THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

Just a bit of chronological context: 'INTRODUCTION TO CHRISTIANITY', which became an almost-instant theological classic, was published one year before Jorge Bergoglio was ordained a priest.

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI


Ooops! Unexpected page change. See previous page for earlier posts today, 7/24/18.






Canon212's 'above the fold' headlines today indicate the growing scandal around McCarrick and the denial by his now-cardinal and Curial dicastery head protege that he ever had any indication of McCarrick's double life during the years he worked with him. Lies heaped upon lies!


Meanwhile, 'good' Bishop Tobin folds up his social media tent on Twitter, but still without articulating the apology he needs to make for his terrible mistake (a totally unforced 'self goal', for there was absolutely no reason for him to ever make that gratuitous tweet - other than wanting to sound like a 'champion' to his fellow bishops, never mind what it made him sound to anyone with common sense!


Fr Z offers cautionary words about our impulses in these times of overheated reactions from all fronts brought about by the miscellaneous mis-steps and mis-statements of the reigning pope and its conjunction with the involvement of many of his close associates with various sex abuses or the coverup thereof.


We should tread carefully

July 25, 2018

These days the gulfs that already yawn between different parties in the secular world as well as within the Church are becoming wider still.

If there is any sort of controversy or disagreement, someone demands that someone else’s head be lopped off. A good example of this came yesterday from the shrill needle of the tricoteuse of the catholic Left, MSW [Michael Sean Winters, who is male and properly referred to as a tricoteur] who shrieked for the elimination of Fr. Dwight Longenecker from ministry. [Tricoteuse' is the French word for a woman knitter, made famous in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, in which he describes the French women who sat beside the guillotine during public execution who supposedly continued to knit in between executions. As used by Dickens, the tricoteuse came to symbolize the nature of the Reign of Terror in which radical Jacobins engaged in mass political persecution of all real or supposed enemies of the Revolution. Winters self-styled himself when he wrote in a blog condemning Trump's nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court: "When the revolution [presumably against Trump] comes, I will be clamoring not for mercy but for a seat next to the guillotine, where I can do my knitting".]

What was Longenecker’s crime? In a tweet he made a connection between the homosexualist agenda and clerical sexual abuse. Whether it is Chad Pecknold or Fr. Longenecker, for Madame Defarge there is only one response.

I hope that the Catholic Right doesn’t fall into the soul-annihilating trap of such shrill and bloody tactics.

More and more I have a sense of menace surrounding all that is good, true and beautiful in the Church.

The Enemy is at work.

It is also as if we have, in secular life and ecclesial life, almost reached the tipping point.

It is hard to explain what I mean. By way of a historical example, in post-war Italy, when Christian Democrats were struggling with Communists for power, the Communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci recommended to his comrades that they let the CDs take Parliament. The Commies would focus on the schools, with the result that, in a few decades, people would ask the Communists to take everything over. It’s a long and patient game of creeping incrementalism, cooking frogs in pots, etc.

In the secular world, decades and decades of control of academia by leftists and liberals have finally sufficiently reduced the percentage of the population who think, rather than merely emote, or who know history, rather than only what was on their Snapchat screen a moment ago, or … well, you know what I mean.

It feels as if they are just about ready to make their definitive moves to seize greater control. You can find hints of this in what is going on in US public discourse – if it can be dignified with the term – from the Democrats. They have swerved sharply to the Left and their responses are, in effect, lots of shouting and screaming and accusing and demanding. They offer even more free stuff and, if I am right about the lowered percentage of the population who can think, they might just succeed with their seductions in the not too distant future.

If you want to know what that world would look like, try the amusingly scary short novels of Kurt Schlichter.

The secular Left is becoming a self-righteous, virtue-signalling mob. If they stay in this course, there will be violence in the streets. Sorry.. even more violence in the streets.

These days we have been treated to more head-hunt howling in the Church. Card. McCarrick’s misdeeds, and the de facto cover up by the powers that be, have sparked rage and calls for action.

My concern is that the calls for action will drive a whole other group of people into a mob, also driven by self-righteousness and virtue-signalling.

By this post, I in no way suggest that no one should be called to account for misdeeds. I do, however, see a trend in the way people deal with each other in conflict: they want their opponents, or the objects of their disappointment or opprobrium not just to be called to account, but to be ruined. They want the opposition not to be persuaded, but to be crushed. Not converted, but obliterated.

I thank God every day that I belong to a Church which was established for sinners, and not for the perfect. Even though I am confident that God is forgiving, and the the Sacrament of Penance has its promised effects, with each passing year I feel more heavily the burden of the sins I have committed and confessed. I trust in God’s mercy, if not that of my neighbor. I would hope for compassion from my neighbor, but I don’t realistically expect it… anymore. Not today. Not in the present environment.

We should tread carefully. I don’t doubt that there will soon be more violence in rhetoric and even physical violence in the streets. I don’t doubt that past misdeeds and also completely false and invented accusations will become the modus operandi of the Left.

I can’t shake the feeling that this beast is coming, and it is slouching just around the corner. Horrors have happened in history. With every other kind of disaster, man made or natural, when we are comfortable we think that bad stuff happens to other people, in other places, not to us. Until it does.

People were behind the Reign of Terror, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Nazism, the Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields, the Rwandan Genocide, Boko Haram and Islamic terrorism. People are behind slavery, torture, human trafficking, drug culture, big-business abortion.

We are people too. If you think bad things can’t happen where you are, just watch people in a grocery store before the hurricane hits or at the department store the day after Thanksgiving. Just watch a four-way stop intersection for a while if you want proof of actual sin, or into the eyes of a testing 2-year-old for proof of Original Sin.

Let us not close ourselves off to compassion to each other. Also, a serious individual examination of conscience is needed. Then…

GO TO CONFESSION!

Detail, 'Holy Communion', August von Courten (1848-1925).

A modest proposal to end the vocations crisis:
Let everyone get back to receiving the Host on the tongue
by Fr. John A.Perricone

July 24, 018


Allow me to touch a liturgical third rail: Communion in the hand.

Before I do, look at the July 4th edition of La Croix International. It reports that of the 96 dioceses in the country of France, 58 produced not a single ordination to the Priesthood. Truth be told, this crisis is not restricted to France. It has enveloped all of Europe, some countries suffering even more severe shortages than France.

Europe is not alone. North American ordinations are also in free-fall. One East Coast seminary, which hosts three major metropolitan dioceses, has a seminarian population hovering around 50 — that is, 50 seminarians for more than 7.8 million Catholics. Before 1960, when the seminary served only one Archdiocese, it housed three hundred seminarians.

This is a collapse of historic proportions. A cause for concern, don’t you think? Might it have something to do with the precipitous decline of reverence for the Holy Eucharist? To some progressive Catholics, this suggestion may seem somewhat quaint. Then again, to that same set of Catholics (and priests of the “new paradigm”), belief in the Real Presence itself is quaint.

Tolerate slippage in the high reverence owed to the Most Blessed Sacrament (how many Catholics even use that expression any longer?), and the Church suffers a decline in the priests whose vocation it is to be its guardian.

Of course, Communion in the hand is an approved practice, but one which is only juridically “tolerated.” No matter how antediluvian this may sound, it is the reality.

Moreover, no intelligent Catholic would maintain that Communion in the hand alone caused a decline either in devotion to the Blessed Sacrament or in vocations to the priesthood. On the other hand, no intelligent Catholic would deny that Communion in the hand holds a principal place in the constellation of factors that have led to these declines. Any other conclusion is counter-intuitive.

Such analysis may seem slightly eccentric to a large portion of Catholics raised in a world constructed by au courant liturgists. But let us remember it was a world built from scraps extorted from the Holy See. Ancient history, but true history nonetheless.

When the liturgical record of our age is accurately documented, Catholics will marvel at how the courtly procedures of Rome were broadsided time after time by fast-moving liturgists. Like the agile English boats wreaking havoc on the hulking Spanish Armada, so the ’60s liturgists ran circles around the stately Roman curia, winning as booty a millennium of rich and sublimely awe-inspiring sacred liturgy.

The issue with Communion in the hand is not a bit of quirky crankiness. The practice arose from the toxic soil of virulent dissent. For some years, youngsters have been instructed that it is another glorious tradition of the ancient Church. This is a plain deception. If not for highly organized pressure groups in the ’60s (which simply initiated the practice in a dramatic act of defiance), its regular practice would still be viewed today as shockingly irregular. By the time the dust settled, fatal concessions had been made.

In due course, like termites chewing away at a foundation, the once mighty Catholic edifice of Eucharistic piety began to crack. This was quite predictable since Catholics believe as they act (lex orandi, lex credendi). When actions are altered, beliefs will inevitably change too — no matter how unintentionally. Trying to defend the novel Eucharistic practice by appealing to its present long fixity in the Catholic mind is no defense. Theological argument is not won by invoking stare decisis.

Rome understood this perfectly. In a pointed effort to stamp out false liturgical practices and defend traditional Eucharistic piety, Paul VI promulgated Memoriale Domini in 1969. This document eloquently upheld the ancient practice of Communion on the tongue while reluctantly tolerating the new practice.

Pope John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI, refused Communion in the hand at all Pontifical Masses. Mere papal preference? Not quite. It is a forceful acknowledgement of the ancient principle: the slightest diminution in any of the reverences to the Blessed Sacrament risks significant diminution of belief.

No wonder the 2000 Institutio Generalis Missalis Romani contains the pregnant clause (#161):

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“If communion is given only under the form of bread, the priest raises the Eucharistic bread slightly and shows it to each one, saying: ‘The Body of Christ’… and [the faithful] receive the Sacrament as they choose, either on the tongue, or in the hand, where this is allowed”

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In the typically spare manner of Roman documents, a notable truth is conveyed. Communion on the tongue remains normative, with Communion in the hand only tolerated, where permitted by law. This detail might be lost in the din of hammering together a liturgical New World, but it should not be lost on those with a deep love for the Body of Christ. But is linking this change in practice to a decline in vocations a slight stretch? Not really.

Holy Church understands that an intimate ontological bond exists between the Holy Eucharist and the Holy Priesthood: an eclipse in appreciation for the one inevitably leads to a decline in interest in the other.

A priest’s whole raison d’être is the Holy Eucharist. He protects it, as the Bridegroom protects the Bride. All the priest’s vigor streams forth from that august sacrament, and it is that sacrament which fashions his priestly personality. His priestly manhood is perfected in the adoration, care, and affection for that sacrament.

Apart from it, the heart of the priest withers and his priestly virility falters. Softness replaces heroism and an epicene compromise substitutes for fiery conviction. Soon the priest no longer seeks the sharp strokes of saintly action but is more at home in the safer and softer secular life.

Conceal the majesty of the Holy Eucharist and you reduce the once noble class of priests into a tribe of spiritual pygmies. And soon even that inglorious residue disappears. Could the lesson be more clear? No healthy young man aspires to be small. Greatness alone summons him.

France has much company in its crisis of priests. Almost every diocese in North America faces frightening declines in vocations. To their credit they have attempted nearly every possible solution: new vocation offices, new vocation teams, high school rap sessions, internet advertising, highway billboards, Madison Avenue firms, bishops’ subcommittees, and even ads in Playboy. Nothing seems to have worked. But have they tried everything?

Maybe the solution has been as close as the church around the corner: the Mass and the Holy Eucharist. Look no further than these. However, when you look at the Mass and the Holy Eucharist, be sure you look at them as the Church understands them, not as the liturgists do.

Too many well-intentioned priests and bishops have naively embraced the mindset of the Liturgical Establishment and not that of the Roman Church. This results in sentire cum periti (thinking with the experts) rather than sentire cum Ecclesiae (thinking with the Church).

Catholics who think with the Church see the liturgy as an end in itself; the Liturgical Nomenclatura sees liturgy as a means to something else.
- Holy Church instructs us that the liturgy is the act of Christ redeeming mankind in the re-presentation of his atoning sacrifice of Calvary.
- Man comes to adore and to love so that he can be filled and sanctified. Man kneels at Mass for no other purpose.
- Endless needs and petitions crowd his mind as he kneels before the Divinity, but all of those are entirely secondary to that act of adoration, that act of loving self-oblation.

For this reason man delights in surrounding the sacrificial act of the Crucified Savior with all manner of riches, splendor, and grandeur. Not any of it for any other reason than to glorify Christ, just as our love at the moment of Transubstantiation is for no one but him.

This is the transcendence of love — his love and ours. It is this Love that makes all other loves possible. It was foreshadowed in the Magdalene’s bath of perfume over the Savior’s feet. “To what end?” the Traitor protests, then and now. The Savior defends the Magdalene’s excess — an excess for no reason save for love of the Savior. This is love’s sublimity. This is the liturgy’s pinnacle shrouded by ranks of angels. This is the axis upon which creation turns.

Establishment liturgists operate in a smaller world, almost Lilliputian. To them the liturgy is only a means to another thing: self-realization, community, peace, justice, healing, diversity, dignity, et cetera, et cetera.

To the liturgist of a Brave New Liturgical World the liturgy is people-work, so it is their solemn law that a plethora of people be found everywhere in its performance. To paraphrase Hamlet: “Man’s the thing.”

Ironically, in this very, very small world of the liturgist there is no room for God, and even less room for men — real men, that is.

Every Catholic should be deeply moved by France’s plight. It is our plight, too. Perhaps it is time to experiment with a different remedy. Explore a new paradigm. Maybe a supernatural problem demands a supernatural solution.

It might seem like strange new thinking. But the “old” thinking doesn’t seem to have worked. C’mon, be daring. Try something new. The only thing you can lose is a crisis.

The Nero act: Are the powers-that-be
fiddling while America – and Rome – burn?
By Robert Royal

July 25, 2018

The famous political philosopher Leo Strauss is reported to have once said that modern political theorists are worse than the ancient Roman emperor Nero. Because contrary to the old saying, they know neither that they are fiddling nor that Rome is burning.

The U.S. bishops held their annual June meeting in Fort Lauderdale a few weeks ago and, to judge from reports, largely spent their time together discussing current politics and changes to a voters’ guide for the Fall midterm elections.

In Rome, just last week, Fr. Antonio Spadaro S.J., editor of the semi-official Vatican publication La Civiltà Cattolica, along with Marcelo Figueroa, a Presbyterian chosen by Pope Francis personally to be editor of the Argentine edition of L’Osservatore Romano, released another long essay attacking an American religious phenomenon: “The Prosperity Gospel: Dangerous and Different.”

Unlike their previous effort, which argued that collaboration between conservative evangelicals and Catholics was an “ecumenism of hate,” this article drew little attention. Which is no surprise.

Though peddlers of the prosperity gospel have connections to President Trump – who seems to be the real target of the essay – few familiar with religion in the United States would regard that slice of our varied faith groups as particularly prominent. In fact, among most religious people, both Left and Right, it’s regarded as a kind of eccentric Christian sect.

Meanwhile, an international threat to the Church is emerging, in several countries simultaneously, a crisis of confidence in Catholic leadership and the Church Herself that could make these other concerns, which are after all rather peripheral to the Church’s life and mission, seem mere fiddling.

In America, many people have been shocked by revelations that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, one of the most prominent U.S. Catholic prelates over the past two decades and the public face of the Church after the 2002 exposure of the priestly abuse crisis, was himself an abuser.

At first, stories emerged of his relationships with adult men, two of whom received monetary settlements from the Metuchen and Newark dioceses, where McCarrick had served as bishop and archbishop. Those stories confirmed what had been widely rumored for many years, that “Uncle Ted” had made a practice of pressuring seminarians and others into sexual situations.

But now a man has come forward with stories of abuse by McCarrick that began when he was eleven. And no doubt there are many further eruptions to come, to judge from what we already know.

This has led to further disclosures by others who were abused by priests and bishops, some in shocking fashion, and the sickening fact that virtually no one in a position of authority took action, especially where bishops were involved. If you can stomach the details, which are sometimes outright blasphemous and literally diabolical, you can get an idea of the nature of the problem.

It’s no surprise that a wave of outrage is building in America just now, even among faithful Catholics. To judge by many of the people with whom I’m in contact on a regular basis and who know these matters quite well, we may well be just at the beginning of another wave of soul-searching in the Church, this time not so much over complaints about priests, but about bishops who should have done something about other bishops and people in positions of authority.

We saw how mishandling of similar charges about the past in Chile soured the pope’s trip to that country earlier this year. Two Chilean cardinals, one on the pope’s own handpicked council of nine, are implicated in the cover-ups and perhaps the misinformation that was passed along to Francis. Just yesterday, Chilean authorities announced that they are investigating 158 members of the Church who are suspected of being abusers or of having covered up abuse.

Another of the pope’s top advisors Cardinal Oscar Rodriquez Maradiaga of Honduras has been accused of financial corruption. But potentially even more serious is that his subordinate, Bishop Juan José Pineda Fasquelle, who runs the archdiocese during Maradiaga’s many long absences, has had to resign after revelations of multiple instances of sexual abuse of seminarians, similar to McCarrick’s.

But the McCarrick case is unusual in that we have a sitting cardinal now judged by proper authorities to have committed offenses over many years who remains a cardinal. Pope Francis has to do something about this – and about those who enabled McCarrick.

Because despite denials, many American bishops received complaints about McCarrick and did nothing about them. Rome itself had to have been informed about the payouts for earlier abuses (we know that a lay delegation went to Rome to try to stop McCarrick’s appointment to Washington precisely because of his known sexual proclivities).

Even The Washington Post, previously uninterested in the rumors about McCarrick, has observed: “Many church-watchers think this is a make-or-break moment for Francis because of McCarrick’s stature and the fact that Catholic clerical sex-abuse crises are exploding in Chile and Honduras.”

Our friend Phil Lawler wrote an essential essay, which appeared yesterday on the First Things website. Inquiring into how McCarrick was able to abuse children and adults for so long, he says, is an important question to protect future victims, but:

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...is less critical than the question of how his rise through the ecclesiastical ranks continued, even while rumors about homosexual activities swirled around him. Why was McCarrick named archbishop of Washington, and given a cardinal’s red hat? Why was he allowed to promote his protégés, to serve special diplomatic assignments for the Vatican, to influence the selection of bishops and even of a Roman Pontiff, after his beach-house antics had become a matter of common knowledge?

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[The problem is that all this was never 'common knowledge' because those who did know of it - more than just a few, obviously - failed to expose McCarrick in public. In any language, that amounts to a cover-up. The few in the media who tried to expose the man failed miserably after their initial attempts. Maybe they should have imply followed the simple tactic to 'try and try again and again until you succeed'. In any case, those in the media who knew about McCarrick's double life and did not lift a finger at all to expose him are just as guilty as all the bishops and priests who had the same knowledge (if not more) and simply chose to look the other way. Whether it was in implicit acceptance of the reality that those in a position to do something about it would not touch McCarrick at all (e.g., John Paul II whom, it is reported, a delegation from the US visited to protest his naming of McCarrick to be Archbishop of Washington and eventually cardinal), or because they themselves, for reasons of their own, did not want McCarrick exposed, all those who covered up for McCarrick must share equal blame. When blogging became a widespread phenomenon in the past decade, why didn't bloggers who had knowledge expose and pursue their exposure on the blogs?]

Finding out how this was possible is going to call for some painful self-examination, both here and in Rome itself. But the alternative is business as usual. And that business is now in danger of bankruptcy.

Now, we have a first reaction from the Vatican hierarchy. My problem is that because Cardinal O'Malley has been Bergoglio's frontman for 'dealing' with clerical and episcopal sex abuse I find it difficult to believe that he had no awareness at all of the allegations against McCarrick before things came to a stinking head!

Cardinal O’Malley condemns
McCarrick’s 'alleged behaviour'
as morally unacceptable
by Michael Davis

July 25, 2018


Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s alleged behaviour was “morally unacceptable and incompatible with the role of a priest, bishop or cardinal,” Cardinal Seán O’Malley has said.

Cardinal O’Malley, the Archbishop of Boston and a leading “fixer” in the clerical sex abuse crisis, issued a statement addressing the allegations against Cardinal McCarrick. [Unfortunately I cannot access O'Malley's full statement published in the Boston Globe, which has a financial firewall.]

“Each new report of clerical abuse at any level creates doubt in the minds of many that we are effectively addressing this catastrophe in the Church,” Cardinal O’Malley said, adding that it further compromises her “already weakened moral authority”.

“While the Church in the United States has adopted a zero tolerance policy regarding the sexual abuse of minors by priests we must have clearer procedures for cases involving bishops,” he continued. “The Church needs a strong and comprehensive policy to address bishops’ violations of the vows of celibacy in cases of the criminal abuse of minors and in cases involving adults.”

O’Malley set out a three-part course of action: “First, a fair and rapid adjudication of these accusations; second, an assessment of the adequacy of our standards and policies in the Church at every level, and especially in the case of bishops; and third, communicating more clearly to the Catholic faithful and to all victims the process for reporting allegations against bishops and cardinals.

The Cardinal closed by assuring that he will raise these concerns with the Holy See “with great urgency and concern” during an upcoming visit.

[Wait! Wasn't that third item on the cardinal's action plan supposedly addressed by the reigning pope - at least according to Vatican announcements? - that he would create a tribunal to deal with erring bishops, and that it would be under the committee to protect minors and children headed by Cardinal O'Malley himself. One has to think nothing was really done about it beyond the initial announcement!

As for a rapid adjudication of the accusations against McCarrick, is it not enough for now that we have the documented settlements made by two New Jersey dioceses with adult victims of McCarrick and the documented investigation of the New York archdiocesan committee that found a New Yorker's accusations of having been sexually abused by McCarrick when he was a pre-teen? Why does O'Malley continue to say 'alleged' for McCarrick's behavior? It may be 'alleged' only in the other cases that have surfaced so far, but even just the three cases that have been fairly 'adjudicated' to date more than suffice to condemn his behavior!]

CATHOLIC THING found it appropriate to reprint today these memorable words from Cardinal Ratzinger's 2005 meditations on the Via Crucis just a month before he became Pope...

The third fall
by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

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What can the third fall of Jesus under the Cross say to us? We have considered the fall of man in general, and the falling of many Christians away from Christ and into a godless secularism. Should we not also think of how much Christ suffers in his own Church?

How often is the holy sacrament of his Presence abused, how often must he enter empty and evil hearts!
How often do we celebrate only ourselves, without even realizing that he is there!
How often is his Word twisted and misused!
What little faith is present behind so many theories, so many empty words!
How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him!
How much pride, how much self-complacency!
What little respect we pay to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where he waits for us, ready to raise us up whenever we fall!

All this is present in his Passion. His betrayal by his disciples, their unworthy reception of his Body and Blood, is certainly the greatest suffering endured by the Redeemer; it pierces his heart. We can only call to him from the depths of our hearts: Kyrie eleison — Lord, save us (cf. Matthew 8: 25).

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NOTE: BIG PULPIT is running two special editions daily, compiling the most significant online commentaries on the McCarrick story and on the 50th anniversary of Humanae vitae. Do check them out.

bigpulpit.com/2018/07/25/mccarrick-watch-monday-edition/
and
bigpulpit.com/2018/07/25/humanae-vitae/

Pewsitter devotes its 'above the fold' headlines today to HV on its actual anniversary day...

Peter Kwasniewski who usually limits himself to very informative and insightful essays about the liturgy has joined Aldo Maria Valli in turning to satire and imagined conversations to make a point.

A conversation with the 'Santissimo Padre'-
perhaps overheard at Casa Santa Marta
by Peter Kwasniewski

July 25, 2018

Santissimo Padre: Who is it?
Swiss Guard: Holy Father, it is Monsignor Lospedale, wishing to have a cup of tea with you.
SP: By all means, send him in.

[The door opens, and a middle-aged priest strolls in, wearing a light blue clerical shirt and jeans.]

SP: So very good to see you. Have a seat. Sister will bring in the tea shortly. What’s on your mind?
Lospedale: Your Holiness, do you realize that polls are showing that 87% of practicing Catholics approve of artificial contraception? Other than those who may be ignorant of the Church’s teaching – a distinct possibility nowadays, since the teaching hardly ever gets mentioned – what do you think accounts for such an astonishing divide between official doctrine and actual practice?

SP:I ask myself about this. It’s clear that 99% of Catholics who still attend Mass are going to the Ordinary Form, but it’s also clear that the 1% who attend the preconciliar liturgy accept the teaching on artificial contraception. So I try to understand the situation. I find myself in front of people who are too lax, an attitude of laxity. And I ask myself: How come so much laxity? You dig, you dig, this laxity always hides something, a lack of faith in Christ. True love is not lax.
Mons: Why did you bring up the liturgy? Do you think it has anything to do with this problem?
Sp: Problem? Why not opportunity for mercy?
Mons: Quite right. Doubleplusgood.

SP: Well, you know the old axiom: “lex orandi, lex credendi,” to which some anti-’68ers – you know, the ones who wear Burkenstocks – add 'lex vivendi'. [Sighs.] I guess I should translate that phrase, seeing as clergy nowadays barely have enough Latin to figure out Novus Ordo. In violation of the clear requirements of canon law, I might add.
Mons: That hasn’t stopped us before.
S.P.: You spend altogether too much time with Coccopalmerio, who should be more retiring at this point in his career. Ah, Sister, thank you for the tea!
Mons: And I know what Novus Ordo means.
SP: So, as I was saying: lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. This means the law of prayer establishes the law of belief, which in turn establishes the law of living. In other words, we believe what we pray, and we live what we believe.
Mons: I’m afraid I’m not following.
SP: Then you ought to become more of a sheep! The majority of Catholics are dissenters from the ban on contraception, and most of them are attending the Novus Ordo of the ever blessed super-saint, my thrice-venerable predecessor in innovation, Paul VI. Indeed, just about the only thing he didn’t innovate on was this vexing question of birth control. On the other hand, a minuscule number of rigid Catholics who attend ridiculously rigid liturgies are not dissenting from what Paul VI (may he be blessed!) taught about contraception.

And I ask myself: Why is it that the rigid people are following the Church’s teaching, whereas the actively participating worshipers in spirit and truth who feast on the table of plenty…are not? It seems as though it should be the other way around. No?
Mons: Umm, isn’t it because the teaching on contraception is rigid, unloving, and insecure? That would explain why the people with the right liturgy use contraception, while the people with the wrong liturgy refuse to. It makes perfect sense. Goes along with the normality of the one group and the kookiness of the other. I knew we’d get to the bottom of this if we tried hard enough.
SP: Ah, but it’s not so easy as that. Not even I, with my Jesuitical equivocations, can make it appear that the Church has not consistently taught a ban on interfering with the procreative aspect of the marital act. It seems like something we ought to pay lip service to, at least…
Mons: You may be right about that.
SP: I’m always right. I’m the pope.
Mons: True. And a good thing, otherwise there might be a lot of confusion in the Church.
SP: Let’s not beat around the bush. The traditionalists are incredibly stubborn. They’re throwing wrenches into the works all the time. I don’t know how to shut them down. And they have something going for them that normal Catholics don’t have. [Looks out the window pensively.]
Mons: Which is…?
SP: They have children, you nincompoop! Do you remember what we were talking about just two minutes ago? “Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table…” They still believe all that stuff.
Mons: To think, in this day and age!
SP: It’s worse than that. They have vocations, too. Lots of them.
Mons: This sounds, Your Holiness, almost like a compliment to the traditionalists.
SP: I intended no such thing. Who am I to budge? I don’t change my mind so freely.
Mons: But…if you don’t mind my saying…in your latest airplane interview –
SP: Which one would that be? I’ve done so many, it’s hard to remember.
Mons: The one en route to Beijing, for the inauguration of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Cathedral.
SP: Go on.
Mons: In that interview, you answered some questions differently from the way you’d answered them before, which has given rise to a belief, shared by all the major liberal newspapers, that your papal magisterium is now evolving to a higher level of consciousness. Maybe even high enough to grasp the secrets of the Vatican Bank!
SP: Papal interviews have not only no magisterial authority, but in many cases no interest except for psychiatrists and biographers. I am surprised, I might as well admit to you, that more people have not registered this important fact. You have noticed, by the way, that I have an official biographer? He has regular access to my sacred person.
Mons: That is Good News, as we would not wish to lose so much as a crumb of the Argentine wisdom that falls from your table of plenty.
SP: You are copying me now. This is not allowed, as the Libreria Editrice Vaticana holds the copyright to all things papal. Including the latest apostolic expectoration, Daemonis Inundatio ['Demonic flooding'?]
Mons: Wonderful! Is this a new type of document? Can you tell me more?
SP: Not everyone is ready for it yet, but that will surely change. Development of doctrine is happening before our very eyes, at an exponentially accelerating pace. All things are in flux, just as Heraclitus said. No one ever steps in the same Tiber twice.
Mons: I understand, your Holiness: the new paradigm, Hegel, Teilhard…
SP: Exactly. Evolution is the name of the game. We’ve known this for a long time about the natural world and the world of cultures and civilizations. Liturgy, needless to say, was a harder nut to crack, with all those fools who thought that we should keep doing what had always been done. Montini took care of that with a monumental nutcracker, or, should I say, sledgehammer. Morality and dogma have been the hardest to fall, as you might expect, but the evolutionary momentum has finally caught up with and subsumed them as well, like an irresistible tsunami.
Mons: Speaking of evolution, if you’ll pardon me, I need to relinquish this very comfortable and obviously poverty-epitomizing chair, stand upright, and use my two legs in hominid fashion to get over to the Secretary of State, who needs to see me.
SP: Really? What peril has Parolin got up his sleeve?
Mons: Something about…I don’t know…suppressing some order or other.
SP: Don’t relish it too much, or I shall have to make an example out of you.
Mons: Oh, don’t do that – it might qualify me for a fast-track canonization! [Lets out a belly laugh.] With my best wishes, Santo Padre, I leave you to that formidable pile of correspondence you’ve got there. Ciao.

[Lospedale shakes hands and strolls out. The Swiss Guard closes the door behind him, leaving the pope with his yerba mate.]

SP [musing]: Monsignor, ah, a useful man. [Pause.] I thought I had abolished that title.

I am certainly glad many have reacted, as I expected they would, to Cardinal O'Malley's outrageously hypocritical and sanctimonious "Who, me? I knew nothing about McCarrick!-
Now let's do something about it" statement that echoes the unconscionable general attitude of his fellow bishops in the USA about this scandal...

Catholic bishops 'beg' for
'a clear policy against evil'
Leading churchmen are denying the undeniable
[What clearer policy do they want than the Ten Commandments
and their own priestly vows of chastity?]
By MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY
NATIONAL REVIEW
July 26, 2018

A few cardinals have roused themselves to respond to the month-old press disclosures that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick is a pederast, whereas before he was merely well known as a serial sexual harasser. Their response is depressing in the extreme and should make any Catholic or person of good will wish for their immediate, tearful confessions of fault, and their resignations of high ecclesial office.

Before mainstream media outlets finally reported [DECADES MUCH TOO LATE!] on his lewd and criminal behavior, McCarrick was the face of the American episcopacy’s response to the sex-abuse crisis in 2002.
- His lewd behavior with seminarians was an open secret among priests and informed laity.
- Expert witnesses in priest-abuse cases, such as Richard Sipe, had long ago publicized what they knew of the behavior of “Uncle Ted.”
- A concerned group of laity and clerics pleaded their case against him in Rome before his elevation to the College of Cardinals.
- Churchmen across the country who didn’t call him “Uncle Ted” with affection or disgust had another nickname related to his proclivities: “Blanche.”
[YET ALL THE ABOVE CHOSE NOT TO EXPOSE HIM - i.e., THEY ALL COVERED UP FOR HIM.]

American bishops now facing questions about what they knew and when have had to choose between looking clueless or complicit. So far, they are choosing the former. They are not, however, very persuasive in presenting themselves as ignorant of the rumors.

So let’s review what these churchmen have said and ask some questions about their responses to these “revelations.”

First, there is Cardinal Kevin Farrell, who was a protégé of Cardinal McCarrick’s. Farrell shared an apartment with McCarrick for six years, years in which settlements were being paid out in New Jersey for McCarrick’s misdeeds.

In a brief interview, Cardinal Farrell said, “I was shocked, overwhelmed; I never heard any of this before in the six years I was there with him. . . . I worked in the chancery in Washington and never, no indication, none whatsoever.” He didn’t mention his living arrangements. But nothing in Cardinal Farrell’s deportment suggests shock, disgust, or embarrassed bewilderment. His expression is one of a man getting through an unpleasant and official line on his actions.

Farrell was also once a senior figure in the Legionairies of Christ, led by sexual abuser, bigamist, and pederast Marcial Maciel. Farrell left, he’s said, over differences in philosophy.

What a life! To have been twice put in the best place to know what, at that level, “everyone knows,” and yet to have known nothing.
- Why should such a clueless man be elevated to the office of cardinal and given a curial position? [BECAUSE HE WAS RECOMMENDED TO THE POPE BY NO ONE OTHER THAN MCCARRICK, WHO PRIDED HIMSELF ON BEING AMONG BERGOGLIO'S GRAND ELECTORS.]
- Why should a prelate whose sense of the Church is so deficient that he resoundingly declared of the abuse crisis in 2002 that it was “over” be in charge of the World Meeting of Families in Dublin this year? [THAT QUESTION SHOULD BE PLACED SQUARELY BEFORE THE REIGNING POPE WHO ALSO NAMED LGBTQ PATRON JAMES MARTIN AS A LEADING SPEAKER IN DUBLIN.]
- If anyone comes forward with credible evidence that Cardinal Farrell did in fact know about McCarrick’s relationships with seminarians, will he resign his offices? [NOT UNLESS HELL FREEZES OVER, HE WON'T!]

Next there is Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley. Yesterday, he issued a long statement about the matter. In part, read:

---

These cases . . . raise up that fact that when charges are brought regarding a bishop or a cardinal, a major gap still exists in the Church’s policies on sexual conduct and sexual abuse. While the Church in the United States has adopted a zero tolerance policy regarding the sexual abuse of minors by priests we must have clearer procedures for cases involving bishops.

---

In other words, he blames this on a policy that he and his brother bishops wrote to deliberately exclude themselves from accountability in 2002. He continues:

---

It is my conviction that three specific actions are required at this time. First, a fair and rapid adjudication of these accusations; second, an assessment of the adequacy of our standards and policies in the Church at every level, and especially in the case of bishops; and third, communicating more clearly to the Catholic faithful and to all victims the process for reporting allegations against bishops and cardinals.

---

Specific actions: adjudication, assessment of standards, and communicating to Catholics a process for reporting allegations. The last implies that the problem with Cardinal McCarrick lies partly with the flock’s inability to bleat correctly while the wolves devour them. This is all bloodless bureaucrat-ese.
- Bishops knew about McCarrick and chose to do nothing.
- Confronted with the reality, they do not accept responsibility, they do not promise to boldly confront evil.
- They cry out for more policies that would help them avoid direct confrontation.

What is most shameful is how Cardinal O’Malley addresses his own state of knowledge. Father Ramsey of New Jersey, a priest in good standing, had written about McCarrick to O’Malley’s office for the Protection of Minors, and he received in return what amounted to buck-passing boilerplate about how offenses against adults aren’t handled by O’Malley’s office. O’Malley writes of this event:

---

Recent media reports also have referenced a letter sent to me from Rev. Boniface Ramsey, O.P. in June of 2015, which I did not personally receive. In keeping with the practice for matters concerning the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, at the staff level the letter was reviewed and determined that the matters presented did not fall under the purview of the Commission or the Archdiocese of Boston, which was shared with Fr. Ramsey in reply.

---

Notice how lawyerly this language is. O’Malley says he did not “personally receive” the letter. An interesting bit of rhetoric. On the surface, it allows one to conclude that O’Malley simply never knew about it. [Now he uses the ploy Bergoglio used to deny he ever received a complaint against Barros that O'Malley says he personally handed to the Pope!]

But O’Malley does not say whether staff discussed with him the contents of the letter and the contents of his office’s response to the letter. In fact, it is preposterous to believe that a matter so sensitive as grave accusations against one of the most notable churchmen in his country would be handled entirely by staff without his knowledge.

O’Malley’s official reputation, the one he is anxiously guarding, is that he is punctilious about accusations of sexual abuse. His real reputation is one as a zealous micro-manager of his own reputation.
- O’Malley surely had heard of the rumors about McCarrick’s behavior with seminarians, and he surely knew that McCarrick chose to live his retirement on the grounds of a seminary, where he would have access to young candidates for the priesthood, when his office received these complaints.
- Did he do anything with the knowledge of the complaint besides send back a form letter washing his hands of the situation?
- If his judgement allowed him to wave away such a grave situation, what good will better policies do?

My office doesn’t have a policy against plunging hammers into the necks of my colleagues. But my co-workers would not excuse themselves from the duty to stop me from doing this by citing the absence of such a policy in a rulebook, or by explaining that their job description did not explicitly include language about hammer-wielding colleagues.

O’Malley is blaming his lack of action on a lack of policy, when the problem is a fear of confrontation, insufficient zeal, or — most likely of all — his moral compromise and passivity in the face of a well-known culture of sexual abuse, blackmail, and moral impunity within the Catholic episcopacy. [More to the point, the very office he heads for the 'Protection' of Minors was supposed to set up a tribunal to deal with episcopal wrongdoings in the matter of clerical sex abuses. It obviously was never set up after all the grandiose announcements from the pope. Wasn't the very need for such a tribunal a reflection of 'policy' that bishops have been getting away with their direct or indirect complicity in clerical and episcopal sex abuses?]

He’s not the only one who has to answer tough questions. Cardinal Wuerl said last month that he had reviewed the records of the Washington, D.C., archdiocese. “Based on that review,” he concluded, “I can report that no claim — credible or otherwise — has been made against Cardinal McCarrick during his time here in Washington.”

Some questions for Cardinal Wuerl might go something like this.
- The Vatican’s representative in Washington, D.C., knew about the legal settlements for McCarrick in 2004; when were you informed of them?
- If you were informed of these settlements, did you take that into consideration when Cardinal McCarrick requested to live in different seminaries that train priests for your diocese?
- If you did not know about them, did Bishop Joseph Tobin or his predecessors in Newark have a duty to inform you of them, given McCarrick’s living arrangements?
- Why, near the end of the last decade, was McCarrick suddenly asked to leave the seminary and reside instead at St. Thomas Woodley Park under Father Roderick McKee?

Further, you are the American on the Congregation of Bishops in Rome. It’s widely reported that McCarrick’s lobbying for certain candidates for elevation in the Church was important.
- How many times did you receive him for an audience on these matters?
- What was the weight of his word in your own recommendations for Joseph Tobin, Kevin Farrell, and Blase Cupich?
- If you knew of these settlements, why did his word have any weight with the congregation and with the Vatican?

I don’t expect answers to these questions. But as a Catholic, I would find it satisfying to at least watch these men squirm or sweat while they lie to us, rather than delivering their lines in great comfort and an atmosphere of deference.

Reporters could also cut to the chase.
- Do you know of bishops who are sexually active? Are you sexually active?
- They should dig through the same “everybody knows” rumor mills that had accurate information on Cardinal McCarrick.
- Ever hear anything funny about Cardinal Edward Egan? About parties that Cardinal Law hosted? About Cardinal Bernadin? What about the reputation of the Mundelein Seminary?

I don’t expect answers to these questions. But as a Catholic, I would find it satisfying to at least watch these men squirm or sweat while they lie to us.

A spokeswoman for the diocese of Metuchen said that she had spoken to Cardinal Tobin and that he “has expressed his intention to discuss this tragedy with the leadership of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in order to articulate standards that will assure high standards of respect by bishops, priests, and deacons for all adults. ”

An expressed intention to articulate standards endorsing high standards. Let them eat standards. This is the moral imagination and moral vocabulary of Cardinal McCarrick’s peers in the Church. They need new policies to confront predators; the fear of perdition doesn’t move them to do so. Nor does respect for the seminarians or their congregants. Nor does self-respect. The reaction of the cardinals goes some way toward explaining how a man like McCarrick flourished in their ranks.



A number of newer articles have been urging the laity to stop contributing to their parishes and dioceses, especially those that have millions if not hundreds of millions in assets. I shall post some of them later.

The McCarrick scandal has just ripped open the shamelessness and moral depravity of all the other US bishops who have preferred and continue to choose to 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil'.

The Catholic Church hierarchy is, in effect, a vast zoo of orangutans whose faces ought to be plastered on the facade of St. Peter's Basilica along with all the non-human fauna that Bergoglio and his Laudato Si fanatics wish to save, except that who would want to save these episcopal and cardinalatial orangutans?

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/07/2018 20:57]

Putin says Christianity
formed the Russian nation
by Michael Matt
Editor

July 29, 2018

For whatever reason, Vladimir Putin has wised up to the importance of Christianity, and Russia's better for it:

---

MOSCOW, July 28, 2018 (AP) – Vladimir Putin says the adoption of Christianity more than 1,000 years ago in territory that later became Russia marked the starting point for forming the Russian nation itself.

President Putin’s comments came Saturday in a ceremony marking the 1,030th anniversary of the adoption by Christianity by Prince Vladimir, the leader of Kievan Rus, a loose federation of Slavic tribes that preceded the Russian state.

Speaking to thousands of clergy and believers at a huge statue of the prince outside the Kremlin, Putin said adopting Christianity was “the starting point for the formation and development of Russian statehood, the true spiritual birth of our ancestors, the determination of their identity. Identity, the flowering of national culture and education.”...

---

REMNANT COMMENT: I really don’t care what the vociferous critics of Vladimir Putin think they know about all the nefarious, KGB shenanigans the President of Russia may or may not be up to. The bottom line is this: If it's now politically beneficial for Russia’s head of state to "pretend" to be an advocate of Christianity, I'd say let it ride. [If Putin were merely 'pretending' to be a Christian for whatever reason, is that any worse than the reigning pope who is doing exactly that? The difference is that Putin did not have to profess his Christianity at all, but he chose to do so openly since he first became the undisputed leader of post-Communist Russia back in 1999 (since when he has either been president or prime minister), making it a point to attend all important Christian holidays with the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church. What political benefit does he get out of this? Not in Russia, and not in the world! It is Bergoglio who is obligated to keep up appearances and pretend to be Catholic, since he was after all elected to be the nominal leader of the Catholic Church.]

Besides, at this point I'll take my chances with this guy over almost any of the actual demons running the "free countries" of the former Christendom. We know exactly what they are, and the day they celebrate the fact that Europe was formed by Christianity will be the day hell freezes over.


BTW, the Wikipedia passage on Putin's religion bears noting:

---

Putin's mother was a devoted Christian believer who attended the Russian Orthodox Church, and his father was an atheist.Though his mother kept no icons at home, she attended church regularly, despite government persecution of her religion at that time. His mother secretly baptized him as a baby, and she regularly took him to services.

According to Putin, his religious awakening began after a serious car crash involving his wife in 1993, and a life-threatening fire that burned down their dacha in August 1996. Shortly before an official visit to Israel, Putin's mother gave him his baptismal cross, telling him to get it blessed. Putin states, "I did as she said and then put the cross around my neck. I have never taken it off since."

When asked in 2007 whether he believes in God, he responded, "... There are things I believe, which should not in my position, at least, be shared with the public at large for everybody's consumption because that would look like self-advertising or a political striptease."

---

Some pictures from the main event in Kiev that commemorated the Christianization of Russia in 988:





The giant statue at the foot of which Putin and company are gathered is that of St. Vladimir [Vladimir the Great], who is Putin's patron saint. The words Kiev Vladimir can be read in Cyrillic at the base of the colossal statue.

Vladimir consolidated Kievan Rus from modern-day Belarus, Russia and Ukraine to the Baltic Sea, solidified its frontiers against incursions of Bulgarian, Baltic tribes and Eastern nomads. Vladimir converted to Christianity from Slavic paganism in 988 and Christianized the Kievan Rus.


Earlier, Fr De Souza made this obligatory commentary on Bergoglio's Ostpolitik vis-a-vis the Russian Orthodox Church at the expense, it seems, of the Ukrainian Catholics. Bergoglio's ruling criterion for anything he says or does seems to be expediency - whatever will favor or facilitate his personal agenda which, more and more, appears to be exclusively political, with a semblance of spiritual gloss for appearances!

1,030 years after the Baptism of Rus’,
the Vatican is turning its back on Ukrainian Catholics
Pragmatism towards Russian Orthodoxy is beginning to look like appeasement
by Fr Raymond de Souza

July 28, 2018


Is Pope Francis, like Donald Trump, guilty of abject capitulation to Russia’s Vladimir Putin? That question was raised by one of the most respected Vatican commentators, John Allen, bringing to greater prominence a criticism often made behind closed doors.

“As with Trump, albeit in a very different key, the question that appears destined to plague Francis going forward is how much is too much – when flexibility and pragmatism, in other words, turn into craven placation?” Allen wrote. “So far, the verdict would appear to be that for both men, the answer remains a work in progress.”

Allen recounts how, since the first months of his pontificate, Pope Francis has proved an ally of Putin in Syria, where Russia has now re-established its Middle East presence in an alliance with President Bashar al-Assad. And since 2014, Pope Francis has been muted in his criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, repeatedly disappointing members of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC).

I noted here last month (in our June 15 issue) that, in a meeting with a delegation of the Russian Orthodox Church in May, Pope Francis appeared to take the Russian side in all matters Ukrainian. That was noticed, apparently, in Kiev, for on July 3 there was a private audience granted to Major-Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the UGCC, by the Holy Father, ostensibly to honour the 1,030th anniversary of the baptism of Kievan Rus’ in 988.

The UGCC statement pointedly noted that the meeting had been requested by Major-Archbishop Shevchuk. Indeed, the lengthy statement by the UGCC after the meeting systematically refuted all the points made by Pope Francis in his meeting with the Russian Orthodox.

All of which is remarkable in 2018, which marks 30 years since the millennium of the baptism of the eastern Slavs in 988. In 1988, with the Cold War still on, Gorbachev’s Soviet Union was prepared to recognise the baptism of Kievan Rus’, the kingdom out which Russia, Belarus and Ukraine would eventually emerge.

In 1988, all were still part of the Soviet Union, and the Russian Orthodox Church claimed for itself the exclusive inheritance of the baptism of 988. Indeed, for the Russian Orthodox, the UGCC should not even exist, and the Soviet Union was right to crush it.

John Paul, though, insisted that the Greek Catholics of the Ukraine – still suppressed and illegal at that time – participate in the millennium celebrations, as heirs to the baptism of Kievan Rus’. He published two apostolic letters to that effect in the spring of 1988, and celebrated Mass with the UGCC hierarchy in Rome in July 1988.

John Paul was making an argument in 1988 that the millennium belonged to more than just Moscow. Vladimir the Great ruled from Kiev – there was no Moscow at the time. He chose to be baptised in the Byzantine tradition of Christianity – this was before the split with what would become Orthodoxy – in Crimea.

That is why, when Putin speaks about Crimea, he partially justifies Russia’s annexation of it by noting that the baptism of Vladimir took place there, making it a place of Russian heritage.

John Paul and the Ukrainian Catholics saw it differently. The baptism of Russia in 988 was a baptism into a Byzantine Christianity in full communion with Rome, and took place in Ukraine’s capital. Today, who are the Ukrainians of Byzantine tradition who are in full communion with Rome? The UGCC.

“The gift of the Christian faith has been passed down as our greatest treasure,” said Major-Archbishop Shevchuk on July 15. “Today we thank God that it was the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church who was privileged to be a successor to Prince Vladimir and his holy baptism.”

In 1988, both the UGCC and the Vatican were making the same argument. In 2018, Major-Archbishop Shevchuk is repeating the argument independent of Rome, or even in contradiction to it.

The political tension between Russia and Ukraine and the conflict between the Ukrainian Orthodox and the Russia Orthodox are all rooted in the history of 988. Over the millennium the gravitational centre of Orthodoxy and political power in the Slavic world shifted east from Kiev to Moscow.

Today, Russia – both Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church – argue that this should mean a Ukraine that takes its lead, politically and religiously, from Moscow. Ukrainians disagree, feeling that Ukraine ought to move away from Moscow’s dominance, re-staking its own claim to the inheritance of 988.

July 28 is the date marking the baptism of Vladimir and the eastern Slavs. Thirty years ago, the Polish Pope made the relevant claims on behalf of the Ukrainian Catholics, for the millennium was not only about the past but also the present. Today, Major-Archbishop Shevchuk does the same in Kiev. But the Holy See appears to have forgotten the position it took in 1988. [Because the Holy See under an anti-Catholic Pope is no longer the Holy See as it ought to be!]

The moment before the storm
[Is it really? Given the apparently meek acceptance so far
of Bergoglio's outrages against doctrine and Christ himself
by most everyone except some bloggers and their followers,
one can't even indulge in wishful thinking!]
by Steve Skojec

July 31, 2018

I’ve been sitting at my desk for the better part of three hours, skimming through news and social media, trying to get a sense of things this week.

It’s not entirely clear to me what I should say. In my entire lifetime as a Catholic, I don’t think I’ve ever seen or felt anything like this. There is a groundswell building in the Catholic world, like the beginning of a scream that starts deep in the gut and begins forcing its way upward. It is a feeling of countless voices beginning to rise in pure, unmitigated outrage.
[From your pen to God's ears!]

This afternoon, I spoke to someone who has been in Catholic media far, far longer than I have. He echoed this sentiment, saying that he, too, had never seen anything like it.

I am searching my mind for an analogy that fits, and what comes to mind is the kind of thunderstorm one gets on a late summer afternoon, where the bright sun begins to give way to thick, dark, roiling clouds that nearly turn the day into night. The kind of sky that tells you on an instinctive, primal level that you’d best get indoors.

The lightning hasn’t broken loose, but the early deep-throated growls of thunder can be heard from afar. The hail and drenching downpour haven’t begun pelting everything in sight, but the air is electric with their promise. What will become tree-bending gusts of winds are for the moment only hinted at, the tips of branches rustling gently, leaves turned up to show pale undersides.

We are in the moment before the storm.

More accusations against McCarrick — and others — are beginning to come forth like the first fat droplets of rain. In a new story I read this afternoon about the accuser going only by his first name, James — the boy who claims he was molested by a young Fr. McCarrick when the child was only 11 — there was a heartbreaking passage:

---

It was the start of an abusive relationship that lasted well into James’s adulthood, said James, whose story was first reported by the New York Times. He said it drove him to alcoholism as a teen. He is now long sober but said the abuse has haunted him since.

“What he did to me was he ruined my entire life. I couldn’t break the hold. I couldn’t live up to my ability — to stay employed, married, have children. I lost all those opportunities because of him,” James said. Breaking into tears, he said, “I try to be a really good kid every day.”

---

Imagine it: a 60-year-old man still thinking of himself in terms of trying to be “a good kid” because the abuse he began suffering at age 11 never allowed him to escape that moment in time. My heart aches for that child.

You know who it doesn’t ache for? The papal henchmen:
- Vatican representatives Greg Burke and Paloma García Ovejero did not respond to several requests for comment.
I wonder what it feels like to sell your soul. It can’t be pleasant.
- Meanwhile, the Honduran Bishops, rather than addressing the concerns of nearly 50 of their seminarians alleging serious problems with homosexual activity in the major seminary at Tegucigalpa, have chosen to attack them – even in the immediate wake of the resignation of the sexually abusive auxiliary bishop of that diocese, Juan José Pineda Fasquelle, CMF.
- According to a report from CNA, the Honduran bishops issued a statement yesterday attacking those who came forward, saying that “it is evident that there are weeds and evil, especially, in making ‘anonymous’ reports;’ in airing them, mixing in facts, suspicions and interpretations; while ignoring the monitoring given to the challenges that arise.
- And further, they asked everyone to “increase your prayers for our Major Seminary and avoid any kind of speculation which fails to respect the dignity of bishops, seminarians, the formators, and that of all of us who with limitations and failings seek to carry out the Lord’s work.”

It has the fingerprints of the villain, Cardinal Maradiaga, all over it.

And considering his pull in Rome, perhaps it should be unsurprising that even the Spanish section of Vatican News got in on this, joining the Honduran bishops in accusing “American media” of publishing “a series of news attacking the Honduran church, and the cardinal” and spreading “infamies against the Major Seminary in Honduras”.

It sells the line given by the Honduran bishops, which asserts, “With complete certainty and truth, we affirm there does not exist, nor has there existed, nor ought there exist in the seminary an atmosphere as presented by the aforementioned National Catholic Register report, in which the impression is given that [the seminary] institutionally promotes and sustains practices contrary to morality and the norms of the Church, viewed with complacency by the bishops”.

Clericalism. Clericalism again and again. Not the good kind of clericalism, that constitutes a reverence for the sacramental priesthood and its sacred functions, but the kind that makes moral monsters feel superior and untouchable because they have been ordained. The kind of clericalism that buries abuse and misconduct.

Meanwhile, the Farrells and Wuerls and Tobins of the Church continue to deny everything they almost certainly knew about McCarrick. In an interview with the Catholic Standard — the archdiocesan paper for Washington, DC — Wuerl also says:

---

There is understandable anger, both on a personal level due to the charges, but also more broadly at the Church. Our faithful have lived through such scandals before, and they are demanding accountability. I believe the actions taken by Pope Francis clearly reflect an understanding that we must move swiftly to address claims of any form of abuse or serious breach of trust by ministers of the Church, no matter who they may be or what position they may hold. Acknowledging such grave breaches of trust and seeking forgiveness open the doors for healing.

---

Understandable anger? No, Your Eminence. You don’t understand the anger. You don’t know what’s going through the mind of every Catholic mother and father who have to consider leaving their child alone with a priest, not knowing if he’s part of the “network.” Altar boy practice? Summer camps? The confessional? Are they ever safe?

And what about the priests who have nothing to do with this?
- How angry do you think they have a right to be for being associated with this and under suspicion because the bishops either refused to rein in the perversity in their dioceses or were actively involved in it?
- How many of them have spent their priesthoods dodging unwanted advances from fellow priests and wary glances from parishioners at the same time? How many have faced retributive action from active homosexuals higher up the ecclesiastical food chain because they won’t play along?
- Maybe they’re past anger. Maybe they’re just despondent.
- Maybe a number of them have even sought solace in other things that do not build up their priesthood or the Body of Christ because they are completely isolated and powerless and ready to give up hope.

And let's not pretend the “actions taken by Pope Francis clearly reflect” anything except that he continues to be willing to protect his own. We’ve covered the cronyism here before. We’ve been doing it for years. I won’t repeat it now.

The doors aren’t going to open for healing, Your Eminence, until the entire Church has been gutted and the infestation cleansed with fire.

And this is all before the interim grand jury report drops next month from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court – a report that will reveal information regarding findings about sex abuse in six out of eight Catholic dioceses in the state.

A report that is supposed to identify THREE HUNDRED “predator priests” – although some are fighting to have their names redacted. The Pennsylvania Attorney General is asking Pope Francis to help the truth come to light.

Does anyone really think he will? Do we think the “healing” can start while the wounds are still being inflicted? This has only just begun.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather see churches torn down stone by stone and be forced to worship in someone’s basement than to allow a single one of these predators another moment of cover.

The storm is almost here, and its ferocity will be a marvel to behold. [I wish I could be as 'sanguine'!]

Tonight I do not have the time to 'organize' and put some order in this hodgepodge of allegations regarding Jorge Bergoglio's cossetting of an Argentine bishop after a disgruntled partner came out with a video he shot of the bishop in flagrante, but check it out- it has visual documentation that is contemporaneous to the narrative episodes.
http://4christum.blogspot.com/2018/07/bergoglio-protected-in-uca-homosexual.html
How coincidental that the name of Bergoglio's bishop protege in Argentina was Maccarone (he died in 2015), which is eerily close to 'McCarrick', though the Argentines parodied the name another way, calling him Abp Marricone ('maricon' is the Spanish word for a male homosexual)!

The blogsite called CATHOLIC MONITOR had this commentary:

Pope Francis's own McCarrick
was Abp Maccarone from 2005
CATHOLIC MONITOR
July 29, 2018

It appears that if Cardinal McCarrick had been under then Cardinal Bergoglio in Argentina in 2005 when his sex scandal was finally fully publicly exposed, he might have been given a letter of "gratitude" for his work for the poor.

The Catholic Argentinian website the Wanderer on October 23, 2014 posted "Unmasking Bergoglio":

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"Bergoglio always had the "gay agenda" among his plans... It is a question of asking the Buenosairean clergy about the constant protection that he lavished on many homosexual priests...

Cardinal Bergoglio as Primate... of the Argentine Episcopal Conference... "[had a] "star"... of the Argentine Episcopate. The great theologian... of the poor [Archbishop Juan Carlos Maccarone].

Until... in March 2005 a video appeared in which the archbishop appeared having sexual games with a young man... Pope Benedict XVI... immediately removed [him from his]... position [as bishop]."

The reaction of Bergoglio
By a letter that Maccarone himself directed in [to] his bother bishops, it can be easily deduced that the entire Argentine episcopal gang knew of his weakness... And, in spite of that, they promoted him to the episcopal office.

Bergoglio... issued a statement in which he expressed his 'gratitude' to the former bishop [Maccarone]."

"... The spokesman of the Buenos Aires Archdiocese went on to say that... the [sex] video corresponded to "the private life of Bishop Maccarone."

Jimmy Burns in his book "Francis, Pope of Good Promise" after referencing that "Maccarone resigned" because of the "videotape showing the bishop having 'intimate relations'" wrote:

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"Bergoglio's own spokesman, rather than focus on Maccarone's political links with Kirchner, jumped to the bishop's defense claiming he had been set up."

"... Fortunato Millimaci, a Buenos Aires sociologist [said]... 'This means that the idea of the Catholic Church as a moral reference of a Catholic nation is very strongly in doubt... It shows that a double standard exists within the Church [of Bergoglio] itself.'" (Pages 231-232)

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[Unfortunately, report above has been selectively edited, and there could be a different picture if we knew what the omissions said!]

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church.

Is the Vatican going to comment at all?

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 01/08/2018 06:00]

A face and a figure that seem to grow more hateful day by day

How the New York Times reported Bergoglio's 'change' to the Catechism is the worldwide perception, at the very least, of what he has done!

Lord help us all! - but it was only a matter of time before Bergoglio was bound to do this! By what right does he think he is able to CHANGE THE CATECHISM
of the Church at a snap of the finger? But before my new rage and outrage wax on ad infinitum, I reminded myself that this is a man who has felt free all
these past five years to edit what Jesus himself said - either by deliberate omission of key words and passages, or by willfully deviant personal
exegesis of what the Gospels recorded Jesus to have said and what generations of wise Catholic men have interpreted Jesus's words to mean.
So, what is it to him to 'change' the Catechism as he wishes, even knowing that the Catechism represents 2000 years of Church Magisterium
based on Scriptures - both Old and New Testaments - together with the accumulation of Tradition, the Magisterium of the popes, and the
exegeses of Doctors of the Church and her saints through two millennia?

Fr Z had it right in his initial commentary on this new Bergoglian move to impose his own personal opinion on the body of the Church's teaching - at least up to
now, things are in the Catechism because they are true, and not the other way around (that things must be true because they are in the
Catechism, which is Bergoglio's end run in seeking to institutionalize his personal opinion as the teaching of the Church.

Pope Francis changes Catechism
to say death penalty ‘inadmissible’

August 2, 2018

Pope Francis has changed the Catechism to say the death penalty is “inadmissible”, sparking a debate over the meaning of the word in the context of Church teaching.

The Vatican announced the change to Canon 2267 on Thursday. The text now reads:

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Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good.

Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state. Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.

Consequently, the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”, and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.

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It is unclear whether “inadmissible” means “always immoral” or only “to be opposed in today’s political context”.

A dogmatic theologian, who asked not to be named, told the Catholic Herald that the Church’s traditional teaching – which states that the death penalty can be legitimate in some cases – “is irreformable dogma. To deny this or assert the contrary is formally heretical. Catholics remain obliged to believe and accept this doctrine with firm faith regardless of any changes to the Catechism.”

The theologian said that, while the Pope’s term “inadmissible” was ambiguous [the Bergoglians obviously spent months trying to find the right term that would be ambiguous enough not to be cited as evidence of material heresy!] – and thus not necessarily in contradiction with Church teaching – it would be widely interpreted as meaning “intrinsically immoral”, which would contradict Catholic doctrine.

The change to the Catechism, the theologian said, was part of the “third level” of magisterial teaching, being “non-definitive” (not declared as divinely revealed or connected with divine revelation), and so did not necessarily command assent.

“As in any case of conflicting obligations, the lesser obligation yields to the stricter. Just as children are commanded to obey their parents unless and except when their parents command anything contrary to the law of God, so Catholics are required to submit to the third level of magisterial teaching unless and except when it comes into conflict with the first two levels of magisterial teaching.

“Just as children are required to obey the law of God even when it means disobedience to their parents, so Catholics are required to believe and hold the divinely revealed dogmas of the faith and definitive Catholic teaching even if it means dissenting from the authentic magisterium of the pope or bishops.”

Today’s announcement was accompanied by a letter from Cardinal Luis Ladaria, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to all bishops around the world.

It said the revision is “in continuity with the preceding Magisterium while bringing forth a coherent development of Catholic doctrine,” citing the Pontifical Biblical Commission which in 2008 spoke of a “refinement” in the moral positions of the Church. [So Cardinal Ladaria has just paid his first tithe to Bergoglio in payment for his red hat!]

“The new text, following the footsteps of the teaching of John Paul II in Evangelium vitæ, affirms that ending the life of a criminal as punishment for a crime is inadmissible because it attacks the dignity of the person, a dignity that is not lost even after having committed the most serious crimes,” the letter adds.

“This conclusion is reached taking into account the new understanding of penal sanctions applied by the modern State, which should be oriented above all to the rehabilitation and social reintegration of the criminal. Finally, given that modern society possesses more efficient detention systems, the death penalty becomes unnecessary as protection for the life of innocent people.”

And now, Father Z...

QUAERITUR: If something is in the Catechism,
do I have to give in, believe it even though
it is different from what the Catechism taught before?

August 2, 2018

I am getting questions from lots people about Pope Francis’s move to change the Church’s doctrine concerning capital punishment.

QUAERITUR:
If this is in the Catechism, do I have to give in and believe it even though this is different from what the Catechism taught before?

QUAERITUR:
What is required of Catholics regarding the change to the teachings on capital punishment? I don’t agree with the change, and what’s worse, I don’t believe what the Holy Father has written is Church teaching. These changes disturb my peace and cause me to question if I can receive communion.

At the very least Francis seems to have cut the legs out from under the authority of the Catechism, if not the Catholic Faith, by introducing something into that Catechism which seems to contradict the Church’s perennial teaching.

What is the authority of the Catechism? I often tell people that, when they hear something confusing, go to the CCC. That is a bit more difficult now, but I stand on it. Why?

Teachings found in the Catechism are not true, reliable and sure because they are in the Catechism.

Teachings are true because they’re true.

Teachings have authority in themselves, because they are rooted in natural law, revelation, the Church’s entire body of teaching, the Rule of Faith, going back to Apostolic Times.

The Catechism is a sure reference and authoritative because it has sure teachings in it. Teachings don’t become sure because they are included.

In his Introduction to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Joseph Ratzinger wrote:

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The individual doctrines which the Catechism presents receive no other weight than that which they already possess. The weight of the Catechism itself lies in the whole. Since it transmits what the Church teaches, whoever rejects it as a whole separates himself beyond question from the faith and teaching of the Church.

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In the same section, Ratzinger said that the CCC is not a “super-dogma”, which can repress theologians in their free explorations.

Let’s stress: “as a whole”. It is possible that some point in the Catechism will have greater authority on the mind and conscience of a Catholic than another. For example, what the Catechism contains concerning the Holy Trinity is far more binding on the minds and hearts of Catholics than what it says about religious liberty or the death penalty or other matters of contingent moral decision making.

Even within matters that concern moral decision making, some issues have more weight than others. For example, the right to life of the innocent is found within the Church’s teaching on abortion and euthanasia, which is unquestionable.

However, capital punishment concerns NOT the taking of the life of an innocent person, but rather a guilty person who has in some way demonstrated a lack of respect for the right to life of others. This point about innocence or guilt has always been at the heart of debates about the legitimacy of capital punishment.

So, if you say I reject the content of the CCC you reject the Catholic Faith in its entirely: it is comprehensive.
- If you say that you reject a doctrine in the CCC which is at the very core of the Catholic Faith, such as the Trinity or the Incarnation or the Resurrection, you reject the Catholic Faith: you cannot believe as a Catholic does if you reject the Trinity.
- If you reject some highly controverted teaching that involves moral contingencies, such as the just war teaching of the Church or such as capital punishment, you do not reject the whole of the Catholic Faith, for the Faith doesn’t depend on those murky issues.

Let’s pretend for a moment – and it doesn’t take much – that baseball’s designated hitter rule is a matter for the Church’s Magisterium. If I, Pope Clement XIV The Second, were to drop into the Catechism a paragraph stating that the designated hitter is wrong and inadmissible, that opinions presence in the Catechism wouldn’t make that statement true and necessary for belief.

Things in the Catechism don’t become true when they are put into the book. They are put into the book because they are true. The fact is, you can argue about the designated hitter forever.

So what happens if something blatantly false is put into the Catechism, such as, “abortion is not intrinsically evil”. That would be a serious violation of the purpose of the Catechism and it would reveal the insertor as a heretic.

But what about the insertion of something ambiguous? For example, stick into the CCC that, because of the human dignity of the person, the capital punishment is “inadmissible”. I suppose we can argue about what “inadmissible” means. It doesn’t manifestly state that capital punishment is intrinsically evil, as abortion and euthanasia is intrinsically evil.

The Church in the CCC 2271 teaches what she has always taught from the earliest times: abortion is a grave moral evil. That teaching is in the CCC because the Church has always taught that.

The Church in the CCC 2277 teaches that direct euthanasia is, in English, “morally unacceptable”. Not too different from “inadmissible”, right. But it goes on to call it “murder gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person… a murderous act”.

What Pope Francis wrote about capital punishment doesn’t call it intrinsically evil or a murderous act.

But he does say that it is “inadmissible”… “not allowable”.

Is that a hedge? It is hard to take it as a hedge.

There is going to be a lot of ink spilled about this.

Finally, it seems to me that Pope Francis has emphasized the Church outward, pastoral policy which she desires to argue before the state: don’t put people to death.

Having thought about it, I am not entirely convinced that what Pope Francis didn’t attempt to change the Church’s teaching about capital punishment. At the very least, he made it far murkier than before.

It seems to me that someone could place the new paragraph side by side with the rest of the body of the Church’s teachings on capital punishment and then make a choice to stick with the traditional teaching.

It WAS, in fact, in the Catechism. And it was there for a reason.

Meanwhile, we seem to be pushing outrage about McCarrick out of the news cycle. [Aha! That too!]


Steve Skojec's outrage is quite graphic...


Heresy in the Catechism:
Wolf in the Vatican,
no shepherds in sight
by Steve Skojec

August 2, 2018

Just as the latest round of homosexual network and sex abuse allegations in the Church are reaching a fever pitch, Pope Francis – who has been eerily quiet of late – dropped a nuclear theological bomb into our midst.

From Crux:

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According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church [that is, as arbitrarily revised by Jorge Bergoglio, and not as it was published in 1952 and meant to be the final arbiter of all doctrinal questions in the Church], the death penalty now is no longer admissible under any circumstances.

The Vatican announced on Thursday Pope Francis approved changes to the compendium of Catholic teaching published under Pope John Paul II.

“The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church now says on the death penalty, adding that the Church “works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”

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As I have previously attempted to demonstrate, this is simply theologically wrong. There’s no way around that. But I wanted the opinion of an expert – which I am not – so I reached out this morning to a trustworthy theologian who is well versed in the finer distinctions of Magisterial authority and its limits. This was the response I received:

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The traditional teaching of the Catholic Church on the intrinsic morality of the death penalty is irreformable dogma. To deny this or assert the contrary is formally heretical. Catholics remain obliged to believe and accept this doctrine regardless of any changes to the Catechism.

What does it mean to say that this is “formally heretical”?

1. Formal versus material heresy. This is a distinction pertaining to the objective status of doctrinal propositions. A heresy is any proposition opposed to any dogma. Two things are required for a doctrine to be dogma: (1) it must be contained in divine revelation and (2) it must be proposed as such by the Church (either by solemn judgment or by the ordinary and universal magisterium).

If both of these requirements are met, then the doctrine is a formal dogma, and the denial of such a dogma is a formal heresy. If a doctrine is contained in divine revelation but has not yet been proposed as such by the Church, then it can be called a “material dogma”. Such was the case with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary in the patristic and medieval periods. Material heresy is the denial of a material dogma.

2. Formal versus material heretic. This is a distinction pertaining to the subjective culpability of persons. A heretic is a person who believes or teaches heresy. A material heretic is a person who believes or teaches something which is objectively a heresy; a formal heretic is one who continues to do so obstinately after having been duly corrected.

So in the case of the dogma of the intrinsic morality of the death penalty, the denial of this dogma is formally heretical, since it contradicts a doctrine which is contained in divine revelation and which has been proposed as such by the ordinary and universal magisterium of the Church. The person who denies this dogma is a material heretic simply in virtue of his denial; but he is not formally a heretic unless he persists in his denial after having been duly corrected.

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What is so absurd about this moment in the Church is that to simply reiterate Church teaching in the face of it being contradicted from the highest office is so dangerous for a theologian in full communion that I am compelled to protect this person’s identity.

I don’t know what to add to the above. We are way off the map at this point in rough and uncharted waters. I began arguing that the Galatians 2 moment had arrived, back when Francis had given the green light for eugenic contraception in 2016. Things have only gotten worse since.

Bishops of the world, if you are orthodox and you care at all about the faith or the souls being lost due to the relentless barrage of scandal and error coming from Rome, you have a moral duty to correct this pope.

Cardinal Burke, Cardinal Sarah, Cardinal Brandmüller, Cardinal Müller, Bishop Schneider – your names come first to mind, but there are others. Hiding out and making oblique references to what his happening and condemning errors without discussing their source is not sufficient in the eyes of the faithful.

The scandal of this pope is only compounded by the absolute lack of confrontation on the part of our bishops who will not rebuke this disaster by name, to the face, as St. Paul did to St. Peter in Galatians 2:11.

Dom Prosper Guéranger wrote that “when the shepherd becomes a wolf, the first duty of the flock is to defend itself.”

Are you really going to force us to do this alone?

Here is Skojec's well-documented argument when he first wrote against about Bergoglio's campaign to abolish capital punishment....
onepeterfive.com/pope-francis-wrong-death-penalty-heres/

The theological roots of the present crisis
An ambiguous attitude to 'human sexuality' on the part of 'mainstream' moral theology
led in time to bishops effectively turning a blind eye to sinful behavior among clerics
by Fr. D. Vincent Twomey, SVD

August 3, 2018

Bishop Edward B. Scharfenberger of Albany put his finger on the root of the present crisis caused by the McCarrick affair. It is, he said, “sin and a retreat from holiness, specifically the holiness of an integral, truly human sexuality.” He adds immediately: “In negative terms, and as clearly and directly as I can repeat our Church teaching, it is a grave sin to be ‘sexually active’ outside of a real marriage covenant.”

What a relief to hear such plain speaking from a bishop!

This clear teaching of the Church has been, at best, obfuscated for some 50 years, as indicated by the way the term “sin” has almost vanished from normal ecclesiastical discourse and holiness is rarely seen as the goal of morality.

That obfuscation, it seems to this writer, is not only at the root of the phenomenon of aberrant sexual behaviour among clergy, as others have pointed out. [1] My thesis is that the same obfuscation is also at the root of failure of religious superiors to face up to such sinful behaviour and to deal with it decisively.

It is not insignificant that the Pandora’s Box opened up by the McCarrick scandal should occur during the very year the Church is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the promulgation of Humanae Vitae.

In the midst of all the celebrations, however, little attention has been given to fact that the Church’s teaching on the central principles of Catholic sexual morality newly articulated by Pope Paul VI was almost immediately rejected by dissenting theologians within days of its promulgation.

Before the text of the papal document could have reached Washington, DC in the pre-fax-machine (and pre-email) era, Professor Charles E. Curran of Catholic University of America whipped up some 87 signatories to a letter that publicly rejected its teaching. Soon the list of signatories reached some 300, when, as Cardinal Stafford once testified, huge pressure was put on theologians and priests to sign, even though few if any could have actually read the document. Similar dissent was expressed in other countries throughout the world, though perhaps not as aggressively as in the USA or Germany.

For the first time in the history of the Church, leading theologians openly dissented from the Magisterium. And this happened even though Pope Paul VI expressly affirmed his authority as Successor of St. Peter to interpret the natural moral law as clarified by Divine Revelation in order to answer to the grave issues raised by demographic and cultural developments in the modern world (cf. HV 4). It was rejected as “non-infallible,” as though what is be accepted as authoritatively binding in conscience was limited to (rare) infallible ex cathedra pronouncements.

Three years after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, which was broadly perceived as having upturned the traditional teaching and praxis in many areas, the appeal to the Church’s teaching authority no longer carried much weight. It was effectively replaced by the newly found weight of the magisterium of the theologians — to which many bishops were also in thrall.

The result was that a number of prominent episcopal conferences —most remarkably that of West Germany (unlike that of East Germany) —came out with ambiguous statements on their reception of the encyclical. Their carefully crafted messages amounted to instructing the faithful to take note of the beautiful official papal teaching, but then judge for themselves as to whether it applied to them in their situation.

This was proposed under the rubric of “following one’s conscience,” a seriously mistaken understanding of the meaning of conscience that characterized (and still characterizes) the dominant school of moral theology.

Humanae Vitae was promulgated in the fateful year 1968, the height of the sexual revolution. Soon the influence of that revolution began to seep into theology — and so into the seminaries, which at the time were full of young men susceptible to the seductive appeal of a more “liberating” approach to sexual morality. That new approach surfaced almost immediately after the rejection of Humanae Vitae.

Thus, for example, in 1974, the Dominican theologian Donald J. Goergen published The Sexual Celibate. In it, he asserts, among other things, that “being celibate does not mean being asexual”; “chastity is not intended to lead one into a ‘no-touch’ style of life”; “when affectionate and genital feelings enter homosexual friendship, one should recognize and accept their presence. This does not mean the relationship is unhealthy.” It became “the reference book” on sexuality in the seminaries in the 1970s. One reviewer of Goergen’s book concludes that, though quite controversial when first written (in the previous year), “Goergen has seemed much more ‘mainstream’ since this book…was published.

How mainstream such ideas had become can be gleaned from the book Human Sexuality: New Directions in Catholic Thought, edited by A. Kosnik and others (1977 — incidentally, this was the year one Theodore Edgar McCarrick was appointed auxiliary bishop in New York). The 322-page 'Kosnik Report', as it came to be known, was the product of a study commissioned by the Catholic Theological Society of America.

It reflects the extensive literature on the subject that was part of the response to Vatican II’s call to moral theologians to renew their discipline. The theological views (and especially the “pastoral guidelines”) of the report became a standard approach to the teaching of moral theology and to pastoral practice.

The authors claimed that contemporary theology was moving beyond the earlier, traditional approach based on outdated notions of morality and sexuality. “The book made excuses for masturbation, cohabitation, swinging, adultery, homosexuality, and even bestiality.”[2] The criticism by the Doctrinal Commission of the American Episcopal Conference (1977) fell on deaf ears, as, indeed, did the 1979 Declaration by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the book.

Its “pastoral guidelines” were based on the dominant school of fundamental moral theology which denied absolute moral norms as proposed by such prominent names as Charles E. Curran, Richard A. McCormick, S.J., Bernard Häring, C.Ss.R., and Josef Fuchs, S.J.

Rejecting the Church’s teaching that any acts, such as homosexual acts, are intrinsically wrong, the writers of the report claim that “the objective moral evaluation of a person’s action must take into consideration the context of that person’s moral stance, the circumstances of the action, and the effects that issue from it” (p. 211). This is what became known as proportionalism, the 'Catholic' version of situation ethics.

The report’s understanding of sexuality was primarily based on “the empirical sciences” — in effect those inspired by the now-discredited Kinsey Report. The new approach to sexuality found expression in the writings of Charles E. Curran, Donald J. Goegen O.P., Philip S. Keane S.S., and others, which were developed in the wake of public dissent from the teaching of Humanae Vitae.

Once fertility is decoupled from the conjugal act, then most sexual acts within or outside marriage can be, if not actually justified, as least excused, the report claims, as long as they “are conducive to creative growth and integration of the human person” (p. 92).

Sexuality, it claimed, is the Creator’s ingenious way of calling people constantly out of themselves into relationship with others. Sexual differentiation (male or female) is consequently reduced to an accidental physical condition of no essential significance, since the sexual impulse is simply “biologically tied” to procreation (and thus will be “biased” in the direction of heterosexuality). As a result: “All else being equal, a homosexual engaging in homosexual acts in good conscience has the same rights of conscience and the same rights to the sacraments as a married couple practicing birth control in good conscience” (p.216).

There is no mention of pederasty or pedophilia in the report. The only vague allusion to such criminal behaviour would seem to be in a paragraph dismissing widespread “myths” regarding homosexuals. There the claim is made that “proportional to their numbers in the population, heterosexuals are more prone to child molestation than homosexuals” (p. 212). Whatever may be true about the general population, child molestation by clerics is some 80 percent homosexual. But this fact was generally ignored in earlier outcries over clerical sexual abuse. Why?

Space does not permit me to engage in any detail with the opinions of the Kosnik Report. Leaving aside significant factors such as psychological immaturity, innate proclivities, etc., these views of the theological establishment are mentioned here as contributing significantly to the spread of homosexual behaviour among seminarians and (later in life) clerics.

The new approach to sexual morality also gave free reign to those with aberrant proclivities, in particular if they were in positions of authority over seminarians and priests. Even more significant in the wake of McCarrick is the way this very ambiguous attitude to 'human sexuality' on the part of 'mainstream' (i.e., dissenting) moral theology led in time to bishops and religious superiors effectively turning a blind eye to the sinful behaviour among clerics which they must have known about, even if they disapproved of it. [Not to mention the offenses committed by such bishops and superiors themselves for whom McCarrick has become the pre-eminent poster gay!]

When dealing with deviant sexual behaviour, the report generally recommended counselling. (Tragically, bishops all too readily accepted such advice.) Moral guilt is minimized, if not actually ignored.

Many clerics and bishops now in office would have been trained in (or at least exposed to) this 'mainstream' moral theology. And even when their own intact moral instinct disapproved of such behaviour, those in positions of responsibility rarely had the theological means of justifying their better instinct — and so would have felt insecure as to how they should respond. (This, of course, is apart altogether from the role of more “human” factors such as cowardice and careerism on the part of bishops.) The theological uncertainty would also have played into the clerical self-protective tendency to cover-up.

In all likelihood, the uncertainty as to the sinfulness of homosexual behaviour may also be the reason why, as Ralph Martin wrote the following in his recent letter to “troubled Catholics”: “To this day, there are quite a number of ‘gay friendly’ parishes in even ‘good dioceses', where those afflicted with homosexual temptation are not encouraged to live chaste lives or offered effective correction, but instead are confirmed in their sexual activity. It seems many bishops are afraid to tackle the local ‘homosexual lobbies’ and choose to turn a blind eye.”

Like the cover-up, turning a blind eye to wrongdoing is also to sin against justice. All sexual sins are by their very nature sins against justice. But the injustice done by religious superiors to the victims of clerical sexual abuse of any kind (and to his or her family, indeed to the wider community) by failing to discipline the perpetrator or, worse still, to cover-up the crime is even graver still.

The Church in recent decades has been vocal in its commitment to social justice. But it seems to have given little attention to the virtue of justice: the acquired personal disposition to give to others what is their due. It is part of tough love. [I have long found that term 'social justice' quite icky, so sanctimonious, hypocritical, so 'bleeding heart' liberal, and ultimately, meaningless - in fact, devoid of genuine justice.]

The attempt by Pope St. John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor (1993) to overcome the malaise in fundamental moral theology (at the core of which is the denial of intrinsically evil acts) was generally ignored by 'mainstream' theologians. Most bishops probably had little idea as to what the Pope was talking about in Veritatis Splendor — an admittedly difficult and dense text.

The Pope’s Wednesday audiences on the Theology of the Body, as well as his post-synodal apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio, were part of Rome’s various attempts to correct the mistaken notion of human sexuality as manifested in the Kosnik Report. Mainstream moral theology ignored them, and indeed any of the other similar documents produced by Rome.

The CDF’s Instruction on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, for example, was sharply criticized and rejected by the same theological establishment. Their claim regarding a dual magisterium (that of the theologians and of the Pope) put authoritative papal teaching, at best, on a par with the alternative, progressive views of moral theologians, but usually considered the former as inferior to the latter (since the teaching of the Church’s Magisterium was seen as conservative and rigid) [a perfect description of Jorge Bergoglio's arrogantly cavalier attitude towards that same Magisterium which he is seeking to singlehandedly supplant! - because he represents the fatidical triumph of the false moral theology upheld by his fellow travellers], thus encouraging the faithful to choose which opinion he or she preferred. This 'choice' was then seen as acting according to one’s conscience.

In the course of the 50 years since leading theologians dissented on the teaching of Humanae Vitae, bishops came more and more to relinquish their own teaching authority. But equally fatally, they tended to turn a blind eye to the sinful behaviour of their clerics —and, it would now appear, of their fellow bishops, though this is yet to be proved.

This tragic development — which, apart from the real scandal it gave and continues to give (scandal understood in the strict sense as causing disbelief [cf. Mt 18:6]), resulted in unspeakable damage to seminarians and clerics at all levels, spiritual, psychological and even physical — can be traced back to the denial of sin, more specifically, the denial of intrinsically immoral acts.

In his statement of August 1 (the feast of St. Alphonsus Liguori, the patron of moral theologians, as it happened), Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo concluded frankly: “Our Church is suffering from a crisis of sexual morality.” That this fact has been publicly acknowledged by the president of USCCB is a real sign of hope. [But alas, the acknowledgment - decades too late - had to be forced by the fact that the evil McCarrick genie finally got out of the bottle and its stench is so overpoweringly fetid!]

But the crisis of sexual morality is rooted, as already mentioned, in an even deeper crisis, namely that of fundamental moral theology. This in turn reflects (and contributes to) the moral crisis at the root of modern, post-Enlightenment culture.

Solzhenitsyn, in his controversial commencement address at Harvard 40 years ago, identified the source of the modern crisis affecting Western civilization as the humanistic way of thinking that emerged initially with the Renaissance.

“This humanistic way of thinking which had proclaimed itself as our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs.”

The failure to admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man and the search for happiness in this world are inte-rrelated. Both are predicated on the denial of Transcendence (and so the denial of conscience as the antenna of Transcendence, that inner sense of right and wrong) and so the denial of the universal call to holiness as man’s goal in life.

Both are materialistic — reducing moral behaviour to a calculus of advantages and disadvantages to the autonomous self. Both constitute the essence of secularism. That secularism has seeped into the very fabric of the contemporary theology. The road to recovery and renewal will be long and difficult.

Opposition can be expected from the theological establishment, those who have effectively lost their authentic Catholic conviction. Writing in 1997, Matthew Lamb noted: “There is no doctoral program in North America with a rigorous ratio studiorum that offers an integral formation in the doctrinal and theoretical traditions of Catholic teaching” (that situation has, in the meantime, been radically changed with the establishment of theology faculties such as those at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ave Maria University, and similar colleges).

The process of renewal must give priority to the state of moral theology. Striving after holiness must become the goal of all moral theology. Recent decades have seen major advances in the development of different schools of moral theology which, rooted in Revelation, are in harmony with Church teaching and are inspired by the recovery of virtue as preferred mode of moral reflection. That approach has been sanctioned by its use in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. And new Catholic universities have been founded to foster such Catholic theology in the full sense of the term. These developments are signs of hope not only for North America. Renewal must evidently be accompanied by prayer and penance (including public penance) by clerics.

It would greatly help to kick-start a more widespread process of theological renewal were Pope Francis to authorize an affirmative answer to the second of the Dubia:

---

After the publication of the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (cf. n. 304), does one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St. John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor n. 79, based on Sacred Scripture and on the Tradition of the Church, on the existence of absolute moral norms that prohibit intrinsically evil acts and that are binding without exceptions?

---

NOTES:
[1] In the wake of the 2002 scandals, Father Matthew Lamb wrote: “No adequate diagnosis of the contributory causes of the Catholic-priest-abuse scandals can overlook the role of dissent among theologians. I am afraid that we theologians have failed to acknowledge our own failures and the lies, to use St. Augustine’s strong language, which we have been communicating in our teaching and writings,” (Theological Malpractice: The Roots of Scandal, dated October 2, 2002). See also George Weigel, The Courage to be Catholic (New York, 2002).

[2] Matthew Lamb, Theological Malpractice, op. cit.

Sandro Magister goes into appropriate detail about one of Bergoglio's pet cardinals who, along with Blase Cupich of Chicago and Joseph Tobin of Newark, was recommended to be named cardinal by Bergoglio principally by 'Uncle Ted' McCarrick.Soemthign similar should be done for Cupich and Tobin.

McCarrick and his proteges:
The miraculous career of Cardinal Farrell

August 2, 2018

As has been known for days, Pope Francis announced in a terse statement that Theodore McCarrick, 88, archbishop emeritus of Washington, is no longer a cardinal, is under house arrest, must lead a life of prayer and penance, and is suspended a divinis. And all this while awaiting the results of the “regular canonical trial.” [Which has yet to be formally announced and obviously, has yet to begin.]

One must go back to 1927 to find a previous case of removal from the college of cardinals. That time the one to be stripped of the scarlet was the Jesuit Louis Billot, on ccount of his allegiance to the political movement Action Française,” condemned the year before by the Holy See.

But for McCarrick the reasons are of a completely different nature and incomparably more serious for moral reasons. They concern his prolonged and disordered sexual activity with adults, young people, and even minors, with priests and seminarians, practiced for decades without having the slightest effect - in spite of the fact that it was known to a great number of persons at various levels of the Church - on his triumphant ecclesiastical career.

Much has already been written about the McCarrick case in recent days. But not much yet on the extent to which it may involve not only the protagonist of the affair, but also the churchmen most closely connected to him, they too the beneficiaries, thanks to him, of careers verging on the miraculous.

One of these in particular prompts serious questions. It is Kevin J. Farrell, 71, made a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2016 and the prefect of the new dicastery for laity, family and life.

Born in Ireland, Farrell entered the Legionaries of Christ in the mid-70s, when that organization was still small and its malevolent founder Marcial Maciel was shrouded in an aura of universal respectability.

After leaving the Legionaries about fifteen years later, Farrell maintained complete silence over Maciel’s sexual misconduct - dramatically come to light - and has always insisted that he never had any noteworthy contact with him. But it emerges from credible testimonies that he occupied positions in the Legion and enjoyed a more than sporadic proximity to Maciel, which makes it implausible that he was completely unaware of the depraved behavior of his superior.

After leaving the Legion, Farrell was incardinated as a priest of the archdiocese of Washington. And at the end of 2001 he became auxiliary bishop there, when McCarrick had been archbishop for a year.

McCarrick’s promotion as archbishop of the capital of the United States - at the summit of an ascent that had seen him become auxiliary of New York, then bishop of Metuchen, and then archbishop of Newark - had already prompted serious objections back then, motivated precisely by what had already leaked out about his insatiable sexual practices. The objections made it all the way to Rome. But the appointment moved forward all the same, and the following year McCarrick was also made a cardinal.

But the appointment of the Irishman Farrell as his auxiliary caused astonishment too. His previous militancy among the Legionaries of Christ was certainly not in his favor, in view of what was starting to leak out about the double life of its founder, Maciel, and about the complicity or the culpable silence of many around him.

But by this time McCarrick was a force to be reckoned with, in the upper echelon of the American hierarchy and not only there. He wanted Farrell there with him and he got him, ordaining him bishop personally. And he also wanted him to live in the same apartment with him in Washington, not in the bishop’s residence but on the fourth floor of a former orphanage, conveniently renovated. Once again, it appears implausible that Farrell knew nothing about the ongoing casual sexual adventures of his patron.

In 2006, McCarrick left the archdiocese of Washington for reasons of age, while continuing to exert significant influence in the upper hierarchy of the Church. And the following year Farrell changed sees, promoted as bishop of Dallas, a diocese of the first rank, with the clear support of his mentor.

In the final phase of the pontificate of John Paul II and during the pontificate of Benedict XVI, Farrell never stood out among the American cardinals and bishops of progressive stamp. McCarrick did. For example, he was among the critics of the directive given by Joseph Ratzinger to the bishops of the United States to withhold communion from Catholic politicians in favor of the legalization of abortion. And he was an open supporter of one of these “pro-choice” politicians, John Kerry, in the presidential election campaign of 2004.

But after Benedict XVI was replaced by Pope Francis, Farrell also rapidly aligned himself with the new course. In the United States, he immediately teamed up with the new progressive leaders - they too with McCarrick as their patron - Blaise Cupich and Joseph Tobin, promoted by Jorge Mario Bergoglio to Chicago and Newark respectively, both of them also promptly made cardinals.
- He enthusiastically hailed “Amoris Laetitia” in its interpretation in favor of communion for the divorced and remarried.
- Above all, having become in the meantime the cardinal prefect of the new Vatican dicastery for laity, family and life, he signed the preface to and recommendation of one of the books most representative of the new Bergoglian climate:
> James Martin S.J., "Building a Bridge. How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity", HarperCollins US, 2018.

The author, one of the best-known Jesuits in the United States and a leading writer for the magazine America, has intended his book to open the way to a substantial revision - via the 'pastoral' path - of the doctrine of the Catholic Church on homosexuality.

But Cardinal Farrell’s preface to the book is not the only authoritative form of support he has given to this coveted paradigm shift. Farrell, because of the role he now occupies in the curia, is also the official director of the upcoming world meeting of families in Dublin, at the end of August, where Martin will be among the speakers and guests, together with homosexual couples from all over the world.

Not to mention Pope Francis’s personal move in this same direction, with the appointment of Martin as an adviser for the new Vatican dicastery for communication, a clear sign of appreciation for this Jesuit’s activity.

Of course, it is easy to charge John Paul II and the Vatican officials of the time with having lacked prudence in promoting to the highest levels a churchman with a notoriously unexemplary life like McCarrick, ignoring all the alarm signals that came to them.

But what seems even more rash is the decision of Pope Francis to call to Rome as head of the dicastery for the family a character like Farrell, who had one after another as his villainous mentors the serial predators Maciel and McCarrick, and moreover presents himself today as a proponent of the legitimization of homosexual amours.

And this is by no means a matter of an isolated case. On the council of cardinals called by Francis to assist him in the “governance of the universal Church,” no fewer than three have been hamstrung on account of sexual abuse issues:
- the Australian George Pell, on trial in his country;
- the Chilean Francisco Javier Errázuriz Ossa, accused of having defended to the extreme, against all evidence, the serial abuser priest Antonio Karadima and his disciple bishop Juan Barros Madrid, on whose innocence even Pope Francis himself expended all of his authority until the beginning of this year, only to acknowledge his guilt afterward and remove him;
- the Honduran Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, still the coordinator of the C9 but whose auxiliary bishop and protege Juan José Pineda was removed last July 20 on account of continuous sexual abuse verified by an apostolic visitation.

But to these must be added not a few churchmen of nonchalant homosexual behavior who populate Bergoglio’s retinue, whom he has wanted close to him on an individual basis: in primis, Monsignor Battista Ricca who manages Casa Santa Marta and acts as the official go-between for the pope and the Institute for Works of Religion, the gossip-ridden IOR. [Go-between - or better said, 'eyes and ears within IOR' - is Ricca's actual job description but he is formally the IOR's prelate or 'spiritual counselor'. It's one thing for Bergoglio to give someone with Ricca's infamous past as an openly homosexual official in the Vatican diplomatic corps a 'second chance' as it were (on the assumption he has repented of his past misdeeds and genuinely amended his life)- but did he have to name him to IOR where, obviously, every papal appointee ought to be, like Caesar's wife, above suspicion of anything remotely immoral?]

Having distinguished himself for scandalous conduct when he was a nunciature official in Algiers, in Bern, and even more so in Asuncion (Paraguay), and having been called back to Rome for this reason, Ricca saw his personal dossier in the curia rewritten ex novo with his scandal-ridden record expunged, rebuilt his career from the ground up and entered into the good graces of the current pope, who referred to none other than him, at the beginning of his pontificate, with that famous phrase: “Who am I to judge?” which has become a universal byword.

You shall know them by the company they keep. Goethe wrote, “Tell me with whom you associate, and I will tell you who you are”, which is almost a verbatim translation of the Spanish saying "Dime con quien andas y lo dire quien eres", which I am sure Jorge Bergoglio must have heard countless times since he was a child. Colin Powell's version of the adage says: “A mirror reflects a man’s face, but what he is really like is shown by the kind of friends (associates) he chooses.” Which is what the colloquial saying "Birds of a feather flock together" means. So what does Begorglio's choice of associates tell us about him if we did not already know it about his own most offensive personal traits that he habitually displays to the world? What about those he has so far managed to hide from the world?

Meanwhile, not surprisingly, there has been no reaction at all from the Bergoglio Vatican on the revelations that have freshly resurfaced about his own McCarrickone (is it providential that the name of Bergoglio's protege bishop in Argentina was indeed Maccarone?]

How the New York Times reported Bergoglio's 'change' to the Catechism is the worldwide perception, at the very least, of what he has done!

Deathgate

4 August 2018

I can't see much point in making substantive comments on the "changes made to the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) on the death penalty" until the new text is published. All I can so far find on the Internet are some vernacular versions.

[Fr Z has just posted the surprisingly prompt Latin translation of the document from the Vatican - henceforth to be considered the official text if it gets published as is in the Acta Apostolis Sediae, and a side by side translation of it in 1) the official Vatican Italian version; 2) the official Vatican English version; and 3) a literal word-for-word translation from Latin to English. There can be no question of what is meant. Fr Z also gives the Vatican translation of the Latin 'non posse admitti' - 'inadmissible' in English, Italian: inammissibile, French: une mesure inhumaine, German: unzulässig; Spanish: inadmisible; Portuguese: inadmissível and Polish: niedopuszczalna.]

This, in itself, I object to. The world has been given the impression that the Catholic Church has changed its teaching when nobody has the wherewithal to judge whether or not this is true. I can only call this sort of behaviour in matters of faith and morals disgracefully frivolous. Can it be that PF wants to make an immediate impression on world opinion without giving theological professionals the prior opportunity to weaken by their analyses that impact?

More importantly: the English version says that the death penalty is "inadmissible". I have not the faintest idea what this curious term means theologically or canonically. If the actual text, when published, turns out to contain the phrase intrinsece malum (intrinsic evil) then, frankly, we do have quite a problem on our hands. But Cardinal Ladaria is no fool. I shall be very surprised if those words are used. I'd put money on this! [He's right - Bergoglio and Ladaria have properly hedged their 'capital stake' by omitting those words to describe the death penalty. As I remarked earlier, the Vatican obviously spent months trying to come up with the right ambiguous word since Bergoglio first started obsessively yapping about the need to abolish the death penalty, one of the subjects he touched upon in his address to the US Congress in September 2015.]

Personally, like PF, I view the death penalty with considerable personal abhorrence ... anywhere, for any reason, at any time. I applaud attempts to discourage its use. I am less certain that the pages of a theological compendium such as the CCC are the right place to wage such a (very worthy) political campaign.

Furthermore, this move appears to take no account of 'advances' in moral theology since and consequent upon Amoris laetitia. That document appeared to leave it to local hierarchies to make decisions for their own countries. But in the case of Deathgate, it appears that PF's wishes are of peremptory universal application. Perhaps the genial Graf von Schoenborn, or the sinister and brooding Fr Rosica, could explain to us, carefully and precisely, what the difference is.

At the same time, it would be good to have an answer to the following: Adultery, while (yes?) generally wrong, may apparently, according to Amoris Laetitia, be Fair Enough in some circumstances. But PF's initiative concerning the death penalty apparently admits no exceptions. Why? And if it does tacitly admit exceptions, are we not left in the same position as we were in with the earlier formula S John Paul had put into the CCC?

Then there is the problem of the Marx which did not bark during the night. Two or three years ago, with regard to Communion for divorcees, Cardinal Marx asserted the autonomy of the 'German Church' with the fearless and ringing words "We are not subsidiaries of Rome". I have not yet seen a similarly brave assertion that, also in this matter of the death penalty, Germany is Not a Subsidiary of Rome.

May I also be personal?

The CCC was made the doctrinal standard of the Ordinariates. I know I will be reminded that any Catholic, in an Ordinariate or anywhere else, is bound to what the Magisterium will authentically teach as well as to what it has taught and is teaching. I agree, absolutely.

But, nevertheless, such an arbitrary change in a documentary henotikon, in which X has metamorphosed into not-X in a very few years, and without (as far as we know) a detailed collegial consultation with the whole College of Bishops (such as Pius XII conducted before defining the Assumption), leaves a very nasty taste in my mouth.

It is because I have been driven to the unhappy conclusion that the present pontificate is manipulative and dishonest, that I wonder if this change in the CCC may be preparing the way for some of Senor Bergoglio's other private opinions and personal convictions to be given spurious Magisterial colouring. [That is exactly what it seems to be - the head of the double-humped Bergoglian camel insinuating itself into the official tent of all Catholic doctrine and preparing to occupy it completely sooner or later.]

Such apprehensions are, regrettably, difficult not to entertain at a time when the ultrapapalist perversion of the Petrine Ministry which Cardinal Ratzinger once so vigorously refuted, and which was condemned in advance by the lapidary phraseology in Pastor aeternus of Vatican I (and see Denziger paras 3114-3117), appears to be the currently dominant ideology within the Domus Sanctae Marthae.

Herewith, Fr Z's comparison of the versions of the rescript:





René Girard’s prophecy:
Pope Francis and the death penalty
by Jason Jones

August 2, 2018

The French literary critic and anthropologist René Girard, commenting on the denial of Peter, made a stunningly prophetic statement before his death in 2015:

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When you are in a crowd, you become literally possessed by the crowd. The Gospels, one of the things they do, from an anthropological viewpoint, is to show you that the crowd’s spirit is all-powerful, [and]that only Jesus can conquer it. It’s all-powerful, after Jesus. That it’s a real power on earth, that it can conquer even Peter — which is pretty disturbing if you regard it as a prophecy, too, of what will happen at the last time, which it may well be. You know, because right now, that’s what we are seeing.

---

Joining the crowd. Surrendering to the spirit of the age by refusing to identify with Christ — refusing to identify with the actual victim. And by Peter, no less.

Girard’s 'prophecy' is revealing in the shade of the recent tactical movements of Pope Francis with respect to the Catechism and the death penalty — just the latest in a long series of such actions.

To stand in solidarity with the vulnerable is to become vulnerable. But to feign concern for the vulnerable in keeping with the zeitgeist for the sake of gaining spiritual, political, or economic power is victimism. And sadly, too often, that is exactly what Pope Francis has done.

Truly standing with the vulnerable costs. That is the essence of what it means to be vulnerable — to suffer, to pay a cost at the hands of the unjust and the violent. Thus, to stand with the vulnerable is to suffer a cost ourselves, whether in time, money, or even our blood.

Victimism operates by the inverse equation. Rather than standing with, victimism stands on the vulnerable, out of ostensible concern for them, for the sake of one’s own power. What merely appears to cost is used for the sake of gain.

How has Pope Francis done this? By tinkering with words. The Church has been loud and clear on its call for the abolition of the death penalty in light of modern circumstances. The Church has already, de facto, been advocating for a moratorium on the death penalty in many places. Pope Francis’s change changes very little.

And yet it garners the headlines of the world. It received the applause and the praise of many of the urbane and elite. The spirit of the age says, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

And that’s why this a shameless distraction.

What is going on right at this moment?
- The American Church has been rocked with yet another sexual abuse scandal.
- Seminarians are coming forward to complain that their campuses have become as dangerous as a Harvey Weinstein production.
- The German Church is in a de facto state of schism with its recent opening of the Eucharistic table to Protestants.
- Genocide is being perpetrated against Nigerian Christians.
- Christians continue to be slaughtered and persecuted in the Middle East.
- Abortion continues apace, claiming millions of lives every single year.

Has Pope Francis ferociously fought the spirit of the age on these issues? Has he made a headline-grabbing statement on any of these things — enough to dominate an entire news cycle, like his decision on the death penalty is doing?

Right this moment, I am in Washington, DC for a meeting of fellow lay Catholics to help hundreds of Christian families in a certain African country get to safety in another country. We are helping the real victims in our world.

In the meantime, the pope is distracting the world with fresh meat for the spirit of the age. He tinkers with words for applause, while moral decay has infested many parts of the Church, and millions are either dying, or under threat.

I’m reminded of a gut-wrenching question I was asked by a Chaldean Catholic priest while I was in Iraq working on a documentary. Saint Peter’s Basilica was awash with images of endangers species being projected onto its walls, and the priest asked me, “Why is the pope projecting pictures of wild animals onto St. Peter’s Basilica when our children are being murdered by ISIS?”

It’s a good question. Particularly on days like today.

An Irish lay Catholic leader I know personally begged the pope for a tweet addressing the recent abortion referendum in Ireland. The pope said nothing about it, and the forces of death won. A month later, a similar vote was taken in Pope Francis’s own home country, Argentina. Again he said nothing, and Argentina’s lower house of Congress passed a bill that could legalize abortion, pending a Senate vote later this year.

In each of these cases, standing up for the real victims in this world involves costs. Whether it be the scorn of the self-proclaimed elites in the various metropoles of the West, or geopolitical consequences for standing up for persecuted Christians against Islamic oppression, standing beside real victims costs.

Rene Girard was right to warn us: The spirit of the crowd is “almost all-powerful”, and it can conquer even Peter — or his successor.

All the while, the crucified Christ, whose likeness we see in the most vulnerable members of the human family, remains betrayed and abandoned.


Pope’s change to Catechism:
Not just a prudential judgment,
but a rejection of dogma
by Peter Kwasniewski

August 3, 2018

In the avalanche of reactions to Pope Francis’s audacious move to modify the Catechism so that it says the opposite of what the Church and every published catechism had ever taught before, there is one line of argument that has surfaced a great deal: “Pope Francis is not making a doctrinal statement about the illegitimacy always and everywhere of the death penalty but merely a prudential judgment about the inopportuneness of its use at this time in history.”

In a recent article, Dr Alan Fimister correctly points out that even if this reading were plausible, the Pope has overstepped his jurisdiction by offering an opinion about a contingent matter of political judgment, which is the proper realm of the laity and not of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, as per the teaching of the Magisterium (e.g., Leo XIII in Immortale Dei).

As much as I might wish that this interpretation of the papal “correction” of the Catechism of the Catholic Church were true, I cannot concur with it, because it fails to do justice to the actual presentation of the new teaching in the revised text of 2267. Let us take each paragraph:

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Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good.

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The implication here is that it used to be thought — indeed, by everyone in the Catholic tradition — that capital punishment could be employed by a legitimate authority. But such a thing can be thought no more. And why?

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Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state. Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.

---

Today, in modern times — so the argument goes — we have made a new discovery, foreign to the earlier philosophical and theological tradition, that human persons have a dignity that cannot be lost, no matter what crime they may commit.

This is certainly a surprising claim to make, as, on the one hand, the truth of the metaphysical dignity that consists in being made to the image and likeness of God is present from the first page of the Bible and has been universally upheld by all Catholic philosophers and theologians of all centuries, and, on the other hand, the moral dignity that consists in living in accordance with that image and likeness can obviously be lost by serious crime.

One can never forfeit the right to be treated as a person, but one can forfeit the right to be included as a member of civil society.

It is the same with supernatural dignity: a baptized Christian always retains the dignity of being a child of God, for this is rooted in the sacramental character indelibly marked on the essence of the soul; but a Christian who commits mortal sin forfeits heaven and, if he dies in that state, will suffer eternally.

The death penalty is a natural analogue to the eternal punishment awarded by the divine Judge.

This second paragraph, although it mentions the contingent issue of reliable systems of detention, is advancing the view that we are now aware of an intrinsic and inalienable dignity of the human person that must be respected to the point of never utilizing the death penalty. In other words, the Catholic tradition prior to Francis failed to recognize this dignity and contradicted it in practice by using (or defending the use of) capital punishment. This claim is, to use the classic language of theological censures, at very least temerarious, and more likely proximate to heresy.

Then comes the conclusion Francis has been driving towards:

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Consequently, the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.

---

All doubt of the nature of this novel teaching is removed by this final paragraph. The reason “the Church” now declares the death penalty “inadmissible” — let us give this word its full force: unable to be admitted, incapable of entry (and this is said without qualification of time or place) — is that “it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” It is, in and of itself, contrary to human dignity and the human good.

The death penalty is wrong, not because we have better detention systems, and not because modern governments are already too cavalier in their treatment of human life (which is unfortunately true). It is wrong because the “the light of the Gospel” shows us that it goes against something always and everywhere true, namely, the inviolable dignity of the person.
- If this is not a philosophical and theological assertion, I do not know what is.
- If this is not intended to be a magisterial statement about what is intrinsically right and wrong, I do not know what is.

In short, the replacement text for 2267 leaves no room for maintaining that the Pope is recommending a shift in policy or a temporary adjustment. He is indeed promoting a shift in policy —nothing short of “worldwide abolition.” But he is doing so because he believes that the thing in itself is and cannot but be wrong.

This is precisely where he himself is wrong and can be known to be wrong, for two reasons.

First, there is no need to beat around the bush: this new teaching is simply contrary to what the Church has always officially taught. One example among a thousand, taken from the Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent, will suffice to illustrate the traditional doctrine:

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The power of life and death is permitted to certain civil magistrates because theirs is the responsibility under law to punish the guilty and protect the innocent. Far from being guilty of breaking this commandment [Thou shalt not kill], such an execution of justice is precisely an act of obedience to it. For the purpose of the law is to protect and foster human life. This purpose is fulfilled when the legitimate authority of the State is exercised by taking the guilty lives of those who have taken innocent lives. In the Psalms we find a vindication of this right: “Morning by morning I will destroy all the wicked in the land, cutting off all evildoers from the city of the Lord” (Ps 101:8).

---

A dogmatic theologian cited yesterday at OnePeterFive explains:

---

In the case of the dogma of the intrinsic morality of the death penalty, the denial of this dogma is formally heretical, since it contradicts a doctrine which is contained in divine revelation and which has been proposed as such by the ordinary and universal magisterium of the Church.

---

That is, to state that the death penalty is inadmissible for theoretical reasons, as we have seen is the Pope’s position, is contrary to established dogma, and therefore formally heretical.

Second, the new teaching requires a false understanding of “development of doctrine,” the wand that enables a magisterial magician to put a frog in the hat and pull out a rabbit. As the letter from the CDF cheerfully and blusteringly tells us: “All of this shows that the new formulation of number 2267 of the Catechism expresses an authentic development of doctrine that is not in contradiction with the prior teachings of the Magisterium.” Voila, just like that — a rescript rabbit!

But the letter gives away too much. For it claims that the new statement is a development of doctrine, so it is not just a “prudential matter,” a “juridical matter” as some would have it, but a matter of what is true always and everywhere: it is the doctrine of the Catholic Church on the death penalty, not its recommended social policy.

This logically requires that “inadmissibility” be a roundabout way of saying illegitimacy, and therefore, immorality. (Would not a Catholic who continued to espouse the death penalty, or who meted it out, or who administered it, now have to be considered to be acting immorally?)

The Pope has thus avoided the easy road. He could have said “This is not expedient” and left it at that, as did John Paul II. But he chose the high road: “This is now Catholic doctrine, as more fully understood in our times.” As Fr. Zuhlsdorf commented yesterday, the notion of the development of doctrine in play is clearly not that of John Henry Newman, for whom development refines and expands, but does not undermine or reject, what was taught earlier. When a later teaching departs from an earlier one, it is a corruption, not a development.

Pope Francis is obviously and sadly wedded to a conception of papal authority that has little to do with the First Vatican Council’s articulation of the papacy’s inherently conservative nature, by which it receives and transmits, in its integrity, the apostolic faith as it passes through the ages — growing in expression, yes, but not morphing into something different or opposed to itself.

Tragically, by functioning as a doctrinal maverick, the pope offers to Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, and the entire world the spectacle of a papacy that confirms rather than denies the familiar anti-Catholic caricature of papal positivism and hyper-ultramontanism that reasonable and faithful people could do nothing other than reject.

NOT TO FORGET THAT IN THE AGE OF PR, BERGOGLIO'S DECISION TO COME OUT AT THIS TIME WITH THE DEATH PENALTY HEADLINE-GRABBER IS A TREMENDOUS GOEBBELS-LIKE PROPAGANDA TACTIC TO DIVERT PUBLIC ATTENTION EFFECTIVELY FROM THE MCCARRICK SCANDAL AND ALL ITS RAMIFICATIONS.

Edward Feser is co-author of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment.

In a move that surprised no one, Pope Francis has once again appeared to contradict two millennia of clear and consistent scriptural and Catholic teaching. The Vatican has announced that the Catechism of the Catholic Church will be changed to declare the death penalty “inadmissible” given the “inviolability and dignity of the person” as understood “in the light of the Gospel.”

There has always been disagreement among Catholics about whether capital punishment is, in practice, the morally best way to uphold justice and social order.

However, the Church has always taught, clearly and consistently, that the death penalty is in principle consistent with both natural law and the Gospel.
- This is taught throughout scripture — from Genesis 9 to Romans 13 and many points in between — and the Church maintains that scripture cannot teach moral error.
- It was taught by the Fathers of the Church, including those Fathers who opposed the application of capital punishment in practice.
- It was taught by the Doctors of the Church, including St. Thomas Aquinas, the Church’s greatest theologian; St. Alphonsus Liguori, her greatest moral theologian; and St. Robert Bellarmine, who, more than any other Doctor, illuminated how Christian teaching applies to modern political circumstances.
- It was clearly and consistently taught by the popes up to and including Pope Benedict XVI.

That Christians can in principle legitimately resort to the death penalty is taught by
- the Roman Catechism promulgated by Pope St. Pius V,
- the Catechism of Christian Doctrine promulgated by Pope St. Pius X, and
- the 1992 and 1997 versions of the most recent Catechism promulgated by Pope St. John Paul II — this last despite the fact that John Paul was famously opposed to applying capital punishment in practice.

- Pope St. Innocent I and Pope Innocent III taught that acceptance of the legitimacy in principle of capital punishment is a requirement of Catholic orthodoxy.
- Pope Pius XII explicitly endorsed the death penalty on several occasions.
- This is why Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as John Paul’s chief doctrinal officer, explicitly affirmed in a 2004 memorandum:

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If a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment … he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion. While the Church exhorts civil authorities … to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible … to have recourse to capital punishment.

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Joseph Bessette and I document this traditional teaching at length in our recent book. For reasons I have set out in a more recent article, the traditional teaching clearly meets the criteria for an infallible and irreformable teaching of the Church’s ordinary Magisterium. It is no surprise that so many popes have been careful to uphold it, nor that Bellarmine judged it “heretical” to maintain that Christians cannot in theory apply capital punishment.

So, has Pope Francis now contradicted this teaching? On the one hand, the letter issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith announcing the change asserts that it constitutes “an authentic development of doctrine that is not in contradiction with the prior teachings of the Magisterium.” Nor does the new language introduced into the catechism clearly and explicitly state that the death penalty is intrinsically contrary to either natural law or the Gospel.

On the other hand, the Catechism as John Paul left it had already taken the doctrinal considerations as far as they could be taken in an abolitionist direction, consistent with past teaching. That is why, when holding that the cases in which capital punishment is called for are “very rare, if not practically non-existent,” John Paul’s Catechism appeals to prudential considerations concerning what is strictly necessary in order to protect society.

Pope Francis, by contrast, wants the Catechism to teach that capital punishment ought never to be used (rather than “very rarely” used), and he justifies this change not on prudential grounds, but “so as to better reflect the development of the doctrine on this point.”

The implication is that Pope Francis thinks that considerations of doctrine or principle rule out the use of capital punishment in an absolute way.

Moreover, to say, as the pope does, that the death penalty conflicts with “the inviolability and dignity of the person” insinuates that the practice is intrinsically contrary to natural law. And to say, as the pope does, that “the light of the Gospel” rules out capital punishment insinuates that it is intrinsically contrary to Christian morality.

To say either of these things is precisely to contradict past teaching. Nor does the letter from the CDF explain how the new teaching can be made consistent with the teaching of scripture, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and previous popes. Merely asserting that the new language “develops” rather than “contradicts” past teaching does not make it so.

The CDF is not Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, and a pope is not Humpty Dumpty, able by fiat to make words mean whatever he wants them to. Slapping the label “development” onto a contradiction doesn’t transform it into a non-contradiction.

An irony is that John Paul’s Catechism was issued to clarify matters of doctrine, and finally put a halt to post–Vatican II speculation that Catholic teaching was open to endless revision. Yet now we have had two revisions to the Catechism’s own teaching on capital punishment — one in 1997, under John Paul himself, and another under Francis.

Nor is the problem confined to capital punishment. This latest development is part of a by-now familiar pattern. [Predator wolf's head inside the doctrinal tent, intending to occupy it all sooner or later!]
- Pope Francis has made statements that appear to contradict traditional Catholic teaching on contraception, on marriage and divorce, grace, conscience, and Holy Communion, and other matters. - - He has also persistently refused to clarify his problematic statements, even when clarification has been formally and respectfully requested by eminent theologians and members of the hierarchy.

The effect is to embolden those who want to reverse other traditional teachings of the Church, and to demoralize those who want to uphold those teachings.
- If capital punishment is wrong in principle, then the Church has for two millennia consistently taught grave moral error and badly misinterpreted scripture.
- And if the Church has been so wrong for so long about something so serious, then there is no teaching that might not be reversed, with the reversal justified by the stipulation that it be called a “development” rather than a contradiction.

A reversal on capital punishment is the thin end of a wedge that, if pushed through, could sunder Catholic doctrine from its past — and thus give the lie to the claim that the Church has preserved the Deposit of Faith whole and undefiled.

Not only does this reversal undermine the credibility of every previous pope, it undermines the credibility of Pope Francis himself. For if Pope St. Innocent I, Pope Innocent III, Pope St. Pius V, Pope St. Pius X, Pope Pius XII, Pope St. John Paul II, and many other popes could all get things so badly wrong, why should we believe that Pope Francis has somehow finally gotten things right?

One does not need to support capital punishment to worry that Pope Francis may have gone too far. Cardinal Avery Dulles, who was personally opposed to the practical use of capital punishment, still insisted that “the reversal of a doctrine as well established as the legitimacy of capital punishment would raise serious problems regarding the credibility of the magisterium.” Archbishop Charles Chaput, who is likewise opposed to applying the death penalty in practice, has nevertheless acknowledged:

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The death penalty is not intrinsically evil. Both Scripture and long Christian tradition acknowledge the legitimacy of capital punishment under certain circumstances. The Church cannot repudiate that without repudiating her own identity.

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[Jesus himself accepted the legitimate imposition of the death penalty on him, which in this case, was the practical means to the end for which God came down to earth as a human.]

If Pope Francis really is claiming that capital punishment is intrinsically evil, then either scripture, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and all previous popes were wrong — or Pope Francis is. There is no third alternative. Nor is there any doubt about who would be wrong in that case.
- The Church has always acknowledged that popes can make doctrinal errors when not speaking ex cathedra — Pope Honorius I and Pope John XXII being the best-known examples of popes who actually did so.
- The Church also explicitly teaches that the faithful may, and sometimes should, openly and respectfully criticize popes when they do teach error.
- The 1990 CDF document Donum Veritatis sets out norms governing the legitimate criticism of magisterial documents that exhibit “deficiencies.”

It would seem that Catholic theologians are now in a situation that calls for application of these norms. [DO NOT FORGET THE CARDINALS AND BISHOPS WHO EACH HAVE PLEDGED A VOW TO DEFEND THE CHURCH - STARTING WITH THE INTEGRITY OF THE FAITH - WITH THEIR BLOOD IF NEED BE! SHAME AND ANATHEMA ON THEM WHO OUGHT TO WEAR COWARDS' YELLOW INSTEAD OF MARTYRS' RED!!!


Pope Francis on capital punishment:
Doctrine built on shifting sands
By Phil Lawler

August 3, 2018

How can a fixed moral principle be dependent on a contingent practical judgment? How can a doctrine be based on shifting circumstances?

The Pope can say — indeed Pope John Paul II did say — that it is always wrong, in every case, deliberately to take the life of an innocent human being. But if he values logical consistency, he cannot say that it is always wrong to take an innocent life under current political conditions. Because political conditions change.

Yet in the language that he has inserted into the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis appears to teach that the death penalty is always unjust — “inadmissible” — because of certain political and social developments. We’ll take a closer look at that argument below. (I have already made a few comments on the explanatory paragraph, in a column posted yesterday.)

Cardinal José Gomez of Los Angeles, in a Twitter comment on the Pope’s announcement, offered his own version of the case for change:
The Church has come to understand that from a practical standpoint, governments now have the ability to protect society and punish criminals without executing violent offenders. Expressed in those terms, the change in teaching prompts a number of questions:
• If a doctrine is based on a “practical” judgment, who should make that judgment? If it is primarily a political judgment, should it not be made by political leaders?
• Do all governments have the ability to protect innocent civilians effectively? If not, how can capital punishment be “inadmissible” in all cases?
• Who should decide what constitutes adequate protection for civilians? Again, is that not clearly a political judgment?
• What would happen if, “from a practical standpoint,” governments lost the ability to protect civilians? Would the Church teaching on capital punishment be changed again?

Archbishop Gomez, in a series of Twitter comments, observed that the Church “has always recognized that governments and civil authorities have the right to carry out executions in order to protect their citizens’ lives and punish those guilty of the gravest crimes against human life and the stability of the social order.”

He appears to believe that Pope Francis has left that time-honored teaching intact; in fact the archbishop acknowledges that “many good people will continue to believe that our society needs the death penalty…” But is that an accurate reading of the new section in the Catechism?

Section 2266 of the Catechism, which was revised by Pope John Paul II in 1997, originally said that “the traditional teaching of the Church has acknowledged as well-founded the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty.” Can we conclude, then, that in some circumstances, despite the new language, capital punishment might be admissible?

The language of the amended 2267 seems to foreclose that possibility: “Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes…” Notice the use of the past tense: execution was considered justifiable. So has the traditional teaching been changed?

Recall that in 1997, St. John Paul II amended the Catechism to say that while capital punishment might in theory be justifiable, the circumstances that might allow for execution “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.” That is the section of the Catechism that Pope Francis has now replaced.

Is it possible to accept the teaching of Pope John Paul II, to oppose the use of capital punishment in most current circumstances, and yet to believe that Pope Francis has taken the argument a dangerous step beyond the reach of appropriate Church teaching? I certainly hope that position is legitimate, because that is exactly the position I myself would take.

Writing in First Things, Edward Feser defends that stand: “One does not need to support capital punishment to worry that Pope Francis may have gone too far.” Feser cites the late Cardinal Avery Dulles and Archbishop Charles Chaput as examples of Catholic leaders who oppose the use of the death penalty in current conditions, while recognizing that it could be justifiable under other circumstances.

If Pope Francis had intended only to encourage opposition to the death penalty, he had no need to alter the language of the Catechism. The language of Pope John Paul already provided ample support for that cause. But whereas Pope John Paul had left open the possibility that some circumstances — “very rare, if not practically nonexistent” — might justify execution, Pope Francis wants to slam that door.

And why did the Pontiff make that change? Again, the language of section 2267 itself provides three explanations*:
1. Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes.
2. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state.
3. Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.

The first sentence seems to suggest that our society has gained a keener appreciation of human dignity than obtained in previous generations. The overwhelming preponderance of evidence — along with the teaching of several Popes, including Francis — weighs heavily in the opposite direction, showing that our society has become increasingly callous in its disregard for human dignity.

In fact it is for that very reason that I would generally oppose the use of the death penalty, in the hope that by allowing a depraved criminal to live, society might bear witness against the growing tendency to eliminate inconvenient human life. [???? Lawler loses me here! How does sparing the lives of the Adolf Eichmanns and Ted Bundys of the world increase our respect for human dignity, if the persons sentenced to death had absolutely none at all for those they killed? And isn't the broadbased worldwide crusade against abortion the best way whereby responsible human beings are demonstrating against the tendency to do away with inconvenient human life? Were the lives of people like Eichmann and Bundy 'convenient' at all for anybody but themselves?]

In an excellent National Review article, Kevin Williamson explains:

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Mercy does not consist of forbearing to impose the ultimate sanction on those who do not deserve it — that is simply the avoidance of active injustice — but rather in forbearing to impose the ultimate sanction on those who do deserve it.

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[But if they deserve the sanction, why be forbearing at all? Does not 'mercy' in this case totally ignore justice in favor of false charity?]

The second sentence of the new Catechism text is, frankly, opaque. I have no idea what, if anything, it means. What is this new understanding? What is the (new?) significance of penal sanctions?

The third sentence, however, makes the critical judgment that “more effective systems of detention” allow for the elimination of the death penalty. In what countries are these wonderful new penal systems in force? In China, Iraq, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia? Obviously not. So the circumstances that explain the Pope’s change in Church teaching do not occur in the countries which account for at least 98% of all the world’s state-sponsored executions!

All arguments against Bergoglio's first arrogation of the very act of 'changing the Catechism' by his personal fiat are ultimately superfluous and unavailing in the face of the simple fact that this pope- who has demonstrated far more than any other pope since Alexander Borgia, who at least did not presume to change Church teaching even if he violated many of the Ten Commandments, how absolutely and miserably 'human' a pope can be in his failings and shortcomings, and how absolutely Luciferian he is in his hubris - is presuming to say he alone knows best what is right against 2000 years of Catholic teaching upheld by the most brilliant minds in the Church.


Changing the Catechism and
the pope's lack of prudence
Translated from

August 4, 2018

It was easily predictable that the pope’s changes to the text of the Catechism about the death penalty would launch a fullscale worldwide ‘debate’ on the issue. [Conveniently turning fickle public attention away from McCarrickism and its reverberations – which doubtless was the primary propaganda motivation for springing the not-quite-surprise.] The discussion is on at least two fronts: the question of the death penalty in itself; and the question of Catholic doctrine and how it could possibly be ‘modified’ in response to changes in the world.

On the first front, since I have no wish to hide my opinions on it, I have written about my personal opposition to the death penalty – based simply on the Fifth Commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’. It is true that as the Catechism underlines (Par 2261), Seripture introduces an important qualification when it reminds us that the sense of the prohibition is “not to kill the innocent and the just” (Ez 23,7), and equally true that 2000 years of Christian thinking and doctrine (e.g., Augustine and Aquinas, to name just two) have upheld the legitimacy of the death penalty in some circumstances as the extrema ratio against an unjust aggressor who cannot otherwise be neutralized (which is the reason why Catholic Magisterium has never called for the unconditional abolition of the death penalty).

Nonetheless, I hold (and in this, I cite theologian Gino Concetti) that the death penalty, like abortion and euthanasia, is a violation of the right to life, by the intolerable imposition of might over weak persons. God says that the human life, any life, is always sacred and inviolable. Life is a divine gift which is not at the disposition of man. Only God can do that. Moreover, since human justice can never be perfect and free of errors in judgement, there is always the risk that the death penalty could be inflicted on an innocent person or on someone who does not deserve it. Since death is irreversible, the risk is too great for anyone to take it. [I would repeat to Valli my argument that even Jesus acknowledged the right of the state to execute him - it became the human means that made it possible for God to consummate the sacrifice he had come down to earth for.]

But the other question has to do with the reason used by Bergoglio to ‘explain’ why the death penalty is ‘inadmissible’. Indeed, he did not cite the patrimony of the faith and the doctrine handed down and transmitted by the Church but only what is happening in the world. He writes of 3 instances of change: the “increasing awareness” today of the dignity of the human being, a “new understanding of the significance of penal sanctions on the part of the State”, and finally, “more effective systems of detention”.

None of that has to do with Scriptures, the teaching of the Church nor the Magisterium. Which opens up a huge problem because, with this move, whatever doctrinal point can now be changed, drawing inspiration from new sensibilities in the world and from new techniques that the world itself, in various forms, is able to promote and apply.

It is not accidental that the so-called LGBTQ community has already expressed its satisfaction at the pope’s decision. Because if, in fact, the prerequisites for changing doctrine would be “an increasing awareness” of a specific phenomenon or condition and the ‘new understanding’ that the world has of that phenomenon or condition, then obviously the entire doctrinal apparatus of the Church could be changed at will and eventually discarded.

The instrument – I was going to say ‘picklock’ – that seems to be most available for operating such a willful disregard for [stable] doctrine is the concept of ‘dignity’. In the name of such undefined ‘dignity’, everything can be allowed. So it is significant that this pope invokes ‘dignity’ to justify his attack on the Catechism. It would have been different if he had invoked the inviolability of human life. But ‘dignity’ is a more indeterminate word which lends itself to other perspectives (‘starting processes’, as this pope loves to call it), especially to block any attempt at exercising moral judgment.

And this is the reason why I say that this pope, in thus justifying his ‘change’ of the Catechism’s canon No. 2267, failed to make use of the first of the cardinal virtues, which is prudence, called the auriga virtutum, the chariot that drives all the other virtues. For him not to exercise prudence is very serious indeed, because it is the virtue of the rational soul which can recognize whether there is true good in every circumstance and is thereby guided in the exercise of moral principles under different situations. [Which makes it all the more ironic that those who justify Bergoglio's arrogance insist he is not changing doctirne but only exercising his (un)-prudential judgment on it!]

Some commentators have said that this is only the beginning and that there will be other changes introduced generically motivated by new sensibilities that become widespread in the world.I do not have prophetic gifts and so I limit myself to saying: GOD FORBID!


Pandora's box of evils is open with
Bergoglio's first change to the Catechism
by Steve Skojec

August 3, 2018

The debate over the pope’s recently announced changes to the Catechism on the subject of capital punishment are being hotly debated in every corner of the Catholic world. Some are saying this change is a mere “development of doctrine.” Some think it’s not a change in doctrine at all, but an adjustment to practical application.

On The World Over with Raymond Arroyo, Robert Royal characterized it as a “break” with tradition; Fr. Gerald Murray called it an “overthrow.” (Their discussion is worthwhile if you have time for it.) Others – like me – take it a step farther, believing that this represents a flat-out contradiction of dogma and, as such, a material heresy.

As is always the case with this pontificate, confusion and division reign. And we all know whose calling cards those are.

But there is more to this change than immediately meets the eye. As with other Francis initiatives, this stands as an affront to the sensus catholicus on its own, but also as an entrée to a larger program. I want to address both of these aspects here.

But first, I want to address a misconception: Catholics who are up in arms over this issue are upset not because they’re worried fewer people will go to the gallows; there are good reasons for reservations over how and when the death penalty should be applied, and that should be open for debate.

What we are upset about is the stunning hubris on display here, taking an infallible teaching and tossing it upside-down. That sets the stage for the entirety of Catholic teaching to be thrown into question.

I sought to establish yesterday that the moral liceity of the death penalty is a matter of divine revelation, affirmed by popes and doctors of the Church, and thus, dogmatic and infallible... Suffice it to say that this is a matter of faith or morals set forth specifically as a divinely revealed truth and thus not changeable. Pope Innocent makes this clear:

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“It must be remembered that power was granted by God [to the magistrates], and to avenge crime by the sword was permitted. He who carries out this vengeance is God’s minister (Rm 13:1-4). Why should we condemn a practice that all hold to be permitted by God? We uphold, therefore, what has been observed until now, in order not to alter the discipline and so that we may not appear to act contrary to God’s authority.” – Pope Innocent I, Epist. 6, C. 3. 8, ad Exsuperium, Episcopum Tolosanum, 20 February 405, PL 20,495.

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Edward Feser, one of the most knowledgeable and well-read Catholics on this topic, explains the pedigree of this teaching in his piece at First Things:

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There has always been disagreement among Catholics about whether capital punishment is, in practice, the morally best way to uphold justice and social order.

However, the Church has always taught, clearly and consistently, that the death penalty is in principle consistent with both natural law and the Gospel...

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[Feser's article is at the top of this post.]

The death penalty is often mischaracterized by modern opponents as unnecessary because, allegedly, advances in technology and systematization have made it possible for criminals to be properly and indefinitely detained.

It should be noted that historically, the mind of the Church was not only focused in this matter on the practical question of whether prisoners could be kept from harming others – a standard not yet realized in even the prisons of the First World – but also the realities of retributive justice (a punishment that fits the crime) and expiation (a punishment that, accepted willingly, remits temporal consequences of the sin committed).

Christ embraced death on the cross for precisely these reasons: that the punishment fit the crime (“The wages of sin are death” – Rom. 6:23), and it accomplished the expiation of our sins. He did not deny the authority of Pilate to condemn him. Rather, he said this power came “from above” (Jn 19:11).

The move away from this understanding toward a utilitarian view of effective detainment had already made its way into the previous version of the Catechism, which read (p. 2,267):

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Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm – without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself – the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.

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The new language instituted by Francis takes this a good deal further:

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Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good.

Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state. Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.

Consequently, the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,’ [1] and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.

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We see here an expression that the death penalty is “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” but this is apparently conditional upon “an increasing awareness” of this dignity and “a new understanding” of penal sanction and “more effective systems of detention.”

This language is nonsensical. Either a thing is inadmissible – meaning no exceptions, because it is a moral evil – or it is not. Morally admissible things do not become morally inadmissible because circumstances change. Either the death penalty always violated the dignity of the person or it did not. Pope John Paul II explains the moral principles involved in Veritatis Splendor 67:

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In the case of the positive moral precepts, prudence always has the task of verifying that they apply in a specific situation, for example, in view of other duties which may be more important or urgent. But the negative moral precepts, those prohibiting certain concrete actions or kinds of behaviour as intrinsically evil, do not allow for any legitimate exception. They do not leave room, in any morally acceptable way, for the “creativity” of any contrary determination whatsoever. Once the moral species of an action prohibited by a universal rule is concretely recognized, the only morally good act is that of obeying the moral law and of refraining from the action which it forbids.

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In other words, applied to the present issue, as a positive moral precept, the moral permissibility of the death penalty is subject to prudential judgment in application. Catholics who admit this divinely revealed permissibility can nevertheless, as John Paul II did, argue that the circumstances in which the death penalty might properly be utilized are extremely limited.

But Francis has turned the question into a negative moral precept. He has attempted to exclude the possibility of utilizing capital punishment by calling it “inadmissible” and an “attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” This means that he is seeking to establish his own understanding that capital punishment is “intrinsically evil, do not allow for any legitimate exception” – in direct contradiction to his predecessors, like Pope Innocent I. [Ah, but Bergoglio/Ladaria cunningly avoid saying so literally, that it is 'intrinsically evil', only that it is 'inadmissible' which can admit of various interpretations and does not open up Bergoglio directly to any charge of material heresy - i.e., in court, he would get off any accusation of heresy on a technicality. The same dodge he used in Amoris laetitia to stay just within the line separating heterodoxy from outright heresy.]

Whereas Innocent sought not to “appear to act contrary to God’s authority,” Francis doesn’t seem to care.This is not a thing that can simply be explained away.

It is always alarming to see what a Rorschach test these papal novelties prove to be. People see in them what they want, and consequently, many – perhaps even most – find a way to justify them. What is astonishing is how many faithful people deny that this represents a manifest rupture with the Church’s perennial teaching.

Many contest the assertion that this is a truth divinely revealed and constantly upheld by the Magisterium on a matter of faith and morals and, as such, is dogmatic and infallible. These include Catholic clergy who at least appear to be committed to doctrinal orthodoxy.

Or perhaps some do believe this teaching is divinely revealed but that nevertheless, it is subject to evolution.

What is happening, in either case, is a perfect example of the very Modernism Pope St. Pius X explicitly condemned in Pascendi Dominici Gregis. He wrote of the way being pried open for “the intrinsic evolution of dogma” through a chipping away at absolute truth. “An immense collection of sophisms this, that ruins and destroys all religion. Dogma is not only able, but ought to evolve and to be changed. This is strongly affirmed by the Modernists, and as clearly flows from their principles.”

And yet, for this to happen at the hands of a pope is catastrophically self-defeating; it undermines the very foundations upon which papal authority is erected. As Cardinal Avery Dulles – who was himself an opponent of the use of the death penalty – said in 2002:

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If the Pope were to deny that the death penalty could be an exercise of retributive justice, he would be overthrowing the tradition of two millennia of Catholic thought, denying the teaching of several previous popes, and contradicting the teaching of Scripture (notably in Genesis 9:5-6 and Romans 13:1-4).

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I doubt whether the tradition is reversible at all, but even if it were, the reversal could hardly be accomplished by an incidental section in a long encyclical focused primarily on the defense of innocent human life. If the pope were contradicting the tradition, one could legitimately question whether his statement outweighed the established teaching of so many past centuries.

Via Feser, Dulles states elsewhere:

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The death penalty is not intrinsically evil. Both Scripture and long Christian tradition acknowledge the legitimacy of capital punishment under certain circumstances. The Church cannot repudiate that without repudiating her own identity.

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Repudiating her own identity. Undermining her own authority. If this long held and infallible teaching can simply be overturned by papal fiat, which other teachings are subject to change? Every single one.

Astute observers began speculating shortly after the news broke of the latest change to the Catechism that this argumentation would be used to batter down the prohibitions against sexual immorality. In record time, they were proven correct.

Today, in a blog post at New Ways Ministry – an advocacy group for “justice and equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Catholics” – we see clearly that the floodgate has opened:

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It’s important for Catholic advocates for LGBT equality to take note of this change because for decades Catholic opponents of LGBT equality argued that it is impossible to change church teaching. They often pointed to the fact that condemnations of same-sex relationships were inscribed in the Catechism, and so were not open for discussion or change. Yet, the teaching on the death penalty is in the Catechism, too, and, in fact, to make this change in teaching, it was the text of the Catechism that Francis changed.

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Ironically, unlike faithful Catholics who are currently bending themselves into knots trying to demonstrate that this change represents no big deal, the people at New Ways Ministry call a spade a spade:

So, the change is not a contradiction, even though it is the opposite of what came before it? Hmmmm.

What does this death penalty news mean for Catholic advocates for LGBT equality? … we now have a clear, explicit contemporary example of church teaching changing, and also a look into how it can be done: with a papal change to the Catechism.

The lid has been blown off Pandora’s box, and Rome lit the fuse. We had best be prepared for what comes out.

St. Alphonsus, Holy Doctor of the Faith

August 2, 2018

Inasmuch as Pope Francis chose August 2, the traditional memorial of St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, bishop and confessor, Doctor of the Church, to make public his attempt to chuck down the Memory Hole the irreformable truth that "the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty," it is only fitting that the faithful recall what this eminent Doctor of Truth had to say on this subject.

From St. Alphonsus' Theologia Moralis, courtesy of the Lex Christianorum weblog:

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"Question II:
Whether it is lawful for proper authority to kill a criminal?

Response: Other than the case of necessary defense, of which more below, no one except public authority may lawfully do so, and then only if the order of the law has been observed, as is made clear in Exodus 22 and Romans 13.. . . . The public authority is given the power to kill wrongdoers, and that not unjustly, since it is necessary for the defense of the commonwealth. (Killing may not be done outside of the criminal’s territory, neither is it presumed that another prince has this right.) They also sin who kill not out of the zeal of justice, but out of hate, or private vengeance. Laym

Similarly, a prince or magistrate sins (normally speaking) who orders a wrongdoer to be put to death without being properly cited, or heard, or adjudged (by public trial), even it if he has personal knowledge of that person’s guilt, because as a matter of natural law, a public act ought to be derived from public knowledge and authority. There is an exception to this rule if: (1) the crime is notorious, or (2) if there is a danger of sedition, or the King’s disgrace, if the cause proceeds juridically."

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In his teaching here, St. Alphonsus follows the unvarying and infallible doctrine of the Church regarding capital punishment, as witnessed in Holy Scripture, in the doctrine of Our Lord and the Holy Apostles, in the unanimous consent of the Fathers, and Holy Church's Magisterium. God forbid that any other Catholic should do less!

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O God, who through the burning zeal for the salvation of souls of Blessed Alphonsus Maria, Thy confessor and bishop, didst enrich Thy Church with fresh offspring, grant, we beseech Thee, that, imbued with his wholesome doctrine, and strengthened by his example, we may, by Thy grace, come happily unto Thee. Through Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, world without end. Amen.
- Collect for the traditional Proper Mass of St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori

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To an uplifting subject, for a change...

Cardinal Zen on Pope Benedict's
liturgical theology
by GREGORY DIPIPPO


We are pleased to present a Chinese reader’s translation of the address given by Joseph Cardinal Zen, Bishop Emeritus of Hong Kong, on the occasion of the presentation of the Chinese edition of Pope Benedict XVI’s Collected Works: Theology of the Liturgy. The address was delivered as a video message posted on the Hong Kong page of the Salesians of Don Bosco (SDB-CIN) on July 29th, 2018. The text is being posted simultaneously on Canticum Salomonis.

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I had planned to introduce this book to you on the occasion of the Hong Kong Book Fair, and it would have been worthwhile to take this opportunity, but unfortunately I am suddenly called away for work and have to leave Hong Kong, but I still want to share some words with you.

Pope Benedict is a great pope, and the greatest thing about him is his theology. He is a theologian, and not only a theologian, but a master of the spiritual life. What is the difference between theology and spirituality? Theology is about the ways revealed by God; the spiritual life is living in accord with the ways God and Jesus have taught us. One of the very important elements of the spiritual life is the liturgy.

We all try to live our faith in our lives, but some saints excel over all others, and we call them mystics. These people have a very direct experience of God, and their mind is caught up ecstatically in the Spirit. [Mystical experience] is not reasonable, but this does not mean it is unreasonable. Rather, it surpasses reason.

We have been blessed to see Pope Benedict many times and we can learn the spiritual life from him. So we thank God that this pope has been with us for many years and is with us even now. He is living by himself in a tiny hermitage, and he is still there praying for us.

I will take a few examples at random from this very rich book.

One of the very important things is that he returns to first principles. Our contemporary Catholics live in a new age, in the age of Vatican II. The aim of the Second Vatican Council was reform, but reform can be misunderstood very easily. Reform brings new things of course, but it is not equal to throwing away or abandoning the old. Rather, sometimes reform means returning to the origin of things. So this reform has to be understood accurately. The teachings of Pope Benedict can lead us to the true spirit of the liturgy, the real reform called for by the Council.

It is easy for us to focus on what we see, because our attention is drawn to what we see. But what we Catholics see is very special, something it is not enough to look at superficially. We have to see the real quality inside it. This requires us to make great efforts, since liturgy is not something we can understand superficially. Vatican II was not accomplished in one day: it was prepared by many qualified theologians and experts of liturgy. Consequently, we have to follow the pope back to the real spirit of the reform.

The spirit of the reform means more than celebrating the liturgy in the vernacular. Of course it is good to use the vernacular. It is not wrong. It is an important part of the reform. But this is not the most important thing. Whatever language is used, the most important thing is the integration of the human spirit with God. When you hear the pope’s teaching it is as if you leave the visible world behind and rise with him into the presence of God.

Liturgy is a very important activity in the Church. The Church gave an excellent definition of liturgy at the Council, when she taught that the Church herself is a sacrament. At that time some people were surprised: We have seven sacraments, why do we need an eighth? But it doesn’t mean that.

A sacrament is visible thing that helps us to understand invisible things. Because there are invisible things, so Jesus helped us use visible things to understand the invisible. Liturgy is completely in accord with this theology of sacraments: all things that can be seen in the Church.

But we cannot stop there. We need a deeper meaning of their true meaning. Therefore, the liturgical reform of the Council does not mean only the use of vernacular languages, or a mere change in ritual, or that some actions are different. The most important thing is to help us encounter God, because God is invisible. Liturgy makes it easy for us to encounter him, giving us a deeper understanding of our faith and allowing him to be part of our life.

In this book, the pope has given us many wonderful teachings. For example, in the sermons he gave when he consecrated churches, he preaches many different things that help us understand what kind of place the church is, and what we should pay attention to in the church.

Sometimes, it is a pity... People know the pope wrote several articles about the ad orientem posture, about praying toward the East. Now the liturgy permits the priest to face the congregation to celebrate the Mass. But what the pope actually suggested was that we can face the Cross together, face the back of the Church, because the great churches of ancient times had a great mosaic of Jesus in the back of the church. In this way, we go together back to God.

So the church building itself is also a sacrament. A church is a visible building, and its architecture can lead us up to the heavenly Jerusalem. Because we are in this world, the church is built with the precious materials of the universe. There are stones, wood, metals, and these things take up nature into the place where we worship God. These are things we can see.

But we have to understand the deeper reality that the church is the symbol of God’s presence with us. The architects arranged these earthly materials so that they elevate our whole spirit toward God.

If we visit the great churches of Rome and other famous basilicas of the world, especially the ancient basilicas, we can understand how the ancient people entered the church: they saw an architectural review of the whole faith, because in the church there are many things that help us to remember the contents of the faith.

Of course, in history there are many artistic styles of church architecture, all expressing rich and colorful spiritual attitudes. But the most important thing they do is allow us to understand that in this house we are one family.

The liturgical reform has emphasized the fact that we are one family gathering in the church. Jesus instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. We eat his flesh, drink his blood, and this meal aspect is significant because the family usually gathers together for the meal.

But the Mass is not only taking a meal. The Mass is a special meal, the Paschal meal, a holy meal that Jesus transformed when he said “This is my Body, take and eat.” This flesh is also an offering, and this makes the Mass a holy sacrifice. So in every moment we have to keep this spirit of veneration and worship in liturgy.Modern people especially need this.

In the ancient church, in European countries with a Christian culture, it is very easy to remember God. The countryside is strewn with crosses and statues of Mary and the saints, and every city has many churches. All this makes remembering easy. But this is not the case in modern cities.

Now people don’t have so many opportunities to remember God. In the church we have to reinforce the principle that the basis of society is Jesus who became incarnate for us, suffered for us, died and rose again.

Liturgy is sacred. When the Church educates the clergy, its chief purpose is not merely to teach them the ritual, because this is very easy, but to teach them the spirit of worship. The pope has used many wonderful words to express this.

He said that in the Church Jesus captures us and unites us with him. We so need to be captured by Jesus, because contemporary society can’t help us to return to Jesus. Only when we make an effort to truly encounter Jesus in the liturgy can we bring Jesus to others. The pope expresses this thought repeatedly.

It has been many years since the liturgical reform, and the pope is highly qualified to evaluate its results. Perhaps many Catholics feel that the reform was good. Indeed, after the Council the most conspicuous change was the reform of the liturgy. But perhaps the reform has remained on the surface of things.

We hope that studying the thoughts of this pope will lead us to a more profound understanding, so that in the liturgy, in all its chants, actions, and other visible things, we can have a deeper encounter with the presence of the Holy God.

One of the things we have to pay attention to is that liturgical reform does not mean abandoning the past. Sometimes, on the contrary, it leads us precisely back to the root, the origin, to its real significance, to the Bible, to the documents of the Council.

After the Council ended, the liturgical reform was implemented later on by certain people - who of course deserve credit for their many efforts - but it is time for the Church to evaluate this liturgical reform, asking whether it completely, faithfully expresses the expectations of the global gathering of bishops at the Council.

How to evaluate it? First, it means reading the council documents, Sacrosanctum Concilium, and looking at the work we are doing now. Obviously, the Church didn’t begin at the Council, so many experts were very clear about the liturgical tradition.

In the Council, it is very clear that, simultaneously with reform, we must preserve the very precious traditions of the Church. This requires hard work. Certainly, not everyone has access to Latin or studies Latin. But there should be some people in the Church who especially study and evaluate whether the liturgical reform attained the goals pointed out by the bishops of the council.

Pope Benedict represents the true spirit of the Council. On the one hand, if we go back to read Sacrosanctum Concilium, and at the same time read the very rich teaching of the Pope, it surely will lead us to the authentic spirit of the liturgy.

On the other hand, [this true spirit] incorporates the long history of the Church: the saints and martyrs who used the liturgy of their time to lay the good foundations of their faith, and even sacrificing their lives for God to bring the Church to every corner of the world, and the missionaries brought the liturgy to every place where they evangelized. These things are the basis of the liturgical reform, on which to build the contemporary Church in the modern society.

So, on the one hand the Church needs to absorb the interests and tendencies of modern people, since every age has its strengths, but it has to be very careful to avoid the false ideas prevalent in modern society, such as secular or relativist ideas. So we absolutely cannot suppose that reform means taking the present day as an absolute starting point.

Perhaps some people were surprised when the Pope said that the Tridentine Mass is still a form that can be used by the Church. But if you participate in it, you will discover that there are many young people there. It is not necessarily only on account of old people who are nostalgic for the past that we began to offer this form of Mass.

Many young people have come to relish the old rite. As I said earlier, in the liturgy there are things that surpass reason, things that can be felt but not expressed. Sometimes, perhaps, these precious things are easily lost in our modern liturgy. Sometimes we think that only those things clearly explained are helpful to us, but that is not necessarily the case.

The Church says we need times of silence. Sometimes we don’t need to sing. Listening to music is also a kind of worship. For example we can use suitable music when we venerate the Eucharist or in personal prayer.

This presents a great challenge to us, since every generation has the responsibility to pass on these precious traditions of the Church to the next generation. A generation does not make itself. Of course we know that every grace is granted by God, but the effort of man is not only the effort of his own generation. Each person has his own responsibility for the liturgy, in the society in which he lives, but he can’t bear this responsibility by himself, because liturgy doesn’t start from him. It was born from the Church and runs up to today, passing through Jesus, the Apostles, missionaries, and so many saints. The heritage they left is very precious.

I think the pope has fulfilled this task, as you can see in his rich teachings. On many occasions, he takes pains to use his own experience in a very moving way to pass this heritage down to us. Perhaps we think, “he is a theologian, so his words are too complicated.” But that is not the case. He explains things very well. As I said earlier, he describes how Jesus captures us and brings us into himself.

In this Book Fair there are many books. I hope Catholics cherish this book, because liturgy is our life. Liturgy is the life of the Church. Liturgy is a very precious thing. The whole Church and the seven sacraments are things we can see. Through these visible, tangible, edible things, we are granted to know what is invisible and intangible. These things rely on the Holy Spirit, who throughout history has stored up many precious instruments for us.

If we want to improve the liturgy, we have to read more. The Book Fair encourages us to read and our Catholics really need to read. In our modern culture, perhaps, people don’t have the patience to read written texts, but we must read. We welcome new audio-visual instruments that make it easier to assimilate things, but we have to have close reading of written texts.

For example, we have to read the Bible, because the liturgy is full of the Bible. The Bible enables us to understand the liturgy, enables us to absorb all the treasures accumulated in the history of the Church. In addition to the Bible, we also have to read the documents of the Council.

Also, we need to read these teachings of the pope. Reading these things will ensure that we are not superficial and passive, because the basic principle of liturgical reform is active participation. Active participation does not mean “the more action the better.” We need to be silent. Active participation means that we need to think to understand to go deeper and to respond. And if we read these teachings of the pope carefully, it will be helpful to us.

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Cardinal Zen celebrates the TLM as often as he can. Left, he offers Christmas Mass in 2016 at Mary Help of Christians church in HongKong.

SOME B16 PHOTO UPDATES


A visit from Stefano Spaziani
July 25, 2018

The name Spaziani brings back a flood of memories from the eight glorious years of Benedict XVI's Pontificate, when the best photographs of even his most
routine events were captured through the lenses of Stefano Spaziani - and one learned to search first through all the photos available online for any by Spaziani.
Our Gloria was the best at collating all the photos, and so both PAPA RATZINGER FORUM and BENEDETTO XVI FORUM benefited greatly from her loving diligence.

The great photographer has compiled the best photographs he took of those eight years and presented them to Benedict XVI at the Vatican Gardens last July 25.




Sorry for the fuzzy pictures on the right which were blow-ups of thumbnails on Spaziani's site.


A Roman wine line Vinea Domini
(vineyard of the Lord) inspired
by Benedict XVI's first words as Pope
June 20, 2018





On June 20, Benedict XVI received a visit from the president and vice president of Gotto D'Oro winery, whose vineyards are in the Castelli Romani [the towns in the Alban Hills southeast of Rome, including Castel Gandolfo], who presented the Emeritus Pope with their line of wines, Vinea Domini, which had been inspired by his first words as Pope, in which he described himself as a humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord.

Luigi Caporicci and his two vice presidents were accompanied by Mons. Marcello Semeraro, Bishop of Albano [and secretary of Pope Fancis's Council of Cardinals], and one of his vicars, Mons. Gualtiero Isacchi.

The Gotto d’Oro winery preserves the ancient winemaking tradition of the fertile Castelli Romani from Roman times and gives the company its brand name Gotto d'Oro (goblet of gold).

The winemakers told Benedict XVI that it took the winery 13 years to get the line going. "We began with choosing the lands most favorable for the production of excellent wines, then we started planting the chosen vines from an international variety, after which we could start producing the wines. In ancient times, it was the Romans who exported their choice vine stocks beyond the Alps, those which throve in our lands and yielded grapes with the best bouquet and flavor," Ricci said.

He told the pope that his company considered it their duty to dedicate their best quality wines "to a pope who has given so much to the territory of the Castelli Romani and to the whole world".


Tributes to prelates
who have passed away

Finally, a thoughtful feature I noticed on the Facebook pages of the FONDAZIONE VATICANA JOSEPH RATZINGER/BENEDETTO XVI - their obituary tributes to prelates who were closely associated with Benedict XVI:

On July 3, 2018, I posted the ff - in the hope that the story would get more media attention than it has rated so far... but as far as I can tell,
no one else has done so except CHURCH MILITANT which ran an article about it on August 4, 2018.
www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/mother-alleges-sex-abuse-cover-up-under-cdl.-b...
Despite all the new uproar about clerical and episcopal sexual predators in the Church, no one else seems willing to touch this story at all...
WHY?????? The documentation appears adequate and ample!



Why and how was a blogpost by Marco Tosatti on May 26 - recounting a Spanish site's 2013 report about a clerical sex abuse cover-up by then
Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires - taken offline shortly thereafter? Subsequent attempts to access the post came back with 'PAGINA
NON TROVATA' (page not found). I have to admit that since I have not been very thorough these days in my quick skims of the sites I try to
follow daily, I completely missed the above post and have only become aware of it now that the news has been recycled as an 'exclusive'
by World News Daily.)

I suppose I am more surprised that Tosatti has apparently not commented so far on the suppression of the post, and I am curious whether
anyone other than the blogsite owner can take a post offline, otherwise one must conclude that Tosatti took it offline himself for some reason,
such as that he concluded his source was not reasonably reliable. In any case, the post was captured by another blogsite before it was taken offline,
and Atila Sinke Guimarães, editor of the website Tradition-in-Action, took it upon himself to call attention to the post and to translate it to English.

BERGOGLIO ENTANGLED IN ANOTHER COVER-UP
by Atila Sinka Guimaraes
Editor


On May 26, 2018, journalist Marco Tosatti posted an article on his website Stilum Curiae reporting the involvement of Pope Francis in a cover-up for a pedophile priest in Buenos Aires when he was Archbishop of that city. The article refreshed some little-known old data reported by the Spanish blog Publico. Soon after, however, Tosatti's article was removed from that site, probably due to pressure from the Vatican.

Nonetheless, his full article had been screen-captured and posted by another Italian website – Acta Apostolicae Sedis. The Brazilian blog Fratres in Unum made the piece accessible in Portuguese, where I found it, with its various Spanish and Italian links. I thank the blog for this important public service. I am translating the data into English and passing the information on to my readers.

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In May 2013, the Appeals Tribunal of Quilmes, Buenos Aires, Argentina, confirmed a sentence by the City Court condemning the Diocese to pay US $27,000 (115,600 pesetas) to a victim of pedophilia to compensate for his psychological suffering and the moral damage he suffered.

Soon after, the Spanish blog Publico highlighted the case which involved a then 15-year-old Argentinian – Gabriel Ferrini – who had been abused by Fr. Ruben Pardo in 2002. Immediately after being sexually violated, the youth reported the crime to his mother, Beatriz. She went to the Bishop of Quilmes, Luis Teodorico Stöckler.

The Diocese of Quilmes is subordinate to the Province of Buenos Aires whose Archbishop at that time was none other than Jorge Bergoglio. Bishop Stöckler called the priest to confront him with the accusation. Pardo acknowledged the abuse before the Bishop 96 hours after the abuse took place.

But since the Bishop delayed in punishing the priest, Beatriz Varela, the boy's mother, tried to communicate with Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio. However, he refused to receive her and ordered his bodyguards to prevent her from entering his residence. At the same time the Archbishop of Buenos Aires was hosting the pedophile priest in a comfortable residence under his jurisdiction.

The abuse took place on August 15, 2002. Beatriz Varela was a worker in a diocesan school of Quilmes. She had asked the vicar of the local parish, Fr. Ruben Pardo, to catechize her two sons. The priest went to her house and, after giving some classes there, told Beatriz that he would continue the instruction in the church, providing that Gabriel spend the night there. He also told the mother that in this way the youth could serve his early morning Mass.

With his mother’s consent, the youth went to the rectory for the class. That evening, Pardo invited Gabriel to sleep with him in his bed. The youth first interpreted the gesture as a paternal invitation, until the moment when the priest actually violated him sexually. Gabriel reported: “I knew he was violating me but I couldn’t think of how to avoid it, because I was in shock and very afraid.”

When the priest ended the abuse and fell asleep, Gabriel slipped out and ran back to his house and reported what had happened to his mother. Beatriz went straight to Bishop Luis Stöcker. She stated: “Initially, he showed consternation, but, as the time went by, he did not take any action.” Instead, she continued, the Bishop “tried to minimize the case, saying that I had to be merciful with persons who chose celibacy as a vocation because they have moments of weakness.”

Beatriz told the Bishop that she wanted “truth, justice and the guarantee that such a thing would not happen to anyone else.” The Bishop then threatened to cut her employment. “I worked for a school in the Diocese,” she said, explaining her difficult situation.

Next, Beatriz had recourse to the Church Tribunal, whose president “refused to accept the denunciation.” Fifteen days later, she was interviewed by four priests “who submitted me to a humiliating interrogation with lascivious and tendentious questions, as if I were the one who had induced the abuse, when they knew for sure that the abuser had admitted the fact 96 hours after the episode before the Bishop, who reprimanded him.”

The mother of the victim also went to the Archdiocese, to the residence of Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio. He refused to receive her and sent his security guards to expel her from the property. Soon afterwards, she learned that Fr. Ruben Pardo was a guest at the Vicar’s House in the Flores neighborhood, a residence directly dependent on the Archbishop of Buenos Aires. She observed: “Bergoglio must have known this because no one can be installed in the Vicar’s House without the authorization of the Archbishop.”

She boldly accused Pope Francis: “This is Bergoglio’s way: He speaks against cases of pedophilia in the Church, but uses hypocrisy, lies and complicity to cover them... In the Church everyone knows and everyone keeps silent; thus, all are accomplices.”

She also mentioned other cases she knew about: “There were priests who were transferred to the Archdiocese of Cordoba after I made the denunciation. Last Friday a desolate mother called me because her 4-year-old daughter had been violated by those two priests, who still work in the school. … Other children are still at risk.” The mother of the abused girl did not want to go to press, but she did start a lawsuit against the priests.

Regarding the final verdict of the Appeals Tribunal and the Court of Quilmes, Varela nonetheless has other bitter memories: “When the priest who abused my son died [of AIDS in 2005], the process disappeared for two years. When the lawsuit was at risk of expiring [because of the statute of limitations], my son tried to commit suicide. He had to be interned for one-and-a-half months in a psychiatric clinic. No amount of money can compensate for what we have suffered.”

Ferrini himself said about the verdict: “The verdict established a judicial precedent and can help other victims so that it will not be so difficult for them to find a solution. It is necessary to take action because many people are afraid or too ashamed to denounce and quarrel with someone in clerical garb.”

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So this was the case that Tosatti highlighted in the blogpost that was then suppressed.

This case resurfaced at the very moment when Bergoglio was being besieged by public indignation over his nomination of and cover-up for Bishop Barros in the Diocese of Osorno, Chile. So, following his old pattern of action, Bergoglio apparently sent his “security guards” to threaten the Italian journalist who was trying to make these data public.

Years ago in Buenos Aires he used the same strong arm system against Beatriz Varela; now in Rome he seems to be using an identical procedure with Marco Tosatti. [This is all conjecture, of course. One hopes Tosatti himself will shed light on how and why his post was suppressed.] Let me help to expose this plot, if it exists. I do not like “security guards” used for this purpose. They remind me of the methods of All Capone.

Further, I believe it is time for us Catholics to become aware of what the “honest, pure, merciful and humble” procedures of our Holy Father really are.

For the record, the story touted by WND as its 'exclusive' basically translates Tosatti's blogpost and adds nothing new to it.
http://www.wnd.com
/2018/07/mom-accuses-pope-of-cover-up-of-sons-sex-abuse/#sThiR1FwHizOm4cA.99

If the report were even partially untrue, then the Vatican simply ought to have issued a statement to say so!

Here is CHURCH MILITANT's report, which has updates on the earlier report on which Tosatti based his retracted post:

Mother alleges sex abuse cover-up
by Cardinal Bergoglio in Buenos Aires
by Juliana Freitag

August 4, 2018

Vatican insider Marco Tosatti recently reported the case of Gabriel Ferrini, a young Argentinian man who was sexually abused by a priest of the diocese of Quilmes, in the province of Buenos Aires, in 2002. Ferrini was 15 years old at the time, and in 2013, a court ordered the diocese to pay restitution to both Gabriel Ferrini and his mother, Beatriz Varela.

A few news outlets picked up on the story, highlighting the fact that Tosatti took the article down from his blog almost immediately after publication. Speaking to Church Militant, Tosatti explained that he initially believed he was breaking a story but then realized the case had already been fully documented by watchdog website Bishop Accountability, which claimed that "Argentinian bishops are among the least transparent in the worldwide Church" years ago. Tosatti took it down as it was ill-timed. [I do not buy this explanation at all!]

Even though it all started 16 years ago, it's difficult to find reports outside of Argentina. Very few articles can be found in English, even though the ruling has repeatedly been quoted as "historical," as it was the first time in the country that a diocese was considered culpable in a case of sexual abuse by one of their priests. Some have speculated it might have been because of the involvement of the archdiocese of Buenos Aires, at the time under Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, who had just been elected Pope when the court announced its decision.

On Aug. 15, 2002, Catholic widow and mother of three, Beatriz Varela, invited Fr. Rubén Pardo, the 50-year-old priest from the church next door, with whom she had a close relationship, to have dinner in her home with her children. As a lifelong Catholic (Varela was a catechist who worked in a Catholic school, her brother is a deacon and her mother was a Legionary of Mary), Varela thought the priest could offer moral and spiritual guidance for her teenage son, Gabriel Ferrini.

After dinner, Fr. Pardo suggested he and the boy continued talking in his parish house, and that Ferrini was welcome to sleep over if he wanted to serve at Mass the next morning. The mother trustingly gave her permission, and Ferrini, who saw Fr. Pardo as a "fatherly figure," thought the priest was acting paternally when inviting the boy to sleep on the same bed.

In his naivety, Gabriel Ferrini didn't expect to be assaulted.
"I knew I was being violated, but I couldn't think of what to do to avoid it, because I was so shocked and scared," he told the prosecutor. As soon as Fr. Pardo fell asleep, Ferrini escaped and went back to his house to tell his mother what had happened.

Varela immediately turned to the Church for help. Two days after her son had been molested, she had an audience with Msgr. Luis Teodorico Stöckler, bishop of Quilmes, where she handed over a letter from her son describing the abuse. Bishop Stöckler seemed empathetic at first, and on Aug. 19, Fr. Pardo confessed everything to the bishop, while "crying bitterly and asking for forgiveness."

Despite the priest's confession, in the second audience, Stöckler was much more reticent:

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[Bishop Stöckler] told me I should be more merciful with people who chose celibacy as a vocation, because they can have moments of weakness. I couldn't believe that he ... said something so atrocious. ... I told him I had been celibate for 13 years, even though celibacy isn't my vocation. I did it in order to dedicate entirely to my children, so they wouldn't be exposed to harm, without realizing that the danger was inside the Church.

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Father Rubén Pardo's sole punishment was a canonical admonition for "violation of the sixth commandment" — "You shall not commit adultery." He was transferred to another parish and was forbidden to say Mass or give public and private declarations for a month. He died on Oct. 6, 2005 due to complications related to AIDS, ending the criminal case against him.

In December 2002, the diocese of Quilmes stopped paying for Gabriel Ferrini and his mother's psychological treatment. The payment ceased once Varela submitted the receipt of a legal consultation with a Buenos Aires organization dedicated to the support of sexual abuse victims. When questioned by Varela, Bp. Stöckler said that "enough time had passed for the solution of this problem," and he has never tried to reach out to the family ever since.

At around this time, Varela tried to plead with the inter-diocesan ecclesiastical court in Buenos Aires. Varela claims she was kicked out of the waiting room by the court's president, Msgr. Jorge Rodé, who insisted she should report the abuser to the diocese of Quilmes. A priest in the waiting room offered to take her to the Metropolitan Curia to try to speak to the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Bergoglio. The cardinal's receptionist didn't give Varela an appointment because of her refusal to reveal the reason for the meeting. Varela still tried to leave Cardinal Bergoglio a note, but was then escorted out of the premises by security guards.

After exhausting all her options in the Catholic Church, Beatriz Varela finally filed a criminal complaint at the beginning of February 2003. At the end of the month, prosecutor Pablo Pérez Marcote forwarded a request to the diocese of Quilmes inquiring "urgently" about Fr. Pardo's whereabouts.

The diocese's reply was evasive: "To date, Fr. Rubén Pardo's pastoral destination hasn't been determined and he resides outside the territorial jurisdiction of this diocese." In September 2003, Fr. Pardo was discovered living in the Mons. Mariano Espinosa clergy house in Buenos Aires. Reportedly, Pardo had been hearing confessions and working in a primary school whilst living there.

It's unlikely that the priest lived in the clergy house known for taking in retired priests without Cardinal Bergoglio's permission, which is why Beatriz Varela claims Cardinal Bergoglio acted compliantly. According to Argentinian newspaper Pagina 12, Fr. Pardo was transferred at least twice before passing away, always around Buenos Aires.

The Espinosa clergy house has always been known as Cardinal. Bergoglio's choice for retirement. According to Aleteia, "The decision was widely known among those who worked with him." Even the room - Number 13 on the ground floor - had allegedly already been set up for the eventual Archbishop Emeritus.

On April 2004, after Fr. Pardo’s case was exposed on national television, Bp. Stöckler released a statement saying he had reported Fr. Rubén Pardo to the Holy See, who put the ecclesiastical court of Buenos Aires in charge of the case. He also denied that the diocese had ceased to help with mother and son’s psychological treatment, but that it was Varela who “no longer turned to the diocese when she decided to file a criminal complaint against the priest."

A month later, Varela and her son were summoned to the inter-diocesan ecclesiastical court of Buenos Aires. According to Varela, the four priests on the panel asked them "lascivious" questions unrelated to the crime and kept questioning her son's sexuality. Cardinal Bergoglio was a moderator in the court but was not present at Varela's hearing.

Beatriz Varela's indignation was aggravated by the fact the diocese of Quilmes had been covering up for Fr. Rubén Pardo for decades. Monsignor Marcelo Daniel Colombo (currently second vice-president of the Argentinian Bishops' Conference and bishop of Rioja) was the rector of the diocesan seminary of Quilmes when Fr. Pardo undertook his studies. Msgr. Colombo confirmed to Varela that he had Fr. Pardo transferred to another seminary due to his "inappropriate conducts".

The police also discovered that, before joining the diocese of Quilmes, the priest was part of the Order of the Camillians, where he had been isolated "for not having the right conditions for religious co-existence." And Fr. Isidoro Psenda, also from the diocese of Quilmes, told Beatriz Varela that he and 10 other priests went to Msgr. Jorge Novak (the previous bishop of Quilmes) and warned the bishop about Pardo's "inadequacy for celibacy," but Msgr. Novak decided to ordain him a priest anyway.

In October 2012, a court in Quilmes ruled that the diocese had been negligent in its management of Fr. Pardo and ordered it to pay restitution to Gabriel Ferrini and Beatriz Varela. The diocese appealed, arguing that Pardo had been employed by an autonomous parish at the time and that Beatriz Varela was partly responsible because she allowed her son to spend the night in the priest's residence. In April 2013 the court rejected these arguments and upheld the previous ruling. The diocese was ordered to pay the plaintiffs 155,000 pesos (about $6,000) plus ten years' interests in compensatory damages.

In 2014, the GlobalPost traveled to Argentina to hear the stories of victims of clerical sexual abuse. All of them declared that "they spent fruitless years seeking an audience with Francis" and that "they were turned away by his office or offered gifts instead of a meeting." GlobalPost also released videos of each of them with a message for Pope Francis.

Beatriz Varela resisted at first, saying she had "nothing to say" to him, but then emotionally said to the camera, "This is a message to Pope Francis: Do as you say you will do. Be sure to follow everything you say with actions. If the Church is to have zero tolerance towards abuse, all the priests you are aware of, whose names and addresses you know, must be gathered up and put in jail now. ... Do what God wants, for all of us.”

Beatriz Varela and Gabriel Ferrini have both stated that they still believe in God, but they have left the Catholic Church.

AND NOT TO FORGET BERGOGLIO'S 'MCCARRICKONE' PROTEGE (Archbishop Maccarone) who has since died, like Pardo in the Varela-Ferrini story, and can no longer be called to account in this world for his misdeeds, but what about his protector? What's stopping gung-ho Vaticanistas like John Allen from investigating these two allegations against Bergoglio of covering up for sexual predators - at least the two that have been named prominently - while he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires?...And why, one might ask again, has the Vatican not issued an outright denial of these allegations?

Fittingly, 1P5 chose this image of the so-called Cadaver Synod to illustrate this article. A bit of background:

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The 9th and 10th centuries AD were turbulent years for the papacy of Rome. Caught up in the political machinations of Europe, the Vatican saw a rapid succession of popes come and go. The situation reached the peak of absurdity with the posthumous ecclesiastical trial of Pope Formosus in January 897, an event commonly referred to as the Cadaver Synod or the Cadaver Trial. Nine months after Formosus died, his body was exhumed and made to sit on a throne so that he could face the charges levied against him by the then Pope Stephen VI. Dressed in full papal finery, Formosus faced accusations of perjury, coveting the papacy as a layman, and violating church canons while he was pope. Defended by a mere deacon and obviously incapable of defending himself, the dead Pope was found guilty on all counts. The charges brought against Formosus during the Cadaver Synod echo those levied against him by Pope John VIII but were really based on the political demands of a fractious continent. The reason so many popes came and went (and why so many of them were assassinated) was because secular kingdoms and fiefdoms would support a candidate for the papacy in order to reap the benefits of a preferred papal allegiance.

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Thanks to Peter Kwasniewski for what is perhaps the best quick overview I have seen of the most egregious papal lapses - where 'lapses' is the tame word to cover the spectrum of offenses committed by the popes, from so-called 'prudential' errors to the worst of canonical and civilian crimes... And no, none of them makes Jorge Bergoglio's offenses any more tolerable nor insignificant...

Lessons from Church history:
A brief review of papal lapses
by Peter Kwasniewski

August 6, 2018

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article was first published at OnePeterFive in October 2015 under the pen name “Benedict Constable.” Due to some controversy (the nature of which need not be gone into here), the article was taken down, but not before it had reached a large number of readers and received praise as one of the most helpful responses yet penned to the present crisis in Church authority. The author has extensively revised the article for republication, benefiting from the feedback of a number of readers, including church historians and dogmatic theologians. It is also being published under the author’s proper name.

There are those in the Church who cannot bear to see a pope criticized for any reason – as if the whole Catholic Faith would come tumbling down were we to show that a particular successor of Peter was a scoundrel, murderer, fornicator, coward, compromiser, ambiguator, espouser of heresy, or promoter of faulty discipline.

But it is quite false that the Faith would come tumbling down; it is far stronger, stabler, and sounder than that, because it does not depend on any particular incumbent of the papal office. Rather, it precedes these incumbents; outlasts them; and, in fact, judges them as to whether they have been good or bad vicars of Christ. The Faith is entrusted to the popes, as it is to the bishops, but it is not subject to their control.

The Catholic Faith comes to us from God, from Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Head of the Church, its immovable cornerstone, its permanent guarantee of truth and holiness [1].

The content of that Faith is not determined by the pope. It is determined by Christ and handed down in Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Magisterium – with the Magisterium understood not as anything and everything that emanates from bishops or popes, but as the cumulative public, official, definitive, and universal teaching of the Church enshrined in dogmatic canons and decrees, anathemas, bulls, encyclicals, and other instruments of teaching in harmony with the foregoing.

One serious problem that faces us is a “papalism” that blinds Catholics to the reality that popes are peccable and fallible human beings like the rest of us, and that their pronouncements are guaranteed to be free from error only under strictly delimited conditions [2].

Apart from that, the realm of papal ignorance, error, sin, and disastrous prudential governance is broad and deep – although secular history affords no catalog of greatness comparable to the nearly 100 papal saints, and plenty of worse examples than the worst popes, which says a lot about man’s fallen condition.

At a time when Catholics are confused about whether and how a pope can go wrong, it seems useful to compile examples in three categories:
(1) times when the popes were guilty of grave personal immorality; (2) times when popes connived at or with heresy, or were guilty of a harmful silence or ambiguity in regard to heresy;
(3) times when popes taught (albeit not ex cathedra) something heretical, savoring of heresy, or harmful to the faithful.

Not everyone may agree that every item listed is, in fact, a full-blooded example of the category in question, but that is beside the point; the fact that there are a number of problematic instances is sufficient to show that popes are not automatic oracles of God who hand down only what is good, right, holy, and laudable.

If that last statement seems like a caricature, one need only look at how conservative Catholics today are bending over backward to get lemonade out of every lemon offered by Pope Francis and denying with vehemence that Roman lemons could ever be rotten or poisonous.

Popes guilty of grave personal immorality
This, sadly, is an easy category to fill, and it need not detain us much. One might take as examples six figures about whom E.R. Chamberlin wrote his book The Bad Popes [3].

- John XII (955-964) gave land to a mistress, murdered several people, and was killed by a man who caught him in bed with the man’s wife.
- Benedict IX (1032-1044, 1045, 1047–1048) managed to be pope three times, having sold the office off and bought it back again.
- Urban VI (1378-1389) complained that he did not hear enough screaming when cardinals who had conspired against him were tortured.
- Alexander VI (1492-1503) bribed his way to the throne and bent all of his efforts to the advancement of his illegitimate children, such as Lucrezia, whom at one point he made regent of the papal states, and Cesare, admired by Machiavelli for his bloody ruthlessness. In his reign, debauchery reached an unequaled nadir: for a certain banquet, Alexander VI brought in fifty Roman prostitutes to engage in a public orgy for the viewing pleasure of the invited guests. Such was the scandal of his pontificate that his clergy refused to bury him in St. Peter’s after his death.
- Leo X (1513-1521) was a profligate Medici who once spent a seventh of his predecessors’ reserves on a single ceremony. To his credit, he published the papal bull Exsurge Domine (1520) against the errors of Martin Luther, within which he condemned, among others, the proposition: [B]“That heretics be burned is against the will of the Spirit” (n. 33).
- Clement VII (1523-1534), also a Medici, by his power-politicking with France, Spain, and Germany, managed to get Rome sacked.

There are others one could mention.
- Stephen VII (896-897) hated his predecessor, Pope Formosus, so much that he had him exhumed, tried, de-fingered, and thrown in the Tiber, while (falsely) declaring ordinations given at his hands to have been invalid. Had this ill advised declaration stood, it would have affected the spiritual lives of many, since the priests would not have been confecting the Eucharist or absolving sins.
- Pius II (1458-1464) penned an erotic novel before he became pope.
Innocent VIII (1484-1492) was the first pope to officially acknowledge his bastards, loading them with favors.
- Paul III (1534-1549), who owed his cardinalate to his sister, the mistress of Alexander VI, and himself the father of bastards, made two grandsons cardinals at the ages of 14 and 16 and waged war to obtain the Duchy of Parma for his offspring.
- Urban VIII (1623-1644) engaged in abundant nepotism and supported the castration of boys so they could sing in his papal choir as castrati. Cardinals denounced him, with Cardinal Ludovisi actually threatening to depose him as a protector of heresy.

There are debates about the extent of the wrongdoing of some of these popes, but even with all allowances made, we must admit there is a papal hall of shame.

Popes who connived at heresy or
were guilty of harmful silence or ambiguity

- Pope St. Peter (d. ca. 64). It may seem daring to begin with St. Peter, but after all, he did shamefully compromise on the application of an article of faith, viz., the equality of Jewish and Gentile Christians and the abolition of the Jewish ceremonial law – a lapse for which he was rebuked to his face by St. Paul (cf. Gal 2:11). This has been commented on so extensively by the fathers and doctors of the Church and by more recent authors that it needs no special treatment here.

It should be pointed out that Our Lord, in His Providence, allowed His first vicar to fail more than once so that we would not be scandalized when it happened again with his successors. This, too, is why he chose Judas: so the treason of bishops would not cause us to lose faith that He remains in command of the Church and of human history.

- Pope Liberius (352-366). The story is complicated, but the essentials can be told simply enough. The Arian emperor Constantius had, with typical Byzantine arrogance, “deposed” Liberius in 355 for not subscribing to Arianism. After two years of exile, Liberius came to some kind of accord with the still Arian emperor, who then permitted him to return to Rome.

What compromise doctrinal formula he signed or even whether he signed it is unknown (St. Hilary of Poitiers asserted that he had), but it is surely not without significance that Liberius, the 36th pope, is the only one among 54 popes from St. Peter to St. Gelasius I who is not revered as a saint in the West. At least in those days, popes were not automatically canonized, especially if they messed up on the job and failed to be the outstanding shepherds they should have been.

- Pope Vigilius (537-555). The charges against Vigilius are four. First, he made an intrigue with the empress Theodora, who offered to have him installed as pope in return for his reinstating the deposed Anthimus in Constantinople [4].
Second, he usurped the papacy.
Third, he changed his position in the affair of the Three Chapters (writings that were condemned by the Eastern bishops for going too far in an anti-Monophysite direction). Vigilius at first refused to agree to the condemnation, but when the Second Council of Constantinople confirmed it, Vigilius was prevailed on by imperial pressure to ratify the conciliar decree. [It seems that Vigilius recognized the condemnation of the Three Chapters as problematic because it was perceived in the West as undermining the doctrine of the Council of Chalcedon but nevertheless allowed himself to be cajoled into doing so. ]
Fourth, his wavering on this question and his final decision were responsible for a schism that ensued in the West, since some of the bishops of Italy refused to accept the decree of Constantinople. Their schism against both Rome and the East was to last for many years [5].

- Pope Honorius I (625-638). In their efforts to reconcile the Monophysites of Egypt and Asia, the Eastern emperors took up the doctrine of Monothelitism, which proposed that, while Christ has two natures, He has only one will. When this was rejected by theologians as also heretical, the further compromise was advanced that, although Christ has two wills, they have nevertheless only “one operation” (hence the name of the doctrine, Monenergism). This, too, was false, but the patriarch of Constantinople made efforts to promote reunion by stifling the debate and forbidding discussion of the matter.

In 634, he wrote to Pope Honorius seeking support for this policy, and the pope gave it, ordering that neither expression (“one operation” or “two operations”) should be defended. In issuing this reply, Honorius disowned the orthodox writers who had used the term “two operations.” More seriously, he gave support to those who wished to fudge doctrinal clarity to conciliate a party in rebellion against the Church.

Fifteen years later, the Emperor Constans II published a document called the Typos in which he ordained precisely the same policy that Honorius had done. However, the new pope, Martin I, summoned a synod that condemned the Typos and upheld the doctrine of two operations. An enraged Constans had Martin brought to Constantinople and, after a cruel imprisonment, exiled him to the Crimea, where he died, for which reason he is revered as a martyr – the last of the papal martyrs (so far).

In 680-681, after the death of Constans, the Third Council of Constantinople was held, which discarded the aim of harmony with the Monophysites in favor of that with Rome. Flaunting solidarity with the persecuted Martin, it explicitly and famously disowned his predecessor: “We decide that Honorius be cast out of the holy Church of God.”

The then reigning pope, Leo II, in a letter accepting the decrees of this council, condemned Honorius with the same forthrightness: “We anathematize Honorius, who did not seek to purify this apostolic Church with the teaching of apostolic tradition, but by a profane betrayal permitted its stainless faith to be surrendered.”

In a letter to the bishops of Spain, Pope Leo II again condemned Honorius as one “who did not, as became the apostolic authority, quench the flame of heretical doctrine as it sprang up, but quickened it by his negligence” [6].

- Pope John Paul II (1978-2005). John Paul II designed the gathering of world religions in Assisi in 1986 in such a way that the impression of indifferentism as well as the commission of sacrilegious and blasphemous acts were not accidental, but in accord with the papally approved program. His kissing of the Koran is all too well known. He was thus guilty of dereliction in his duty to uphold and proclaim the one true Catholic Faith and gave considerable scandal to the faithful [7]. [For all that, he is now a saint, of course, as will Paul VI two months from now, who had far more grievous prudential lapses than Wojtyla's Assisi and Koran indiscretions. I dread that the Bergoglians will insist that none of Bergoglio's heresies or 'near heresies' will keep him from becoming canonized eventually!]

Popes who taught something heretical,
savoring of heresy, or harmful to the faithful
Here we enter into more controversial territory, but there can be no doubt that the cases listed below are real problems for a papal positivist or ultramontanist, in the sense that the latter term has recently acquired: one who overstresses the authority of the words and actions of the reigning pontiff as if they were the sole or principal standard of what constitutes the Catholic Faith.

- Pope Paschal II (1099-1118). In his desire to obtain cooperation from Emperor Henry V, Pope Paschal II reversed the policy of all of his predecessors by conceding to the emperor the privilege of investiture of bishops with the ring and crosier, which signified both temporal and spiritual power. This concession provoked a storm of protest throughout Christendom.

In a letter, St. Bruno of Segni (c. 1047-1123) called Pope Paschal’s position “heresy” because it contradicted the decisions of many church councils and argued that whoever defended the pope’s position also became a heretic thereby. Although the pope retaliated by removing St. Bruno from his office as abbot of Monte Cassino, eventually Bruno’s argument prevailed, and the pope renounced his earlier decision [8].

- Pope John XXII (1316-1334). In his public preaching from November 1, 1331 to January 5, 1332, Pope John XXII denied the doctrine that the just souls are admitted to the beatific vision, maintaining that this vision would be delayed until the general resurrection at the end of time. This error had already been refuted by St. Thomas Aquinas and many other theologians, but its revival on the very lips of the pope drew forth the impassioned opposition of a host of bishops and theologians, among them Guillaume Durand de Saint Pourçain, Bishop of Meaux; the English Dominican Thomas Waleys, who, as a result of his public resistance, underwent trial and imprisonment; the Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra; and Cardinal Jacques Fournier.

When the pope tried to impose this erroneous doctrine on the Faculty of Theology in Paris, the king of France, Philip VI of Valois, prohibited its teaching and, according to accounts by the Sorbonne’s chancellor, Jean Gerson, even reached the point of threatening John XXII with burning at the stake if he did not make a retraction. The day before his death, John XXII retracted his error.

His successor, Cardinal Fournier, under the name Benedict XII, proceeded forthwith to define ex cathedra the Catholic truth in this matter. St. Robert Bellarmine admits that John XXII held a materially heretical opinion with the intention of imposing it on the faithful but was never permitted by God to do so [9].

- Pope Paul III (1534-1549). In 1535, Pope Paul III approved and promulgated the radically novel and simplified breviary of Cardinal Quignonez, which, although approved as an option for the private recitation of clergy, ended up in some cases being implemented publicly. Some Jesuits welcomed it, but most Catholics – including St. Francis Xavier [perhaps the most outstanding Jesuit saint] – viewed it with grave misgivings and opposed it, sometimes violently, because it was seen as an unwarrantable attack on the liturgical tradition of the Church [10].

Its very novelty constituted an abuse of the lex orandi and therefore of the lex credendi. It was harmful to those who took it up because it separated them from the Church’s organic tradition of worship; it was a private person’s fabrication, a rupture with the inheritance of the saints.

In 1551, Spanish theologian John of Arze submitted a strong protest against it to the Fathers of the Council of Trent. Fortunately, Pope Paul IV repudiated the breviary by rescript in 1558, some 23 years after its initial papal approval, and Pope St. Pius V altogether prohibited its use in 1568. Thus, five popes and 33 years after its initial papal approval, this mangled “on the spot product” was buried [11].

- Pope Paul VI (1963-1978). As the pope who promulgated all of the documents of the Second Vatican Council, whatever problems are contained in those documents – and these problems [12], neither insignificant nor few in number, have been identified by many – must be laid at the feet of Paul VI.

One might, for example, point out materially erroneous statements in Gaudium et Spes (e.g., n. 24, which asserts that “love of God and neighbor is the first and greatest commandment” [13], or n. 63, which asserts that “man is the source, the center, and the purpose of all economic and social life” [14]), but it is perhaps the Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis Humanae (December 7, 1965) that will go down in history as the low water mark of this assembly. Like some kind of frenzied merry-go-round, the hermeneutical battles over this document will never stop until it is definitively set aside by a future pope or council.

In spite of Herculean (and verbose) attempts at reconciling D.H. with the preceding magisterium, it is at least prima facie plausible that the document’s assertion of a natural right to hold and propagate error, even if it be misunderstood by its partisans as truth, is contrary both to natural reason and to the Catholic faith [15].

Far worse than this is the first edition of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, promulgated with the signature of Paul VI on April 3, 1969, which contained formally heretical statements on the nature of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

When a group of Roman theologians headed by Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci pointed out the grave problems, the pope ordered the text to be corrected so that a second revised edition could be brought out. In spite of the fact that the differences in the text are astonishing, the first edition was never officially repudiated, nor was it ordered to be destroyed; it was merely replaced [16].

Moreover, although expounding the claim would exceed the scope of this article, the promulgation of the Novus Ordo Missae itself was both a dereliction of the pope’s duty to protect and promote the organic tradition of the Latin Rite and an occasion of immense harm to the faithful.

- Pope John Paul II asserted on multiple occasions a right to change one’s religion, regardless of what that religion may be. This is true only if you hold to a false religion, because no one is bound to what is false, whereas everyone is bound to seek and adhere to the one true religion. If you are a Catholic, you cannot possibly have a right, either from nature or from God the author of nature, to abandon the Faith. Hence, a statement such as this: “Religious freedom constitutes the very heart of human rights. Its inviolability is such that individuals must be recognized as having the right even to change their religion, if their conscience so demands”[17] is false taken at face value – and dangerously false, one might add, because of its liberal, naturalistic, indifferentist conceptual foundation.

- Pope Francis. One hardly knows where to begin with this egregious doctor (and I do not mean it in the complimentary sense of doctor egregius). Indeed, an entire website, Denzinger-Bergoglio, has been established by philosophers and theologians who have listed in painstaking detail all of the statements of this pope that have contradicted Sacred Scripture and the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, we may identify several particularly dangerous false teachings.
(1) The explicit approval of giving Holy Communion to divorced and “remarried” Catholics who have no intention of living as brother and sister, expressed as a possibility in the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia and confirmed as a reality in the letter to the bishops of Buenos Aires published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis [18].

(2) The attempted change in teaching on capital punishment, first raised in a speech in October 2017 and now imposed on the Church by means of a change to the Catechism, in spite of the fact that the new doctrine manifestly goes against a unanimous tradition with its roots in Scripture [19]. The worst aspect of this change, as many have already pointed out, is that it loudly transmits the signal, most welcome to progressives, liberals, and modernists, that doctrines handed down over centuries or millennia, printed in every penny catechism that has ever rolled off the printing press, are up for revision, even to the point of saying the opposite, when the Zeitgeist pipes and the pope dances to the tune.

There is no telling what further “development of doctrine” is in store for us enlightened moderns who see so much farther into the moral law than our barbaric predecessors. Ordination of females, overcoming the last vestiges of primitive patriarchalism? Legitimization of contraception and sodomy, finally letting go of the reductionistic biologism that has plagued Catholic moral teaching with the bugbear of “intrinsically disordered acts”? And so on and so forth.

As a Benedictine friend of mine likes to say: “The issue is not the issue.” A Dominican priest perceptively wrote: “This isn’t about the death penalty. It’s about getting language into the Catechism that allows theologians to evaluate doctrine/dogma in historicist terms; that is, ‘This truth is no longer true because times have changed.’ The Hegelians got their wish.”

(3) The annulment reforms, which amount, in practice, to an admission of “Catholic divorce” because of the novel concept of a “presumption of invalidity” [20].


This overview, from Paschal II to Francis, suffices to allow us to see one essential point: If heresy can be held and taught by a pope, even temporarily or to a certain group, it is a fortiori possible that disciplinary acts promulgated by the pope, even those intended for the universal Church, may also be harmful. After all, heresy in itself is worse than lax or contradictory discipline.

Melchior Cano, an eminent theologian at the Council of Trent, famously said:

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Now one can say briefly what [those do] who temerariously and without discrimination defend the supreme pontiff’s judgment concerning everything whatsoever: these people unsteady the authority of the Apostolic See rather than fostering it; they overturn it rather than shoring it up. For – passing over what was explained a little before in his chapter – what profit does he gain in arguing against heretics whom they perceive as defending papal authority not with judgment but with emotion, nor as doing so in order to draw forth light and truth by the force of his argument but in order to convert another to his own thought and will? Peter does not need our lie; he does not need our adulation. [21]

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Let us return to our point of departure. The Catholic faith is revealed by God, nor can it be modified by any human being: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever” (Heb 13:8).

The pope and the bishops are honored servants of that revelation, which they are to hand down faithfully, without novelty and without mutation, from generation to generation. As St. Vincent of Lerins so beautifully explains, there can be growth in understanding and formulation, but no contradiction, no “evolution.”

The truths of the Faith, contained in Scripture and Tradition, are authentically defined, interpreted, and defended in the narrowly circumscribed acta of councils and popes over the centuries. In this sense, it is quite proper to say: “Look in Denzinger – that’s the doctrine of the Faith.”

Catholicism is, has always been, and will always be stable, perennial, objectively knowable, a rock of certitude in a sea of chaos – despite the efforts of Satan and his dupes to change it.

The crisis we are passing through is largely a result of collective amnesia of who we are and what we believe, together with a nervous tendency toward hero-worship, looking here and there for the Great Leader who will rescue us.

But our Great Leader, our King of Kings and Lord of Lords, is Jesus Christ. We follow and obey the pope and the bishops insofar as they transmit to us the pure and salutary doctrine of our Lord and guide us in following His way of holiness, not when they offer us polluted water to drink or lead us to the muck.

Just as our Lord was a man like us in all things except sin, so we follow our pastors in all things except sin – whether their sin be one of heresy, schism, sexual immorality, or sacrilege. The faithful have a duty to form their minds and their consciences to know whom to follow and when. We are not mechanical puppets.

Neither are the popes: they are men of flesh and blood, with their own intellect and free will, memory and imagination, opinions, aspirations, ambitions. They can cooperate for better or for worse with the graces and responsibilities of their supreme office.

The pope unquestionably has a singular and unique authority on earth as the vicar of Christ. It follows that he has a moral obligation to use it virtuously, for the common good of the Church – and that he can sin by abusing his authority or by failing to use it when or in the manner in which he ought to do so.

Infallibility, correctly understood, is the Holy Spirit’s gift to him; the right and responsible use of his office is not something guaranteed by the Holy Spirit. Here the pope must pray and work, work and pray like the rest of us. He can rise or fall like the rest of us.

Popes can make themselves worthy of canonization or of execration. At the end of his mortal pilgrimage, each successor of St. Peter will either attain eternal salvation or suffer eternal damnation. All Christians, in like manner, will become either saintly by following the authentic teaching of the Church and repudiating all error and vice, or damnable by following spurious teaching and embracing what is false and evil.

I can hear an objection from some readers: “If a pope can go off the rails and stop teaching the orthodox Faith, then what’s the point of having a papacy? Isn’t the whole reason we have the vicar of Christ to enable us to know for certain the truth of the Faith?”

The answer is that the Catholic Faith pre-exists the popes, even though they occupy a special place vis-à-vis its defense and articulation. This Faith can be known with certainty by the faithful through a host of means – including, one might add, five centuries’ worth of traditional catechisms from all over the world that concur in their teaching. The pope is not able to say, like an absolute monarch: La foi, c’est moi.

But let us look at numbers for a moment. This article has listed eleven immoral popes and ten popes who dabbled, to one degree or another, in heresy. There have been a total of 266 popes. If we do the math, we come out with 4.14% of the Successors of Peter who earned opprobrium for their moral behavior and 3.76% who deserve it for their dalliance with error.

On the other hand, about 90 of the pre-Vatican II popes are revered as saints or blesseds, which is 33.83%. We could debate about the numbers (have I been too lenient or too severe in my lists?), but is there anyone who fails to behold in these numbers the evident hand of Divine Providence? A monarchy of 266 incumbents lasting for 2,000 years that can boast failure and success rates like this is no mere human construct, operating by its own steam.

These numbers teach us two lessons.
- First, we learn a sense of wonder and gratitude before the evident miracle of the papacy. We learn trust in a Divine Providence that guides the Holy Church of God throughout the tempests of ages and makes it outlast even the relatively few bad papacies we have suffered for our testing or for our sins.
- Second, we learn discernment and realism. On the one hand, the Lord has led the vast majority of his vicars along the way of truth so that we can know that our confidence is well placed in the barque of Peter, steered by the hand of Peter. Yet the Lord has also permitted a small number of his vicars to falter or fail so we will see that they are not automatically righteous, effortlessly wise in governance, or a direct mouthpiece of God in teaching.

The popes must freely choose to cooperate with the grace of their office, or they, too, can go off the rails; they can do a better or worse job of shepherding the flock, and once in a while, they can be wolves. This happens rarely, but it does happen by God’s permissive will, precisely so we do not abdicate our reason, outsource our faith, and sleepwalk into ruin.

The papal record is remarkable enough to testify to a well-nigh miraculous otherworldly power holding at bay the forces of darkness, lest the “gates of hell” prevail; but the record is speckled just enough to make us wary, keep us on our toes. The advice “be sober, be vigilant” applies not only to interactions with the world “out there,” but to our life in the Church, for “our adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Pet 5:8), from the lowly pewsitter to the lofty hierarch.

Our teacher, our model, our doctrine, our way of life: these are all given to us, gloriously manifested in the Incarnate Word, inscribed in the fleshy tablets of our hearts. We are not awaiting them from the pope, as if they do not already exist in finished form.

The pope is here to help us to believe and to do what our Lord is calling every one of us to believe and do. If any human being on the face of the Earth tries to stand in the way – be it even the pope himself – we must resist him and do what we know is right [22]. As the great Dom Prosper Guéranger wrote:

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When the shepherd becomes a wolf, the first duty of the flock is to defend itself. It is usual and regular, no doubt, for doctrine to descend from the bishops to the faithful, and those who are subject in the faith are not to judge their superiors.

But in the treasure of revelation there are essential doctrines which all Christians, by the very fact of their title as such, are bound to know and defend. The principle is the same whether it be a question of belief or conduct, dogma or morals. …

The true children of Holy Church at such times are those who walk by the light of their baptism, not the cowardly souls who, under the specious pretext of submission to the powers that be, delay their opposition to the enemy in the hope of receiving instructions which are neither necessary nor desirable. [23]

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Notes
[1] On the changelessness of the Faith that derives from Christ’s nature and mission, see my Winnipeg address and my article at OnePeterFive, “The Cult of Change and Christian Changelessness.”
[2] To understand this point better, I recommend reading the words of Fr. Adrian Fortescue and the excellent posts of Fr. Hunwicke. This explanation of infallibility is also worthy of consideration.
I define “papalism” or its more extreme version “papolatry” as follows: If the Faith is seen more as “what the reigning pope is saying” (simply speaking) than “what the Church has always taught” (taken collectively), we are dealing with a false exaltation of the person and office of the pope.
As Ratzinger said many times, the pope is the servant of Tradition, not its master; he is bound by it, not in power over it. Of course, the pope can and will make doctrinal and disciplinary determinations, but relatively few things he says are going to make the cut for formal infallibility.
All that he teaches qua pope (when he seems to be intending to teach in that manner) should be received with respect and submission, unless there is something in it that is simply contrary to what has been handed down before.
The examples given in my article show certain cases (admittedly rare) where good Catholics had to resist. This, I take it, is what Cardinal Burke and Bishop Schneider have also been saying: if, e.g., the synods on marriage and family or their papal byproducts attempt to force on the Church a teaching or a discipline contrary to the Faith, we cannot accept them and must resist.
[3] E. R. Chamberlin, The Bad Popes (Dorchester: Dorset Press, 1994).
[4] Following (sometimes verbatim) Henry Sire’s account in Phoenix from the Ashes (Kettering, Ohio: Angelico Press, 2015), 17-18. I recommend Sire’s book as the best analysis of modern Church history that I have yet read.
[5] He did not carry through with this move – but only because the Emperor forbade it.
[6] Again following the account in Sire, Phoenix, 18-19.
[7] See Sire, Phoenix, 384-88.
[8] Following the detailed account of Roberto de Mattei. It is true that the term “heresy” was used rather widely in earlier times, almost as shorthand for “anything that looks or sounds uncatholic,” but there is implicit in Paschal II’s temporary stance on investiture a false understanding of the true, proper, independent, divine, and non-transferable authority of the Church hierarchy vis-à-vis all temporal authority. It is, in other words, a serious matter, not a mere kerfuffle over bureaucratic procedure.
[9] For full details, see this article.
[10] See Alcuin Reid, The Organic Development of the Liturgy, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 37.
[11] We should not be surprised to find that, almost 400 years later, Archbishop Bugnini in 1963 expressed his unbounded admiration for the Quignonez Breviary, which in many ways served as the model for the new Liturgy of the Hours.
[12] In Phoenix from the Ashes, Henry Sire provides excellent commentary on many of the difficulties of Vatican II. One may also profitably consult Roberto de Mattei, The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story (Fitzwilliam, N.H.: Loreto, 2012). Msgr. Bruno Gherardini has made excellent contributions.

Paolo Pasqualucci has provided a list of “26 points of rupture.” While I do not necessarily agree with every point Pasqualucci argues, his outline is sufficient to show what a mess the Council documents are and what an era of unclarity they have prompted. The simple fact that popes over the past fifty years have spent much of their time issuing one “clarification” after another, usually about points on which the Council spoke ambiguously (one need only think of the oceans of ink spilled on Sacrosanctum Concilium, Lumen Gentium, Dignitatis Humanae, and Nostra Aetate), is sufficient to show that it failed in the function for which a council exists: to assist Catholics in knowing their faith better and living it more fully.
[13] G.S. 24 states that “love of God and neighbor is the first and greatest commandment.” This contradicts Christ’s own words: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Mt. 22:37-40). [It is shocking and utterly shameful that such a willful - because very obvious - mis-statement of Christ's words appears to have been simply ignored by the Council Fathers - each of whom, one presumes, signed their names to Gaudium et Spes.] Are we required both to assent to Christ’s words that the first and greatest commandment is the love of God while the second is love of neighbor and to assent to G.S. 24 that the first and greatest commandment is the love of God-and-neighbor (cf. Apostolicam Actuositatem 8)?

While the love of God and of neighbor are intimately conjoined, love of neighbor cannot stand on the same level as the love of God, as if they were the very same commandment with no differentiation. Yes, in loving our neighbor, we do love God, and we love Christ, but God is the first, last, and proper object of charity, and we love our neighbor on account of God.
We love our neighbor and even our enemies because we love God more and in a qualitatively different way: the commandment to love God befits His infinite goodness and supremacy, while the commandment to love one’s fellow man befits his finite goodness and relative place.
If there were only one commandment of love, then we would be entitled to love God as we love ourselves – which would be sinful – or to love our neighbor with our whole heart, soul, and mind – which would also be sinful. In short, it is impossible for one and the same commandment to be given for the love of God and the love of neighbor.

The same erroneous view is found in Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium 161: “Along with the virtues, this [observance of Christ’s teaching] means above all the new commandment, the first and the greatest of the commandments, and the one that best identifies us as Christ’s disciples: ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you’". (Jn. 15:12).
Here John 15:12 has been taken for the first and greatest commandment, which it is not, according to Our Lord’s own teaching. Characteristic of the same confusion are the misleading applications of Romans 13:8,10 and James 2:8 that follow in E.G. 161, which give the impression that “the law” being spoken of is comprehensive, when in fact it refers to the moral law. In other words, to say that love of neighbor “fulfills the whole law” means that it does all that the law requires in our dealings with one another. It is not speaking of our prior obligation to love God first and more than everyone else, including our very selves.
[14] G.S. 63 claims: “Man is the source, the center, and the purpose of all economic and social life.” This might have been true in a hypothetical universe where the Son of God did not become man (although one might still have a doubt, inasmuch as the Word of God is the exemplar of all creation), but in the real universe of which the God-Man is the head, the source, and the center, the purpose of all economic and social life is and cannot be other than the Son of God, Christ the King, and, consequently, the realization of His Kingdom.
Anything other than that is a distortion and a deviation. The fact that the same document says elsewhere that God is the ultimate end of man (e.g., G.S. 13) does not erase the difficulty in G.S. 63.
[15] See Sire, Phoenix, 331-358, for an excellent treatment of the problems.
[16] For details, see Michael Davies, Pope Paul’s New Mass (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 2009), 299-328; Sire, Phoenix, 249, 277-82.
[17] Message for the World Day of Peace, 1999. Compare the formula in a letter from 1980: “freedom to hold or not to hold a particular faith and to join the corresponding confessional community.”
[18] See John Lamont’s penetrating study.
[19] See my articles here and here, and Ed Feser’s article in First Things online. There will undoubtedly be a thousand more responses, all equally capable of showing the magnitude of the problem Francis has (once again) created for himself and for the entire Church.
[20] First, such a presumption contradicts both the natural moral law and the divine law. Second, even if there were nothing doctrinally problematic in the content of the pertinent motu proprios, the result of a vast increase in easily granted annulments on thin pretexts will certainly redound to the harm of the faithful by weakening the already weak understanding of and commitment to the indissoluble bond of marriage among Catholics, by making it much more probable that some valid marriages will be declared null (thus rubber-stamping adultery and profaning the sacraments), and by lowering the esteem with which all marriages are perceived. For good commentary, see Joseph Shaw.
[21] Reverendissimi D. Domini Melchioris Cani Episcopi Canariensis, Ordinis Praedicatorum, & sacrae theologiae professoris, ac primariae cathedrae in Academia Salmanticensi olim praefecti, De locis theologicis libri duodecim (Salamanca: Mathias Gastius, 1563), 197. This is often cited in a paraphrase: “Peter has no need of our lies or flattery. Those who blindly and indiscriminately defend every decision of the Supreme Pontiff are the very ones who do most to undermine the authority of the Holy See – they destroy instead of strengthening its foundations.” (This is how it appears, e.g., in George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of John Paul II [New York: HarperCollins, 1999], 15.)
[22] St. Robert Bellarmine: “Just as it is licit to resist the Pontiff that aggresses the body, it is also licit to resist the one who aggresses souls or who disturbs civil order, or, above all, who attempts to destroy the Church. I say that it is licit to resist him by not doing what he orders and by preventing his will from being executed; it is not licit, however, to judge, punish, or depose him, since these acts are proper to a superior” (De Romano Pontifice, II.29, cited in Christopher Ferrara and Thomas Woods, The Great Façade, second ed. [Kettering, Ohio: Angelico Press, 2015], 187).
[23] The Liturgical Year, trans. Laurence Shepherd (Great Falls, Mt.: St. Bonaventure Publications, 2000), vol. 4, Septuagesima, 379-380. He is speaking here of opposition to the Nestorian heresy.

John Paul II addressing the participants of the 1993 World Youth Day in Denver, the year he promulgated Veritatis Splendor.

'Veritatis Splendor' at 25
John Paul II’s great and most controversial encyclical, on morality and moral theology,
published August 6, 1993, still answers some of the most crucial questions of our time
by Samuel Gregg

August 2, 2018

Outside the Catholic world, the issuing of papal encyclicals rarely garners much attention. That, however, wasn’t the case when, 25 years ago, John Paul II promulgated his long pontificate’s most controversial encyclical on August 6, 1993.

Its very title, Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth), threw down a gauntlet to societies — and a church — increasingly in thrall to relativism. Major newspapers not only gave considerable coverage to Veritatis Splendor’s release; they opened their opinion-pages to the encyclical’s supporters and critics, with Catholics and non-Catholics found on both sides.

The fact that this division didn’t break down along “Catholics-versus-everyone-else” lines was revealing.
- First, it underscored that some Catholic scholars had effectively rejected something which the Church has taught unambiguously from its beginning: that certain acts are intrinsically evil (intrinsece malum) and never to be chosen.
- Second, it became apparent that many non-Catholics understood how denying such moral absolutes strikes at the heart of any society which aspires to be civilized.

I was barely in my twenties when the encyclical appeared. I’ll never forget, however, a Jewish friend commenting that he considered it indispensable reading for anyone who didn’t want to see the West collapse any further into a morass of moral incoherence. There was simply, he said, no other contemporary document like it.

Veritatis Splendor was certainly that rarity: a post-1960s text which forcibly challenged the moral subjectivism and sentimentalism which had permeated most Western culture-shaping institutions.

But the encyclical wasn’t just about reaffirming basic Catholic moral teaching. It sought to present to a church and world increasingly settling for moral mediocrity a compelling narrative about what freedom and the good life are really about.

The rise of the new morality
Skepticism about humanity’s ability to know truth can be traced back as far as the Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis (circa 365-275 BC). Christianity, however, has always insisted that humans can know moral truth through faith and reason.

This includes the truth, as John Paul wrote in his 1984 exhortation Reconciliatio et paenitentia, that there are “acts which, per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object.”

His next line describes this as “a doctrine, based on the Decalogue and on the preaching of the New Testament, and assimilated into the kerygma of the Apostles and belonging to the earliest teaching of the Church” (RP 17).

That’s about as specific as a pope can get. But John Paul’s unambiguous reaffirmation of the existence of what are called exceptionless moral norms indicated his awareness that some Catholic theologians had all but abandoned what Veritatis Splendor would describe as a matter of “revealed faith” (VS 29).

One reason for this abandonment was the concerted campaign before and after Humanae Vitae to overturn settled Catholic teaching on contraception. The Church’s equally settled position that certain acts may never be chosen constituted an insurmountable barrier to any such reversal.

Some theologians concluded, without directly saying so, that this teaching had to be rendered meaningless so that contraception need not be understood as always contra the good of life. The result was, Veritatis Splendor bluntly stated, was “an overall and systematic calling into question of traditional moral doctrine” (VS 4) and, many would add, perhaps two generations of Catholic clergy in many seminaries being serious malformed in moral theology.

This, however, isn’t the whole story. Some roots of the problems identified by Veritatis Splendor went back further — especially to how Catholic moral theology had been widely understood in the decades leading up to Vatican II.

A comprehensive account of these developments may be found in Servais Pinckaers, OP’s The Sources of Christian Ethics. This illustrated how Catholic moral analysis had become
- detached from reflection on Scriptural and Patristic sources,
- inattentive to the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, and
- highly focused on a morality of obligation issuing from law.
The latter’s influence, Pinckaers argued, was exacerbated by the popularity of Kantian ethics and its emphasis on the categorical imperative among German theologians from the nineteenth century onwards.

As a result, much pre-Vatican II Catholic moral theology was marked by considerable tensions between freedom and law. According to Pinckaers, “law” had “the appearance of a pressure external to the person, despite all attempts to interiorize and justify it.” That encouraged many confessors to stress rules-for-the-sake-of-rules. “Freedom” was thus reduced to “whatever isn’t forbidden.” Taken together, this contributed to a mentality of “how far can I go without breaking the rules?”

The upshot of this were often legalistic approaches to morality. When the Church consequently came under immense pressure in the 1960s to abandon its opposition to contraception, much of the moral theology being taught in the Roman universities and seminaries around the world wasn’t well-equipped to respond adequately.

It was against this background that scholars like Pinckaers sought to renew Catholic moral theology after Vatican II. Renewal, however, isn’t the same as displacement. Some Catholic moralists saw the contraception controversy as an opportunity to further their efforts to construct a new morality: one which retained some of the language and structure of Catholic moral reasoning but embodied ways of ethical reflection far removed from Catholic teaching.

Errors old and new
One of Veritatis Splendor’s objectives was to explain major errors characterizing particular theories advanced by influential Catholic moralists who became prominent in the 1960s. While these individuals weren’t named, it’s not hard to identify who they were.

Consider the encyclical’s critique of what was called “the fundamental option.” This position was associated with the German Redemptorist theologian Bernard Häring (1912-1998) who taught for many years at Rome’s Alphonsian Academy. In brief, it involved stating that what ultimately mattered for morality was the radical choice for faith in God.

This “fundamental option” for Christ was, the argument went, of much greater consequence than more particular free choices. As long as you love Christ, you’ll remain a Christ-centered person. You shouldn’t subsequently fear that God will get too concerned about any number of actions always understood as gravely sinful by the Church.

Häring, his defenders might reply, was trying to help Catholic moral theology escape a fixation with rules and to underscore love as the fundamental way of the Christian. But while affirming that the Christian is someone who’s made a fundamental choice for Christ, Veritatis Splendor also stated that Christianity has always understood this same choice to be linked to doing certain acts and always, without exception, refraining from other particular actions (VS 66-67, 84).

That’s one reason why the encyclical’s analysis of Christ’s encounter with the rich young man identifies the choice to always follow the negative commandments listed in the Decalogue’s second tablet (don’t murder, don’t steal, etc.) as “the basic condition” (VS 13) for life in Christ. For these “negative precepts” protect and promote goods like life and truth-telling which are core to our nature as humans and provide content to the great commandment to love God and our neighbor (VS 13).

Veritatis Splendor also observes that each of my free choices for or against these goods engages the fullness of my reason and free will (VS 71). Accordingly, should I freely choose to murder someone, I can’t help but damage my fundamental option for Christ who teaches us that this choice is never compatible with life in him.

Of course, our friendship with Christ is restorable via another free choice: the confessing of the sins that broke our relationship with Christ and a loving God’s ensuing forgiveness. Nor is it enough to just “do no evil.” We’re also called to do good. To claim, however, that our basic free choice for God can somehow be reconciled with free choices for evil is to fly in the face of both Catholic faith and reason itself.

A second category of approaches to morality condemned by Veritatis Splendor is likewise characterized by their implicit denial that certain acts may never done. These theories are grouped under the titles of “consequentialism” and “proportionalism.”
- The first holds that an act’s morality is determined by calculating the foreseeable consequences of our free choices.
- The second maintains we make moral choices by determining the proportions of evil and good that’s probable in a given act.

To find a generic representative of these ways of thinking, we need look no further than Josef Fuchs, SJ, (1912-2005), another well-known German theologian who taught at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University for decades. The most precise expression of Fuchs’ method of moral reasoning may be found in his Christian Ethics in a Secular Arena (1984). Fuchs describes it in the following way:

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Because of the co-existence of pre-moral goods and pre-moral evils in every human act, we must determine the moral rightness or wrongness of an act by considering all the goods and evils in an act and evaluating whether the evil or the good for human beings is prevalent in the act, considering in this evaluation the hierarchy of values involved and the pressing character of certain values in the concrete.

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For Fuchs, then, one or more aspects of an act might be evil. But that act may still be undertaken if you’re compared the totality of evils and goods in that act, concluded that the goods outweigh the evils, and measured this against the totality of bads and goods involved in alternative acts.

That, however, contradicts the Christian teaching that an act is good only if good in all relevant respects, and evil if defective in any respect (Bonum ex integra causa, malum ex quocumque defectu). It also nullifies the very idea of intrinsically evil acts.

But there’s also a philosophical problem with Fuchs’ method. It assumes that we can measure moral goods and evils.

Humans can certainly weigh those outcomes which are quantifiable. This occurs all the time in the natural sciences and particular social sciences like economics. But, Veritatis Splendor stressed, proportionalists and consequentialists were proposing that we can comparatively evaluate things which are in many ways incomparable and unquantifiable.

Precisely how might you determine, for instance, that three evils potentially realized in an act outweigh, say, two goods potentially realized by the same act?
- How do you measure the effects of an evil like stealing against the impact of pursuing a good like knowledge of truth?
- From what perspective can any human being propose to engage in such weighing in a way that’s reasonable?
In short, Fuchs and his followers were proposing a commensuration of things which are incommensurable.

This wasn’t a new philosophical error. The same mistake plagues Jeremy Bentham’s act-utilitarianism and John Stuart Mill’s rule-utilitarianism: the error of seeking to measure the immeasurable.

Thus Veritatis Splendor highlighted “the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of evaluating all the good and evil consequences and effects . . . of one’s own acts.” Such “an exhaustive rational calculation,” the encyclical added, “is not possible. How then can one go about establishing proportions which depend on a measuring, the criteria of which remain obscure?” (VS 77).

It follows that if you embrace proportionalism or consequentialism then, at some point, you’re bound to become arbitrary in the way you make moral judgments. And to be arbitrary in one’s moral reasoning is to be irrational. Indeed, the only being who could possibly know all the foreseen (let alone the unforeseen!) good and evil effects of any given free choice is God — and Him we human beings most certainly are not.

When the encyclical appeared, some proportionalists and consequentialists maintained they did believe in moral absolutes. Their writings, however, demonstrated that they didn’t understand moral absolutes in the same way that Christ, Paul, Augustine and Aquinas did.

Instead we find formulations like those proposed by the Jesuit moralist Bruno Schüller (1925-2007) in a 1980 festschrift for Karl Rahner, SJ. These take the form of tautologies like “don’t steal when it would be wrong to do so” or “don’t kill wrongfully.” They leave open the possibility that there might be such things as “rightful stealing.” That’s contrary to Catholicism’s understanding of moral absolutes because the object of an act of theft is always evil, and therefore irreconcilable with the good.

Denying moral absolutes, however, does something else. It opens the door to people rationalizing evil.

In a 2005 essay, Joseph Ratzinger noted that [B]“a moral theologian, now deceased, once remarked that “good means ‘only better than'.” Reflecting on that claim, Ratzinger warned, “If this is the case, nothing is intrinsically evil.” That would mean it’s conceivable that anything may be done.
- If that’s true, maybe it’s tolerable to hand over the Jews in your village to the SS if you calculate that this will save the whole village from going to Auschwitz.
- Perhaps it’s sometimes reasonable to kill prisoners to harvest their organs if this is the only way to save innocent individuals’ lives.

Yes, these are vivid examples, and no doubt some proportionalists and consequentialists would never have countenanced such choices. The difficulty is that their theories couldn’t generate an in-principle objection to such actions ever being undertaken.

This is what my Jewish friend found so impressive about Veritatis Splendor. Its insistence on the moral absolutes that he, as a Jew, recognized in the Decalogue wasn’t only about living a coherent moral life. He grasped that they protect the weak from the strong, the fashionable, the loud, and the ruthless.

Christian morality’s more excellent way
Other errors which had permeated Catholic moral theology since the 1960s were critiqued in Veritatis Splendor. Yet there was another side to the encyclical: its effort to show how striving to live the way of Christian morality is a path to grandeur for everyone, however humble our station in life.

In a 2014 interview with Commonweal, Cardinal Walter Kasper asserted that “heroism” — by which he appears to have meant heroic virtue — “is not for the average Christian.” But settling for moral mediocrity isn’t Veritatis Splendor’s view of the Christian vocation. This is spelt out in the encyclical’s first and third chapters. These integrate freedom and truth in ways which ensure they aren’t at odds but rather directed to the fullest realization of life in Christ.

Against those who reduce freedom to absence of constraint, Veritatis Splendor specified that Christianity’s understanding of liberty goes beyond this. Freedom, it emphasized, is inseparable from man’s unique capacity for reason, free will, and consequent ability to know and choose more-than-instrumental-goods. When we constantly strive to choose these goods and avoid evil, we shape ourselves in the direction of the true, good and beautiful. No longer are we slaves of our passions. Instead we become wholly free and more truly alive.

To this end, Veritatis Splendor reminds us that the completeness of the liberty to which our reason directs us is found in Christ: the Logos who opens up to us the prospect of eternal life and the Revelation that God is capital “L” Love.

From this standpoint, Christian moral principles aren’t “rules-for-rules-sake.” Instead “the rules” are intimately concerned with living in the Truth. Obviously we can’t do this on our own. Veritatis Splendor recalls Paul’s insight that while we can know and choose the good, we’re also drawn to evil. All of us have violated one or more of the negative commandments. Hence, the encyclical underscores, we need grace (VS 102-105).

In some of its most powerful passages, Veritatis Splendor points to the saints and martyrs as those who testify that keeping God’s law is “never impossible” (VS 102). Their lives demonstrate, John Paul wrote, that “It would be a very serious error to conclude . . . that the Church’s teaching is essentially only an ‘ideal’” (VS 103). The saints and martyrs show us that everyone is capable of holiness: that, as the encyclical insists, “It makes no difference whether one is the master of the world or the ‘poorest of the poor’ on the face of the earth. Before the demands of morality we are all absolutely equal” (VS 96).

No doubt, enduring pain or even losing one’s life by witnessing to the moral absolutes central to Christian moral reasoning — by refusing like the Japanese Jesuit Paul Miki to deny one’s faith; by refusing like Thomas More to lie on oath; by refusing like the Ugandan boy-pages to submit to the king’s sexual demands — makes little sense to the consistent utilitarian. Veritatis Splendor, by contrast, underscores how a truly Christian ethics firmly incorporates our free choices against evil and for the good into our witnessing to the Kingdom of God.

Because every time we respect what Veritatis Splendor called “certain fundamental goods” (VS 48) — especially when doing so means suffering — we illustrate that Christian morality is no mere “ideal.” Instead man’s capacity for true freedom and excellence and the workings of God’s grace are shown to be real. And that reality is a foretaste of the Kingdom which is to come.

Such is the radiance of the greatest of truths which, if we choose, sets us free.

Language, truth and reality:
Revisiting 'Veritatis Splendor' 25 years later
Time for a creative retrieval of this work so as to revitalize
the present theological culture and life of the Church
which has been drifting toward none other than a new modernism
by Eduardo Echeverria

August 5, 2018
al, Humanae Vitae; August 6th is the twentieth-fifth anniversary on August 6 of St. John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor; and September 14th is the twentieth anniversary of John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio.

My focus in this article is on Veritatis Splendor (hereafter VS), with some mention of Fides et Ratio (hereafter FR). I seek to illuminate the issues dividing John Paul’s Lérinian understanding of doctrinal development, which is indebted to Vatican II, in the realm of morality, with that of the proponents of a “new paradigm,” in particular Richard Gaillardetz, Professor of Systematic Theology at Boston College, who advances a notion of pastoral-oriented doctrinal development in light of what Christoph Theobald, SJ, Professor of Fundamental Theology at the Jesuit Faculties of Paris, has called “the principle of pastorality”.

In the following, I consider the crucial matters of the nature of divine revelation, language, truth, and reality, propositional truth and how truth is authenticated, as well as the normative and comprehensive dynamics of the moral life. These matters are fundamental to their respective understandings of doctrinal and moral development.

Lérinian legacy of Vatican II
According to John Paul II, analysis of moral actions is situated in the normative and comprehensive dynamics of the moral life, which are fourfold, namely:
[1] the subordination of man and his activity to God, the One who ‘alone is good’;
[2] the relationship between the moral good of human acts and eternal life;
[3] Christian discipleship, which opens us before the perspective of perfect love; and finally
[4] the gift of the Holy Spirit, source and means of the moral life of the ‘new creation’ (cf. 2 Cor 5:17)” (VS §28).

Briefly, God, the “Supreme Good” (FR §83), is the chief end of man’s whole moral life (cf. VS §79),—the source and ground of all goodness— but also Truth itself (prima veritas) (VS §§9, 35, 40; FR §22).

Good moral actions must be virtuous, conforming to the moral law, and the good of the person himself (cf. VS §79), and only then are they consistent with that end and hence integrally good.

Furthermore, the truths of the moral life must be lived out, practiced, carried out, as integral to Christian discipleship, and hence cannot be reduced to being merely believed, asserted, and claimed.

Finally, to be a “new creation” in Christ means that the moral life in Christ is about the renewal of man’s fallen nature from within the order of creation by God’s redemptive grace in Christ, properly ordering man to his chief end.

In short, our Adamic humanity, with its darkened understanding, alienation from God, and blindness of heart, is transformed in Christ, putting on the new man, “created according to God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph 4:22-24). God who created all things in and through Christ (Col 1: 16), has restored his fallen creation, which was savagely wounded by sin, by re-creating it in Christ.

In this normative setting, says John Paul, “Sacred Scripture remains the living and fruitful source of the Church’s moral doctrine; as the Second Vatican Council recalled, the Gospel is ‘the source of all saving truth and moral teaching’ [Dei Verbum §7].”

In particular, he holds that "there exists, in Divine Revelation, a specific and determined moral content, universally valid and permanent” (VS §37). In general, John Paul claims, “The Bible, and the New Testament in particular, contains texts and statements which have a genuinely ontological content. The inspired authors intended to formulate true statements, capable, that is, of expressing objective reality.” In addition, says John Paul, “This applies equally to the judgments of moral conscience, which Sacred Scripture considers capable of being objectively true” (FR §82). The pope develops this very claim in VS §60:

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The dignity of this rational forum (conscience) and the authority of its voice and judgments derive from the truth about moral good and evil, which it is called to listen to and express. This truth is indicated by the ‘divine law’, the universal and objective norm of morality” (see the whole context, §§57-61, 51-53).

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These moral truths are grounded in the eternal law of God, and that law gives moral propositions something to be true of without which moral objectivity would be groundless. Underscoring the universal and permanent validity of moral propositions is foundational for understanding why there are intrinsically evil acts. These moral truths belong to the deposit of faith. Assisted by the Holy Spirit, the Church has attained a doctrinal development about morality that is “analogous to that which has taken place in the realm of the truths of faith. (VS §28)

Catholic Mass Lectionary omits
anti-homosexualism verses from Romans 1
by Dr Taylor Marshall

Why do Catholics in America support homosexuality proportionately more than the general population?

Two reasons: lack of authentic Catholic teaching regarding homosexuality…and the Church omitted one of the clearest Bible verses on homosexuality from the lectionary

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One of the very unfortunate results of the New Lectionary is that verses that might be deemed offensive have been omitted from our liturgical celebrations. (I’ve written about how three “offensive” Psalms were removed from the Liturgy of the Hours after 1971 here.)

An example of the silence of offensive passages is from the readings of last week, where the reading of Saint Paul against homosexuality (including female lesbianism) in Romans 1:26-32 is notably omitted from the cycle. Below are the readings for the 28th Week in Ordinary Time (Lectionary 468 and 469):

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Tuesday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time
Lectionary: 468
Reading 1 ROM 1:16-25

Wednesday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time
Lectionary: 469
Reading 1 ROM 2:1-11

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So what’s missing? Romans 1:26-32 is clipped out. Yet this passage at the end of Romans 1 is the locus classicus for Paul’s theology against homosexual behavior and it also forms the cited passage in the Catechism of the Catholic Church for its teaching:

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CCC Para. 2357. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” They are contrary to the natural law.”

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In the footnotes in the CCC for this passage, you’ll find the citation for Romans 1:26-32. So if this passage is important for the Saint John Paul II’s Catechism, why is it skipped over in the Lectionary? Here is the skipped passage in full:

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26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural [Paul calls lesbianism is “unnatural”],
27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men [male homosexual acts are “shameless acts”] and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error [homosexual acts are an “error” with “due penalty”].
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct.
29 They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips,
30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
32 Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but also approve those who practice them [those that approve of homosexual acts and any of the sins above deserve to die according to “God’s decree”]

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This passage is inspired by the Holy Spirit – by the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity. This is not a politically correct passage of the Bible, but it’s just as true as John 3:16. We may not read it at Mass, but we need to accept it as “inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16).

Why is it omitted from the cycle of Romans for the Novus Ordo Mass? Is there a bishop out there who will ask the Holy Father to have this verse included in the Mass readings of Roman Rite?

In this time of crisis, we need a Saint John the Baptist who defends God’s teaching on human sexuality against the Herod’s that compromise God’s loving law.

With ultra-Bergoglian Cardinal Angelo Becciu now heading the Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood (he who is also Bergoglio's ready and willing 'commissar' over the Vatican-castrated Knights of Malta), one must expect further unconscionable abuses of the beatification/canonization process of the Church by the reigning pope who is all toO ready to fast-track his personal candidates for sainthood by declaring them martyrs to get around the requirement for a miracle in order to be beatified. As he has done with one of his Argentine proteges surnamed Angelelli and whose infamy in life was such that the Argentine press nicknamed him Satanelli... Rorate caeli shares with us this Argentine editorial about Bergoglio's latest 'martyr' - he died in a car accident but apparently qualifies to be a martyr because of rumors that he was 'assassinated' through tampering with his car! What outrage has Bergoglio not attempted? And how much more can the faithful tolerate of this pope's hubristic rampage through all that is holy in the Church?

'Satanelli' beatification:
Argentine editorial denounces Bergoglio's
promotion of a political-ideological sainthood cause

August 12, 2018

There were many radical bishops in the wild years following the Second Vatican Council. But Enrique Angelelli, bishop of La Rioja, Argentina, was probably the most radical. He was a Communist in all but name and stridently supported the terrorist organization "Montoneros", the leftist terrorist branch of the Peronist movement.

It can be said that the horrid military dictatorship that governed Argentina from 1976 until the Falklands War was brought about as a brutal overreaction to the terrorist attacks coordinated by Montoneros in favor of a Socialist-Peronist revolution.

Angelelli was so leftist, so radically leftist and so political, that the shocked practicing faithful of his own diocese used to call him in life "Satanelli". He died in a car accident in 1976. Yet Jorge Bergoglio has decided to beatify Satanelli as a "martyr"! (It is all very ironic because, even though it is claimed, now, that Fr. Bergoglio opposed the dictatorship, at the time he was considered an ally of the military, and even close to the most brutal of the Junta's members, Admiral Emilio Massera.)

La Nación, the oldest and most respected daily in Argentina (the only major newspaper that supported the pro-life position in their recent victory against abortion in the national Senate), ran the following editorial on this startling piece of news. La Nación is also, by the way, an ally of Francis, and its Rome correspondent, Elisabetta Piqué, is the journalist who is probably closest to Francis -- so this is obviously not moved by any animus against the Bishop of Rome.

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A Political-Ideological Beatification
Bishop Angelelli does not, in any way, represent the model of Christian
exemplariness that the Church demands to start a canonization procedure
LA NACION
July 30, 2018

On August 4, 1976, Bishop Enrique Angelelli died, after the rollover of the vehicle in which he was travelling in National Route 38, in La Rioja, along with Father Arturo Pinto, who survived. In the report made immediately after, following comprehensive search for evidence -- autopsy, accident expert summary, photos of the place of the accident, and the testimony of Pinto, who alleged memory loss and being in a state of shock -- the procedure was archived under the name "Angelelli, bishop Enrique A. rep./death."

However, many years later, friar Antonio Puigjané, a guerrilla who took part in the attack oN the La Tablada military base, raising arms against the constitutional [democratically elected] government of Raúl Alfonsín, made a complaint in [the province of] Neuquén in which he put forward the theory that Angelelli had been assassinated. In an opposing view, the daily La Prensa published a statement by bishop Bernardo Witte, of La Rioja, who affirmed: "We were surprised that the mysterious death of bishop Angelelli was characterized as an assassination with no sufficient evidence."

Statements by an eyewitness to the event, Raúl Alberto Nacuzi, affirm that the driver was not the bishop, but Pinto, who was the one who set up the version that a vehicle was following them, and then took shelter under the supposed memory loss.

After a court declared lacking jurisdiction in the matter and following the collection of new evidence and the new analysis of past evidence, the Federal Court of Appeals of Córdoba decided, in 1990, that, pondering the investigations and evidence, it was impossible to ascertain that the accident had been caused by criminal action. Other eyewitnesses declared not having seen any other vehicle at that spot, nor fleeing the accident.

With the investigation over, the Court determined that, "considering that the data of amassed evidence are not sufficient to demonstrate the perpetration of a crime, in agreement with what was opined by the prosecutor before this Chamber, this Court considers appropriate the stay of the current procedure."

In July 2014, the Federal Verbal Tribunal of Criminal Causes in La Rioja, considering that it was a Crime against Humanity, reached an opposite conclusion, which is not surprising, since it is guided by the prevailing view -- now as then -- that such crimes can be judged outside what is determined by constitutional and criminal law.

General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez and Commodore Luis Estrella were thus convicted to life imprisonment for the "crime" (sic) of 'assassinating' Bishop Angelellias "indirect" perpetrators, a legal construction that has been abused in this kind of trials.

In this case, it allowed the conviction of hierarchical superiors for a crime that was never proved, and in which there are no "direct" perpetrators at all. The verdict considered certain that the rollover of the car in which Angelelli travelled had its origin in an intentional maneuver by another vehicle that was following orders given by military chiefs.

Even if, hypothetically, it had been a murder, Angelelli would not be a martyr - [least of all] for defending the faith. The La Rioja bishop had an active and proved link with the terrorist organization Montoneros. In the photo that illustrates this text, he is seen celebrating mass with the banner of this organization at his back, while in his homilies he spoke in favor of uprising and proposed arming young people.



With a beatification or canonization, the Church proclaims the Christian exemplariness of the life of a person and authorizes his being the object of cult. A violent and sectarian model must never be proposed. For this reason, we do not think right the words of the current bishop of La Rioja and second vice-president of the Bishops' Conference, Marcelo Colombo, who, when receiving news of the beatification, affirmed: "It is a recognition of the brave witnesses of the Kingdom of God."

It is well known how rigorous are the beatification procedures, how thorough and tedious are the presentation of evidence to endorse a cause. This thoroughness was not applied in this case.

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The pope and Cardinal Sodano at a Vatican ceremony on Dec. 7, 2017.

The McCarrick scandal has prompted John Allen to revive the 'case' against Cardinal Angelo Sodano's long and questionable history of seeming to protect two
important prelates from investigation for sexual crimes - and why the Dean of the College of Cardinals has not been made to answer for it.

On Cardinal Sodano and
the meaning of ‘accountability’
by John L. Allen Jr.

Aug 12, 2018

ROME - In the mounting conversation about accountability amid the Church’s sexual abuse scandals, one question that often doesn’t get as much attention as it should is what, exactly, people need to be held accountable for - that is, which sorts of actions on the abuse scandals are worthy of sanction, and what proof higher authority needs before consequences ought to be imposed.

To begin with the clearest case, “zero tolerance” obviously implies that the direct commission of sexual abuse requires swift and stern discipline, and we now know that standard holds even for Princes of the Church due to the example of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

We also know, at least in theory, that covering up abuse by others is also a violation of the “zero tolerance” policy, meaning that it, too, is supposed to draw sanction - though proving such knowledge, as opposed to suspecting it, is often surprisingly difficult.

Where it gets stickier is when the charge isn’t committing a crime or a cover-up, at least not directly, but simply being on the wrong side of history - showing such poor judgment, such tone-deafness and insensitivity, as to suggest ignorance of the magnitude and depth of the abuse crisis, thereby rendering the Church’s response weaker and less convincing.

If there is accountability for that sort of lapse in the Catholic Church, you certainly couldn’t tell it judging by the current Dean of the College of Cardinals.

This week, the Irish Times reported that Italian Cardinal Angelo Sodano, while he was the Vatican’s Secretary of State under St. Pope John Paul II, broached the idea of negotiating a deal to keep Church archives closed from government inquiries with then-Irish President Mary McAleese in November 2003. The Times also reported that two years later, Sodano asked then-Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern if his government would promise to indemnify the Vatican for any losses it might occur in Irish courts related to sex abuse litigation.

While the Vatican hasn’t commented on those reports, they’re entirely consistent with what we know about Sodano’s modus operandi.

In February 2005, for instance, Sodano asked then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to intervene to block a class-action lawsuit then before a United States District Court in Louisville, Ky., which sought to hold the Vatican financially responsible for the sexual abuse of minors. Rice was compelled to explain that in the American system the executive branch of government doesn’t have that power, and that foreign states are required to assert their immunity themselves in American courts. (For the record, the Vatican [under Benedict XVI] eventually did just that, successfully, and the lawsuit foundered.)

Bear in mind both the Irish and American requests came after the explosion of the abuse scandals in the U.S. in 2002/2003, so one can’t argue that Sodano didn’t understand how serious the crisis was, or how hurtful it would be to survivors to see the second most powerful figure in the Vatican making protecting institutional assets his top concern.

Nor is that the only question mark in Sodano’s history in terms of his view of what “zero tolerance” implies.

In 2010, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, Austria, accused Sodano of having blocked a Vatican investigation of the late Cardinal Hans Hermann Gröer, who was accused of various forms of sexual abuse and misconduct and who was eventually stripped of his duties and privileges as a cardinal in 1998. According to Schönborn, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, wanted to launch a trial against Gröer under Church law but Sodano got in the way.

Schönborn was later compelled to travel to Rome for a kiss-and-make-up session with Sodano and Benedict, but he never retracted the substance of his charge.

Schönborn spoke, by the way, not long after Sodano used the phrase “petty gossip” in an Easter homily in connection with press coverage of the reports of clerical abuse victims, in a way that many victims found deeply insensitive.

Then there’s the issue of Sodano’s longstanding strong support for Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legion of Christ, who was found guilty by Ratzinger and his team at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of sexual abuse and misconduct in 2006 and sentenced to a life of prayer and penance.

Sodano was a Maciel ally up to the bitter end. Even as Ratzinger’s team was conducting its investigation, Sodano arranged for the Vatican to issue a public statement insisting there was no “canonical procedure” against Maciel - which was technically correct, since the decision had been made to handle the case informally due to Maciel’s age and health, but the statement obscured the larger truth that the Vatican was on his trail.

Sodano even fought against releasing a public statement about the 2006 sentence, well after the letter communicating it had already been received by Maciel and distributed within the order, on the grounds of saving Maciel the embarrassment.

So, where does all that leave us?

There’s certainly never been a suggestion that Sodano himself has abused anyone, and even charging him with “cover-up” in the case of Maciel may be a stretch - rather than him having direct knowledge of Maciel’s crimes, the more plausible scenario likely is that Sodano just didn’t want to know. [He may not have' wanted to know' but that does not mean he did not know anything at all about the widely-substantiated 'rumors' that had been going on for years about Maciel! It's like Cardinals Wuerl and Farrell claiming they never heard anything about McCarrick's crimes. You can't be occupying a position of power for years and claim ignorance of open secrets about your peers or subordinates.] He admired Maciel’s orthodoxy, zeal and success with youth - not to mention his fundraising prowess - and was inclined to ascribe the charges against Maciel, which had circulated since 1997, either to envy or political opposition.

On the other hand, there’s little question that the cumulative weight of Sodano’s career suggests an official who’s been unwilling, or unable, to take on board the real nature of the clerical abuse crisis, and he hardly inspires confidence in terms of a robust commitment to reform.

Granted, Sodano is now 90, yet he remains the Dean of the College of Cardinals, and if Pope Francis were to die tomorrow, he’d still preside over the daily meetings of cardinals in the run-up to the conclave to elect a successor. Moreover, Sodano is active despite his age, and is widely seen in Rome as exercising significant behind-the-scenes influence through an extended network of friends and proteges, especially in the Secretariat of State.

As Francis ponders what “accountability” for the abuse scandals implies, sooner or later he’ll likely have to consider figures such as Sodano - officials who may not be guilty of a crime or a cover-up, but whose choices and statements have left many observers, especially abuse survivors, wondering exactly how serious the system truly is about “zero tolerance.”

Back in 2011, Catholic World Report published the following article by Edward Pentin - fairly well-documented, but it was like a pebble dropped into a very deep well for all the effect it did not have and continues not to have! Is there any way for journalists like Allen and Pentin to keep track of stories like these that they call attention to but whose readership all appear to be like the three monkeys who 'see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil'?

The allegations against Cardinal Sodano
Calls for his resignation grow amid
reports of his connection to multiple scandals
by Edward Pentin

May 4, 2011

Over the past few months, Cardinal Angelo Sodano has faced a number of serious allegations in the media, most especially regarding his connections with the disgraced founder of the Legionaries of Christ, the late Father Marcial Maciel Degollado.

The controversies prompted leaders, both in the traditionally orthodox and heterodox sectors of the Catholic press, to call for Sodano’s resignation as dean of the College of Cardinals. In a May 12 editorial in First Things, the publication’s editor, Joseph Bottum, wrote that Cardinal Sodano “has to go,” as he has been found too often “on the edges” of scandal.

“Never quite charged, never quite blamed, he has had his name in too long a series of depositions and court records and news accounts — an ongoing embarrassment to the Church he serves,” Bottum wrote.

He lamented that the cardinal, 82, should be plagued by scandal at end of his life, saying it “would be kinder to protect the man and let him slip away unnoticed.” But after explaining some of the allegations against Sodano, Bottum concluded that even such a figure as the cardinal “has to be removed from his current position and told to serve the Church in prayer.” Everyone inside the Church “needs to be taught that there are consequences for scandalous mistakes,” Bottum wrote.

Many of the allegations against Sodano had been made by Jason Berry, the investigative reporter who disclosed his findings in the National Catholic Reporter, most recently in a long two-part exposé of the Maciel scandal published in April this year. Unsurprisingly, Berry too believes Cardinal Sodano should step down and considers him clearly guilty of a number of unjust and corrupt actions. “I don’t think Benedict can salvage his papacy in the eyes of the world unless he gets rid of Sodano,” Berry told CWR, “and I don’t say that with any personal agenda against the Pope.”

So what are these damaging allegations against the cardinal who for 16 years served as Vatican secretary of state? Arguably, the two most serious cases involve his dealings with Father Maciel and his blocking of an investigation into Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër, the late archbishop of Vienna, who was found guilty of sexually abusing children in 1998.

Regarding Father Maciel, Cardinal Sodano is accused of taking substantial amounts of money in order to help the Legion ingratiate itself with the Vatican. This allegedly led Sodano to hinder investigations into Maciel, beginning in 1998 when ex-Legion victims filed a canonical case against Maciel with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. According to Berry, Cardinal Sodano pressured Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then the congregation’s prefect, to halt the proceedings.

Drawing on sources close to the Legion, Berry alleges that Cardinal Sodano had been wined and dined by the Legion throughout his career as secretary of state, often visiting the order’s headquarters in Mexico City to celebrate major events. He was described as a major “cheerleader” for Maciel’s order by one source, who alleged that Sodano was willing to give a talk to the Legion at Christmas for $10,000. Another priest said he recalled Sodano receiving a $5,000 donation.

“It was like a business arrangement. He was on the payroll, so to speak,” Berry told CWR. “You have to bear in mind that the Legionaries had become part of the Vatican’s ecclesiastical structure.” This wasn’t an accidental development, according to Berry, but a “highly calculated” strategy to “ground the order in the religious infrastructure of the Church in Rome.” He said this led to Maciel building a Legionary university campus in Rome — the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum — with the vital help of Cardinal Sodano.

Cardinal Sodano, originally from Piedmont, Italy, served as apostolic nuncio to Chile from 1977 to 1988. During that time, he became friends with Maciel and was friendly with the country’s dictator, General Augusto Pinochet. He used his political clout to help the Legion be admitted into Chile, despite strong opposition from several Chilean bishops, including the archbishop of Santiago, Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez.

By 1989, Berry says Sodano, then a senior official in the Roman Curia, was already an honored guest at Legion dinners and banquets and had become Maciel’s biggest supporter. One of his tasks was to help fulfill Maciel’s wish to build the Regina Apostolorum. Berry quotes Glenn Favreau, a Washington, DC attorney and former Legionary in Rome, who said that Sodano intervened with Italian officials to get zoning variances to build the university on a wooded plateau of western Rome.

“Maciel hired Sodano’s nephew, Andrea Sodano, as a building consultant,” Berry wrote, “but Legionaries overseeing the project complained to Maciel that Andrea Sodano’s work was late and poorly done; they were reluctant to pay his invoices. To them, Maciel yelled: ‘Pay him! You pay him!’ Andrea Sodano was paid.”

Further questions surround Cardinal Sodano’s links with his nephew and in particular the nephew’s business associate, Raffaello Follieri, a property developer. Follieri was jailed in New York on fraud and money-laundering charges in 2008. A major part of his business involved the buying up of Church properties and parishes, many of which had been put on the market to pay for lawsuits from sexual abuse victims, and then reselling them.

Andrea Sodano was Follieri Group’s vice president. Press reports record Cardinal Sodano attending the company’s 2004 launch party in New York, and the firm trumpeted its “deep commitment to the Catholic Church and its long-standing relationship with senior members of the Vatican hierarchy.”

Follieri was later to misappropriate millions of dollars of investment capital from billionaire Ronald Burkle that was meant to buy up churches in the United States. But before then, soon after a series of investigative reports and two months prior to the Vatican banishing Father Maciel from public life in 2006, Cardinal Sodano sent a letter of complaint to Follieri.

In the missive, he wrote: “I feel it is my duty to tell you how perturbed I am to hear that your company continues to present itself as having ties to ‘the Vatican,’ due to the fact that my nephew, Andrea, has agreed on some occasion to provide you with professional consulting services. I do not know how this distressing misunderstanding could have occurred, but it is necessary now to avoid such confusion in the future. I do, therefore, appeal to your sensibility to be careful with respect to this matter. I shall accordingly inform my nephew Andrea as well as anyone else who has asked me for information regarding your firm. I take this opportunity to send you my regards.”

On October 23, 2008, Follieri pleaded guilty to 14 counts of wire fraud, money- laundering, and conspiracy, and is now serving 54 months in a federal prison. FBI agent Theodore Cacioppi told Berry that Andrea Sodano’s company “took in fraudulently earned money” and that the Bureau considered him and some of his associates “unindicted co-conspirators.”

Andrea Sodano was safely back in Italy at the time of Follieri’s arrest, and the FBI didn’t think it worth spending resources investigating him. But Berry reported on the government document that accuses Andrea Sodano of receiving payments, and also says that the Vatican itself received “donations” from Follieri’s scam.

The government sentencing memorandum on Follieri, filed by the US Attorney, Southern District of New York, stated:

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“Follieri created the false impressions that he had ties to the Vatican, which enabled him to obtain church properties at below-market values, through his relationship with Andrea Sodano, the nephew (“Nephew”) of the then-Secretary of State of the Vatican Cardinal Angelo Sodano…and making unauthorized donations to the Vatican with investor money.

Follieri misused investor funds to pay the Nephew for ‘engineering’ services that the Nephew never performed so that the Nephew could travel with Follieri when visiting church officials and help Follieri obtain access to the grounds of the Vatican.

It was through this connection that Follieri was able to attend one of the Pope’s services and, along with many others, get his picture taken with the Pope… show the private gardens of the Vatican to Follieri’s friends and associates, and arrange for guided tours of a museum at the Vatican...

Follieri also falsely represented that he needed over $800,000 to pay for the engineering reports prepared by the Nephew. Follieri claimed that the Vatican needed to review these engineering reports before the Vatican could make any decision about whether to sell the properties to Follieri.”

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Berry believes Cardinal Sodano had long been aware of his nephew’s dubious connections with Follieri. “It’s pretty clear he knew Follieri was a cash cow for Andrea Sodano and Msgr. [Giovanni] Carru [undersecretary at the Congregation for Clergy],” he said, although there appears to be no evidence at all to directly implicate Cardinal Sodano in any of Follieri’s crimes.

Berry, however, is disturbed by Sodano’s sense of amorality. “What is most striking about Cardinal Sodano’s letter is that he’s not saying cease or desist. He’s not expressing moral outrage. He’s telling him to be careful,” he said.

Up until this time, Maciel was busy trying to further ingratiate himself with the Vatican, offering gifts to Vatican officials to achieve his aims, one of which was to turn the Regina Apostolorum into a bona fide pontifical university. Many senior officials, including Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, refused to accept such gifts, but others didn’t. Cardinal Sodano is only on record as having accepted up to $15,000 as a gift from the Legion, but some sources believe he took more.

Although under canon law (no. 1302), Vatican officials, including cardinals, are obliged to report financial gifts to the cardinal-vicar of Rome, it’s not clear whether Cardinal Sodano considered himself bound by the same rule. “Vatican officials aren’t supposed to receive personal financial gifts for themselves, but they can act as channels for their own charities,” said one source close to the Vatican. “So if someone gives an official money and they give it to a charity, that’s OK, it doesn’t need to be reported.”

But this source said it was unclear to whom other gifts should be declared, and whether Cardinal Sodano needed to report to anyone else. “I don’t think he was answerable to anyone,” he said, adding there “should really be a clearer procedure to follow.”

But the alleged scandals surrounding Cardinal Sodano and Father Maciel go beyond just the financial. In 2004, the Vatican sent Msgr. Charles Scicluna, an official of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to Mexico to investigate the Legion. After Scicluna returned from one of his trips in 2005, just after the conclave that elected Cardinal Ratzinger pope, a communiqué was sent to the Legion from Cardinal Sodano’s office saying “there is no canonical procedure in course nor is one foreseen for the future with regard to Father Maciel.” The communiqué was given without consulting the CDF.

“The Legion took that statement and put a spin on it to say Father Maciel had been exonerated,” said Berry. “In fact nothing of the sort had occurred.” The Holy See press office likewise sided with the secretary of state (it had no choice under the circumstances), and said there was not to be a canonical procedure.

In 2006, Cardinal Sodano helped minimize harm caused to the Legion’s name and structure. Although the Vatican ordered Maciel to refrain from all public ministries and to adopt a “life of prayer and penitence,” the Vatican statement continued to praise the Legion and Regnum Christi (the Legion’s lay movement) despite the misinformation campaign the Legion was running against the victims.

The statement allowed the Legionaries to spin the news, leading to their own communiqué saying that Maciel had accepted the Vatican’s decision “with faith, complete serenity and tranquility of conscience, knowing that it is a new cross that God, the Father of Mercy, has allowed him to suffer.” Berry said he has it “on good authority that Sodano’s fingerprints were all over that [Vatican] statement.”

This wasn’t the first time that Cardinal Sodano had interfered with an investigation. In May of this year, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the archbishop of Vienna, hinted that the former secretary of state had a history of mishandling abuse scandals. Speaking off the record to Austrian journalists, he said that in 1995, the future Pope Benedict pushed for a probe into abuse allegations against Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër but that Cardinal Sodano resisted the probe.

A month earlier, Cardinal Schönborn had told the New York Times that Cardinal Ratzinger had called for an investigation of Cardinal Groër, who served as archbishop of Vienna from 1986 to 1995, but that “the other side, the diplomatic side, had prevailed.” Cardinal Groër eventually relinquished all his ecclesiastical titles in 1998, at the request of Pope John Paul II, as mounting evidence of sexual abuse emerged.

What makes these allegations against Sodano serious is the extent to which his actions (in 1998, 2004, and 2006 with regards to Father Maciel, and in 1995 concerning Cardinal Groër) obstructed investigations and led to further injustices being perpetrated.

Sodano’s image of showing inadequate concern for the victims of sexual abuse by clergy was not helped on Easter Sunday of this year, when he issued what many saw as a bizarre tribute to the Holy Father in the face of a media onslaught on the Church over the sexual abuse crisis.

In an unscheduled statement, Cardinal Sodano referred to the criticism of the Pope’s handling of the abuse issue as “petty gossip.” Cardinal Schönborn, in that same meeting with Austrian journalists, said Sodano had “deeply wronged” the victims of sexual abuse by downplaying the importance of the issue. Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, called them “certainly not the wisest of words” and made it clear that Benedict XVI had never asked for such a tribute.

For Berry, Sodano’s gesture wasn’t bizarre but “breathtaking in its arrogance” and entirely in keeping with his character. “If you stand back with a wide angle lens, Sodano has always been a realpolitik figure within the Vatican,” he explained. “He negotiated with Noriega to get him out of [the] nunciature to go to Florida, where he was assured to go to prison; he was close to Pinochet. I think Sodano has a Machiavellian attitude about power…. I can’t speak about his psychodynamics, but his public behavior certainly suggests a man in a Machiavellian role who is functioning within a monarchical power structure and knows he is the highest prince under the Pope.” Others see Sodano not so much as Machiavellian but as a certain kind of Italian stereotype— someone shrewd, wily, and shameless about nepotism.

Despite all the allegations swirling around him, Cardinal Sodano refuses to share his side of the story. When CWR contacted his office, we were told he was “too tired and busy traveling” to answer our requests for an interview. No officials, including those in the Holy See press office, were willing to step forward and defend him.

Berry, who also tried unsuccessfully for an interview, was unsurprised at his reluctance. “How does someone in his position explain some of the things he has done?” he asked.

Berry, however, stands full-square behind his revelations about Sodano, discovered in his research on the Legion. “I wouldn’t have written a book with [Gerald] Renner, made a film, and written all those articles if I didn’t believe in them,” he said. “I don’t want to say we’ve been vindicated, but we have been abundantly confirmed in our accuracy.”

Joseph Bottum, in his May 12 article for First Things, described Berry’s April exposé on the Legion as “fumbling” journalism and “thinly sourced” when it came to uncovering financial deals in Rome. But he felt Berry’s allegations were nevertheless “fumbling toward what seems to be the truth.”

The widespread hope is that Cardinal Sodano will come clean, thereby helping the purification of the Church and enabling healing to begin.

And what about this take on Cardinal O'Malley, Bergoglio's pointman for handling the clerical sex abuse crisis in the Church??? Who has already alleged no one called his attention to a letter written to him about McCarrick's crminal conduct?

O'Malley sends Boston seminary rector on extended vacation
after receiving complaints about unbecoming conduct

August 10, 2018

This afternoon, Cardinal O'Malley released a statement saying the rector of St John's seminary has been told to take an extended summer vacation for the Fall semester after two former seminarians posted on social media that they witnessed and experienced activities contrary to moral standards and formation to the Catholic priesthood. Boston Catholic Insider has latest details.

Some of the appointees on Cardinal Sean's team are unknown to me, so I am reserving judgement on whether the outcome is rigged until after I do diligence.

I will say O'Malley has never come across to me as someone who has any desire to reach independent conclusions about internal corruption. My nickname for him was "the sled dog". I always had the feeling the archdiocese was loading up his sled and he was trying to sell the snake oil.

Further, an extended summer vacation for the rector does not reflect the serious nature of the seduction, harrasment, persecution, obstruction and corruption at Catholic seminaries.

I'm hoping the willingness of seminarians to publicly speak about the filth and the related harassment of faithful men who refuse to go along with it, will help drain swamps at other seminaries across the US.

I think we are going to have to wait and see how it plays out.

Prior to this developing story, I had been giving prayerful reflection to next steps in draining the episcopal swamp. I watched Cardinal DiNardo's recorded statement and tuned in to several of Cardinal Wuerl's guest appearances on the crisis. I also read bishop Barron's article. With all due respect, they are out of their ever-loving minds.

The pattern emerging is apology tours, an investigation on what happened with McCarrick and developing more useless procedures on how to internally inform the chain of command who has never done anything but promote those who teach or practice sexual debauchery and abuse power.

We've been there/done that. All we have for souvenirs is a basement full of patronizing letters from chanceries.

We have a very small window of opportunity to pull the rug out from under their 2018 sequel to the dog and pony show.

Please. Let us dispense with the farce that we need an investigation on why McCarrick was given 50 years to abuse his power to conduct gay orgies.

We already know what happened.
- There is an endemic culture of homosexual sex in the priesthood and hierarchy that protects everyone in the club.
- If you give any indication you have zero tolerance for using the Church as the Tinder for Catholic homosexuals, your vocation or family are targets for malicious conduct.
- This dynamic has been in full throttle for 60 years, whether in a parish, a school, a seminary, CCD or any other apostolate in the Catholic Church.
- In some dioceses, it is the operating culture.

Let us also face another sad reality: There is no hope of cleaning house with a Holy Father who would promote and appoint a bishop who painted a homoerotic mural of himself and Christ or surround himself with a Cardinal whose apartment is raided for gay orgies or pick a spokesperson for himself whose obsession is encouraging gays to have sex.

Catholics have informed him and begged for his help and his response has made crystal clear that his intentions are the promotion and enabling of the club. The damages to trust are irreparable.

What is needed is an independent clearing house for allegations of every priest and bishop in every diocese whose pastoral ministry advocated gay sex, abused power, sexually harrassed or used intimidation tactics to against orthodox practicing Catholics.

Where there is smoke, there is fire.

Boston Catholics tried reporting suspicious and bad conduct to Cardinal Sean for many years.

When complaints began surfacing that one priest was only at the the parish weekends and was spending weekdays in Massachusetts gay sex hookup community of Provincetown, complainants were told by the Cardinal's staff that the Cardinal has "confidence" in this priest.

When complaints surfaced that another priest lived with his gay lover for years in the South End, you can guess what happened when Catholics called the chancery. Nothing.

When another priest notorious for luring and confirming gays into mortal sin was simulating the Sacrament of marriage with a phony ritual, complainants were told the priest is the Cardinal's friend.

When a gay parishioner of a Boston Shrine wrote a tell-all book of sexual debauchery taking place within a Franciscan order and described (and even nicknamed) an archdiocesan priest's involvement in the sex club, you know what happened when Catholics called the chancery? The same thing that happened when people complained about McCarrick. Bupkis.

When problems with Church teaching had a foothold, Boston Catholics developed an independent infrastructure for reporting bad behaviors and promised anonymity. If the evidence was clear and verifiable, it was publicly reported. That was the only effective way to avoid the hijacking of outcome and uprooting the corruption. Perhaps the same structure is needed to manage the abuse of power.

In February, Cardinal Joseph Tobin made the mistake of publicly tweeting what he meant to be a private message. "Nighty-nights baby. I love you." He offered the ludicrous explanation it was meant for his 65-year-old sister. He got away with it. Any team doing forensics needs to start with his phone records and his computer. Reconstructing McCarrick's train accident is a complete waste of resources and hands bishops the outcome of useless procedures they never have and never will follow.

Frank Keating recently said the bishops had their chance 15 years ago to put meaningful reforms in place, they've proven they will not and the only thing left is complete exposure. The right structure and the right people have to go into place, but my recommendation is an independent clearing house and forensic team.

Laity provides lists of allegations and an independent team of orthodox Catholic lawyers and law enforcement officials trained in forensics conduct audits of the files of parishes, dioceses, orders or seminaries concerned.