he cites clearly refer to spiritual poverty], in a markedly sociological sense: the poverty of the “peripheries” and of those excluded from wealth.
The second contradiction is between poverty as a salvific value and at the same time as an enemy to be fought, to defeat which Bergoglio moreover indicates remedies that “rehash old third-worldist templates” disconnected from reality.
In fact, one does not have to be a supporter of free-market capitalism - Professor Cuniberto is not - to recognize that it has nonetheless lifted from poverty an endless mass of people who have become part of the new middle classes.
[And by Bergoglian logic, that no one questions, would thereby become sinners again like all the rest of us, instead of being so pure and virtuous he sees them all as incarnations of Jesus himself!]
This, for example, is precisely one of the facts that Pope Francis does not see.
On July 12, 2015, asked point-blank by a German journalist on the return flight from Paraguay to explain why he never talks about the middle classes,
Francis effectively admitted the “mistake” of overlooking them in his analyses, but he added that in his judgment these classes “are becoming ever smaller,” crushed by the polarization between rich and poor. [How can anyone claiming to prescribe 'the remedy' for all the world's social ills, namely, the UN's SDG for 2030, ignore the vast middle classes at all when proposing his listen-because-I-know-better-than-anyone social formulas? If you need any proof at all that JMB lives in a parallel unreal world - in which he makes up 'facts' to fit his hypotheses - there it is!]
Below is how Professor Cuniberto analyzes and contests these contradictions in some passages of the book, which naturally is much more thorough and a must-read.
[Once again, one must regret the false dichotomy Cuniberto presents.]
Poverty:
An enemy to be fought or a precious treasure?
by Flavio Cuniberto
Debatable on the theological-exegetical level, this interpretation of poverty [made by Pope Francis] generates a tangle that is very similar to a brain teaser.
If in fact poverty as material misery, exclusion, abandonment is indicated from the beginning as an evil to be fought, not to say the evil of evils, and is therefore the primary objective of missionary action,
the Christological meaning of poverty however makes it at the same time a value, and indeed the supreme and exemplary value. [The first beatitude, often incorrectly because incompletely preached as "Blessed are the poor", refers in fact to all the 'poor in spirit', as the full verse goes - and two millennia of undisputed exegesis have said this refers to those who are humble enough to realize that they need God's help for their spiritual wellbeing. JMB is the first Catholic of consequence to give it a predominantly if not completely material meaning.]
If beatitude, referring to the benediction one gains in attaining the Kingdom, is proclaimed to the poor, if the very existence of the poor possesses a “salvific power” to which the Christian must adhere (because he thus adheres to Christ himself) [but that is not at all what the First Beatitude means, and this professor is propagating the fallacy!], it becomes difficult to think of poverty as a mere enemy to be fought, as a mere passivity to be eliminated.
Why fight poverty and uproot it, when it is on the contrary a “precious treasure,” and even the way to the Kingdom? Enemy to be fought or precious treasure? Social rejects to be integrated or mysterious figures of the Incarnation? The discussion seems to spiral into this bottomless contradiction. [It's A FALSE DICHOTOMY to have written a book about!]
Let’s suppose - this is obviously a utopian vision - that the missionary action oriented by the “option for the poor” could ultimately obtain the declared aim of freeing the poor from their condition of social exclusion, in brief, of eliminating poverty.
What would become, at that point, of poverty as a Christic model, of poverty as a mysterious spiritual resource from which the grace of Christ can be drawn? Of the poverty without which one cannot enter the Kingdom of heaven?
The spring would dry up, the model would be sacrificed to an ideal - entirely of the Enlightenment and modernity - of generalized progress, which in abolishing the pockets of poverty would finally lead to the New Jerusalem of the free and equal upon the earth. Is this really the aim of
Evangelii Gaudium? The elimination of material poverty?
[Not just of EG, but of JMB the whole person himself! And he has said so many times, in what I can see as a reiteration of Original Sin, when Adam, urged by Lucifer, thought he knew better than God and could do better than God. Why does no one point out this inexorable sense underlying Bergoglian presumptions???]
But let’s set the question aside to move on to a second and no less formidable tangle. “Evangelii Gaudium” at nos. 186-204 directly competes with the socio-economic system of advanced capitalism, indicated as the “structural cause” of mass poverty. Here the thesis of the document becomes drastic and can be boiled down to a dry formula:
the essential cause of poverty is inequality, “unfairness,” “hunger is the result of a poor distribution of goods and income” (191). [. . .]
The substantial naivete of the discourse is in part masked by that which seems to be a point-blank attack on “free market dogmas”: we can no longer trust, we read, “in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market” (204).
It is the classic “third-worldist” thesis (whether it is a classic Marxist thesis remains to be seen:
the Marxian praise of the enterprising and modernizing bourgeoisie introduces a complex nuance that evades easy characterization). [The bourgeoisie that JMB has admittedly and egregiously left out in all of his facile but fallacious sociological formulations.]
Here however it is not a matter of initiating an economic-theoretical dispute on the advantages and disadvantages of the free market model, or on the advantages and disadvantages of the “correct” capitalist model in the sense of social solidarity. [. . .]
The question rather concerns the overall tenor of the analysis proposed by the document:
an analysis that appears to be upheld by a theoretical and lexical instrumentalization that is strangely backward with respect to the geo-economic situation that is referenced. [An awkward mess of verbiage, but one gets the point] [. . .]
The thesis according to which the race for profit on the part of the “markets” would at the same time provoke growing inequality and growing impoverishment is in fact too easy a thesis, which ignores the subtle mechanisms of what is called “globalization.” The commonplace that would have on one side a rich world that is ever more rich and a poor world that is ever more poor can lead to a false diagnosis. [. . .]
We must in fact observe that the globalization, or modernization, of the planet in reality pursues an objective opposite to the one denounced by the pontifical document.
The logic of the market economy is more subtle than the “en-hungering” framework. And it is so in that it rests, as is known, on the paradigm of unlimited growth: the logic of growing profit implies a system of growing consumption, where the growth of consumption is made possible and at the same time necessary by the continual and unstoppable progress of technology. [. . .]
And since the average level of consumption in the advanced West is already very high - and the margins of growth are limited - the big money globalizes its strategies in view of as large a community of evolved consumers as possible. [. . .] In other terms,
economic-financial globalization presupposes not the exclusion of the masses, but on the contrary their growing inclusion precisely in the dynamics of mass consumption. [. . .]
It is a process that involves an increase and not a reduction of social inequality: the widespread growth in levels of consumption involves a growth of profits and a growing concentration of these in the hands of limited financial elites. [Is this the actual cost-benefit analysis of globalization, or is it just the professor's perception, which coincides with the Bergoglian perception?]
But the commonplace according to which the growth of the social divide involves in itself an impoverishment of the lower layer is a mistaken
topos, or rather backward with respect to the current horizons of the globalized economy.
[DIM=pt][That is to say that lifting up the consumption capacity of poorer peoples does improve their lives but also brings 'great profit' to certain rich 'elites'. Would preventing said 'elites' from making more money be preferred instead of giving a chance to improve the socio-economic status of the less advantaged but also benefiting those entrepreneurs who make this possible? As always, the enemy of the good is 'perfect', or at least, what omniscients consider 'perfect'.]
In the BRIC countries
[Brazil, India and China - known as the 'emergent' mega-economies] and the like, a broad and growing middle class is being formed that can be compared, in terms of consumption levels, to the middle class of Western societies. In the course of recent decades millions of Chinese, Indians, Turks, etc. have emerged from a condition of ancestral poverty - consumption at a minimal level, of pure subsistence or less - to reach a condition of relative prosperity (according to Western parameters) and in any case of non-poverty. [. . .]
To summarize. The problem is not what may be the most effective strategy to fight poverty by eliminating its structural causes. To which the response, in fact, is simple: under current conditions it is the modernization, on technological and capitalistic bases, of the economic structure.
The problem is instead it is rather
how to evaluate an emergence from poverty that unfolds, precisely, in the forms imposed by the modernization and globalization of lifestyles. [. . .] It is how to evaluate the form of life - not more poor but less poor - generated by the process of modernization, [. . .] a process that appears unstoppable, and that tends to sweep away every factor of ethical-religious resistance, as well as political. [. . .]
To this question “Evangelii Gaudium” does not give a reply, or better: it does not give one because it does not pose the question. [. . .]
The diagnosis, apparently very severe, that the exhortation proposes of the capitalist West thus ends up being a
reassuring analysis
[Reassuring to whom????]: because, in relaunching old slogans of easy consumption, it seems to ignore the subtle mechanisms of the market and the devious nature of the strategies put into effect by the capitalist West to realize the hoped-for Global Village:
a massive, omnipervasive media propaganda the aim of which is to propose-impose as good, desirable, necessary, objects of consumption thought up and commercialized for the sole purpose of fostering the “growth” of consumption itself, and as a result the growth of profits. [Any interested and intelligent observer of the capitalist system knows that. But greed being an all-too-human vice, should one ignore the actual benefits the system has brought in terms of bringing people out of poverty, just because the entrepreneurs are operating not out of sheer altruism but in expectation of profit? As Fr. Scalese says, a healthy dose of realism is both necessary and useful.] [. . .]
On this aspect of the technological-economic “machine,” “Evangelii Gaudium” is silent, as if poverty did not also decline in terms of mental slavery, of forced consumption. [. . .]
In praising the new media [Has it done that, other than by passive basking in its near-universal acclamation?], the magisterium does not realize that it is praising the Trojan Horse contrived by Big Money to conquer the
strongholds [???] of ancient poverty and turn it into the religion of consumption.
Two recent articles from www.chiesa on poverty and wealth in the words and actions of Pope Francis, and on his political vision:
> Welcome, Wealthy. Francis Receives Them With Open Arms (11.3.2016)
> “The People, Mystical Category.” The Political Vision of the South American Pope (20.4.2016)