BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI







Andrea Gagliarducci's 'inside track' analysis of recent Curial developments is informative but it suffers from a basic error which I find incredible. To classify Cardinal Woelki, now Archbishop of Cologne, as a conservative - after he promptly came out of the progressivist closet with Benedict XVI's retirement to reveal his ultra-liberal propensities regarding homosexuality, communion for remarried divorcees (overwhelmingly endorsed by the German bishops' conference, of which Woelki was not one of the few holdouts), and most alarmingly, his open support of Islamist activism in Germany while suppressing attempts by the faithful in Cologne to protest Islamist advances in that country - takes away 50% of the premise that Gagliarducci lays down, namely, that JMB/PF is 'balancing' his appointments.

However, Gagliarducci does underscore some pertinent facts about Benedict XVI's Pontificate, as well as the much-maligned Cardinal Bertone, that most commentators, even the most veteran Vatican observers, have conveniently ignored. But Gagliarducci almost never fails to interpolate such observations, even if parenthetically, when the opportunity arises. For that, Benaddicts and anyone who respects facts as opposed to facile myth, should be thankful to him


The so-called Francis revolution reverts to form:
Finally, Curial appointments 'Vatican-style'

April 6, 2015

For the first time in these two years of his pontificate, Pope Francis has made two “Vatican style” appointments. Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi’s appointment as Prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, along with the inclusion of Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki among the members of the APSA (Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See) – both announced on March 31 – signal the Pope’s recognition of his need to re-balance his “governing team.”

At the same time, the two appointments prove that Pope Francis is switching his focus toward the more conservative, curial wing – a wing that just some months ago was not being taken into consideration.

Cardinal Versaldi’s appointment as Prefect of the Congregation for the Catholic Education offers with it many sub-texts, to be understood. When the establishment of the Secretariat of the Economy was decided – on the margins of Pope Francis’ first consistory – Cardinal Versaldi was observed standing around the corridors dumbfounded during the new Cardinals’ courtesy visits.

He was worried that as Prefect for Economic Affairs he was losing competences and was headed toward an uncertain end. What would happen to him? What was he going to do? Would Pope Francis send him away from Rome as bishop in an Italian diocese?

Observers for the most part gave credit to this latter option. Insiders also noted that Cardinal Versaldi was one of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone’s men, and that Cardinal Bertone was one of Benedict XVI’s men, his Secretary of State, and that he remained so during Pope Francis’ first months.

Despite his loyalty to Benedict XVI – or perhaps because of it – Cardinal Bertone had been the privileged [???] target of every media campaign orchestrated against Benedict XVI’s pontificate, and following the Pope’s resignation, the victim of media campaigns decrying curial dysfunction.

After Pope Francis’s election, everyone waited – and hoped – for him to put a spoils system in place against the Curia that Cardinal Bertone had fashioned. However, this spoils system did not take hold.

True, the diplomatic wing, led by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Dean of the College of Cardinals and Cardinal Bertone’s predecessor as Secretary of State – gained new importance and influence. But the re-organization of Vatican dicasteries is proving in the end to be a mere reshuffle and nothing more.

Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, transferred to the Apostolic Penitentiary from the powerful Congregation for the Clergy, has held on [I think the proper verb is 'was kept on' (as president of)] to the presidency of the Pontifical Foundation “Aid to the Church in Need”, a crucial body that assists Catholic missions and Christians in difficult foreign countries.

Cardinal Pietro Parolin, whom Pope Francis appointed Secretary of State, comes from the old diplomatic school, but also served in the Cardinal Bertone’s Secretariat of State. [That says little of Parolin's political orientation. Increasingly, he has shown himself to be outspoken about the aim of this Pontificate to be pro-active on the world's political stage - a most secular goal that not even John Paul II ever articulated, even if his intense opposition to Communism which had established a stranglehold on his native Poland since the end of World War II made him one of the triumvirate of leaders, along with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who eventually brought about the collapse of the Soviet empire and effectively, of Communism in Europe.]

And Cardinal Bertone left his post not because the Pope got rid of him, but because of his age – he was almost 80, way beyond the age of retirement, set at 75. The fact that Pope Francis does not dislike Cardinal Bertone can be deduced from the fact that the Emeritus Secretary of State is still a member of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. [After all, they worked together for several months, and Cardinal Bertone is known for his great likeableness and bonhomie.]

The head of that Congregation is Cardinal Fernando Filoni, whom Cardinal Bertone chose as his deputy in the Secretariat of State and then backed as prefect. Cardinal Filoni was appointed special papal envoy to Iraq in August, and he also spent Holy Week there in order to bring papal support to persecuted Christians.

In the end, the much vaunted “Pope Francis Revolution” has turned into a modest reshuffle of top posts and into the establishment of a parallel Curia that is step by step replacing the old structures. [Actually, it is this establishment of a parallel Curia that is the more general observation that has to be made about Curial reforms so far.]

As the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs was going to be suppressed, Cardinal Versaldi had to be positioned in a new place. Where?

In Vatican corridors, it is rumored that Cardinal Versaldi has had some misunderstanding with Cardinal George Pell, Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, because of a clash of competences between the two bodies and a different view of how financial reform should be carried out.

These discussions were part of a wider internal debate, and this debate resulted in the leak of confidential information to the Italian magazine L’Espresso. The leak revealed no big news as such, but it sounded like a shot across the bow of Cardinal Pell. Some internal observers noticed that the leaked information could have come from the ranks of the Prefecture for Economic Affairs or from any of the Vatican financial institutions connected with it. The leaks prove that the Vatileaks period has not come to an end. It can begin again at any moment.

Pope Francis responded to the risk of a new Vatileaks with a classical “promoveatur ut amoveatur” – to promote in order to remove. The Pope promoted Cardinal Versaldi, who previously was president of a Prefecture and now is prefect of a Congregation.

With that promotion, the Pope also showed that curial reform is still far off. Cardinal Versaldi’s appointment freezes any changes to the Congregation for Catholic Education for at least four years – the Cardinal will reach the retirement age then. [Not necessarily 'freezes'... It could still be absorbed into a super-dicastery, and then the Pope will have to decide what to do with Cardinal Versaldi, unless he makes him head of that super-dicastery.]

Some proposals for curial reform that have been floated up till now had suggested the establishment of a super-dicastery that would comprise the Congregation for Catholic Education and the three Pontifical Councils for Culture, Social Communication and Promotion of the New Evangelization. [There you are! In which case, Versaldi's only rival to head the super-dicastery would be Cardinal Ravasi who now heads Culture. Both Mons. Celli at Social Communications and Fisichella at New Evangelization are not cardinals - and not likely to be soon, unless JMB decides that his pointman for the Holy Year of Mercy, Mons. Fisichella, should be made cardinal before or at the start of that year. And in any case, whoever ends up heading the super-dicastery, at least one Curial cardinal would be left without an office to head.

I do not know exactly Cardinal Versaldi's qualifications to head the Congregation for Catholic Education, which was led for 16 years by Polish Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, appointed by John Paul II in 1999, and who ended up serving under Benedict XVI and Francis as well. Interestingly, he was Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura from 1998-1999, until he was made in charge of Catholic Education, a congregation that deserves far more public attention than it has been getting, because it is supposed to oversee Catholic institutions of higher learning, including universities, to make sure that they remain Catholic in identity as manifested in their adherence to Catholic orthodoxy in their choice of professional faculty and in the overall exercise of their academic functions. This has, of course, been notoriously defied by many Catholic universities and colleges in the United States, and even by what was once a stronghold of orthodox Catholicism, Louvain University in Belgium.]

But the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization has a new life, too. Pope Francis entrusted it with the organization of the upcoming Extraordinary Holy Year of Mercy, and Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the president of the dicastery, has already made it known that there will be no Preparation Committee for the Jubilee, since the Pontifical Council will take over every part of the organization.

At the same time, everyone’s eyes have been focused on Vatican economic reform. Even there, in fact, the big revolution did not take place; Pope Francis simply continued what Benedict XVI had started.

The Prefecture for Economic Affairs will be suppressed in May, since its competences were taken over by the Secretariat for the Economy and the Council for the Economy. The Secretariat for the Economy has been entrusted with oversight and budget projections, including those of the Vatican City State administration. The Council for the Economy has been entrusted with tasks of financial planning and oversight, previously assigned to the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs with its March 2012 regulation reform. That reform made the Prefecture a modern “Ministry of Finance.”

The Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (namely the APSA) is the third pole of the Vatican economy. It was slightly remodeled under Pope Francis. It first served as a kind of central organ of the Holy See, but is now being fashioned into a sort of central bank – this is the reason that the original tasks of the ordinary section have been transferred into the Secretariat for the Economy, while the ordinary section is now taking care of relations with central banks.

Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki of Cologne has been appointed as a member of APSA. Cardinal Woelki comes from the influential and rich German Church, and is an exponent of a theological wing quite distant from that pursued by Cardinal Walter Kasper, and even further than that of Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising. The latter is President of the German Bishops Conference, a Member of the Council of Cardinals and Coordinator of the Council for the Economy.

Cardinal Woelki was previously Archbishop of Berlin. When he was transferred to Cologne as archbishop, it was fair to say that Pope Francis had made an appointment that hewed closely to Benedict XVI’s sensibilities. [NO, NO AND NO! Yes, Woelki was named Archbishop of Berlin by Benedict XVI and later made cardinal, but Benedict's promotion of Woelki appears to have been based on the fact that Woelki was for eight years auxiliary bishop to Cardinal Joachim Meisner as Archbishop of Cologne, an outspoken and staunch conservative, as well as a close personal friend of Joseph Ratzinger. So Woelki apparently followed Cardinal Meisner's orthodox line faithfully, and in doing so, earned his promotion to Berlin, where one of his earliest initiatives was to coddle Berlin's influential gay community. After Benedict XVI retired, Woelki came out in full progressivist garb and has flaunted that ever since, surely an attribute that prompted Pope Francis to name him to Cologne when Cardinal Meisner retired.]

Cardinal Woelki’s appointment to Cologne was followed by Archbishop Osoro Sierra’s appointment as Archbishop of Madrid – even in this case, an appointment that certainly did not align with progressivist notions that have dominated in the media over the past two years.

Now Cardinal Woelki is member of an important Vatican dicastery, called there to balance Cardinal Marx’s positions. The appointment may also show that Marx’s push toward reform has come to an end. [Even assuming that Woelki holds orthodox views, how does a member of APSA 'balance' out a cardinal who is not only on the Pope's advisory council of 9 but also heads the Council for the Economy which can dictate policy for all of the Vatican's financial offices, including APSA? For as long as Marx holds those two all-important positions in the Vatican, how can anyone say that his 'push for reform' is at an end? He has been doing all he can to promote the idea that a national church can be autonomous of Rome, as he claims the German Church is, in his capacity as president of the German bishops' conference. Not to forget that he is the Archbishop of Munich-Freising, Europe's second largest diocese (after Milan).

In many ways, Marx is really more powerful and influential than the two other megastars of the Bergoglian supercouncil - Cardinal Pell, who no longer has any episcopal function and whose influence is 'limited' to the Pope and the Vatican, or Cardinal Maradiaga, who heads a tiny archdiocese in Honduras where he is hardly home, although he heads Caritas International and has certainly been JMB/PF's most audacious, outspoken (occasionally, over the top) and ostensibly unbridled surrogate on the international circuit.]

And perhaps it is not by chance that the fiscal agreement the Vatican had signed with Italy – the first ever signed by the Holy See – has been presented as a sort of revolution toward more financial transparency. In fact, the agreement merely represents a (not needed) facilitation in the exchange of fiscal information between the Holy See and Italy. [But, of course, it had to be hyped as yet another first-ever under JMB!]

Italy will be able to require information on that status of bank accounts and money transfers by Vatican employees who hold an account in the IOR, and the Holy See will communicate this information by means of a simplified procedure. This is, however, no more than a development of the cooperation that has always existed between the Holy See and Italy.

In fact, Vatican sources maintained that the way this new agreement was conceived was not good, not least in the manner it was written. This is the reason Vatican officials hurried to stress that the agreement preserved the Holy See’s sovereignty. [Big deal! Of course, it does - it is an agreement between two states. No one in his right mind would have signed it on behalf of the Vatican if anything in it called the sovereignty of Vatican city state into question!]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/04/2015 06:42]

Today is a good day to start an annual novena for Benedict XVI on the occasion of his double gala celebration this year - his 88th birthday on April 16, and the tenth anniversary of his election as Pope on April 19. AD MULTOS ANNOS, YOUR HOLINESS!



Thanks to Beatrice and to her source, Antonio Socci's Facebook pages, some reflections that are 'necessary' for the sake of objectivity and fairness and therefore, out of respect for fact...

Pictures speak louder than words
EASTER ATTENDANCE
AT ST. PETER'S SQUARE -
2010 AND 2015

Socci posted this on his Facebook page, with the caption: "BERGOGLIO 2015 - URBI ET ORBI BLESSING AT EASTER - NB: THE SAME WEATHER - BENEDICT XVI 2010". It is obvious, of course, that the weather on Easter 2010 was even worse than last Sunday, and yet, and yet...

Let me translate Beatrice's introduction to Socci's Facebook entry:

Many people commented yesterday on the attendance (or deficiency thereof) at the Easter Mass celebrated by Pope Francis on St. Peter's Square [and the Urbi et Orbi blessing that followed soon afterwards]. I refrained, at the time, from adding my own personal commentary.

But I saw that promptly, the [Bergoglian] firemen on duty rushed quickly to counter those who noted the relatively poor attendance on Sunday by saying it was because of... the rain. Of course, it rains in Rome on Easter Sunday - perhaps not frequently, but not rarely, either, in early spring.

It is, of course, absurd and even indecent, especially for Catholics, to set up a petty war of numbers between the 'two Popes'. [Even if that is what the Francis fanworld has been doing since March 13, 2013 - to hype their obvious 'insurmountable advantage in popularity' over Benedict XVI, who, I am sure, never aspired to be a popular Pope, only a good one. Not that JMB/PF does not have the same goal.]

But... we are only human, after all, and personally, I invoke the very human right to respond.

Since March 2013, those who were immediately branded "Ratzinger nostalgians' (sic!) have had to put up with the incessant comparisons made between Francis and his predecessor, obviously to the detriment of the latter. Our ears have been battered by anecdotal accounts of the famous "Francis effect", of oceanic crowds at his Angelus prayers and audiences, and even unprecedented lines before the confessionals! [One must note, by the way, that every Pope since John Paul II has been credited with working their own positive effect - e.g., 'the Wojtyla effect' and the 'effetto Benedetto', a felicitous phrase in Italian. One of these days, I ought to post a compendium of all the articles on the 'effetto Benedetto' in his time.]

So, we can now savor an innocent little payback (not against the Pope, but against his diehard incense-bearers), for which we beg pardon from the Supreme Judge.

Antonio Socci's photo documentation was accompanied by this commentary:

---

Since there are those who claim that the rain in Rome yesterday accounted for the relatively poor attendance in St. peter's Square on Easter Sunday, let us compare it to Easter Sunday 2010 (Remember that it came in the midst of the general media hurricane recycling the outrage over sex-offender priests) [that had dominated reporting on the Church in 2001-2002 - but in 2010, the object was to force Benedict XVI to resign from 'shame', even if the media failed miserably, despite the mightiest huffing and puffing, to prove he was culpable in any way, directly or indirectly, for any related sins and crimes]. It also rained that day - and the photographic comparison is 'pitiless'... GRANDE BENEDETTO XVI!

On Easter 2010, it rained so hard that the photo shows the raindrops on the camera lens...

---

Beatrice continues:
I have not read the reactions to Socci's post, but later, he felt it necessary to make his point clear in not quite gracious terms:

---

I see that these photos have 'eaten up' some people with envy. But I repeat what I wrote under the photos and which apparently was not read by many who have reacted with commentary:

Personally, I reject numerical comparisons, but since the Bergoglian court continually exalts the Argentine Pope's massive triumphal crowds, comparing it to his predecessor's (the Vatican itself has published such statistics and comparisons), then I say: Deal with it [what the photos show]! But above all, think!

Beware of the media's 'box office' mentality and the worldliness of mediatic success, especially those that turn out to be bluff!

---

A personal comment to conclude: Rain never kept the faithful from being there for Benedict XVI (even if no one wants to talk about it now), and no offense meant to myopic ideologues!

I remember particularly the marvellous images of the 'rain of faith' on October 7 in Mariazell, Austria.[Not to mention that moving and awe-inspiring WYD Eucharistic Vigil taking place in a near-Biblical freak storm-deluge at Cuatro Vientos in Madrid in 2010!]

A news item in the Passauer Neue Presse, the regional newspaper that covers Regensburg, was published on 4/3/15, with the title "Ratzinger defends Francis against critics", even if the burden of what Mons. Georg Ratzinger told a PNP interviewer was that Benedict XVI must never be thought of or misrepresented as an 'anti-Pope', since he would never even think of intervening in any way with the affairs of the Church now that he is no longer Pope.

I do have a problem with interviews like these which, it seems to me, intend to instrumentalize those closest to Benedict XVI - his brother and his private secretary, Mons. Georg Gaenswein - by leading them to say favorable things about Pope Francis (since obviously, they would never ever say anything unfavorable). And perhaps worse, to say - and be quoted widely - that Benedict XVI shares his successor's views and is 100 percent behind him.

Because when they are asked directly, they could not possibly say anything else, if only not to aggravate the uncharitable view promoted by anti-Benedict elements since he retired - and even before his successor was elected - that Benedict XVI intends to exercise his influence in the Church as long as he is alive. The problem, of course, is that B16's critics tend to think of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI as no more than an 'ordinary man', i.e., like each of us who have not been gifted with the extraordinary graces that God endowed him with. And so they project to him what they would do if they ('an ordinary man') were in his place...

Thus, I 'dismissed' the interview Georg Gaenswein gave to Bergoglio biographer Elisabetta Pique for the Argentine newspaper La Nacion two weeks ago, in which he expresses fulsome praise for Pope Francis, who is, of course, his official boss. The article led off with a quote from GG who says that "Benedict XVI is very impressed with Pope Francis". I respect GG's independent opinions and his right to speak them out, but I was not going to give myself more heartburn - literal and otherwise - by translating it.

Frankly, the overall impression one gets from GG's praises of Pope Francis, wittingly or unwittingly, is that he is superior to Benedict XVI in his work habits, in his prayer life and God knows what else. It may well be, as GG sees it, and it is just sheer prejudice that makes me recoil from GG's encomiums.

I have gritted my teeth through similar statements from GG in earlier interviews - too many, I think - in the belief that he must go out of his way to say these things in order to neutralize all the stories of supposed behind-the-scenes maneuverings from Benedict XVI to somehow meddle in Vatican affairs, such as the 'family synod', in opposition to Bergoglian initiatives. Fine, but I think he is overdoing it, and the La Nacion interview went 'over the top', as it were.

All the while I was reading it, my mind kept screaming, "Please, Georg Gaenswein, just shut up! You have not said anything factually new about Benedict XVI in the past year, and your new boss certainly does not need your fulsome praises - he has more than enough sycophants doing that for him". But as Mons. Gaenswein is an honorable man, I do not doubt his sincerity in expressing such admiration for Pope Francis, and he has every right to do so, and to say whatever he wants to say. I just wish he would stop doing so!

Does all that praise of Pope Francis from someone who works with him and must accompany him on all of his public events change my mind about JMB? No, because the points GG makes usually have nothing to do with my major objections to JMB, or otherwise circumvent them...

Georg Ratzinger defends his brother
against those who think of him as an anti-Pope
Translated from
PASSAUER NEUE PRESSE
April 2, 2015

Georg Ratzinger, brother of Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, has defended Pope Francis against his conservative critics.

In a conversation with Passauer Neuen Presse, Mons. Ratzinger, 91, acknowledged that "Much about Francis's style is rather unusual", but "That is what he believes (his conviction), and it is in tune with his mission." This opinion is shared by Benedict XVI, who was chosen to lead the Catholic Church ten years ago. [There being no direct or indirect quotation from Georg Ratzinger, this statement seems to be a conclusion drawn by the writer.]

Ratzinger rejects all allegations that his brother is allowing himself to be yoked in as the 'anti-Pope'. "That is most certainly not the case," the former Kapellmeister of Regensburg Cathedral underscored. He said there are no conflicts between Francis and Benedict and that their relationship has been "very friendly, collegial and priestly".

The impression that his brother could assume the role of 'anti-Pope' is, in his opinion, nurtured by those who have "problems with the new Pontificate", and that such an idea can grow on that ground.

Mons. Ratzinger said: "Perhaps these people suggest that my brother could intervene or in some way be active in Church politics and correct the line being taken on relevant problems. But they are wrong". [Before his successor was even chosen, Benedict XVI vowed before the College of Cardinals that he would "respect and obey" the next Pope. That was an unconditional promise, and one imagines it would take outright heresy by his successor to make him transgress that promise.

But I think, for all his raging ambition to transform the Roman Catholic Church into his image and likeness, JMB/PF is much too clever and jesuitical to risk crossing the line into formal heresy. Even if personally, I don't see how 'communion for everyone' isn't heretical, but I am sure JMB's theological brain, Mons. Fernandez must have a tract ready by now that interprets Christ's words at the Last Supper as somehow intending 'communion for everyone' literally, and that it is only 'the pharisaical theologians' who subsequently required that one must be in a state of grace to partake of the Eucharist.

If 'communion for everyone' is legislated for the universal Church - I'm sure with enough verbal hedging in the norms for its execution so that it does not appear to be the license to sin that it is - what would Benedict XVI do?]

Mons. Ratzinger also commented on criticisms of Benedict XVI's Pontificate. There are many people, he said, "who do not like the clear lines set down by my brother, people who simply believe that every current cultural manifestation must immediately be translated to reality", which is not good for the Catholic Church, since "Whoever weds himself to the spirit of the time (Zeitgeist) is soon a widow(er), as the saying goes. [Well, our feisty nonagenarian got in his own there, didn't he? Clearly a reference to the Bergoglian initiatives to be decided by the next synodal assembly on the family. And how clever to use a metaphor whose main verb is 'marry'!]

The online text of the article says "You can read more in your issue of the Passauer Neuen Presse", presumably the newspaper edition.

What is the world coming to? Between a US President who, it turns out, is a closet Muslim and increasingly bigoted against Christians (though he professes to be Christian) and a UN climate chief who says that 'global warming' - the most monumental liberal hoax - should be solved by 'reducing population increases'? I won't bother posting on Obama's latest anti-Christian indulgence, but what the UN climate chief says deserves notice. Obama will be gone and powerless in two years, but the UN will march onward indefinitely to dictate more and more what countries and peoples should do... [BTW, PewSitter chose a rather diabolical-looking image of the UN lady chief!]

UN Climate Chief:
We should ‘make every effort’ to reduce population increases
'Today we are already exceeding the planet's carrying capacity'
By Michael Bastasch

April 6, 2015

United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres said humanity “really should make every effort” to reduce global population trends to protect the environment and fight global warming, in an interview with Climate One.

[Figueres (born 1956) has been Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change since May 2010. Daughter of a three-time President of Costa Rica and sister to another President, she worked for the Costa Rican government first as a diplomat then as a minister for various development programs. In 1995, she founded the Latin American Center for Sustainable Development, at a time when she also became an international negotiator for the UN Convention for Climate Change, providing critical international strategy for achieving developing country support and approval of the Kyoto Protocol and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). And on and on.. Her biodata shows someone obsessed with environmentalism...]

The U.N. predicts the global population will number 9 billion people by 2050 — a number that makes many environmentalists worry. Climate One Founder Greg Dalton pressed Figueres on whether or not she thinks there are policies to reduce the 9 billion 2050 estimate.

“I mean we all know that we expect nine billion, right, by 2050,” Figueres told Dalton in an interview. “So, yes, obviously less people would exert less pressure on the natural resources.”

Indeed, the U.N. has warned that food and water resources will be stretched thin as the global population booms. A recent U.N. report on water argued that the world would only be able to meet 60 percent of its water needs in 15 years because of population and economic growth. The U.N. said countries will have to increase water prices or recycling programs to accommodate more people.

The U.N. argued in 2013 that more people should eat insects for protein and help the environment by reducing the demand for traditional meats from cows, chickens and pigs.

“Insects are everywhere and they reproduce quickly, and they have high growth and feed conversion rates and a low environmental footprint,” the U.N. reported.

“So is nine billion a forgone conclusion?” Dalton asked. “That’s like baked in, done, no way to change that?”

Figueres responded: “We can definitely change those numbers and really should make every effort to change those numbers because we are already, today, already exceeding the planet’s planetary carrying capacity. To say nothing of adding more population - that is really going to overextend our capacity. So yes we should do everything possible.”

“But we cannot fall into the very simplistic opinion of saying just by curtailing population then we’ve solved the problem. It is not either/or, it is an and/also,” Figueres added.

For decades, environmental activists have been suggesting the world has too many people. White House science czar John Holdren argued in the 1970s that governments needed to take measures to reduce population or suffer ecological calamity.

Calls for population controls cooled in the 1980s and 90s after predictions of ecological collapse from overpopulation failed to materialize. But in recent years, some have been pushing for the use of birth control to keep birth rates down in developing countries.

Former Vice President Al Gore and Microsoft founder Bill Gates have said “fertility management” was the key to fighting global warming.

“Depressing the rate of child mortality, educating girls, empowering women and making fertility management ubiquitously available … is crucial to the future shape of human civilization,” Gore said at the World Economic Forum last winter.

[Note the new term 'fertility management' for 'population control'!]

Ironically, the U.N.’s chief demographer has said reducing global population increases will have little to no impact on global warming. John Wilmoth said that while there is “relatively little uncertainty” in population growth estimates over the next century, but there is “complete uncertainty” population will have little effect on carbon emissions.

Creation of the Sun and Moon, Michelangelo (1511), Sistine Chapel.

What a welcome fresh look at one of Joseph Ratzinger's less-known texts, as an illustration of JR/Benedict XVI's canonical exegesis - interpreting Scriptures as a whole in the context of the history of salvation, and therefore, of the faith, instead of the reductionist historico-critical method which looks at the texts isolated from each other and from the faith and culture of the People of God who are the true 'authors' - "led, and spoken to, by God himself, who, through men and their humanity, is, at the deepest level, the one speaking".

The Word in Creation:
The Ratzingerian critique of the historical-critical method
and its application to the Creation accounts
by THOMAS L. MCDONALD

March 30, 2015




At the heart of Benedict XVI’s papacy, and of the theological and ecclesiastical career of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, is a highly developed — and in some ways radical — biblical theology.

Indeed, all things most characteristic about the work of Ratzinger/Benedict XVI — liturgical renewal, the return to the Church Fathers, the fundamentally catechetical nature of his encyclicals — spring from his Scripture scholarship.

This is unique for a pope, and indeed, Scott Hahn goes so far as to say, “Never before in the history of the Catholic Church has a world-class biblical theologian been elevated to the papacy.” (1)

This biblical theology developed in a time of flux in the Church, not just with the Council, but with ressourcement and the ongoing revolution in Scripture study. His life has coincided with a time of radical upheaval in many areas of theology, but most notably in the area of exegesis, and in particular in the development of — and the Church’s reaction to — the historical-critical method.

Under Cardinal Ratzinger’s direction, the Pontifical Biblical Commission issued several key Church documents about biblical interpretation, among them, “The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scripture in the Bible” (2001) and “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church” (1994).

These documents show Ratzinger’s efforts to refine biblical theology for a new generation by outlining the “hidden dangers” and “positive possibilities” of the various techniques of study. His pointed critique of modern scholarship is a common theme of his writing, as he tries to tease the wheat from the chaff.

The most expansive example of his exegetical technique is found in his magnum opus, the Jesus of Nazareth series. (2) An earlier text, however, provides a fascinating glimpse of Ratzinger’s method at work on the vexed subject of Creation.

In 1981, he delivered a series of homilies on the opening passages of Genesis — subsequently published as 'In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall — which sought to reconcile a reasonable understanding of creation and the fall with what the natural sciences now tell us about the universe, the Earth, and the rise of life.

These passages of Genesis are fraught with challenges for the modern Catholic exegete, who must navigate a path between materialism and fundamentalism, which both insist on an overly literal interpretation that is unsupported by the text.

By using the tools offered by the historical-critical method, drawing on the Fathers, and practicing canonical criticism (which views each piece of Scripture in light of the whole), he comes to a satisfying solution to the “problems” of Genesis that preserves the deep theological relevance of these beloved passages.

New Methods in the Study of Scripture
In Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, Joseph Ratzinger recalls his student days, when the consensus was that the historical-critical method had offered the “last word” on the meaning of Scripture. One professor even declined to supervise any more dissertation work on the New Testament, saying that “everything in the New Testament had already been researched.” (3) One is reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) story of the Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office who is supposed to have remarked, in 1899, that the office should be closed because “everything that can be invented has been invented.”

The development of new methods began in the early 19th century, when scholars broke from using the textus recepticus (4) and returned to Greek and Hebrew texts closer to the sources.

The presence of overlapping, variant texts (doublets) in the Pentateuch gave rise to the “documentary hypothesis,” which questioned the tradition of Moses as its sole author, and continued with speculation on the composition of the Synoptic Gospels.

The problem with this approach is that “it did not pay sufficient attention to the final form of the biblical text and to the message which it conveyed in the state in which it actually exists.” (5) In a kind of a reverse gestalt, the pieces were judged greater than the whole.

Textual, literary, form, and redaction criticism developed in stages, each contributing something to the historical-critical method that allows us to study community, composition, form, and editing more closely.

It is “historical” because it attempts to understand the historic context of the texts and the long process by which they came to their current form.

It is “critical” because it attempts to use objective, scientific criteria to analyze a biblical text as one would any other historical or literary document.

It seeks the earliest, best manuscripts and subjects them to close linguistic analysis to determine what can be known about the people who produced the text, and the process of writing and revising them.

At first, the new process and the old frequently found themselves in conflict. In time, traditional exegesis came to accept some of the claims about the texts, acknowledging that they were, in fact, produced over time by diverse hands.

Too often, however, the process is separated from the proper placement of Scripture in the Church, with exegetes forgetting that “the text in its final stage, rather than in its earlier editions … is the expression of the word of God.” (6) As Pope Benedict observes, this unity is, itself, a “theological datum.” (7)

Problems with the Method
The problem with the scientific method of modern biblical criticism is that it developed largely devoid of self-reflection that might have illuminated its limitations.

The post-Enlightenment bias of the architects and subsequent practitioners of the historical-critical method inherited “philosophical, epistemological, and historical assumptions” (8) as part of the package.

They created a method to critique the Bible, but did not linger on a critique of the method itself, and its inherent flaws. They mistook this method — a mere tool, and an incomplete one at that — for a purely rational device by which one could truly understand the source, audience, and meaning of every biblical text.

Yet bias was baked right in the cake. Miracle stories were out. The supernatural was set aside or explained away. Any evidence of subtle and complex theology was seen as proof of late authorship, working under the assumption of another post-Enlightenment bias: the application of the theory of evolution to all things.

Benedict observes that this assumption of the relevance of evolution remains one of the key biases modernist scholars bring to the table, and one which is of particular relevance in discussing creation accounts.

They assume a “neo-evolutionary model of natural development” where texts are concerned, asserting that complex forms of a text evolve from simpler forms. If a text is theologically sophisticated, it is late. If it is simple, it is early. These simpler forms must, of course, be closer to the real source, and thus a more “authentic” representation of history.

This process is particularly vexing for Ratzinger when applied to the New Testament, since often it results in trying to tease out the “Hellenistic” from the “Jewish” tradition in Scripture under the assumption that the Greek was a corrupting influence, rather than “an event of decisive importance, not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history.” (9) In other words, the Hellenistic encounter with Christianity was not incidental, but integral, and any attempt to dehellenize any text written in Greek is bound to fail.

Uncertainty
Ratzinger refers often to the “method and limits of historical knowledge,” (10) applying Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle11 to his assessment of modern scientific biblical criticism.

If the historical-critical method is going to take the natural sciences as its model, it has to also accept its limitations. If the idea of uncertainty is true in quantum mechanics, it’s doubly so in historical research.

After all, in the physical sciences, the facts and theories in question must be subject to contemporary testing. A phenomenon must be observed and measured, and the results must be reproducible. Since history has already happened, this is, of course, impossible.

The scholar can never produce a wholly objective model of history or textual interpretation, because he is shaped by countless factors affecting his conclusions. His choice of subject matter, training, knowledge, area of expertise, starting point, intellect, skill, school of thought, epistemology, bias, and even his biography render him a less-than-impartial observer.

Furthermore, since the events of Scripture are the work of humans, the subjective influence of the observer is even greater.

Thus we see that the “objective” historian or textual critic is an illusion: objectivity may never be achieved because even the most thorough and “scientific” method — which the historical-critical method certainly claims to be — is subject to all these inherent flaws.

Some practitioners certainly are aware of these limitations, but far more are reluctant to accept them. The history of the method itself belies its own claims to be a “scientific” process. Were it truly a scientific method, truth would have gone from disputed to undisputed, from general to specific, from unknown to known. Progression of knowledge is one of the key elements in the scientific method.

Yet when we look at two centuries of “scientific” approaches to biblical study, we see nothing of the sort. What Ratzinger observed in his lifetime of studying this material was simply this: we do not have one linear progression from imprecision to precision, but, rather, a “history of subjective constellations, whose trajectories correspond precisely to the developments of intellectual history and reflect them in the form of interpretations of the text.” (12)

In brief, each new generation offers new interpretations that reflect the fads and preoccupations of that generation.

The missing element — the central fatal flaw — of the method is its unwillingness to realize that “faith is itself a way of knowing.” When faith is set aside, the result is not scientific objectivity, but the elimination of crucial perspective on the text under examination. It “refuses to acknowledge the contingency of the conditions of the vision it, itself, has opted for.

By contrast, when we realize that the Holy Scriptures come from a subject that is still very much alive — the pilgrim People of God — it is clear, even rationally, that this subject has something to contribute to the understanding of this book.” (13)

Ratzinger suggests, as a response to this methodological limitation, a “diachronic reading,” which takes the product of each writer and understands it in the context of that writer’s “philosophical presuppositions.”

In other words, use the tools of scientific criticism as far as they take you, but don’t labor under the delusion that these tools preserve you from bias and subjectivity. He concludes by urging that this not lead to “skepticism,” but to a self-limitation and purification of the method.

Canonical Criticism: Understanding the Whole
The Fathers were quite correct in understanding the four senses of Scripture, and they also knew that these senses were not “individual meanings arrayed side by side, but dimensions of the one word that reaches beyond the moment.” They held a deeper meaning, and we would not still be reading these texts and drawing out new meanings “unless the words themselves were already open to it from within.” (14)

Canonical criticism takes on a central role in any attempt to read the Bible with the mind of the Church. The authors are not merely individuals writing for their own benefit, but part of a collective subject, the “People of God,” from within whose heart and to whom they speak.

Hence, this subject is actually the deeper “author” of the Scriptures. And yet likewise, this people does not exist alone; rather, it knows that it is led, and spoken to, by God himself, who — through men and their humanity — is, at the deepest level, the one speaking. (15)

In the absence of this understanding, the historical-critical method has trouble reaching solid theological conclusions. The Bible as a whole, representing a received text of particular meaning to a particular community, is not just important, but central to a proper understanding of the meaning of Scripture.

Canonical criticism — whether it examines the process of canonical development by which a community refines and accepts a text, or the final text itself — attempts to understand the Bible as a “norm of faith” by the community that both produced and inherited it, with each part contributing to “the single plan of God.” Understood this way, it does not challenge the historical-critical method: it purifies and “completes” it. (16)

Genesis: An Example of Canonical Criticism
Ratzinger was prompted to deliver his homilies on the creation accounts of Genesis after noting the utter of absence of the creation theme from catechesis. It was no longer a tenable concept in the wake of Darwin, and notions of “creation” at the hand of a Creator were being seen as less intellectually honest than ideas like selection and mutation. It was, in fact, dismissed as an “unreal concept.” (17)

This reductionist approach, however, holds grave implications for the faith, stripping God from any role in the formation of the material world. Yet how do we reconcile the text of the creation and fall — written, as the catechism notes, in “figurative language” (18) — with what science reveals about the age of the earth and the development of life thereon?

Ratzinger, in citing the opening passages of Genesis, asks the pertinent question: the words are beautiful, but are they also true? - Has science — which now measures the lifespan of the universe and the earth in billions of years, and suggests that the rise of life happened gradually — made this nothing more than a poetic fairytale, to be disposed of by modern rational man?
- Do they merely come out of an “infant age” of mankind which we have left far behind?

Form and Content
Ratzinger’s first layer of interpretation of Genesis is a common one: form versus content. The Bible is not a textbook, and does not attempt to offer modern scientific answers to important questions. In a time when the pendulum has swung so far, that scientific answers are adjudged to be the only relevant answers, this would seem to render the Genesis accounts little more than fables.

That is not, however, what we should take away from a proper understanding of form. The distinction must be made between “the form of the portrayal and the content that is portrayed.” (19) The form is determined by the community which wrote the passages, drawn from the images that held meaning for them.

The intent was not to show, for example, how the amphibian came to have its legs, but to show that the world was not created from a swirling chaos or by gods or other mythological creatures, but by one God, the Prime Mover, who, in his Reason and through his Word, wielded the power of creation.

It was, in a sense, a counter-narrative, shifting the focus from gods and goddesses, spirits and demons, to the One True God. What’s more, as the Scripture will reveal, God is knowable, and has chosen the Israelites as people uniquely beloved.

Ratzinger offers this answer, but it does not wholly satisfy him for a reason that is central to our understanding of his exegetical method. If this is, in fact, the correct way of reading the creation accounts: "Why wasn’t that said earlier? … The suspicion grows that ultimately perhaps this way of viewing things is only a trick of the church and of theologians who have run out of solutions but do not want to admit it, and now they are looking for something to hide behind. And on the whole, the impression is given that the history of Christianity in the last four hundred years has been a constant rearguard action, as the assertions of the faith and of theology have been dismantled, piece by piece." (20)

There is a fear that, if the process continues long enough, theologians will run out of places to hide. We’ll be left clinging to a favored text that is no longer reliable.

Furthermore, if the Church can change the way she understands one element of Scripture — seeming to redefine the boundaries between image and intention at will — why can’t she do it for others? If one act of God (Creation) is now seen to be merely figurative, based on the revelations of science, why can’t another act of God (the resurrection) be treated similarly?

The Canonical Understanding
In order to come to grips with the situation, Ratzinger refines his question of image versus intention by applying canonical criticism to it, asking if the entirety of the Bible itself makes the distinction, and if the Fathers and the Church recognize that distinction. His conclusion is that the creation account was never “closed in on itself.” (21)

From the very beginning of the Israelite encounter with God, the story is about a people struggling to “seize hold of God over the course of time,” (22) and of God to make himself known to them.

The Creation account is not just set down once, as is now clear from careful analysis of the text. It is, rather, something the People of God struggle with and return to over time, perhaps even centuries.

The formation of Scripture was not just a one-time event, but a process of gradual understanding.The only way to truly grasp the ultimate meaning of any passage is not to isolate it, chloroform it, and pin it to a board like a butterfly. It is to follow the living text all the way from the beginning to the end.

That end does not happen when Genesis moves from Creation to the account of the Fall and beyond. It reappears, in a new and more perfect form — when St. John pens the opening lines of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word.”

And only then can we understand what Genesis is telling us. As Ratzinger puts it: “every individual part (of Scripture) derives its meaning from the whole, and the whole derives its meaning from the end — from Christ.” (23)

Genesis is only a partial story of creation. The complete story of creation can only be understood after the Incarnation.

Creation and the People of God
Creation was not a preoccupation of the Israelites until after the Babylonian captivity, when they began looking back at their origins and — drawing on ancient tradition — developed the passages into the form we now know.

What they tell the Jews is simply this: God was never just the God of one piece of land or one place. If he was, then he could be overthrown by another, stronger “god.” After Israel lost everything, and began encountering God again in their misery, they came to understand that this was the God of all people, all lands, and indeed, of all the universe. He had this power, first in Israel, then in Babylon, because he created the world and all that was in it.

In captivity, they heard creation myths such as that of the Babylonian Enuma Elish, which tells of Marduk splitting the body of a dragon in two to form the world, and fashioning humans out of dragon blood. All of this dark and primordial nonsense is banished by the image of an earth “without form and void.” No more dragons, no more gods, no more violence and blood: just the pure power of creation from nothing, by a God who made man, not to suffer and struggle and die, but to walk in paradise.

There was order to creation, not chaos. It emerged from Reason, not madness. And it was spoken into being by the Word of God. Indeed, Jews believed that the Torah existed before creation. Creation happened to make the Torah known.

Furthermore, the shape of the creation account itself was meant to echo the Torah and to sanctify time and the week. Time becomes sacred in this account, with man laboring for six days in imitation of God, and resting to worship God on the seventh, in imitation of the “rest” of God Himself.

The Creation accounts thus build towards, and culminate in, the Sabbath, “which is the sign of the covenant between God and humankind.” (24) In a very real sense, then, the creation account can be seen as liturgical: “Creation exists for the sake of worship.” (25)

That final day is a day in which humanity itself participates in the freedom of the almighty, provided to us in the covenant. We “enter his rest” (in the words of Psalm 95 and Hebrews).

Continuing Creation
Creation accounts don’t end with the first paragraphs of Genesis. There’s another one right away in Genesis, and then more in the Psalms and the Wisdom literature.

The Wisdom literature — written under the Hellenistic influence — then forms a bridge to the New Testament, which recasts creation in Christological terms in the opening lines of the Gospel of John.

We understand, at last, that “In the beginning,” the logos and the spirit — the intellect and the will — of God, were with God, and that the world bears the imprint of the divine thought. We see the theme of creation not as a one-time closed moment depicting a literal event in a literal way, but as a recurring motif of birth and renewal flowing through the entire text of the Bible.

These accounts use different images because they emerge from different milieu and are speaking to a different audience. Do we really think the redactors of the Scripture were unaware that two accounts of creation and the formation of man were placed back to back in the text? Of course not: they included them because each used images which spoke to the People of God in unique ways and recalled particular times and places in which they were written. It is, in fact, these so-called “contradictions” that tell us most truly that we are dealing with images that are malleable, adapted to speak to the community’s needs.

By isolating each book, each text, and each piece of text, the historical-critical method becomes incapable of conducting a proper analysis of these passages. The techniques can reveal certain things about structure, language, and even community, but they will always fail to grasp the true importance of a biblical text for a very simple reason: they’ve ruled out the theological meaning of a theological text. They’ve put aside the very idea that the passages tell a certain truth in a specific way.

Furthermore, the relevance of the natural sciences to these texts is non-existent. They can neither confirm nor deny, prove nor disprove, the words of Genesis. It’s like claiming a botanical thesis can somehow illuminate the true meaning of Shakespeare’s words about the rose.

It does not tell us literally “how” God made the universe and all that’s in it. It tells us that he made it, and that he was a God of love and reason, and that, therefore, the world is derived from his infinite Reason, and may thus also be considered reasonable. (26) And if creation is reasonable, then faith, too, is reasonable.

Bibliography
Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000).

Hahn, Scott. Covenant and Communion: The Biblical Theology of Pope Benedict XVI. (Great Britain: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2009).

Pontifical Biblical Commission. “Interpretation of the Bible in the Church.” (ewtn.com/library/curia/pbcinter.htm).

Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal. “Exegesis and the Magisterium of the Church.” ed. José Granados, Carlos Granados, and Luis Sánchez-Navarro, trans. Adrian Walker. Opening up the Scriptures: Joseph Ratzinger and the Foundations of Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008).

Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal. In the Beginning…’: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995).

(Ratzinger) Pope Benedict XVI. Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. (New York, Doubleday Religious Publishing Group, 2005.

Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal. Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005).

Notes:
1 Scott Hahn, Covenant and Communion: The Biblical Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Great Britain: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2009), 13. ↩
2 Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration (2008), Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to The Resurrection (2011), Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives (2012). ↩
3 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005), 27. ↩
4 A succession of Greek texts compiled from several manuscripts by Erasmus and others. ↩
5 Ratzinger, Pilgrim. ↩
6 Ibid. ↩
7 Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration (New York, Doubleday Religious Publishing Group, 2005), Kindle Locations 231-235. ↩
8 Ibid. ↩
9 Ibid. ↩
10 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Exegesis and the Magisterium of the Church,” ed. José Granados, Carlos Granados, and Luis Sánchez-Navarro, trans. Adrian Walker, Opening up the Scriptures: Joseph Ratzinger and the Foundations of Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 135. ↩
11 Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) was a German theoretical physicist who observed that the more precisely one property of a particle is measured (say, its momentum), the less precisely another property can be measured (such as position). Put simply: there are limits to how much we can know about an object in question because when we achieve precision in one area, we surrender it in another. ↩
12 Ratzinger, “Exegesis,” ibid. ↩
13 Ibid. ↩
14 Benedict, Jesus, Kindle Locations 250-251. ↩
15 Ibid, Kindle Locations 258-262. ↩
16 Pontifical Biblical Commission, “Interpretation of the Bible in the Church.” (ewtn.com/library/curia/pbcinter.htm). ↩
17 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, In the Beginning…’: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall, (Grand Rapids, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), xi. ↩
18 Catechism of the Catholic Church: Second Edition (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), 300. ↩
19 Ibid, 5. ↩
20 Ibid, 6. ↩
21 Ibid, 8. ↩
22 Ibid, 9. ↩
23 Ibid. ↩
24 Ibid, 27. ↩
25 Ibid, 28. ↩
26 Einstein wrote that the laws of nature “revealed such a superior Reason that everything significant which has arisen out of human thought and arrangement is, in comparison with it, the merest empty reflection.” ↩

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/04/2015 22:39]

Father Z has decided to be quite blunt about this facile and quite unrealistic talk about 'schism' these days, in more direct, terse and therefore more effective words than I have done so far...

And he is right: It's the left and their accommodating headline writers in the media who are making such a fuss of it.

For obvious reasons: Schismatics are generally looked on depreciatively in the Church, because heretofore, the schismatics - like the Eastern Orthodox Churches and the churches born of the Protestant Reformation - did in fact break off from the one, holy, Roman Catholic Church to set up shop on their own.

But for the progressivists in the Church today to peddle the idea that orthodox Catholics may break off in any way from the one true Church is just ludicrous. If all these decades the progressivists themselves have not broken off from the Catholic Church, it has only been out of convenience: The Church has not thrown them out, regardless of the outrageous positions they espouse and promote in violation of many of the Church's teachings, and they are not about to risk going out on a limb to found a 'new church' of their own. Oh, the logistics and the infrastructure, the cost and the whole trouble, of having to do that! - as against the comfort and convenience of using the established institution, the Catholic Church, as a platform for their progressivist agenda (may the best man win!, they think, as if faith were a competition). With the added bonus that as dissidents, they can always count they will have the media on their side. Once they leave the Church and set up on their own, they'll be no better than the thousand and more non-Catholic Christian denominations, and where's the fun in that? No more media stardom or even special attention, to begin with.

Yet, for fifty years now, they have been hoping to prevail against Catholic orthodoxy. Now they are riding high because they think they finally have a chance with a Pope who, at the very least, appears to share some of their pet heterodox ideas...


Stop talking about schism -
Catholics don't 'schism'!
by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

April 9, 2015


The upcoming Synod of Bishops in October is probably going to be a knock-down, drag-out over a few issues. The Germans are set on achieving a progressive agenda and have hinted at doing their own thing if the Synod doesn’t go their way. Others are set on defending the Church’s doctrine.

Some people are talking about “schism” because of the Synod.

No matter what happens at the Synod, there will be no schism by either side.

Schisms are passé. Catholics don’t schism.

Indifference and apathetic drifting are the real threats.

Conservatives have nowhere else to go (e.g., the SSPX simply not an option). Conservatives accept Vatican II AND the Catechism of the Catholic Church AND Code of Canon Law. [It's not that conservative Catholics - read orthodox Catholics - 'have nowhere else to go', but that we cannot and should not and will not be pushed into leaving the 'one true Church': We are sticking with her, despite any aberrations that may be imposed by her hierarchy in the name of 'pastoral mercy' or whatever. Because one trusts that any such aberrations will be temporary and will be corrected eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later, under a new dispensation (or Pontificate, for that matter).

How exactly we shall live through the aberrations I cannot dare predict, especially if the aberrations have papal patronage and sanction - there is just no precedent in modern times. Human nature being what it is, when the Pope leads, the great majority of bishops and clergy, perhaps of the faithful, too, will follow, so if the aberrations indeed come from the Pope himself, I think the orthodox faithful will end up being 'creative minorities' within an amorphous follow-the-leader/follow-the-Zeitgeist mass, as Cardinal Ratzinger once envisioned that the intermediate prospects for Catholicism would be.]

Liberals love to hear conservatives talk about “schism”, because liberals are actually the ones trying to bring it about. As they try to impose NewChurch, liberals are already in de facto schism. But they’ll never make it official. They are basically Congregationalists. They are still in the cafeteria. They take what the want and leave the rest. Schism would take too much effort and money.

Schism talk is for journalists only, for headline effect. But it’s to the liberals’ advantage.

So, I want to assure the world that there will not be a schism.

There is no real threat of schism from the right. There will be no formal schism on the left, for different reasons.

So – get over it. Stop the distraction.

Schism talk benefits mainly liberal kooks.

Sorry… that was redundant.

Sorry to be two days late with this report...

I am trying to recall any similar spontaneous 'movement' by orthodox Catholics petitioning the Vatican and the Church hierarchy to uphold Catholic teaching on any particular subject, but I don't think there has been anything in my lifetime (six decades plus now). Probably, the only similar 'petition' movement from orthodox Catholics was to protest the abrogation of the traditional Mass back in 1969-1970.

In both cases, the point is to uphold something that has held and worked for centuries against the contemporary tendency to 'change' for the sake of change, most often because the dominant mentality demands changes that conform to it as being 'in step with the times'. But Catholic doctrine and discipline are not whims or preferences that can change with time - the teaching of the one true Church of Christ and the practices and discipline demanded of the faithful in following such teaching are meant to be timeless and ever relevant. Not subject to the idiosyncracies of any Pope or to the parliamentary vote of the bishops of the Church.

But the Church's most basic teachings on marriage, sexuality and the Eucharist are being challenged in the 'family synods' called by Pope Bergoglio with the naked intention of getting a ratification, by majority vote of the synodal bishops, of changes ostensibly directed 'only' at relaxing ecclesial discipline in these areas 'without touching doctrine', which is a logical contradiction.

Discipline represents the norms that govern how clergy and faithful enforce and follow doctrine. The discipline of the faith arises from its doctrine, and is not arbitrarily imposed. To start to make exceptions in enforcing such discipline is to dilute the doctrine behind the discipline to the point of defying or negating the doctrine itself.

I don't pretend to have any higher knowledge of theology or ecclesiology, but as a simple Catholic, the inextricable link between doctrine and discipline seems so obvious that I cannot comprehend the zeal of the progressivists to virtually do away with discipline and claim that they are not thereby 'touching' doctrine at all. That argument is patently dishonest and false. [The metaphor I like to use for comparison is this: Would New Age enthusiasts who are 'into' yoga or transcendental meditation ever think of defying or modifying the discipline required in those processes (which each have a doctrine of their own) to accommodate their personal preferences? Why should the discipline of the Catholic faith be any less 'sacrosanct' than the discipline demanded by yoga and TM? Or, for that matter, of sports training for athletes, or daily drills for ballet dancers?]

So it is very heartening to note an immediate support from 500 English laymen and women for the letter of the 500 Priests urging the coming synodal assembly on the family to uphold what the Church has always taught. The numbers are small compared to the number of Catholic laity and Cahtolic priests, respectively, in England and Wales. But that the 500 priests and the 500 laypeople cared enough to speak out as they have done publicly is rewarding enough in itself. And one prays that more and more Catholics like them in more and more countries will follow their example.


500 lay people echo priests’ plea to stand firm
against Communion for the remarried
by Madeleine Teahan

Wednesday, 8 Apr 2015


More than five hundred lay people have signed a letter in support of hundreds of priests who recently wrote to the Catholic Herald declaring their support for the Church’s teaching on marriage.

Here is the text of the lay people’s letter, published in this week’s edition of the Catholic Herald:

---

The Editor
The Catholic Herald

Dear Sir,

We, the undersigned, wish to endorse and support the letter signed by over 460 priests in the recent edition of the Catholic Herald.

As laity, we all know from our own family experiences, or those of our friends and neighbours, the harrowing trauma of divorce and separation, and we sympathise with all those in such situations.

It is precisely for that reason that we believe that the Church must continue to proclaim the truth about marriage, given us by Christ in the Gospels, with clarity and charity in a world that struggles to understand it.

For the sake of those in irregular unions, for the sake of those abandoned and living in accordance with the teachings of the Church, and above all for the sake of the next generation, it is essential that the Church continues to make it quite clear that sacramental marriage is indissoluble until death.

We pray, and expect, that our hierarchy will represent us, and the Church’s unwavering teaching, at the Synod this autumn.

Yours faithfully,
Mark Lambert
Andrew Plasom-Scott

---

[As it did with the priests' letter, the Herald published the names of all the signatories in alphabetical order.]

The original letter, signed by nearly 500 priests and published last month, stated: “We wish, as Catholic priests, to re-state our unwavering fidelity to the traditional doctrines regarding marriage and the true meaning of human sexuality, founded on the Word of God and taught by the Church’s Magisterium for two millennia.”

Although the priests’ letter was not welcomed by Cardinal Vincent Nichols, who said that such debate should not be conducted through the media, the lay people’s letter to the Catholic Herald calls on Church hierarchy to show “unwavering” support for Catholic teaching.

Meanwhile, a separate online petition has been launched in support of the priests in question and has gained 704 signatures so far.

Last year’s extraordinary synod provoked heated debate on the question of whether remarried Catholics should be permitted to receive Holy Communion – a proposal presented by retired German Cardinal Walter Kasper.

Another story that I am posting belatedly - more interesting perhaps for the strong reaction to one of the statements made by Cardinal Mueller in the interview. After all, he says nothing new about the questionable and vexing issues forced onto the agenda of the October 2015 synodal assembly on the family. But he is right, of course, to reaffirm the Church position, the doctrine of the faith, as often as he can - that is his duty as CDF Prefect...

Interview with Cardinal Mueller
by Samuel Lieven and Nicolas Senèze
Translated from

March 29, 2015

For Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, visiting France for the release of the first volume in French of the COMPLETE WRITINGS OF JOSEPH RATZINGER, to which he wrote the Preface, the doctrine of the Church is the expression of the truth revealed in Jesus Christ, even as he distinguishes dogma from the concrete organization of the sacraments.

Made a cardinal by Pope Francis, Mons. Mueller firmly defends the position of the Church on remarried divorcees.

The Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith says it is impossible for the Church to eventually recognize a second marriage after divorce [unless of course, the divorcee's sacramental spouse has died, or the Church marriage has been annulled.].

How do you conceive of your role in this Pontificate? Is it different than it was with Benedict XVI, who was a theologian and had preceded you at the CDF?
The arrival at the Chair of Peter of a theologian like Benedict XVI is without a doubt exceptional. But John XXIII was not a theologian by profession or training. Pope Francis too is more pastoral, and the CDF has the mission to provide a theological structure for the Pontificate.

I appreciate the experience of this Pope who comes from Latin America. I have often visited Peru and other Latin-America countries. I know a bit about the situation there, especially that of a poverty which is absolutely different from the poverty we see in Europe.

I think it is Pope Francis's great mission to unify the world, to overcome this enormous difference between the European and North American countries, and the peoples of Africa, Latin America and Asia. He points out that there is only one humanity, one earth, and a universal responsibility. His coming encyclical on the ecology will underscore this global responsibility with respect to climate and to universal access to common resources. [Not that Benedict XVI did not already do all that in Caritas in veritate!]

Is that not an argument close to liberation theology? Now that Mons. Romero will be beatified, does LT now have the right to be cited by the very highest officials in the Church?
It has never been condemned by the Church. But it simply must overcome the risk of a purely political or social focus. Catholicism does not separate the transcendent dimension and the world. With the Incarnation the two dimensions were intimately unified. We speak of integral salvation. We have a social doctrine that has developed over the past 150 years, and in Deus caritas est, Benedict XVI also pointed out that the diaconate was a fundamental activity of the early Church, in its liberating function as in its political dimension. Politicians cannot be content to be simply managers. We need a morality of solidarity, of unity among men, instead of selfishness, materialism, populism....

The Catholic Church has been perceived till now as firmly buttressed in its doctrine. Is this changing now?
One may have the impression that previous Pontificates were fixated on sexual morality and that Pope Francis wishes [to return to the universal message of the Gospel. But his message is also very clear about the sexuality of the human being ordered to the will of God who created humans as man and woman. [One would have expected Mueller to point out the counter-analogy that previous Popes certainly preached the universal message of the Gospel - Francis is not 'returning' to doing this - and that the perception of the Church's (and her Popes') focus on sexuality is simply the perception of a world so obsessed with sex in its pursuit of happiness and fleeting pleasures that all it sees about the Catholic Church is her insistence that sex has a divinely ordained function within the sacrament of matrimony, and is otherwise sinful.]

The Church rejects every gnostic or dualist view that would make sexuality an isolated element of human nature. The Pope wishes to broaden reflection to underscore that the mission of the Church is to give hope to all men.

And that is precisely the theme of the family synods in 2014 and 2015 on "the mission of the family in the Church and in the world". [Which makes it even more egregiously glaring that the problem of remarried divorcees, practising homosexuals and unmarried cohabiting couples have hogged all the attention All three categories are 'extra-familial' - these are the irregular unions which do not meet the attributes of the Christian family in very fundamental ways, so why are they the focus of discussion in these 'family synods'?

Cardinal Burke was right: a separate synod should be called to discuss them - presumably on what the Church should and can do to lead them away from the chronic state of sin that they have chosen to inhabit, not what the Church can do to, as Pope Francis has said, 'fully integrate them into the life of the Church' while seemingly indulging them in their chosen lifestyle, as Cardinal Kasper has articulated.]

Would a synthesis be possible between views that are so different and diametrically opposed as we saw in the last synodal assembly?
As Prefect of the CDF, I have responsibility for unity in the faith. I cannot be partisan. But things are clear: We have the words of Jesus about marriage and their authentic interpretation throughout the Church's long history - the Councils of Florence and Trent, the synthesis of it in Gaudium et Spes and all subsequent Magisterium.

Theologically, everything is very clear. We are confronting the secularization of marriage with the separation of religious marriage and the civil contract. Thus we have lost the constitutive elements of marriage as a sacrament and as a natural institution.

The message of the Church on marriage opposes this secularization. We must rediscover the natural foundations of marriage and underscore for all the baptized the sacramentality of marriage as a means of receiving the grace that irrigates the spouses and their whole family.

Can the bishops' conferences have more latitude on these subjects?
One must distinguish two levels: dogma and the concrete organization. Jesus instituted the Apostles with Peter as the principle of the unity of the faith and of the Church's sacramental communion. The Church is an institution of divine right. In addition, we have canonical structures that have evolved according to circumstances.

The bishops' conferences are an expression of the collegiality of the bishops within a country, a culture or a language, but it is a practical organization.

The Catholic Church exists as a universal Church in the communion of all its bishops united with and under the aegis of the Pope. She also exists in the local Churches. But the local Church is not the Church of France of the Church of Germany. It is the Church of Paris, the Church of Toulouse, etc. each of which corresponds to a diocese.

The idea of a 'national Church' would be totally heretical. Autonomy within the faith is impossible! Jesus Christ is the Savior of everyone - he unites all men.

Are disciplinary changes possible without touching doctrine?
Discipline and pastoral ministry should be in harmony with doctrine, which is not a platonic theory to be corrected by practice, but the expression of the truth revealed in Jesus Christ.

On the question of remarried divorcees, is it possible to imagine that, after some penitential course, the Church could recognize a second union which does not have a sacramental character?
It is not possible to have two wives! If the first union is valid [presumably a Church marriage, in this case], it is not possible to contract a second marriage. Yes, a penitential course is possible, but not a second 'marriage' [if the Church marriage is not annulled, or the first spouse is still alive].

The only possibility is to return to the first legitimate marriage, or to live the second 'marriage' as brother and sister. That has been the position of the Church, according to what Jesus himself said. I would add that it is always possible to seek a declaration of annulment of the Church marriage from an ecclesiastical tribunal.

Do you think then that the solution would come through a 'softening' of canonical rules?
Benedict XVI already posed that question. Unfortunately, for some Catholics, marriage in Church is nothing more than a folk ritual, whereas for others, it really has a sacramental sense. It is up to a Church tribunal to prove the genuineness, or not, of the Church marriage. Canonical law can be applied to concrete situations. [In other words, there is no one-size-fits-all solution even on the matter of annulments.]


Interestingly and understandably, Andrea Tornielli, JMB/PF's number-one unofficial propagandist, bridled at Cardinal Mueller's statement about 'theological structuring' of the Pontificate. Here was his reaction in VATICAN INSIDER:

Müller suggests new task for the CDF
The German cardinal has suggested a new area of responsibility for his dicastery: to provide the “theological structure of a pontificate”
by ANDREA TORNIELLI
VATICAN INSIDER

In one of the numerous interviews he has given over the past few weeks focusing on the next Synod, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, spoke about a new task for his dicastery. It is a task that has never been mentioned in the documents outlining the precise competencies of the former Holy Office.

In an interview with the French Catholic newspaper La Croix, the German cardinal stated: “The arrival of a theologian like Benedict XVI in the Chair of St. Peter was no doubt an exception. But John XXIII was not a professional theologian. Pope Francis is also more pastoral and our mission at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is to provide the theological structure of a pontificate.”

So according to Müller’s statement, the former Holy Office must “theologically structure” Pope Francis’s pontificate. And this is probably the reason why the Prefect gives public statements on such a frequent basis, like never before.

This is a significant piece of news, bearing in mind what is stated in article 48 of Pastor Bonus, the Apostolic Constitution on the Roman Curia promulgated by John Paul II in 1988: “The proper duty of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is to promote and safeguard the doctrine on faith and morals in the whole Catholic world.”

While the Pope “by the will of Christ Himself”, as Francis recalled at the end of the 2014 Synod, is the “supreme Pastor and Teacher of all the faithful” (Canon 749).

Until a few decades ago (the last to do so was Paul VI) it was the Pope himself who personally presided over the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, precisely because of this task which, by virtue of the Petrine primacy, only he has the power to exercise. A primacy which belongs to the Bishop of Rome, which involves presiding “in charity” and resolving theological questions where needed. [Yes, but that is why a Pope needs the CDF. has Tornielli forgotten that JMB/PF himself has said so a number of times that while he gives the general picture, it is up to the CDF to make the precise brushstrokes that will make the picture theologically clear. On the other hand, he wants to have his cake and eat it, too, because he has told bishops that they should go ahead and do what they think is right, and not worry if the CDF objects! In other words, Mueller and the CDF provide him with a useful hedge in that their existence serve as a guarantee of his orthodoxy - and so, Mueller's blunt statements regarding the hot-button issues of the Bergoglian family synods are allowed and tolerated. As long as the Pope and his bishops can do as they please, 'pastorally'. For now, Mueller has confined himself to general reaffirmations of Church teaching on marriage, sexuality and the Eucharist against those who would dilute that teaching, without ever implying that the Pope himself may be among these.]

Cardinal Müller’s words - which introduced the new task of “provid[ing] the theological structure of a pontificate”, a task that had not been formalised until now - went practically unnoticed. [Because, in general, the Anglophone media generally ignore or underplay non-English Vatican reporting and commentary outside of Italy.]

While on the one hand his words open up new doctrinal scenarios in relation to Church tradition, on the other they seem to suggest that, according to Müller, the current pontificate – and St. John XXIII’s too – lacks sufficient theological “structure”. [MEOW! Or is that really a tiger's growl masquerading as sarcasm?]

I personally think that Mueller was thinking in terms of the task faced by the CDF to seek to provide a theological rationalization for JMB/PF's more audacious heterodoxies if, God forbid, they should be formalized to apply to the universal Church! At which point, I have been wondering, will Mueller cease to be useful as a hedge, and JMB/PF goes ahead to name his theological brain and alter ego, Mons. Victor Fernandez, as Prefect of the CDF? I truly believe the latter already has all his theological ducks in a row - in black and white on a pre-prepared document - to provide the rationalization that Mueller could never provide for JMB/PF if, in fact, he proceeds to legislate his famed 'communion for everyone' for the universal Church, with or without ratification by the October 2015 synodal assembly.

As for Tornielli's reaction to Mueller's statement, I think it is only because he needs to go on record with his objection. Even if like all the rest who have ignored the provocative Mueller statement, he knows that Mueller is entirely expendable once JMB/PF no longer needs him as a theological hedge. And precisely because Mueller is no threat at all to the Pope, who can replace him at any time, only a couple of conservative blogsites have picked up Tornielli's reaction, and the original story, for that matter. For the rest of Catholic media, Mueller-vs-Francis is simply a 'no contest'.

The Conversion of St. Paul on the Road to Damascus, Michelangelo, 1550. Mural, Pauline Chapel, Vatican.

Easter and evangelism
St. Paul’s mini-spiritual autobiography helps us understand
just how radically the experience of the Risen Lord
changed the first disciples’ religious worldview
by George Weigel

April 8, 2015

Galatians 1:15-18 is not your basic witness-to-the-Resurrection text. Yet St. Paul’s mini-spiritual autobiography helps us understand just how radically the experience of the Risen Lord changed the first disciples’ religious worldview, and why an evangelical imperative was built into that experience.

Here’s the Pauline text:

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… when he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia; and again I returned to Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and remained with him for fifteen days …

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Note the sequence: Saul of Tarsus is stunned on the Damascus road by a revelation of the risen Lord Jesus Christ; after being baptized in Damascus, the new disciple disappears into the Arabian peninsula (for how long, he doesn’t say); he then returns to Damascus; and only then does he make the pilgrimage to the founding Church in Jerusalem to confer with Peter.

Thus Paul’s first encounter with another apostolic witness to the Resurrection didn’t occur for years: at least three-plus (if the “three years” in verse 18 refer to both his Damascus and Arabian sojourns), and quite probably more.

What took him so long?

Paul’s snapshot of his early Christian life immediately follows his self-description as one who was “advanced in Judaism beyond many … among my people” and “extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers” [Galatians 1:14]. So it doesn’t torture the text of Galatians 1:15-18 to suggest that Paul spent those unaccounted-for years trying to figure things out:

What did his undeniable — and shattering — meeting with the Risen One mean? How could this encounter fit within what a Jewish scholar would know as the pattern of redemption?

The Gospels record that it took the first Christian believers a while to understand what the Resurrection meant — their fears and incomprehension (Who is this? Is it a ghost?) bear witness to the unprecedented nature of the experience of the Risen One.

Over time, though, Easter and the subsequent appearances of the Risen Lord worked profound changes in how these pious Jews thought and prayed. The Resurrection changed their idea of the Sabbath; they now celebrated the Lord’s Day on Sunday rather than Saturday.

The experience of the Risen Lord changed their idea of what “resurrection” meant; this was not a resuscitated corpse but an utterly transformed body, recognizably human (he eats and drinks) but not limited by the normal boundaries of time and space (doors mean nothing to him).

And the Resurrection changed their understanding of what time itself meant (the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed in his public ministry dramatically changed history at Easter, but “history” continued).

As a highly educated rabbi, Paul faced an even more complex problem: What did this unexpected Messiah, who died a shameful death but was raised to a new form of life, do to Israel’s messianic expectation, its sense of its story from the Exodus to the present, its self-concept as the Chosen People?

The urgency of those questions suggests that Paul, in his wilderness years, was wrestling with the beginnings of Christian theology — stretching, but not abandoning, Israel’s messianic hope and the meaning of its mission to be a “light to the nations.”

For Paul came to see, through his reflection and his ministry, that the redemptive promises God made to the Chosen People had been extended to all of humanity — the cutting from the “wild olive tree” of the Gentiles had been “grafted … into a cultivated olive tree,” Israel, such that a new messianic people had been formed [Rom 11:24].

And here was an evangelical imperative: What the Church learned from its experience of the Risen One, who changed both history and the cosmos, demanded to be shared. Easter faith is necessarily, not accidentally, missionary faith — two millennia ago for St. Paul; today, for all of us.

It's hard to articulate just how appalled - and even incredulous - one has to be over the ostensible dominance in today's society of what Carl Olson calls here 'the reign of gay'. A decided minority (4% self-declared LGBT in the USA, and that's supposed to be a generous estimate) in a democratic society has managed to bully its way to where they now are, with the proactive collusion of the cultural, intellectual and political elite. Is it still democracy when the will of the majority is continually sidelined in favor of a tiny minority??

All in the name of 'political correctness' which glorifies and coddles a minority to the detriment, not just of the majority, but of the common good. Political correctness has clearly and inexplicably addled too many brains who are supposed to know better, and who apparently do not see anything wrong with the tyranny of the minority because they are the very ones promoting such an anti-democratic notion and practice.

Where will all this end? Already, invented LGBT 'rights' trump the fundamental right to religious freedom and freedom of conscience. The tragedy is that the reign of gay has burgeoned so dramatically in just the past few years, which is an indication of just how 'sick' and morally flawed contemporary society is in the West, with the USA leading the way.


The Reign of Gay and the RFRA:
Round-up and Reflections
A dizzying but essential tour through
the madness of the past couple of weeks

April 08, 2015

• A year ago today, I posted what was probably my most controversial editorial: "Welcome to the Reign of 'Gay'". With that in mind, it seems fitting that my first "Carl's Cuts" in several months takes a look at recent controversies over the spreading Reign.

• I first read about Indiana's Senate Bill 101 — aka, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) — via a sports news feed on my iPhone. The headline referenced "Indiana's anti-gay law", but the article did not explain what the law actually stated. Instead, it had quotes from sports commentators gravely uttering banalities and clichés — something, admittedly, they do constantly in their daily work — that also shed no light on the RFRA.

Charles Barkley, the Round Mound of Unprofound, stated: "America's always had a racial problem. Now we have a homophobic problem. Any form of discrimination, you have to check it." Any, Chuck? Even discrimination against child molesters, KKK members, and looters? Barkley's logic here is about as sound as the defense he used to never play while starring in the NBA.

• The first dozen news articles I looked at online also managed to say little or absolutely nothing about the contents of the RFRA, and so I finally looked up the actual law and read it. At that point, having seen the approach taken by various "news outlets", I knew the usual Reign of Gay tactics were already in place:

1). Emote: The use of passion, anger, and outrage is a tried-and-true way of obscuring details and pushing people to make a knee-jerk judgment based on sentiment, not sober, sane thought.

2). Demonize: Insist the law in question is "anti-gay" and then hammer home the point that those who wrote it and voted for it are haters, pure and simple.

3). Harangue and Insult: Don't argue the actual points in question, but immediately threaten to sanction, coerce, and boycott. Call people names, preferably "bigots" and "homophobes". (One Reuters blogger, to his credit, wrote, "On the LGBT side, it’s time to stop calling religious people bigots and homophobes." Good luck with that.) Talk endlessly — often in 140 grammar-challenged characters or less — about people "loving each other", an example of such being Hillary Clinton's March 26th tweet: "Sad this new Indiana law can happen in America today. We shouldn't discriminate against ppl bc of who they love." (Personally, I find it a bit comical to be lectured on the nature of love by either Bill or Hillary Clinton.)

• President Obama, in his speech at Easter Prayer Breakfast yesterday at the White House, went off script for a moment and said: "On Easter, I do reflect on the fact that as a Christian, I am supposed to love. And I have to say that sometimes when I listen to less than loving expressions by Christians, I get concerned. But that's a topic for another day."

Goodness, whatever or whoever could he be talking about? Tis a mystery. But keep in mind that even before he famously "evolved" on the matter of "gay marriage," Obama had made it clear that any sort of opposition to the Reign of Gay would not, in the long run, be tolerated. In a 2009 address at a "LGBT Pride Month Reception" at the White House, he said:

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Now this struggle, I don't need to tell you, is incredibly difficult, although I think it's important to consider the extraordinary progress that we have made. There are unjust laws to overturn and unfair practices to stop. And though we've made progress, there are still fellow citizens, perhaps neighbors or even family members and loved ones, who still hold fast to worn arguments and old attitudes; who fail to see your families like their families; and who would deny you the rights that most Americans take for granted. And I know this is painful and I know it can be heartbreaking. ...

So this story, this struggle, continues today -- for even as we face extraordinary challenges as a nation, we cannot -- and will not -- put aside issues of basic equality. (Applause.) We seek an America in which no one feels the pain of discrimination based on who you are or who you love. ...

Now, even as we take these steps, we must recognize that real progress depends not only on the laws we change but, as I said before, on the hearts we open. For if we're honest with ourselves, we'll acknowledge that there are good and decent people in this country who don't yet fully embrace their gay brothers and sisters -- not yet.

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Not yet. Ah, the inevitability of being on the right side of history and all that clichéd nonsense. Which is not to deny, of course, that many Americans really, really like clichéd nonsense — super sized and with extra whipped cream, please!

As for Christians who lack love, the President would do well to look at the hate-filled rants of Jeremiah Wright, whose Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago the Obamas attended for several years. (To be fair, Wright explained in 2012 that, for the Obamas, "church is not their thing...")

• As many conservative (that is, not mainstream) news outlets explained, in varying detail, the RFRA was very similar to the 1993 law passed by Hillary's soulmate, former President Bill Clinton. From the Weekly Standard site: "The first RFRA was a 1993 federal law that was signed into law by Democratic president Bill Clinton. It unanimously passed the House of Representatives, where it was sponsored by then-congressman Chuck Schumer, and sailed through the Senate on a 97-3 vote."

The law was meant to put into place a "a balancing test for courts to apply in religious liberty cases (a standard had been used by the Supreme Court for decades). The same piece summarizes: "The point of RFRA is not to discriminate against gay Americans. It is supposed to prevent the government from discriminating against religious Americans."

• Which brings me to this simple point: in the Reign of Gay — which I stated a year ago, in the aforementioned editorial — it is always about gays and it is always about what they want. Period. As I stated in April 2014:

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The new “morality” is squarely founded on the belief that homosexuality is normal, perhaps even superior to heterosexuality. This means that those who dissent from this “truth” not only distance themselves from the norms of good society, they participate in attacking it. They are, in short, enemies of society, for they oppose what is a sort of religious belief system. ... The Reign of “Gay” is proud, loud, and quite unwilling to tolerate dissent or discussion. And until we face that fact and come to grips with the situation as it really is, we will not be able to respond, regroup, and rebuild in any meaningful way.

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Which means, again, that a law meant to protect the religious freedoms and beliefs of Americans is immediately and constantly presented as an attack on gays. It's a one-way street. As one commenter summed it up: "The notable thing about Culture War 4.0 is its consistent rejection of tolerance in favor of government enforced morality."

• A week ago, Public Discourse published a short statement from Archbishop Chaput, Robert George, Archbishop Lori, Al Mohler, and Russell Moore. An excerpt:

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As Americans commemorate their respective holy days, we urge all our fellow citizens to remember the moral roots of their constitutional system, and to engage in a sensible national conversation about religious liberty. Even those who are not religious have a stake in seeing that our “first freedom” — religious freedom, freedom of conscience — is protected in law.

In recent days we have heard claims that a belief central to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — that we are created male and female, and that marriage unites these two basic expressions of humanity in a unique covenant — amounts to a form of bigotry. Such arguments only increase public confusion on a vitally important issue. When basic moral convictions and historic religious wisdom rooted in experience are deemed “discrimination", our ability to achieve civic harmony, or even to reason clearly, is impossible.

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That last sentence is worth pondering a bit: "When basic moral convictions and historic religious wisdom rooted in experience are deemed 'discrimination,' our ability to achieve civic harmony, or even to reason clearly, is impossible." That is true, and so it raises the question: what next?

• NRO's Jonah Goldberg — who describes himself as an essentially secular Jew who generally supports "gay marriage" — lets it rip::

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Indeed, this whole ridiculous, insane, paranoid, sanctimonious, bullying, freak-out has me despairing for the country.

I don’t know that I can do another stem-winder on the liberal Gleichschaltung or the fact that real, meaningful, diversity must be a diversity of customs, institutions, and communities. Civil society is where life happens; we want it to be as rich an ecosystem as it can be.

That means tolerating — or even celebrating — hippies and drag queens in San Francisco, but it also means tolerating — or even celebrating — religious and observant people, too. All RFRA was intended to do was to give millions of Americans a little space to be and do what their religion tells them they must. If that faith goes too far, than the common good trumps it. But short of that, let people be, for God’s sake.

No one would confuse me for a particularly pious or religious person. If properly compensated, I would happily bake a cake for a gay wedding — or write a special “news”letter for some lesbian nuptials — myself, though I don’t expect there’s a big market for that (but make me an offer!).

But I also believe that in a perfect world businesses should be able to decline service to anyone for almost any reason. I firmly believe in the right of people to exit systems and institutions they do not want to belong to.

I’m much less committed to the idea that people must be able to join any institution or group they want to just because they want to. I could have sworn that even liberals believed that freedom means the freedom to create the rules you want to live by, individually and collectively. In a perfect world, campus Christian groups could have rules barring, you know, non-Christians from joining.

This, a bit later, is an essential point:

We teach young people they should be morally heroic, and that is good.

The problem is we lack the ability to think about morality seriously, never mind talk about it seriously. In a world where Harvard — once a Christian seminary! — is now a place where its “safe spaces” aren’t safe enough because the poetry is too offensive, we should not expect a lot of serious conversation.

This is one of the reasons why our moral categories are so content-less. Tolerance and sympathy become moral imperatives without reference to what is being tolerated and sympathized with. All week people on Twitter have been telling me that all discrimination is bad, no matter what. That’s awful news, because I really don’t want to invite pedophiles, Nazis, or complete strangers from the 7-11 parking lot to my Passover seder. Now I’m told such discrimination is wrong, no matter what.

We are, in other words, living in a rootless culture that relies on clichés, sentimentalism, and group think while acting as if we have achieved heights of moral goodness and intellectual brilliance never imagined. We are, in sum, relativistic fools.

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• As Prof. Joyce Little wrote (I'm stealing from my 2014 editorial again) in her exceptional book, The Church and the Culture War: Secular Anarchy or Sacred Order (Ignatius Press,1995) in explaining the essential differences between the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the "gay rights" movement:

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People intent on exercising total autonomy cannot afford to acknowledge serious ontological and moral differentiations among human beings, because they understand freedom not, as the Church always has, as the power to be and to do the good, but as the ability to do what they want to do do. And they can act this out only if all choices are equal and interchangeable. ... This trivialization of all choices rests upon a trivialization of all differences found among people.

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• Indiana's RFRA, of course, was revised, tweaked, changed — and thus gutted.

The “fix” is bad public policy that explicitly exempts sexual orientation and gender identity laws from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act except with respect to a narrow class of nonprofit religious organizations and their agents. The “fix” specifically targets the millions of other religious Americans who wish to live their lives in accordance with their faith values, free from government coercion. ...

It is important to note that this fix does not create new sexual orientation and gender identity privileges in Indiana; it says that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act cannot protect citizens from existing (municipal) Indiana sexual orientation and gender identity laws and ensuing coercion from government.

In other words, it eliminates any balancing test for sexual liberty and religious liberty. It says sexual orientation should trump religious liberty. That’s bad policy.

Shocking. But that's how the Reign of Gay advances: one gutless capitulation at a time.

• Kevin Williamson points out the problems with said capitulation (in case they weren't painfully obvious):

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There are three problems with rewarding those who use accusations of bigotry as a political cudgel.

First, those who seek to protect religious liberties are not bigots, and going along with false accusations that they are makes one a party to a lie.

Second, it is an excellent way to lose political contests, since there is almost nothing — up to and including requiring algebra classes — that the Left will not denounce as bigotry.

Third, and related, it encourages those who cynically deploy accusations of bigotry for their own political ends.

His conclusion is essential reading:

The ancient rival to étatism in the Western world is the church militant, both in its formal institutional expression and in the relatively newfangled (and thoroughly American) choose-your-own-adventure approach to Christianity.

For the culture warrior, bringing these nonconformists to heel is a strategic priority. Gay couples contemplating nuptials are not just happening into cake shops and florists with Christian proprietors — this is an organized campaign to bring the private mind under political discipline, to render certain moral dispositions untenable.

Like Antiochus and the Jews, the game here is to “oblige them to partake of the sacrifices” and “adopt the customs” of the rulers. We are not so far removed in time as we imagine: Among the acts intended to Hellenize the Jews was a ban on circumcision, a proposal that is still very much alive in our own time, with authorities in several European countries currently pressing for that prohibition.

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• David French hits on similar notes, but with an eye toward the response of various churches:

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Given that same-sex marriage has the same level of scriptural support as abortion (none), we’ll see the same phenomenon at work in the contemporary churches. Christians who are already on their way out of orthodoxy will embrace same-sex marriage largely to the same extent that they’ve already embraced porn, abortion, and sex outside of marriage.

In fact, churchgoing Christians who support same-sex marriage are eight times more likely than churchgoing Christians who oppose same-sex marriage to think viewing porn is acceptable, almost four times more likely to believe cohabitation is acceptable, almost six times more likely to think adultery is ok, and almost six times more likely to support abortion rights.

The churchgoing supporter of same-sex marriage is much more like the average American than the average churchgoing American.

The cultural and legal forces demanding acceptance of same-sex marriage are every bit as strong as those demanding acceptance of abortion, yet orthodox churches have held firm. In fact, the legal forces supporting abortion have in some ways been much stronger than those demanding acceptance of same-sex marriage.

For years, pro-life lawyers have known of the “abortion distortion” in constitutional law, where expressive activity that would be perfectly legal in virtually every other context can be criminally punished when turned against abortion (see, for example Hill v. Colorado). The Left is transparently trying to create the same kinds of legal double standards for same-sex marriage. And while they may temporarily change the law, they won’t change the culture of the church.

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• Rod Dreher has a couple of exceptional pieces over at The American Conservative site about all of this. First, there is his piece, "Christians 'Must Be Made' to Bow", which takes on a bullying column by New York Times columnist Frank Bruni that flatly states that Christians "must be made" to accept homosexuality as a good and moral thing. Dreher writes:

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And just how do Bruni and his militant Social Justice Warriors plan to force us to repudiate our beliefs? We are going to find out. Indiana and Arkansas showed that most Americans don’t much care about religious liberty — and in fact, people like Bruni and the newspaper he works for have contempt for it, at least when it is practiced by “conservative Christians.” ...

Can you imagine the outcry if the Times published a column saying that Jews or Muslims must be “made” to quit believing a tenet of their religion? If socialists must be “made” to disavow any of their political convictions?

But not when the target is conservative Christians who persist in their heresy.

---

In another piece, "The Post-Indiana Future for Christians", Dreher recounts a long conversation with "a law professor at one of the country’s elite law schools." The bottom line is this: colleges and universities today aren't your Grandpa and Grandma's colleges and universities. Not even close:

---

It’s hard to say what kind of landscape Christians will be looking at twenty, thirty years from now. Kingsfield says he has gay colleagues in the university, people who are in their sixties and seventies now, who came of age in a time where a strong sense of individual liberty protected them. They still retain a devotion to liberty, seeing how much it matters to despised minorities.

“That generation is superseded by Social Justice Warriors in their thirties who don’t believe that they should respect anybody who doesn’t respect them,” Kingsfield said. “Those people are going to be in power before long, and we may not be protected.”

---

And I see that Dreher posted another piece, "Pseudo-Debate In Our Time". I'll just say that I agree completely with it.

• Finally, from Dr. Robert George:

---

The lynch mob is now giddy with success and drunk on the misery and pain of its victims. It is urged on by a compliant and even gleeful media. It is reinforced in its sense of righteousness and moral superiority by the “beautiful people” and the intellectual class. It has been joined by the big corporations who perceive their economic interests to be in joining up with the mandarins of cultural power. It owns one political party and has intimidated the leaders of the other into supine and humiliating obeisance.

And so, who if anyone will courageously stand up to the mob? Who will resist? Who will speak truth to its raw and frightening power? Who will refuse to be bullied into submission or intimidated into silence?

I'm not asking, which leaders? Though that, too, would be good to know. Are there political or religious leaders who will step forward? Are there intellectual or cultural leaders who will muster the courage to confront the mob?

No, I'm asking what ordinary people will do. Are there Evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox Christians who will refuse to be intimidated and silenced? Are there Latter-Day Saints, Orthodox and other observant (or even non-observant) Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs? Buddhists?

---

I saw a glimpse of all of this over twenty years ago. That hardly makes it easier to understand or to respond to now. Quite the contrary.

I take solace in the words of Saint John Paul II:

---

As a result of that mysterious original sin, committed at the prompting of Satan, the one who is "a liar and the father of lies" (Jn 8:44), man is constantly tempted to turn his gaze away from the living and true God in order to direct it towards idols (cf. 1 Thes 1:9), exchanging "the truth about God for a lie" (Rom 1:25). Man's capacity to know the truth is also darkened, and his will to submit to it is weakened. Thus, giving himself over to relativism and scepticism (cf. Jn 18:38), he goes off in search of an illusory freedom apart from truth itself.

But no darkness of error or of sin can totally take away from man the light of God the Creator. In the depths of his heart there always remains a yearning for absolute truth and a thirst to attain full knowledge of it. (Veritatis Splendor, 1)

---

What Carl Olson's round-up lacked - the Vatican position today on the LGBT ascendancy - is the burden of this commentary in FATIMA PERSPECTIVES by Christopher Ferrara of the traditionalist newspaper The Remnant. Ferrara is rather blunt about denouncing the sin of sodomy, and uses the stronger term 'homo-fascism' for what Olson calls 'the reign of gay'.

So far, the Vatican position - and that of the Pope - appears to be one of indulgence towards LGBTs, avoiding any explicit denunciation of why, if they are Catholic, their lifestyle and choices constitute a chronic state of sin from which they should desist. But the litmus test, of course, is whether this Pope will accept the nomination of a prominent homosexual as the next French ambassador to the Holy See. Benedict XVI rejected a similar nomination by President Sarkozy years ago.


Vatican remains silent
as homo-fascism rises
by Christopher A. Ferrara

April 6, 2015

As Cardinal Burke warns that the “gay lobby” within the Catholic Church is plotting for disaster at the Synod, civil society is increasingly dominated by a “homo-Fascism,” aided and abetted by the mass media, that demands absolute conformity on the part of Christians to social acceptance of the sin of sodomy.

Witness the debacle in Indiana, where a state version of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, designed to protect Christians from demands that they accommodate the “gay agenda” in their businesses — as, for example, by selling “gay wedding” cakes with two male figurines on top — came under furious attack by the media-driven homo-Fascist juggernaut.

Within days of the law’s passage, Governor Pence, running for the tall grass, promised to “fix it” by way of legislative amendments that not only gut the law but actually turn it into a “gay rights” measure. And the amended law has just been signed into law by the Governor.

As LifeSiteNews rightly noted before the amended law was enacted, “the proposed ‘fix’ amounts to nothing less than a wholesale repeal of the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act with respect to those who need religious liberty protections the most.” The Indiana law now actually prohibits discrimination based on “sexual orientation” — that is, the practice of sodomy and living in unholy “unions” that diabolically mock and defile the sacrament of Holy Matrimony.

What is now effectively Indiana’s first statewide “gay rights” law allows narrow exemptions only for churches and other nonprofit religious organizations. The protection for private businesses has been removed, leaving business owners subject to “gay” demands that they lend their goods and services to “gay weddings,” “gay bachelor” parties, and other such abominations arising from the sin of sodomy. Christians will be required to kowtow to “gay community” activists who demand services for their “gay-themed” sodomitical events.

In a matter of days, then, Indiana went from passing a law that protected Christians from extortionate demands that they endorse sodomy to a law that compels them to do so! [And shame on Governor Mike Pence and his fellow Indiana lawmakers for capitulating so easily after less than two weeks of a media and pressure group campaign!]

Such is the power of the homo-Fascist enterprise. All over the Western world homo-Fascism is on a conquering march.

And the Vatican’s response? Nothing beyond Francis’s infamous “Who am I to judge” regarding hypothetical godly “gays” in the Catholic hierarchy. [Actually, in the interest of journalistic precision, none of the instances Ferrara cites can be considered a Vatican response to the Indiana fiasco, because they all happened way before the events of the past two weeks. Even the Barros appointment and consecration as diocesan bishop came before the Indiana furor.]

Worse than silence, the Pope has placed Msgr. Battista Ricca, a flagrant homosexual embroiled in numerous scandals arising from his homosexual activities, in charge of the very household he occupies, prompting the renowned Vaticanist Sandro Magister to dub Ricca “the prelate of the gay lobby.”


This infamous photograph of Ricca and Francis is an iconic depiction of the Vatican’s total capitulation to the “gay agenda.” [I do not know why the photograph should be considered 'infamous', much less, 'iconic' - it was, after all, taken when others were present, and one gathers from this photo that Mons. Ricca is a very demonstrative person who is showing his affection for the Pope! Are we supposed to read anything into the photograph?...

As for 'total capitulation to the gay agenda', that remains to be seen. If the Pope accepts President Hollande's homosexual nominee to be the ambassador to the Holy See, then that may well be so. Because whereas we may assume that Mons. Ricca made a full confession of his former (hopefully) lifestyle to the Pope, received absolution for it, and has since led an upright life, I don't think the new French envoy would confess to the Pope or to any priest that he has been living in a chronic state of sin (for him, it is no sin at all), and even if he did, I doubt he would then necessarily live a chaste life while serving his diplomatic assignment in Rome.]

Then there is the Pope’s “private” audience and warm embrace — promptly broadcast to the world — with a “transsexual” woman who pretends to be a man and “his” supposed fiancée.

And, just days ago, the astounding installation of Juan Barros as the new Bishop of the Diocese of Osorno, Chile, despite substantial credible evidence, presented to Francis, that Barros both witnessed and later covered up the homosexual predations of boys by his close friend Rev. Fernando Karadima. Although the statute of limitations had run on Karadima’s crimes, the Vatican found him guilty of sexual abuse in 2011, ordering him to a “life of prayer and penitence” (an order he has flouted). The outrageous elevation of Barros to the office of bishop was greeted by massive protests against his installation by members of the laity, who literally tried physically to prevent it.

[But the Vatican has since made it clear that the Congregation for Bishops is 'confident' there was no objective reason to block or delay Barros's new appointment (he was already a bishop before then, but to the Chilean armed forces, not of a diocese). 'Confident' was also the word the Pope reportedly used to a Chilean archbishop about his appointment of Barros just days before the latter's tumultuous consecration Mass (which was incomplete - without homily and without communion - because of the protests mounted by a few hundred faithful). This 'confidence' defies the perception that Barros is, at the very least, suspect of disingenuousness about Karadima's record and that he has yet to be officially investigated with respect to the allegations by three Karadima victims that Barros was present at the time Karadima committed one of his offenses. And that any prelate with such questions still swirling around him should not be seen to be 'favored' by the Pope in any way that seems to make a mockery of his supposed 'zero tolerance' in these matters!]

Also, let us not forget that with Francis’s explicit approval the first session of the ludicrously misnamed “Synod on the Family” published to the world a document — never approved and in fact later rejected by the Synod Fathers — that calls for “valuing” the “homosexual orientation” and the “gifts” of homosexuals and depicts “homosexual unions” as providing “precious support in the life of the partners.”

This Eastertide we remembered the Passion of Our Lord. Today the Church, which is His Mystical Body, is undergoing its own passion. And the horrific reality is that many of those who are wielding the whips by which the Church is being scourged belong to her upper hierarchy. Thus do we see confirmed that the Third Secret of Fatima prophesies an apostasy that “begins at the top.” And if what we are witnessing is not apostasy, then the word has lost its meaning. [P.S. Apostasy is defined as "formal disaffiliation from, or abandonment or renunciation of a religion by a person" - and JMB/PF has not done that at all, even if he may appear to have abandoned or renounced some aspects of the Church's teaching on the sacramental aspects of matrimony and the Eucharist. So far, I do not see that he could be accused of anything beyond some heterodox ideas in terms of doctrine and discipline - certainly unworthy of any Pope - but far from heresy or apostasy!]

We take our consolation from the fact that the Church, like Our Lord Himself, will ultimately overcome this crisis. But how much she will have to endure before that happens remains a terrifying unknown whose outcome, however, seems to be depicted in that vision of a devastated city and the execution of the Pope atop a nearby hill — appropriately enough, at the foot of a large wooden cross. [Since visions are symbolic and not necessarily literal, who executes the Pope? Or is it an allegory of a Pope executing himself, in effect, for his own sins against the faith?]

Our Lady of Fatima, intercede for us!

Meanwhile, here's the latest 'status report' on the possible rejection by Pope Francis of a homosexual named to be the next French ambassador to the Holy See...

Vatican, France in showdown over gay ambassador


VATICAN CITY, April 11, 2015 (AFP) - Three months after appointing an openly gay diplomat as France's ambassador to the Vatican, Paris is still waiting for the green light from Rome.

With Pope Francis entering his third year in the post, some activists see the Vatican's silence as a test of the depth of reform in the Catholic Church.

While the Vatican usually declares it has accepted a candidate around a month after an appointment is made, it makes no public statements at all if the answer is no.

Paris appears determined to stick with seasoned candidate Laurent Stefanini, a 55-year-old practising Catholic whom the foreign ministry described as "one of our best diplomats".

"That's why we appointed him. We are waiting for a reply to our request," it said.

Sources close to President Francois Hollande said his appointment was "the wish of the president" and the cabinet of ministers. The French cabinet approved Stefanini's appointment on January 5 but has not yet received a reply.

"A delay of three months like this is not normal," a well-informed source in Rome told AFP. "The reply normally doesn't take more than a month, a month and a half," this source added.

If there is a refusal, "the Vatican doesn't reply, doesn't offer an explanation and it's up to the country concerned to interpret this lack of a reply."

In 2007, France proposed openly gay diplomat Jean-Loup Kuhn-Delforge to be its ambassador at the Vatican. Paris never received a reply, and it eventually put forward another nominee.

But unlike Kuhn-Delforge, Stefanini is single and is very discreet about his personal life. Italian daily Il Messagero described him as "a practising Catholic, very cultivated, of absolute discretion".

From 2001 to 2005, he served as the number two at the French embassy in the Vatican.

Italy's La Stampa daily's Vatican Insider blog said Stefanini's position on gay marriage -- not his sexual orientation -- may be the problem in getting the Vatican's green light. [I anticipated there would be some rationalization that would 'soften' the rejection!]

Gay marriage has been legal in France since 2013, despite the Catholic Church's opposition.

Francis, the first pope to hail from Latin America, is widely regarded as having been a huge success in his two years at the helm of the Church.

His charm, decisive approach to issues such as paedophile priests and his pleas for a more merciful and worldly approach on questions such as homosexuality and divorce have endeared him to a much broader public than his more conservative predecessor Benedict XVI could reach.

But the delay over Stefanini's nomination has opened the Vatican up to a slew of criticism.

"Homosexual people are rejected in the Vatican, despite their merits (and) indisputable qualities," said Flavio Romani, who heads the Italian gay rights group Arcigay.

Accusing the Holy See of failing to implement its "teachings of openness", he blasted the Vatican as acting "like Uganda", where gay people are heavily persecuted.

"The facts speak for themselves: the senior prelates have shown their true face," Romani said.

Let us pray this really means a rejection of the appointee who, I am sure, if President Hollande and his cabinet trust him that much, could well be ambassador to a larger, more politically significant state than the postage-stamp-sized Vatican City State. Just not to the Holy See, IMHO, unless he happens to be one of those heroic Catholic homosexuals who have chosen to stay chaste rather than indulge their sexual tendencies. In which case he would be a model that the Vatican could hold up to the LGBT world. Maybe he is such a model because both Cardinal Jean Louis tauran, papal Chamberlain and President of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialog, and Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois, Archbishop of Paris, have reportedly endorsed Stefanini for the position. So why the 'silent' signal from the Vatican?

Where there's a will, there's a way. And the will of secular media - despite all their celebration of JMB/PF whom they believe to be very much on their side on many Church positions opposing the dominant mentality - is to thrash the Church whenever it can, however it can.

Like most of the non-Catholic Francis fanworld, media love this Pope but continue to abominate the Church he leads and cannot wait for him to deliver her into their hands, so they hope... Thus, we have, from a major UK newspaper, this guaranteed attention-grabbing headline about 'the Vatican' (it certainly grabbed mine, and I had to find out what it was all about), even if both incidents described - though the headline suggests an abundance of gay orgies and murder scandals - affect two separate Italian dioceses, and the crimes apparently have not gone beyond those jurisdictions where they were both dealt with on the local level without having to be raised to the Vatican...And BTW, if these had happened in B16's time, you can bet the newspaper would have tacked on their boilerplate denunciation of Joseph Ratzinger as having been the singlehanded cause of the entire clerical sex abuse crisis, yada, yada, whereas this story does not even mention Pope Francis at all (rightly so, as he has nothing to do with the incidents, unless they are not acted on at the diocesan level, although if the Pope had been B16, the newspaper would doubtless have invoked the principle of command responsibility to blame him for the events).


Gay orgies and 'murder' scandals engulf Vatican
by ROSE TROUP BUCHANAN

April 8, 2015


The Vatican has been embroiled in two separate, highly embarrassing, scandals.

In one, a north Italian priest has been removed from office after allegations emerged that he had been surfing the internet to find gay lovers and had been involved in gay orgies.

The other, which has generated – if possible – even more lurid press coverage in Italy, alleges a priest in the south of the country is under investigation on suspicion of murdering one of his parishioners.

Father Gratien Alabi, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, is under investigation for murder following the discovery of female bones under the flagstones of an ancient mountain chapel.

The bones are thought belong to Guerrina Piscaglia, 50, who disappeared from nearby Arezzo in Tuscany last year, The Times reported.

The case has generated intense media interest, with some papers claiming that Father Alabi had engaged in an affair with the woman, a parishioner of his and another priest’s church, and fathered a child with her.

Father Alabi has denied all claims, protesting his innocence.

Meanwhile, to the north of the country, the local Curia is scrambling to address the allegations made by a 32-year-old man from Rovigo, midway between Bologna and Venice.

The unidentified man apparently approached the media after church authorities failed to take action following his official complaint to the Ecclesiastical Court of the Puglia region against the unidentified 50-year-old priest.

The younger man claimed he met the priest through Facebook, forming a close friendship with the clerical figure who then confessed his homosexuality to his online correspondent.

In his complaint, according to Italian newspaper Corriere del Mezzogiorno, the man included a record of his conversations with the priest.

In these online interactions, the priest admitted to sexual relationships with other religious figures – as well as members of the Vatican’s elite Swiss Guard – using the internet to find new partners and engage in sexual encounters online.

Following the intervention of the Archbishop of Taranto, Filippo Santoro, the individual involved was immediately removed from office, once the “reliability of the facts” had been established. The allegations included behaviour that was “absolutely incompatible with the priestly ministry”.

“Needless to say, the feelings of the archbishop and the Curia are those of regret and dismay,” a Vatican spokesperson told the Italian newspaper.

So, in both cases, appropriate action was taken on the diocesan level. What the media ought to do is to follow up any canonical or criminal proceedings initiated against the two priests, not inflate the headlines to 1) imply multiple sex and murder scandals when there is one sex crime allegation and one murder suspicion under investigation; 2) imply that nothing has been done about these 'scandals'; and 3) 'embroil' the Vatican in diocesan events that are being dealt with appropriately, at least to begin with.

The Independent is indulging in sheer media dishonesty and naked manipulation of its readers, especially those who never go beyond reading the headlines.

On the other hand, how many media outlets used the AP story on the accusations made against Mons. Barros by a man, now 51 and a practising journalist, who not only claims that Barros watched while Karadima made sexual advances to him and two other boys, but also that Karadima and Barros themselves engaged in sexual dalliance in the presence of the boys (teenagers at the time)?

There is an AP report from Chile dated March 16 about this that I never saw before, and only came across it today on an anti-Francis blogsite that linked to the AP story carried by the Huffington Post (which I never visit, so I missed this):
www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/16/pope-francis-sex-abuse-chile-bishop_n_6881...

The AP report itself, while it carries the details of the accusers' accounts, appears to give Pope Francis the benefit of the doubt in this case - in which not only is his appointee for diocesan bishop accused of being complicit in a notorious priest's sexual escapades back when the priest (Fr. Karadima) was his mentor, and later intercepted and destroyed complaints sent to a bishop to whom he, Barros, was private secretary, but is now said to have engaged in sexual activity with Karadima himself; on top of which the Chilean archbishop who admits he ignored initial reports to him of Karadima's abuses now sits on Pope Francis's Advisory Council of 9.

Just how many levels of alleged culpability seem to have been ignored by the Vatican and Pope Francis in this sorry and sordid episode that are seemingly shrugged off as well by AP, the media in general, and the various victims' advocacy groups who were forever snapping unfairly against Benedict XVI?? Because after Barros was consecrated Bishop of Osorno on March 21, the AP and everyone else appear to have simply sat back and said, "Oh well, that's done!", in effect, giving JMB/PF a pass on an egregious episode, for a fraction of which they would have hounded Benedict XVI to hell. (Of course, his name is not even mentioned when the media report that 'the Vatican' in 2011 found Karadima, then 84, guilty of abusing minors and sentenced him to 'a life of penitence and prayer').

I am posting the AP report for the record, as it well illustrates the double standard employed by AP, the rest of MSM and the militant victim advocay groups towards Pope Francis and his predecessor....

Pope Francis's pledge of zero tolerance for
child abusers is being tested in Chile
By EVA VERGARA
http://i601.photobucket.com/albums/tt96/MARITER_7/AP.jpg

SANTIAGO, Chile, March 16, 2015 (AP) — Juan Carlos Cruz recalls that he and another teen boy would lie down on the priest's bed, one resting his head at the man's shoulder, another sitting near his feet. The priest would kiss the boys and grope them, he said, all while the Rev. Juan Barros watched.

"Barros was there, and he saw it all," Cruz, now a 51-year-old journalist, told The Associated Press.

Barros has been tapped by Pope Francis to become bishop of a southern Chilean diocese this month, provoking an unprecedented outcry by abuse victims and Catholic faithful who contend he covered up sexual abuse committed by his mentor and superior, the Rev. Fernando Karadima, in the 1980s and '90s.

A Vatican investigation found Karadima guilty in 2011 and sentenced the now 84-year-old priest to a cloistered life of "penitence and prayer" for what is Chile's highest-profile case of abuse by a priest.

Barros had long declined to comment publicly on allegations against him. However, in a letter sent Monday to the priests of the diocese he'll be overseeing, he said he did not know about Karadima's abuses when they happened.

"I never had knowledge of, or could have imagined, the serious abuses that this priest committed against the victims," said the letter, a copy of which was obtained by the AP.

Now bishop for Chile's armed forces, he has said he learned of Karadima's abuse through a 2010 news report he saw on television, according to court records.

While not directly accused of abuse, Barros is said by at least three victims to have witnessed the sexual molestation at the Sacred Heart of Jesus church, part of the El Bosque parish that serves an affluent neighborhood of Santiago.

That history has parishioners, clergy and lawmakers in this predominantly Catholic country protesting the pope's decision to appoint Barros, 58, to become spiritual leader over the diocese in Osorno, about 580 miles (930 kilometers) south of Santiago.

More than 1,300 church members in Osorno, along with some 30 priests from the diocese and 51 of Chile's 120 members of Parliament, sent letters to Francis in February urging him to rescind the appointment, which was announced in January and is set to take effect on March 21.

They have not heard back and Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi declined to comment on the matter.

Numerous attempts to reach Barros were not successful; nor has he responded to the victims' accusations or the outcry over his appointment.

The Rev. Peter Kleigel, deputy pastor of the Sacred Heart parish in Osorno, is among those vocally opposing Barros's arrival.

"We're convinced that this appointment is not correct because, following canon law, a bishop must be well-regarded," he told the AP. "We need a bishop who's credible."

Such complaints come even as Francis said this month that a minster needs not only God's blessing, but the blessing of "his people" to do his work.

The controversy is being watched by victims, advocacy groups and others as a test of whether Francis will meet their demands to hold bishops accountable for having ignored or covered up wrongdoing by priests.

Anne Barrett Doyle from BishopAccountability.org, an online resource about abusive priests and complicit bishops, called the appointment "bafflingly inconsistent" with Francis's promise to root out abuse.

"The pope should have suspended and investigated Barros, not given him another diocese to run," Barrett Doyle said in an email to the AP.

Karadima led the parish of El Bosque for nearly six decades before allegations came to light in April 2010, when a news investigation into the abuse was broadcast on state television. Two months later, the archbishop of Santiago, Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz, forwarded the allegations to the Vatican amid an eruption of abuse cases globally.

Victims say allegations against Karadima were reported earlier, but were ignored by the cardinal. Errazuriz, who is one of nine cardinals on Pope Francis' key advisory panel, has acknowledged in court testimony that he failed to act on several abuse allegations because he believed them to be untrue.

Karadima, who lives in isolation at a nun's convent, is barred from having contact with anyone outside of his own family.

Criminal charges against Karadima were dismissed in 2011 by Judge Jessica Gonzalez because the statute of limitations had expired. However, Gonzalez said that based on her interviews of Cruz and other victims during her yearlong investigation, she determined their accusations were truthful and dated "at least as far back as 1962."

Victims say they were between ages 14 and 17 when they first were abused by Karadima.

A letter detailing abuse allegations against Karadima was sent by some victims to Cardinal Francisco Fresno in 1982. But authors of the letter accuse Barros, who then was the cardinal's private secretary, of intercepting it and destroying it.

Francisco Gomez, 52, a publicist who says he was molested by Karadima, told the AP that he signed the letter drafted by two other victims. A friend of his who worked with Fresno, Juan Hoelzzel, told Gomez that Barros ripped it up after reading it — an account that was recorded in testimony during the criminal investigation.

Speaking to the AP, Gomez said he was told by Hoelzzel: "As long as Juan Barros is there, there is no doubt that this will happen again."

During Karadima's criminal trial, Barros confirmed that Hoelzzel, who has since died, had worked in the archbishop's office. Regarding the letter, court documents quote Barros as saying he had "no knowledge" of its existence, adding "I neither deny it nor affirm it."

In his letter on Monday, Barros said: "I never had knowledge of any complaint regarding Father Karadima while secretary to the Cardinal."

Barros is one of four bishops who were mentored by Karadima and defended him from the accusations.

Cruz has said that during the time he was abused, Karadima and Barros behaved intimately with one another in his presence.

"I saw Karadima and Juan Barros kissing and touching each other. The groping generally came from Karadima touching Barros's genitals," Cruz said in a January letter to Monsignor Ivo Scapolo, the papal nuncio in Chile. Cruz provided a copy of the letter to the AP.

Despite Francis' pledge to have no tolerance for abuse by priests, James Hamilton, another victim of Karadima's, said the appointment demonstrates to him that the church "had not changed."

Hamilton, now a 49-year-old doctor, said Barros enjoyed watching Karadima commit the abuse. "I saw how Barros watched it all," he said.

Since 2004, Barros has been bishop for Chile's military, an appointment made by Pope John Paul II. Previously, he was assistant bishop in the port city of Valparaiso and bishop of the northern city of Iquique.

No representatives of his former dioceses have spoken out in his defense. On Saturday, Chile's papal nuncio published a letter urging parishioners in Osorno to welcome Barros and "prepare, by way of prayer and good works, for the beginning of his pastoral governance."


Yet Pope Francis and the Congregation for Bishops are 'confident' that there was no objective reason to block or delay Barros's appointment. How about ordering an investigation at least into the charges made by Cruz - perhaps uncovering circumstances that could prove he is only making up his stories?

And how about the fact that the Pope and the Vatican ignored the petition sent by the faithful and priests of Osorno, along with almost half of Chile's parliamentarians?

Mons. Barros may well be innocent of any wrongdoing in all this, but the accusations are serious and sordid enough to be simply brushed aside, absent any formal investigation, just because JMB/PF and the Congregation for Bishops are 'confident' they made the right decision on appointing Barros.

I think it shows that, as in the case of Mons. Ricca at IOR, and Francesca Chiaoqui in the IOR Reform Commission, JMB/PF is not one to reverse any decision once he has made it, no matter how compelling the reasons are for reconsideration and retraction. It's the same cocksure confidence that he is always right that has made him defy the tradition honoring the true intentions of the Mass of the Lord's Supper, and that makes him say the Gospel is really about the poor and for the poor.

If he can be so bullheaded about something so fundamental for the faith, then it's no wonder he can ignore any objections to his questionable personnel appointments like they were nothing more than dust motes in the air.

I have not dared imagine how, if at all, the Catholic world - other than those who love and admire him - might pause a moment to think of Benedict XVI and pray for him when he turns 88 five days from now, and when we come to the 10th anniversary of his election eight days from now.

But let us be thankful to the Vatican publishing house LEV which is coming out with a book to mark the 10th anniversary of his election as Pope, as Beatrice discovered, but not from any official Vatican news site.

LEV is publishing the book although Benedict XVI is no longer Pope, and that says something. I doubt they would have done it if he were deceased - for instance, I don't think they published any book for the 10th anniversary of St. John XXIII's election (he was Pope for five years). On the other hand, the B16 years represented a definite boom for LEV, with record-breaking sales on all their offerings by and about B16 (not to mention all the royalties on any and all Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI books published since he became Pope, of which 50% goes to LEV and 50% to the Fondazione Vaticana JR/BXVI). [BTW, in two years, I have yet to see LEV crow about their JMB/PF book sales, which also tells us something surprising, considering the unprecedented popularity of the current Pope.)



Surprisingly, the news about the new LEV book has come out first, as Beatrice noted, on the website of

a site I really should visit more regularly. It is now trilingual (Italian, English and Spanish) and it has a number of interesting features. Here is its announcement of the LEV book:

Events to mark the 10th anniversary
of Benedict XVI's election as Pope


The book Benedetto XVI: Servo di Dio e degli uomini (Benedict XVI: Servant of God and of men), published by the Libreria Editrice Vaticana, will be presented on April 20 at 6.30 p.m., at the Campo Santo Teutonico, (Via della Sagrestia 17, Vatican City). [This is the site of the German college with chapel and cemetery within the Vatican. From 1982-2005, Cardinal Ratzinger celebrated Thursday morning Mass at the chapel when he was in Rome.]

The book was published to mark the 10th anniversary of the papal election of Joseph Ratzinger, on 19th April 2005.

The meeting will start with the greetings and the presentation of the project “Biblioteca Romana Joseph Ratzinger-Benedetto XVI” [Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI Roman Library) by Monsignor Stefan Heid, director of the Roman Institute of Görres-Gesellschaft. [Isn't it great there will be such a library in Rome?]

Next, Father Giuseppe Costa, director of the Libreria Editrice Vaticana and Albrecht Weiland, director of the Schnell & Steiner publishing company of Regensburg, will greet the audience. Schnell & Steiner has published the book in German.

Christian Schaller, vice director of the Institut Papst Benedikt XVI of Regensburg and awarded with the Ratzinger Prize in 2013, will present the book.

Many different authors collaborated to this book, which offers a portrait of Ratzinger’s life and works through words and images.

“People wanted to see Benedict XVI, but above all they needed to listen to him,” said Archbishop Georg Gänswein.

The aim of the book is in fact to give the emeritus Pope a continuing 'voice' in the Church today.

Also to mark the 10th anniversary, the Herder publishing company has organized a lecture-conference by Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and general editor of the Opera Omnia (COMPLETE WRITINGS) of Joseph Ratzinger.

The event will take place on April 17 at 7 p.m., also at the Campo Santo Teutonico.



Joseph Ratzinger's 'Complete Writings':
Interview with the director of LEV,
publisher of the Italian edition
by Luca Caruso
Translated from

March 18, 2015

At what point are we with the publication of Joseph Ratzinger's COMPLETE WRITINGS? Fr. Giuseppe Costa, director of the Libreria Editrice Vaticana (Vatican publishing house, was asked about this in this interview.

Who is in charge of publishing Joseph Ratzinger's COMPLETE WRITINGS?
That is in the hands of Cardinal Gerard Ludwig Mueller, who coordinates it through the Institut Papst Benedikt XVI based in Regensburg.

LEV has a direct involvement with the Italian edition. Our involvement takes into account Benedict XVI's own wishes, who asked us not to make haste with the publication and to give priority to the volumes with the greatest pastoral significance. We must also consider that our translators must know German very well.

How are the translations being made from the original German?
LEV has the publishing rights to the COMPLETE WRITINGS, and we can extend these rights to other publishers on request. This year, we gave the rights to the French publishing house Parole et Silence, which has just published the first volume. (This was Jesus de Nazareth: Le figure et le message, presented by Cardinal Mueller at the College des Bernardins in Paris on March 25. It contains the entire JESUS OF NAZARETH trilogy and comprises Book 1 of Volume 6 of the COMPLETE WRITINGS; Book 2 is an anthology of Joseph Ratzinger's shorter Christological writings.)

In Spain, we have given the rights to the Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos (BAC), which is under the auspices of the Spanish bishops' conference - they have published Vol. 4 of the opera omnia. In the United States, Ignatius Press has published the first volume of the English edition. There is also a Polish edition being published by
Wydawnictwo Kul of Lublin. The original edition in German is, of course, published by Herder,

How's the work going for the Italian edition?
We translate from the German, adapting the bibliography to the corresponding books available in Italian. This aspect takes time, for all of the translations. And our translators from the German must all have specific competencies. Prof. Pierluca Azzaro is in charge of supervising this translation, with the approval of Cardinal Mueller.

In Novembre 2013, we published the third release in the Italian edition, Gesù di Nazaret – La figura e il Messaggio, Book-1 of Volume 6. We are now working on Book 2, the other Christological writings, with a target publication date in October.

How have the books been received by the public?
We have had many requests from Italian readers*. The first volume we published, on liturgy, has gone through three printings, which is rare in these days of crisis for book publishing. We had great success as well with the two other volumes released after that, one on the priesthood, and now, with the complete JESUS OF NAZARETH in one volume.

*[One must note that the hardback volumes - no paperbacks seem to be planned - are priced like academic textbooks, since they are aimed primarily at scholars and libraries, rather than the man on the street].

The Fondazione website also provides an up-to-date presentation of the COMPLETE WRITINGS volumes that have been published so far in various languages:

---

1. POPOLO E CASA DI DIO NELL’ECCLESIOLOGIA DI SANT’AGOSTINO
(The People and the House fo God in the Ecclesiology of St. Augustine)
Degree thesis and other studies on Augustine of Hippo
(published in German, Spanish)
2. COMPRENSIONE DELLA RIVELAZIONE E TEOLOGIA DELLA STORIA IN SAN BONAVENTURA
(Understanding Revelation and the Theology of History according to St. Bonaventure)
The entire written dissertation written by Joseph Ratzinger for his Habilitation (license to teach at German universities). [Before this, only the second part of the text had been published - the part he decided to submit after his dissertation adviser severely rejected his first submission.] The volume also includes other writings on St. Bonaventure.
(German, Spanish)
3. IL DIO DELLA FEDE E IL DIO DEI FILOSOFI
(The God of Faith and the God of Philosophers)
The mutual relationship between faith and reason
4. INTRODUZIONE AL CRISTIANESIMO (Introduction to Christianity)
Faith – Baptism – Obedience to Christ
5. ORIGINE E DESTINO DELL’UOMO (Origin and Destiny of Man)
Creation – Anthropology – Mariology
6. GESÙ DI NAZARETH - two books
Spiritual Christology
(German - both books; French and Italian - Book 1 so far]
7. TEOLOGIA DEL CONCILIO (Theology of the Council) - two books
Texts on the Second Vatican Council Concilio Vaticano II
(German - both books; Spanish - Book 1)
8. SEGNO TRA I POPOLI (A Sign among Peoples)
Texts on Ecclesiology and Ecumenism
(German)
9. RIVELAZIONE – SCRITTURA – TRADIZIONE (Revelation, Scripture, Tradition)
Hermeneutics and principles of Catholic Theology
10. RESURREZIONE E VITA ETERNA (Resurrection and Eternal Life)
Contributions to eschatology
(German)
11. TEOLOGIA DELLA LITURGIA (The Theology of Liturgy)
(German, English, Italian, Polish, Spanish)
12. ANNUNCIATORI DELLA PAROLA E SERVITORI DELLA VOSTRA GIOIA
(Announcers of the Word and Servants of Your Joy)
Theology and spirituality of Holy Orders)
(German, Italian, Polish, Spanish)
13. A COLLOQUIO COL PROPRIO TEMPO (Conversing with Our Time)
Interviews – Opinions – Objections
14. OMELIE E PREDICHE PER L’ANNO LITURGICO (Homilies and Preachings throughout the Liturgical Year)
Meditations – Prayers – Reflections
15. LA MIA VITA (My Life)
Autobiographical texts
16. BIBLIOGRAFIA E INDICI (Bibliography and Indexes)

---

Lastly, the latest photograph available online from Mater Ecclesiae
is this one picked up by Beatrice from the Donaukurier, a Bavarian regional newspaper, published on April 7, 2015:


She also provides some information about the photograph (the site is available only to subscribers), as follows:

Six seminarians from the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt in Bavaria were in Rome recently for a weeklong pilgrimage as part of their training. They attended a Wednesday GA with Pope Francis and then visited Benedict XVI at Mater Ecclesiae.

The emeritus Pope was very eager to get news about the University, from which he has an honorary doctorate. It is the only Catholic university in Germany today, and, as Archbishop of Munich-Freising, he had been instrumental in its creation in 1980.

(Eichstätt is a city in central Bavaria, situated between Munich and Nuremberg.)

April 12, 2015 - Second Sunday of Easter
The eighth day of the Easter Octave was earlier observed as the Sunday of St. Thomas the Apostle,
commemorating his contact with the Risen Christ, but it is now Divine Mercy Sunday.

Divine Mercy Sunday is based on the Catholic devotion that Saint Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938) advocated from her mystic conversations with Jesus. He asked her to paint the vision of Divine Mercy pouring from his sacred heart and specifically asked for a feast of Divine Mercy to be established on the first Sunday after Easter so mankind would take refuge in Him. The Divine Mercy devotion was actively promoted by Pope John Paul II who, on April 30, 2000, canonized Sr. Faustina and officially designated the Sunday after Easter as the Sunday of Divine Mercy in the General Roman Calendar. A year after establishing Divine Mercy Sunday, John Paul II re-emphasized its message in the resurrection context of Easter: "Divine Mercy is the Easter gift that the Church receives from the risen Christ and offers to humanity". Providentially, he died on the eve of Divine Mercy Sunday in 2005, and it was only right and fitting that he was beatified on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2011, and canonized on Divine Mercy Sunday last year.


AT THE VATICAN TODAY
Pope Francis celebrated Mass at St. Peter's Basilica to mark the first centenary of what is commonly called 'the Armenian genocide' perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks against more than a million Armenians living on Turkish territory. But none of the Vatican announcements nor the Pope's texts used the word genocide at all. [P.S. Mea maxima culpa! The Pope did use the word genocide once, citing John Paul II and the Armenian Catholicos Karekhin II, in a joint declaration in 2001, who referred to the Armenian tragedy as 'the first great genocide of the twentieth century".]



The chosen euphemism for genocide was the 'Armenian martyrdom' in what the Armenians call Metz Yeghern (The Great Evil). The centenary was also the occasion to proclaim the 10th Century Armenian monk Gregory of Narek as a Doctor of the Church. (Gregory was not Catholic - he belonged to the Armenian Apostolic Church founded in 301 - but acquired an equipollent canonization as a Catholic saint when Pope Francis declared him a Doctor of the Church.)

The Pope concelebrated the Mass with His Beatitude Nerses Bedros XIX Tarmouni, Patriarch of Ciliciaa of the Armenian Catholics, in the presence of His Holiness Karekin II, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenia, and His Holiness Aram I, Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia.

The Pope unusually delivered an address about the 'Armenian martyrdom' before the Mass, and addressed the Armenian people directly after the Mass when he met with the Armenian Patriarchs and the President of the Republic of Armenia, Serž Sargsyan, in the Chapel of the Pieta. He gave each of them a copy of the letter intended for the Armenian people.

In his homily, as well as in the noontime Regina caeli, the Pope underscored the significance of Divine Mercy Sunday and how the Apostle Thomas proclaimed his faith in the Risen Lord.

On Divine Mercy Sunday last year, Pope Francis canonized his predecessors John XXIII and John Paul II.






Here is Benedict XVI's mini-homily before the Regina caeli prayers on the first Divine Mercy Sunday of his Papacy on April 23, 2006:

---

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

This Sunday the Gospel of John tells us that the Risen Jesus appeared to the disciples, enclosed in the Upper Room, on the evening of the "first day of the week" (Jn 20: 19), and that he showed himself to them once again in the same place "eight days later" (Jn 20: 26). From the beginning, therefore, the Christian community began to live a weekly rhythm, marked by the meeting with the Risen Lord.

This is something that the Constitution on the Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council also emphasizes, saying: "By a tradition handed down from the Apostles, which took its origin from the very day of Christ's Resurrection, the Church celebrates the Paschal Mystery every seventh day, which day is appropriately called the Lord's Day" (Sacrosanctum Concilium, n. 106).

The Evangelist further recalls that on the occasion of both his appearances - the day of the Resurrection and eight days later - the Lord Jesus showed the disciples the signs of the crucifixion, clearly visible and tangible even in his glorified Body (cf. Jn 20: 20, 27).

Those sacred wounds in his hands, in his feet and in his side, are an inexhaustible source of faith, hope and love from which each one can draw, especially the souls who thirst the most for divine mercy.

In consideration of this, the Servant of God John Paul II, highlighting the spiritual experience of a humble Sister, St Faustina Kowalska, desired that the Sunday after Easter be dedicated in a special way to Divine Mercy; and Providence disposed that he would die precisely on the eve of this day in the hands of Divine Mercy.

The mystery of God's merciful love was the centre of the Pontificate of my venerable Predecessor.

Let us remember in particular his 1980 Encyclical Dives in Misericordia, and his dedication of the new Shrine of Divine Mercy in Krakow in 2002. The words he spoke on the latter occasion summed up, as it were, his Magisterium, pointing out that the cult of Divine Mercy is not a secondary devotion but an integral dimension of Christian faith and prayer.

May Mary Most Holy, Mother of the Church, whom we now address with the Regina Caeli, obtain for all Christians that they live Sunday to the full as "the Easter of the week", tasting the beauty of the encounter with the Risen Lord and drawing from the source of his merciful love to be apostles of his peace.

---

But I flash forward now from that Divine Mercy Sunday in 2006 to the one five years later when Benedict XVI beatified his beloved predecessor... For all those who love and venerate John Paul II and who, like me, have been praying to him all along for his heavenly intercession, the event might as well have been his canonization, after all; and the actual canonization last year was but the formalization of what we have felt about the great Pope since he died.



It was on May 1, 2011, that Pope Benedict XVI beatified his predecessor six years after Pope John Paul’s death. The beatification ceremony in Rome was attended by over 1.5 million pilgrims. Included in their number was Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, the French nun whose miraculous cure from Parkinson's Disease paved the way for the beatification.

Just to bring back the flavor of that very special day, here is the photo summary I attempted of it the day after...

---

John Paul II's Beatification Day yesterday, May 1, 2011, was a truly historic event only likely to be equalled by what will almost certainly be the next big moment in the great Pope's story, his canonization...

Very appropriately, the event has left the mass media - including the normally logorrheic commentariat - relatively dumbstruck. The ceremony said it all, and what needed to be said in words was expressed so magnificently, and with his usual simplicity, by Benedict XVI in his homily. All other words are superfluous, but not the photos...

PHOTO SUMMARY:
BEATIFICATION DAY


The mini-slideshow from Vatican Radio online with highlights of the day, and an AP fact sheet on John Paul II.




Establishing shots of St. Peter's Square. In the top photo, I inserted an inset of the Mass that took place outside Cracow.


Photos I used for the Beatification Day banner.



Pope Benedict arrives for the ceremony.



As usual, too few photos of the Mass. The bottom panel shows the presentation of the Blessed's relic to Benedict XVI
by Suor Tobiana, John Paul II's chief housekeeper at the Vatican, and Sr. Marie Simon Pierre, the late Pope's 'miracle nun'.


Panel shows a videocap showing the Pope giving his homily, on a split screen with a JP2 poster, and photos from the End of the Mass,



Pope Benedict in prayer before the casket of John Paul II in St. Peter's Basilica; the other prelates at the Mass followed.


The Pope met the President of Poland and his wife, and President Napolitano of Italy, as well as other visiting heads of state,
before the Basilica was opened to the public to pray at the casket.

---

If I had the material to use, I would obviously do a similar spread on John XXIII's beatification, but I have not had the time to research and assemble that...

And here is the text of Benedict's homily on May 1, 2011, one of his many loving tributes over three decades to his Pope and friend (I believe an Italian publisher has anthologized them all in a recent book):

---

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Six years ago, we gathered in this Square to celebrate the funeral of Pope John Paul II. Our grief at his loss was deep, but even greater was our sense of an immense grace which embraced Rome and the whole world: a grace which was in some way the fruit of my beloved predecessor’s entire life, and especially of his witness in suffering.

Even then we perceived the fragrance of his sanctity, and in any number of ways God’s People showed their veneration for him. For this reason, with all due respect for the Church’s canonical norms, I wanted his cause of beatification to move forward with reasonable haste.

And now the longed-for day has come; it came quickly because this is what was pleasing to the Lord: John Paul II is blessed!

I would like to offer a cordial greeting to all of you who on this happy occasion have come in such great numbers to Rome from all over the world – cardinals, patriarchs of the Eastern Catholic Churches, brother bishops and priests, official delegations, ambassadors and civil authorities, consecrated men and women and lay faithful, and I extend that greeting to all those who join us by radio and television.

Today is the Second Sunday of Easter, which Blessed John Paul II entitled Divine Mercy Sunday. The date was chosen for today’s celebration because, in God’s providence, my predecessor died on the vigil of this feast.

Today is also the first day of May, Mary’s month, and the liturgical memorial of Saint Joseph the Worker.

All these elements serve to enrich our prayer, they help us in our pilgrimage through time and space; but in heaven a very different celebration is taking place among the angels and saints! Even so, God is but one, and one too is Christ the Lord, who like a bridge joins earth to heaven. At this moment we feel closer than ever, sharing as it were in the liturgy of heaven.

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (Jn 20:29). In today’s Gospel Jesus proclaims this beatitude: the beatitude of faith. For us, it is particularly striking because we are gathered to celebrate a beatification, but even more so because today the one proclaimed blessed is a Pope, a Successor of Peter, one who was called to confirm his brethren in the faith.

John Paul II is blessed because of his faith, a strong, generous and apostolic faith. We think at once of another beatitude: “Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven” (Mt 16:17).

What did our heavenly Father reveal to Simon? That Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Because of this faith, Simon becomes Peter, the rock on which Jesus can build his Church.

The eternal beatitude of John Paul II, which today the Church rejoices to proclaim, is wholly contained in these sayings of Jesus: “Blessed are you, Simon” and “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe!”

It is the beatitude of faith, which John Paul II also received as a gift from God the Father for the building up of Christ’s Church.

Our thoughts turn to yet another beatitude, one which appears in the Gospel before all others. It is the beatitude of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of the Redeemer.

Mary, who had just conceived Jesus, was told by Saint Elizabeth: “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord” (Lk 1:45).

The beatitude of faith has its model in Mary, and all of us rejoice that the beatification of John Paul II takes place on this first day of the month of Mary, beneath the maternal gaze of the one who by her faith sustained the faith of the Apostles and constantly sustains the faith of their successors, especially those called to occupy the Chair of Peter.

Mary does not appear in the accounts of Christ’s resurrection, yet hers is, as it were, a continual, hidden presence: she is the Mother to whom Jesus entrusted each of his disciples and the entire community.

In particular we can see how Saint John and Saint Luke record the powerful, maternal presence of Mary in the passages preceding those read in today’s Gospel and first reading.

In the account of Jesus’s death, Mary appears at the foot of the cross (Jn 19:25), and at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles she is seen in the midst of the disciples gathered in prayer in the Upper Room (Acts 1:14).

Today’s second reading also speaks to us of faith. Saint Peter himself, filled with spiritual enthusiasm, points out to the newly-baptized the reason for their hope and their joy.

I like to think how in this passage, at the beginning of his First Letter, Peter does not use language of exhortation; instead, he states a fact.

He writes: “you rejoice”, and he adds: “you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1 Pet 1:6, 8-9).

All these verbs are in the indicative, because a new reality has come about in Christ’s resurrection, a reality to which faith opens the door. “This is the Lord’s doing”, says the Psalm (118:23), and “it is marvelous in our eyes”, the eyes of faith.

Dear brothers and sisters, today our eyes behold, in the full spiritual light of the risen Christ, the beloved and revered figure of John Paul II. Today his name is added to the host of those whom he proclaimed saints and blesseds during the almost twenty-seven years of his pontificate,

thereby forcefully emphasizing the universal vocation to the heights of the Christian life, to holiness, taught by the conciliar Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium.

All of us, as members of the people of God – bishops, priests, deacons, laity, men and women religious – are making our pilgrim way to the heavenly homeland where the Virgin Mary has preceded us, associated as she was in a unique and perfect way to the mystery of Christ and the Church.

Karol Wojtyła took part in the Second Vatican Council, first as an auxiliary Bishop and then as Archbishop of Kraków. He was fully aware that the Council’s decision to devote the last chapter of its Constitution on the Church to Mary meant that the Mother of the Redeemer is held up as an image and model of holiness for every Christian and for the entire Church.

This was the theological vision which Blessed John Paul II discovered as a young man and subsequently maintained and deepened throughout his life. A vision which is expressed in the scriptural image of the crucified Christ with Mary, his Mother, at his side.

This icon from the Gospel of John (19:25-27) was taken up in the episcopal and later the papal coat-of-arms of Karol Wojtyła: a golden cross with the letter “M” on the lower right and the motto “Totus tuus”, drawn from the well-known words of Saint Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort in which Karol Wojtyła found a guiding light for his life:

“Totus tuus ego sum et omnia mea tua sunt. Accipio te in mea omnia. Praebe mihi cor tuum, Maria" – I belong entirely to you, and all that I have is yours. I take you for my all. O Mary, give me your heart” (Treatise on True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, 266).

In his Testament, the new Blessed wrote: “When, on 16 October 1978, the Conclave of Cardinals chose John Paul II, the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, said to me: ‘The task of the new Pope will be to lead the Church into the Third Millennium’”.

And the Pope added:
“I would like once again to express my gratitude to the Holy Spirit for the great gift of the Second Vatican Council, to which, together with the whole Church – and especially with the whole episcopate – I feel indebted.

"I am convinced that it will long be granted to the new generations to draw from the treasures that this Council of the twentieth century has lavished upon us. As a Bishop who took part in the Council from the first to the last day, I desire to entrust this great patrimony to all who are and will be called in the future to put it into practice.

For my part, I thank the Eternal Shepherd, who has enabled me to serve this very great cause in the course of all the years of my Pontificate”.

And what is this “cause”? It is the same one that John Paul II presented during his first solemn Mass in Saint Peter’s Square in the unforgettable words: “Do not be afraid! Open, open wide the doors to Christ!”

What the newly-elected Pope asked of everyone, he was himself the first to do: society, culture, political and economic systems he opened up to Christ, turning back with the strength of a titan – a strength which came to him from God – a tide which appeared irreversible.

By his witness of faith, love and apostolic courage, accompanied by great human charisma, this exemplary son of Poland helped believers throughout the world not to be afraid to be called Christian, to belong to the Church, to speak of the Gospel.

In a word: he helped us not to fear the truth, because truth is the guarantee of liberty. To put it even more succinctly: he gave us the strength to believe in Christ, because Christ is Redemptor hominis, the Redeemer of man. This was the theme of his first encyclical, and the thread which runs though all the others.

When Karol Wojtyła ascended to the throne of Peter, he brought with him a deep understanding of the difference between Marxism and Christianity, based on their respective visions of man.

This was his message: man is the way of the Church, and Christ is the way of man. With this message, which is the great legacy of the Second Vatican Council and of its “helmsman”, the Servant of God Pope Paul VI, John Paul II led the People of God across the threshold of the Third Millennium, which thanks to Christ he was able to call “the threshold of hope”.

Throughout the long journey of preparation for the great Jubilee he directed Christianity once again to the future, the future of God, which transcends history while nonetheless directly affecting it.

He rightly reclaimed for Christianity that impulse of hope which had in some sense faltered before Marxism and the ideology of progress. He restored to Christianity its true face as a religion of hope, to be lived in history in an “Advent” spirit, in a personal and communitarian existence directed to Christ, the fullness of humanity and the fulfillment of all our longings for justice and peace.

Finally, on a more personal note, I would like to thank God for the gift of having worked for many years with Blessed Pope John Paul II. I had known him earlier and had esteemed him, but for twenty-three years, beginning in 1982 after he called me to Rome to be Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, I was at his side and came to revere him all the more.

My own service was sustained by his spiritual depth and by the richness of his insights. His example of prayer continually impressed and edified me: he remained deeply united to God even amid the many demands of his ministry.

Then too, there was his witness in suffering: the Lord gradually stripped him of everything, yet he remained ever a “rock”, as Christ desired. His profound humility, grounded in close union with Christ, enabled him to continue to lead the Church and to give to the world a message which became all the more eloquent as his physical strength declined.

In this way he lived out in an extraordinary way the vocation of every priest and bishop to become completely one with Jesus, whom he daily receives and offers in the Eucharist.

Blessed are you, beloved Pope John Paul II, because you believed! Continue, we implore you, to sustain from heaven the faith of God’s people. So many times you blessed us on this square from the [Apostolic] Palace. Today, we pray to you, Holy Father, bless us! Amen.]

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P.S. The 5/2-5/3/11 issue of OR includes the last two sentences added on by the Holy Father extemporaneously to his homily before the Amen. I have included them in the English translation above. But this concluding paragraph is worth reading in Italian, as follows:

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Beato te, amato Papa Giovanni Paolo II, perché hai creduto! Continua - ti preghiamo - a sostenere dal Cielo la fede del Popolo di Dio. Tante volte ci hai benedetto in questa Piazza dal Palazzo! Oggi, ti preghiamo: Santo Padre, ci benedica! Amen.

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The final sentences of the homily touched me as much as the similarly spontaneous words he said in English during the Mass in St. Patrick's Catehdral in April 2008. Both times, it was the simple naturalness of his humility that was most moving.

And I appreciate that natural humility even more when I read the eulogies to Blessed John Paul II these days in which commentators praise his witness, his faith, his teaching and his holiness, as if he had been singular in all these things among the Popes of recent memory, and as if the present Pope himself [Benedict XVI at the time] did not have those same qualities.

It does not detract one bit from Karol Wojtyla's overwehlming personal merits to note that the Church has been blessed with Popes in the past 150 years - i.e., since modern times - each of whom truly deserved the honorific title 'Holy Father' or 'Your Holiness'.

But unlike the Popes before him, Blessed Wojtyla actually held the world stage for over a generation, through his extensive travels and the wonders of modern communication which amplified and literally broadcast his charisma to the whole world. Consequently, people around the world - not just in Italy, as it was for John XXIII - for the first time felt a loving familiarity with a Pope, as with a family member one not only loves but admires greatly because he brings out the best in us.

We can only pray that soon, the general perception of Benedict XVI by the faithful and the media will be just as overwhelmingly positive and loving for this gentle, positive and loving holy man who described himself that April evening in 2005 as a 'simple and humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord' whom his fellow cardinals had chosen "after the great John Paul II". And one knows this was not empty rhetoric nor false modesty, but the genuine humility of one who does not try to be other than who he is. Fortunately for the Church and all of us, who he is happens to be in every way no less meritorious than St. Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II.



Obviously, I can only reiterate with much more force and overriding passion today the sentiments I expressed in May 2011 about the bias of media and public opinion against Benedict XVI, because today, even John Paul II has been eclipsed in the minds of many by the 'perfection' of Pope Francis...




Looking back to the beatification of John Paul II is a small way for me to make up for failing to mark the tenth anniversary of his death on April 2 - though I had left a blank post for the purpose - and of his funeral on April 8, which was, to all intents and purposes, the dramatic introduction to the world, on a unrepeatable historical occasion, of the man who would be elected his successor.

But I also want to underscore that St. John Paul II was the Pope of Divine Mercy, that the idea of 'mercy' was not something newly 'discovered' by JMB/PF, whose formal proclamation yesterday of his Extraordinary Holy Year of Mercy does not trump the annual celebration of Divine Mercy Sunday instituted by St. John Paul II, nor the widespread devotion around the world, established for decades, to the Divine Mercy of Jesus.

Very much apropos, here is Father Z's inspired initiative launched on this Divine Mercy Sunday:

Would that not appropriately crown the Extraordinary Holy Year of Mercy if St. John Paul II were to be declared 'Doctor of Mercy'? Your move, Pope Francis!

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/04/2015 05:14]

How gratifying that CRUX magazine is not letting the Barros case just die out from the media for obvious lack of interest, even by all those who were so militantly seeking to push Benedict XVI from office in 2009-2010 for all his supposed misdeeds in dealing with clerical sex-abuse issues! I hope CRUX pursues the story even on the Chilean end, since one of Mons. Barros's accusers claims he saw lecher-priest Fernando Karadima engaging in sexual play with Barros himself! The accuser, now 51, is a Chilean journalist.

Anti-abuse commission members
upset about Pope's appointment of Chilean bishop
will meet with Cardinal O’Malley
by Inés San Martín

April 10, 2015

ROME — Two survivors of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy who now sit on a Vatican anti-abuse commission are traveling to Rome this weekend to meet with Boston Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley to protest Pope Francis’s recent appointment of a Chilean bishop linked to a notorious sex abuser.

A commission member speaking on background because he’s not authorized to discuss the matter confirmed to Crux that the meeting between O’Malley and the two victims who sit on the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors — Marie Collins of Ireland and Peter Saunders of the United Kingdom — will happen on Sunday.

Collins and Saunders will be joined by two other members of the Vatican panel.

Saunders spoke on Friday about the upcoming meeting in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter.

“I’m hoping Francis will be there as well, because we’re going to meet [O’Malley] in the Domus Santa Marta about this Chilean bishop situation, which is really quite disturbing,” Saunders said.

The Chilean bishop is Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid, previously in charge of Chile’s military diocese, who was appointed in mid-January as the new bishop of the small Osorno diocese and installed March 21 amid violent protests.

Barros is one of four bishops mentored by the Rev. Fernando Karadima, a long-time point of reference for [sex abuses by] Catholic clergy in the country. In 2011, the Vatican sentenced Karadima to a life of “penitence and prayer” after finding him guilty of pedophilia and abuse of his ecclesiastical position.

The victims of Karadima have accused Barros and three other bishops of covering up for Karadima while he sexually abused devoted followers during the 1980s and 1990s. None of those bishops was ever charged with a crime, either by the Vatican or Chilean law enforcement agencies.

Saunders, founder of the UK-based National Association for People Abused in Childhood, told NCR that Barros “should not be in charge of a diocese where he will be responsible for young people. It’s an outrage.”

Through Twitter, Collins also has been outspoken against the appointment of Barros to the diocese of Osorno, calling it “a disappointment.”

The commission is currently working in small groups, each providing different perspectives to issues related to the prevention and protection of minors and vulnerable adults.

Two other survivors will be a part of the Sunday lunch with O’Malley, called “to take advantage of the cardinal being in Europe to participate in the meetings of the council of nine cardinals who advise the pope,” according to the commission member who spoke to Crux.

SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, released a statement saying they’re encouraged that four abuse victims will meet this weekend with O’Malley about what they called Pope Francis’ “irresponsible appointment of a corrupt Chilean bishop.”

However, the SNAP statement added that “every single member of the pontiff’s commission should be shouting from the rooftops about this callous and hurtful appointment that will only discourage other victims, witnesses and whistleblowers from exposing clergy who commit and conceal child sex crimes.”

Looking ahead to the commission’s next plenary meeting, working groups are focusing on several priorities:
- Pastoral care for survivors and their families
- Education on warning signs and proper responses to abuse allegations
- Guidelines for best practices
- Formation for the priesthood and religious life
- Ecclesial and civil norms governing allegations of abuse
- Accountability for those in positions of responsibility within the Church when dealing with allegations of abuse

Any bets as to whether JMB/PF will budge on his decision about Barros? [who, in any case, has been consecrated Bishop of Osorno - assuming that the incomplete Mass of consecration was valid regardless). How will Cardinal O'Malley mollify his protesting commission members otherwise?

Apparently, O'Malley did mollify the protesting commission members by simply promising he would call the Pope's attention to their concerns. One would think the Pope already knows about these concerns - the commission members' alarm was certainly very much in the news, and their concerns they are no different from those expressed in the letters sent to the Pope by the diocesan faithful of Osorno, some of the diocesan priests and almost half the members of the Chilean Parliament - but the Pope brushed off these concerns effectively by saying he was 'confident' he acted right to appoint Barros.

O'Malley tells commission members
he will present their concerns over
the Barros appointment to the Pope

April 13, 2015

Four lay members of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors met with one of Pope Francis’ top cardinal advisers at the Vatican on Sunday to voice their concerns about the appointment of a Chilean bishop, accused of covering up for an abusive priest.

The four said in a written statement the same day that Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, who is also the protection commission’s president, “agreed to present their concerns to the Holy Father” about the nomination of Bishop Juan Barros to the Diocese of Osorno, Chile.

The bishop had been accused of covering up for a priest who was known to have committed sexual abuse. Bishop Barros, however, denied having had knowledge of Father Fernando Karadima’s criminal behaviour, prior to news about the abuse in the press.

Commission member Marie Collins from Ireland expressed her satisfaction with their discussion at the Vatican, posting on her Twitter feed on April 13 that she was “heading home after a good meeting” with Cardinal O’Malley. [Was the meeting 'good' because O'Malley promised to bring their concerns to the Pope, or did he manage to convince the protesters how and why the Pope came to his decision on Barros and is sticking to it?]

The three other members of the 17-person commission at the 30-minute meeting included Peter Saunders, Dr Catherine Bonnet and Baroness Sheila Hollins. Collins and Saunders are both survivors of clerical sex abuse.

“Although we are not charged with dealing with individual cases, the protection of minors is our primary concern,” the four members said in their statement. “The process of appointing bishops who are committed to and have an understanding of child protection is of paramount importance.”

Bishops, they said, must be able to “enact effective policies” on sex abuse and “carefully monitor compliance.” [A bishop may well do (or intend) all of that, but what if he starts out with the multi-layered accusations about his personal conduct, as Barros does, in that he is said to have tolerated and/or covered up the sex abuses committed by his mentor, and worse, engaged in sexual dalliance himself with that mentor, who has been proven to be a real lecher?

1) Should the Pope not have applied the principle that "Even Caesar's wife must be above suspicion"? 2) Should not a formal investigation into the accusations against Barros have been launched? and 3) Pending such an investigation, could the Pope not have appointed someone else as Bishop of Osorno? Then, if and when Barros is cleared of these accusations, he can always be appointed bishop without any miasma of dishonour hovering around him!]

The commission members had scheduled their meeting with Cardinal O’Malley to coincide with his arrival in Rome for another weeklong session of the nine-member Council of Cardinals, set to start April 13.

The earlier story anticipating this meeting said that O'Malley was meeting the four Commission protesters at Casa Santa Marta. I am truly surprised that our beloved and most informal and spontaneous Pope did not drop in on the meeting and mollify the protesters himself! After all, if he managed to receive the Spanish trans-sexual Diego and his fiancee, don't his Abuse Commission members deserve the same privilege?

Steve Skojec has a reasoned and reasonable reply to Fr Z and those like myself who would not speak about schism lightly or loosely...


We’re going to keep talking about schism!
BY STEVE SKOJEC

APRIL 10, 2015


I consider Fr. Z an ally in our cause. I respect him, and I agree with him more often than I don’t. But something about his post yesterday isn’t sitting well with me. [Skojec goes on to reproduce Fr Z's post on 'Catholics don't schism!']

For a working definition of schism, let’s grab the handy Catholic Encyclopedia off the shelf, shall we?

---

Schism (from the Greek schisma, rent, division) is, in the language of theology and canon law, the rupture of ecclesiastical union and unity, i.e. either the act by which one of the faithful severs as far as in him lies the ties which bind him to the social organization of the Church and make him a member of the mystical body of Christ, or the state of dissociation or separation which is the result of that act. In this etymological and full meaning the term occurs in the books of the New Testament...

“Between heresy and schism”, explains St. Jerome, “there is this difference, that heresy perverts dogma, while schism, by rebellion against the bishop, separates from the Church. Nevertheless there is no schism which does not trump up a heresy to justify its departure from the Church (In Ep. ad Tit., iii, 10).

And St. Augustine: “By false doctrines concerning God heretics wound faith, by iniquitous dissensions schismatics deviate from fraternal charity, although they believe what we believe” (On Faith and the Creed 9). But as St. Jerome remarks, practically and historically, heresy and schism nearly always go hand in hand; schism leads almost invariably to denial of the papal primacy.

---

Put more simply, we find this in the current Code of Canon Law:

---

Can. 751 Heresy is the obstinate denial or obstinate doubt after the reception of baptism of some truth which is to be believed by divine and Catholic faith; apostasy is the total repudiation of the Christian faith; schism is the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him.

---

Schism is on the table. We hear a lot of talk these days about de facto vs. de jure schism. Fr. Hunwicke gave some consideration to the distinction earlier this week in a brief analysis of the canonical situation of the SSPX:

---

A year or two ago, Cardinal Mueller suggested that, although the excommunication of its bishops had been lifted, the SSPX was still in de facto schism.

At first, I disliked this idea, because it seemed to nullify the emollient effects of the removal of the excommunications, as intended by Benedict XVI.

But, upon lengthier thought, I came (as I usually do … honest, no irony here …) to the conclusion that his Eminence is right. After all, with whatever justification, the SSPX does not have any recognition in Rome or throughout the world-wide churches which are in unflawed communion with the Holy Father. De facto there is no communicatio in sacris between SSPX clergy and diocesan bishops. To call this a de facto schism, which after all does imply that the Society is not in a de iure schism, and thus is not canonically schismatic, does seem at least arguably to be a useful analytical category.

I wonder exactly how far heterodox or heteropractic elements in the hierarchy need to go before they themselves can prudently be judged to have entered this interesting new category of de facto schism.

I have in mind Cardinal Marx and his like, with their threats “go ahead without waiting for the Synod” et similia. How different is this from the SSPX going down its own path without waiting for Rome to “return to the Eternal Rome”?

---

I think the answer, to both Fr. Z and Fr. Hunwicke’s points, is that yes, real, actual schism is here right now.

The SSPX, for our purposes, is an actual distraction from this larger point. When it comes to the active, raging heterodoxy amongst apostolic successors happening this very moment across the world, the debate over de facto or de jure is a technicality.

The effects of this schism, wherever you stand on taxonomy, are markedly less academic – though they would probably be far less damaging if they were juridically declared rather than allowed to fester as they have.

Tragically, like the proverbial boiled frog, we’ve been steeping in this toxic amalgam of legitimacy and schismatic heresy within the institutional Church for such a long time that few of us seem able to tell for certain just how bad it really is right now. Like good sheep, we await the guidance of our shepherds; like good subjects, we await the judgment of our monarch.

Yet none is forthcoming.

And here is the crux of the issue: the reason we are dealing with de facto schism left uncondemned instead of de jure schism declared and denounced is astonishingly, frighteningly simple: The chief legislator of the Church has chosen not to pronounce sentence. [In the actual situation, however, how can the 'chief legislator of the Church', the Pope, pronounce sentence when he appears to be the leader of those elements whom orthodox Catholics are resisting?

In a schism, one part splits off from the other. In this situation, the Pope is certainly not 'splitting off' from the Church which he was elected to lead. But no matter how much orthodox Catholics resist heterodoxy and heteropraxy - even if the Pope himself leads these - we are never going to leave the one true Church either, even if it masquerades as a 'new church' under Bergoglio...

In other words, the de facto schism Skojec argues is simply the orthodox analog of the de facto schism practised by the Vatican II progressivists since 1965. In which case, the Church today is really split three ways: the orthodox, the progressivists, and those in between - probably the overwhelming majority - who do not know and/or care enough to take sides but simply follow the path of least resistance, as they did unquestioningly with the Novus Ordo. And so we are at status quo ante.]

The Encyclopedia cites St. Jerome in saying that “schism leads almost invariably to denial of the papal primacy.” But why deny papal primacy when it is the mechanism by which a break into the Church’s communion and from its teachings has been imposed? [I don't understand Skojec's point. If you don't deny papal primacy, doesn't that mean you accept everything a Pope does in the exercise of that primacy? Skojec certainly does not think so, as his next words suggest.]

In other words: how did Kasper and Marx and Daneels and Forte and Baldisseri and Galantino and Maradiaga and Wuerl and all the hairy hordes of prelates who infect the Church with error wind up at the top of the Synod food chain to flout Our Lord’s teachings with impunity?

Because Pope Francis put them there, and has not seen fit to remove them.

This is the reality Catholics around the world are struggling with right now. They don’t know what to think. We’re all papists, we faithful sons of the Church. But when do you say to Peter: “I’m sorry, your holiness, I can’t follow you down this road.”?

I’ve seen people — real, actual, non-hypothetical people — asking what they are to do if, at the conclusion of this year’s portion of the Synod, one of the following scenarios plays out:

o Pope Francis blesses some document or language allowing the divorced and remarried to receive communion after some prescribed process that does not involve removing themselves from the adulterous relationship, or
o Pope Francis does not make such a decision, but rather delegates the discretionary power to do the same to either the regional bishops conferences or the local ordinary.

What these concerned people want to know is simple: “Can I go to Mass or communion at a parish or in a diocese where they are allowing Eucharistic sacrilege by inviting those who are living in adultery to receive communion? And if I can, should I?”

The fact is, even the sacraments of a heretic or schismatic are valid, ex opere operato. So the reality on the ground is that it’s like the Arian crisis all over again. At the time, St. Basil wrote:

---

Religious people keep silence, but every blaspheming tongue is let loose. Sacred things are profaned; those of the laity who are sound in faith avoid the places of worship as schools of impiety, and raise their hands in solitudes, with groans and tears to the Lord in heaven.” (Ep. 92).

Four years after he writes:
Matters have come to this pass: the people have left their houses of prayer, and assemble in deserts,—a pitiable sight; women and children, old men, and men otherwise infirm, wretchedly faring in the open air, amid the most profuse rains and snow-storms and winds and frosts of winter; and again in summer under a scorching sun. To this they submit, because they will have no part in the {460} wicked Arian leaven.” (Ep. 242).

Only one offence is now vigorously punished — an accurate observance of our fathers’ traditions. For this cause the pious are driven from their countries, and transported into deserts. The people are in lamentation, in continual tears at home and abroad. There is a cry in the city, a cry in the country, in the roads, in the deserts. Joy and spiritual cheerfulness are no more; our feasts are turned into mourning; our houses of prayer are shut up, our altars deprived of the spiritual worship.” (Ep. 243)

---

Can you imagine living like this? I’ve heard tell of parish priests in my own diocese who have warned their flocks that such a time may be coming, and soon.

There is a third possible outcome, which is that Pope Francis will pull a sneak attack, surprising everyone by strongly and unequivocally re-stating Church teaching on the Sixth Commandment and possibly even disciplining those who had chosen to attempt to transmogrify the Church into an institution that accepts illicit sexual unions.

Some Catholics are really holding out hope that Wildcard Scenario #3 is going to happen. And theoretically, it could. If Pope Francis is planning a surprise attack, however, he’s doing the surprise part very, very well. Still, the Holy Spirit works in mysterious ways, and Pope Vigilius was a huge letdown to Empress Theodora and her not-so-merry band of Monophysites, so never say never.

But we have to deal with what we know, and the realm of probability. The last half of the Synod empowered some very bad men to do some very big damage to Church teaching on marriage and sexuality. And we have an as-yet uncontested account from the guy appointed by the pope to run the show that the pope was actually…running the show. Make of it what you will.

So where does this leave us?

Faithful Catholics are not going to start a schism. It’s not how we work. Fr. Z is right about that. We believe in docility and obedience to the Magisterium. But the fault lines have already appeared, and they’ve begun looking more like battle lines now. Groups of the faithful are making pledges to uphold Church teaching. Pledges that others have been respectfully asked to make, to no avail. The other side is already saying they won’t be made to do anything other than what they want.

With so much of the outcome already on the table, it seems that the Synod itself may be only a formality.

This is real, not imagined, division. This is not just “indifference and apathetic drifting,” though these are present too (which explains the lack of resistance in most places). We are a house divided, and we know that unless something changes, the house — as it is — cannot stand.

No, talk of schism is not a distraction. It’s the main event. The men who are seeking to violate Christ’s commandments from within an official Church body under the guidance of the pope and to foment widespread Eucharistic desecration and the normalization of homosexual relationships within the moral law will never win the war, but the battles are theirs for the taking.

The tide is turning against us in society, and I fear that we are in the minority within the Church.

One way or another, these fractures and fissures are going to turn into breaks and chasms. People will choose new parishes that align with their ideologies. Faithful priests will be persecuted. Holy Masses may eventually have to be said in secret. The Bride of Christ will, once again, share in His Passion.

Our Lady warned us of this as recently as 1973. She said:

---

“The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against bishops. The priests who venerate me will be scorned and opposed by their confreres…churches and altars sacked; the Church will be full of those who accept compromises and the demon will press many priests and consecrated souls to leave the service of the Lord.

“The demon will be especially implacable against souls consecrated to God. The thought of the loss of so many souls is the cause of my sadness. If sins increase in number and gravity, there will be no longer pardon for them”.

Our Lady speaks also of temporal annihilation:
“As I told you, if men do not repent and better themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity. It will be a punishment greater than the deluge, such as one will never seen before. Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful. The survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead.”

---

Does this sound familiar? It should:

---

And the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrha brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he destroyed these cities, and all the country about, all the inhabitants of the cities, and all things that spring from the earth. And his wife looking behind her, was turned into a statue of salt. And Abraham got up early in the morning and in the place where he had stood before with the Lord, He looked towards Sodom and Gomorrha, and the whole land of that country: and he saw the ashes rise up from the earth as the smoke of a furnace. (Gen 19:24-28)

---

The destruction of Sodom, but on a mass scale. As fitting as it is terrifying.

So, to answer the question that’s on your mind right now: what do we do? Fast. Pray. Resist. Teach as many people as we can to think critically and to learn the unchangeable truths of our faith. Prepare our children. Learn the Litany of Humility, because you’re going to need it when people start coming out of the woodwork to condemn you for standing up for what’s right. Ready ourselves even for the possibility of martyrdom, as Cardinal Burke has said.

Of course, Our Lady gave us the only sure remedy:

---

“The only arms which will remain for you will be the Rosary and the Sign left by My Son. Each day recite the prayers of the Rosary. With the Rosary, pray for the Pope, the bishops and priests.”

---

We have our marching orders. In the words of Winston Churchill, “This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.”

About praying the rosary: If it helps anyone, I can say from personal experience that in decades, I have never had to squirm or otherwise agonize when waiting for anything, nor am I 'idle' when simply walking on the street, or on a bus or train and am unable to read - all because I spend all that otherwise idle time praying the rosary for all kinds of intentions. On a normal commuting day, I am able to pray at least four complete rosaries (twenty mysteries)... Try it...

I must admit that I've only skimmed through the 'Bull of Indiction' because I did not expect JMB/PF to 'complete' his preaching on mercy in any way with this document - i.e., not just to underscore that God's mercy is infinite, and all we have to do is ask, but also to point out our responsibility to be worthy of this mercy by amending our ways and keeping away from sin, especially from any chronic state of sin.

The headline fragments above seem to bear out that impression. For instance: A 'non-judging Church'? It's expressions like those that turn me off JMB's pontifications, and until he preaches divine or pastoral mercy and forgiveness with the required truth and charity that ought to accompany mercy and forgiveness, I do not think he has anything to teach me about mercy.

In any case, a more patient Vatican news junkie at Rorate caeli has taken the Bull by the horn and has written a first analysis of the things that struck him most about it...
http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2015/04/notes-on-misericordiae-vultus-1-defense.html


JMB'S 'MERCY OFFENSIVE':
A juggernaut coming your way soon


My first impression is that ecclesiastical tribunals, including those in the Vatican, as well as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which is supposed to adjudicate delicta graviora, will be put out of business by the Bergoglian 'missionaries of mercy'. The latter will be sent around the world to absolve persons guilty of delicta graviora - mostly sins against the sacraments - without need of adjudication, in yet another manner of 'license to sin' bestowed in the name of mercy!



Trust Father H to come up with one of his inimitable observation/commentaries on two events of note that I have yet to acknowledge with posts on their own. The first is Pope Francis's use of the word 'genocide' to describe the massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks, which has caused Turkey to recall its ambassador to the Holy See... And the second is about those Bergoglian 'missionaries of mercy', about which Fr H is particularly and delightfully droll!

Francis follows Benedict:
What will the Wolves make of it?

Aoril 13, 2015

As an unashamed admirer of the emeritus Roman Pontiff, I feel dead chuffed that his successor has chosen to follow right in his footsteps in two highly significant ways ... and on the same glorious day!

(1) Pope Benedict fearlessly delivered his Regensburg lecture, undeterred by the probability of uproar from the Wolves. And now our beloved Holy Father Pope Francis has shown his fearless solidarity with the magnificent Christian Armenian people by refusing to be be bullied by the Turkish Government into Holocaust Denial. Let us hope that pusillanimous Western governments will have the guts to follow his courageous lead.

It will be amusing to see if the Wolves who attacked Benedict after Regensburg will deploy the same splenetic malevolence against Francis. I'm betting that they won't, because so many of them were endlessly devising flimsy pretexts for attacking Benedict XVI, but have invested a lot of their own tenuous credibility in their confected image of "Good Pope Francis". Armeniagate, of course, will be argued to be subtly different from Regensburggate!!

(2) Pope Benedict also received endless flak from the Wolves for Mercifully remitting the excommunications upon the four bishops consecrated by His Excellency the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. They particularly went into paroxysms of their usual simulated fury about the Merciful inclusion in this package of Bishop Williamson, reputed to be a Holocaust Denier.

More recently, His Wykehamist Excellency re-incurred, only last month, the same excommunication latae sententiae for consecrating another bishop absque mandato Apostolicae Sedis.

But now Pope Francis, even more Merciful than Pope Benedict, is to send out confessarii with extensive faculties to absolve even the matters most specially reserved to the Holy See.

So all that Richard Williamson will need to do is to catch an early train in from Broadstairs (just eighty minutes to St Pancras) and get into the queue in Westminster Cathedral when one of these Grand Penitentiaries is installed there hard at work absolving ("And finally, Father, I have performed Episcopal Consecration without a Mandate from the Holy See". "Male or female, my son, and how many times?" "Male ... once." "... te absolvo ab omni vinculo excommunicationis suspensionis et interdicti, in quantum possum et tu indiges ... "). Just the cost of a single train ticket!

Can ripping up into tiny pieces a major reserved papal excommunication ever have been such a total doddle? Oodles of Mercy for Williamson toties quoties!!! How will the Wolves handle that possibility? By discovering, d'you think, some handy canonical small-print meaning that the Jubilaeic Mercy will be just a trifle less all-embracing than the Holy Father clearly intends? Wait for it!

[The news of the regularization of the FSSPX in Argentina by no less than JMB's successor as Archbishop of BA really deserves space of its own. The implication is that, without waiting for any formal resolution of the doctrinal talks between the FSSPX and the Vatican, which began in 2010, Pope Francis appears ready to take back the FSSPX into the Church of Rome, without demanding any conditions about Vatican II... If this is so, will there be any negative fallout at all for JMB/PF from those who went bonkers when B16 lifted the excommunication of the four Lefebvre-ordained bishops? Or will the Francis fanworld hail it as Bergoglian mercy in action, as Fr. H suggests above? In which case, it will be yet another application of a double standard when 'judging' Benedict XVI and his successor. ]

As respectfully as he can, Fr. Schall appears here to be reacting to JMB/PF's strange notion (and apparent conviction) 1) that "reality is more important than ideas", as if somehow, ideas were not a reality of their own, especially the ideas, good and bad alike, that have shaped and continue to shape the concrete 'reality' of our world and our lives; and 2) that 'intellectuals' in the Church [those who do not happen to think as he does - because intellectuals like Walter Kasper are worthy of his fulsome praise] are necessarily anti-'pastoral', and worse, pharisaical, in their insistence that Church discipline and practice must follow from Church doctrine. (That is why his pitiless tirades against intellectuals and Pharisees have always struck me as somehow a continuous attack on Benedict XVI in the only way Bergoglio can do so without making it obvious!)


The reasonable character of the credibility
of the Christian Faith
The Church understands that it needs thinkers
to examine and explain why arguments are leveled against it
and whether or not these arguments are valid
by James V. Schall, S.J.

April 12, 2015

---

“Some reduce to a meaningless formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in order to gain eternal salvation. Others finally belittle the reasonable character of the credibility of the Christian faith.”
— Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, 27
August 12, 1950

---

I.

Some time in Holy Week, I chanced to watch a report on FOX News of some terrified African children being carted off by a Muslim group for death, forced conversion, or slavery. What struck me about this scene was not its uniqueness — such incidents seem to happen some place in the world most every day. What alerted me was the comment of an unknown reporter or observer who said: “There is no longer any place on the planet that is safe for Christians.”

I mentioned this incident to a friend who added: “It is no longer just a question of physical persecution, but the very ideas and beliefs of Christianity are rejected.” Christian beliefs have no “place” in any public order. The Catholic League noted the number of times that David Letterman mocked the Eucharist on several of his shows. We cannot mock anything black, Jewish, gay, or liberal, but we can ridicule Catholics and Christians.

In this context, it is only fair to say that many Catholics are themselves unclear about many things.
- Just what Cardinal Kasper understands by “mercy” and “divorce” is a widely controverted and by no means neutral question.
- The Indiana bishops seem not to have understood what religious freedom might mean for themselves if the government can force us to act against our conscience in order to have presence in a society. A modern version of the Christian Roman soldiers being forced to sacrifice to idols in order to serve the Emperor is taking place in the Hoosier State.
- Few can admit that the so-called “terrorists”, who seem to be everywhere telling us that they will make our cities run with blood, might well be valid Muslim followers as they think they are.

On reading John Rist’s remarkable book, Augustine Deformed (Cambridge, 2014), which concerns a rethinking of Genesis’s account of the Creation and the Fall, I was reminded of Pius XII's 1950 encyclical, Humani Generis, a much controverted document ["concerning some false opinions threatening to undermine the foundations of Catholic Doctrine"].

I was struck by the passage cited above about the “reasonableness” of the “credibility” of the faith. Since the time of Pius XII, the relation of reason and revelation has become a familiar one. Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI devoted insightful considerations to this most important relationship.

Meantime, the culture has largely gone relativist so that the very meaning of “reason” is undermined. Reason becomes merely a tool for us to make or get what we want, whatever the structure of the world might be.

I think it is fair to say that, with Pope Francis, we do not see as much emphasis on the intellectual side of the faith. To be sure, the faith itself presupposes that an intelligent seeking of truth is found among men prior to or aside from any question of faith.

Strictly speaking, faith concerns God’s intelligence directed to our intelligence. Our “submission” to God’s intelligence and love is not apart from our effort to understand what is being presented to us as true. God does not contradict Himself or the laws of what He has created. Revelation, directly or indirectly, fosters and deepens understanding.

II.
Pope Francis has not presented himself as an intellectual pope. He is not unlearned but although he speaks and writes clearly [????] he has a spare scholarly record.

Popes do not need to be members of the world’s intelligentia, though some are. Yet they do need some grasp of the importance of ideas in addressing the world they confront.

Pope Francis presents himself primarily as a “pastoral” pope, one who is kindly and loving. [Not that previous Popes have 'presented themselves' as unkind or unloving!] He does have certain definite opinions about economics, poverty, ecology, war, and culture that are definitely based on ideas that can and should be examined.

If we are able to get everyone going back to church, receiving the sacraments, aiding the weak and poor, leading a more simple life — he implies — then we can address ourselves to thinking, if it is still a problem. The people that Pope Bergoglio criticizes most often are, in fact, intellectuals, along with bureaucrats in his own Curia. The Pope seems not to like ivory towers or offices surrounded by machines. He puts cardinals in confessional boxes.

Christianity, in comparison with Islam, liberalism, Hinduism, or Buddhism, is said to be a very complicated religion. It insists on logic, the principle of non-contradiction, facts, and internal coherence. [B][All of which are painfully absent in much of Bergoglian pontification against anything and anyone he dislikes! A general incoherence which makes such posturings so 'insupportable' - one expects arguments that cohere and hold together, not to mention objective facts that are abundantly available about most of the secular topics he pontificates about.]

The succinct, brilliant Nicene Creed, that all Catholics, even the least brilliant, are supposed to hear and recite on Sundays, cannot be understood without some philosophical, linguistic, and historical learning.

Usually, this complex quality is taken to be a drawback. The fewer principles, the more agreement — or so it is implied. To follow this minimalist advice would only be a drawback, however, if what Catholicism maintains about itself, God, and the cosmos were not true.

It is often quite necessary to be clear, precise, and systematic if we are to do justice to the complexities of reality and the effort to understand and express them.

Christianity has discovered, often the hard way, that it is no good to simplify something that is not simple. And even the fundamental doctrine that God is “simple” is not exactly simple when we try to understand that the simplicity of God still grasps all things that are not God.

And God is more than all existing things. He could do very well if nothing but Himself existed. When He chose to put the world into existence, with us in it, He added nothing to Himself but everything to us, beginning with our very being.

The Church has long considered itself to be a “body”, a “mystical” body, as the same Pius XII called it. St. Paul spoke of the many different parts of this body to explain the unity of the Church. The foot, the arm, and the heart do not do the same things. If they did, we could not have a body.

Often, modern equality theory makes it seem that we are all replaceable, that anyone can do what anyone else can do. This view represents a confusion between the notion of equality of being with equality of talent and purpose.

We often notice that those with great talent to do or make something are also very lazy, undisciplined, or corrupt so that they really accomplish very little of their potential for good. On the other hand, the famous story of the Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke, a very menial act in itself, was what was needed to save the countryside from flooding.

III.
The notion of a “common good” does not mean that everyone receives the same benefits or contributes the same talents. They do not, and it is no injustice to anyone. Rather it means that all sorts of things are there to be done by those willing and able to do them.

The only way that they can be confronted is if different people spend their lives and talents on doing them. If someone is not willing to spend fifteen years learning to be a doctor, we will not have good doctors.

One of the greatest blessings and freedoms that we all have is that we do not have to do or know everything. The great truth of the division of labor or specialization is that my good depends on someone else doing things I will not do, cannot do, or do not have time to do. It may be quite possible for me to change the oil in my car every few thousand miles. But it may also be true that if I take time to do these chores, I will not be able to do what I do better. So I go to Jiffylube where someone else gladly does what I do not have time to do.

When it comes to thinking, the same general principles hold. The fact that we are rational animals means that we can think. That capacity gives us knowledge of a whole range of things beyond ourselves — things to do, things to make, things just to think about.

In a way, thinking is like horseback riding or golfing; to be good at it we need both talent and experience. Some are better than others. And some of those who are more talented use their talents badly. Some can “belittle” the reasons for the “credibility” of the faith. People have “reasons” why they do not want the faith to be true, however credible it may be. These reasons can in turn be thought about, spelled out, and examined.

The Church has long understood that one of the main reasons it needs thinkers is to examine and explain why arguments are leveled against it and whether or not these arguments are valid. Not everyone needs to be wrapped up in this enterprise, but we need some who are.

And as Chesterton wrote in his Heretics(1905) it is an exhilarating experience to see the “reasons” given for not believing — and they are “given”. Catholics are not “fideists” who just believe to believe. Nor are they just rationalists who think they have figured everything out or soon will.

They believe because it makes sense to believe and they can give reasons why what they hold is true. They know their reason can grasp some things, indeed many things, but it always leads to a mystery, to something that is reasonably beyond reason. They suspect that God can reveal things to them. They are not overly surprised with claims and evidence that He has are brought forth.

Andrea Tornielli, in his book, Francis: Pope of a New World (Ignatius Press, 2013), cites the Pope, while reflecting on what has happened to him, to remark that we have “A God who comes to seek you before you seek him.” [A notion, Mr. Tornielli, that Benedict XVI - and countless other Catholics - have often articulated!]

That “being sought” is our real human context, even when we reject God. The rejection is always one-sided. God does not reject us. But He does allow us to live, even forever, with our choices. And our choices always reflect our understanding of what we think reality, including ourselves, is about.

The Mystical Body, to be itself, needs all its members, not only those who work and suffer, those who pray and are just and merciful, but also those who think, along with those who think well.

But it does not just exist for itself. The Church also exists for those who think wrongly and those who love wrongly, so that they might have hope. This purpose is why the apostles were told to “teach and baptize”. Neither “eternal salvation” nor the means to attain it are “meaningless formulae”. Why this is so is also worth understanding, however complex and challenging.

I'm very happy and gratified that Sandro Magister has chosen to write this article on Cardinal Sarah for L'Espresso (the Italian equivalent of TIME), which anthologizes his articles on the site www.chiesa. But not too happy that Magister chose to present him as a papabile, not because the cardinal is not eminently qualified to be Pope, but because it opens him to pressures from those in the Curia who oppose his orthodoxy in the face of the prevailing heterodoxy in the papal court - an orthodoxy that he affirms firmly and bluntly in the book DIEU OU RIEN: Entretien sur la foi (God or nothing: An interview on the faith] that has brought him to media attention in recent weeks. The excerpts Magister chose from the book contain statements far more bold than the isolated excerpts that have been cited in the media so far, and in their way, just as strong or even stronger than statements that have been made by Cardinal Burke. Clearly, Cardinal Sarah speaks as an African prelate, not as a member of the Pope's Curia.

As careful as he may be, as Cardinal Burke is, not to express direct opposition to the Pope, their message is unmistakable, and confirms those of us who believe that the tendencies and concrete proposals they oppose would seem to be the very views held (or at the very least, entertained) by Pope Francis himself - i.e., we are not just imagining things nor speaking out of bias.

A Pope from Black Africa
He would be the first in history. And he could be the next Pope.
Name: Robert Sarah, author of a revelatory book
by Sandro Magister



ROME, April 10, 2015 – He has said so himself, with candor: “I have the feeling that God has put me here for a short time.” Four or five years, or even less.

It is natural that this disclosure of Pope Francis should reignite the conjectures over who will succeed him. [Hardly a disclosure, unless he has been told he suffers from a terminal disease, of which there is no indication whatsoever. He was expressing a probability that is present whenever anyone is his age. Of course, it drew the expected outcry from the Francis fanworld: "BOO-HOO! Oh, please don't say that! What would we do without you?", articulated by no less than Cardinal Dolan who is not naive!]

And immediately bounding to the top of the lists of the experts and speculators is the cardinal who has been baptized “the Pope Francis of Asia,” Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle, Filipino with a Chinese mother, age 56, who travels by bus, welcomes vagrants in the cathedral, does not condemn but embraces, and has even studied theology in the United States with renowned “liberal” teachers. His was the joyous face that appeared beside Francis on the triumphant journey in the Philippines last January. [I am restraining myself with a muzzle and straitjacket to keep from commenting!]

But few noted that Francis had brought another cardinal with him from Rome, who had been in the islands after the 2013 tsunami to bring “the pope’s charity,” in his capacity as president of “Cor Unum.”

His name is Robert Sarah, an African from Guinea, 70 years old. He was for the most part an unknown, until a book-length interview with him published in France a month ago revealed his impressive profile. Francis surprisingly promoted him last November as prefect of the Vatican congregation for divine worship, a key appointment for his new curia in the process of reform. [Surprising move, but also an expedient fix for JMB/PF who is actively considering a super-dicastery for 'justice and peace' that would absorb Cor Unum and that would proactively promote his idea of charity best espoused by his chief henchman and surrogate, Cardinal Maradiaga, who will head the super-dicastery. Cardinal Sarah, of course, even before his book came out, was an outspoken advocate of the idea of Christian charity with faith best characterized and described by Benedict XVI in the encyclicals Deus caritas est and Caritas in veritate, and in the November 2012 Apostolic Letter motu proprio Intimae naturae Ecclesiae de caritas minstranda [The deepest nature of the Church (includes) the service of charity].

Of course, the Pope could not very well dismiss an African cardinal from his Curia, and the CDW post happened to be vacant. Convenient and expedient. (Especially since, if Cardinal Maradiaga's super-dicastery comes into being, the other African cardinal in the Curia, Cardinal Turkson, would lose his position, since his Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace would be absorbed in the new super-dicastery.) After all, what could Cardinal Sarah do at CDW to undermine this Pontificate in any way? The Novus Ordo is well in place, Summorum Pontificum - whether JMB likes it or not - is succeeding wherever there are Catholics who prefer their liturgy to be sacred in every way, and the CDW Prefect cannot initiate anything on his own that is not ordered or approved by the Pope... Ah, but now we know: He can speak as the voice of Catholic Africa, not as a member of the Curia! Praise the Lord!]

For the Church it is the moment of Africa, the continent of converts, going from 2 million Catholics in 1900 to 185 million today, and a land of martyrs, slaughtered like lambs on the shores of the Mediterranean or slain on a university campus in Kenya. This too is part of Sarah’s biography.

He was born in a remote village in the savanna, into a freshly converted family. At the age of 12 he was circumcised and initiated into manhood in the forest. He studied to be a priest and became one, while his Guinea was under the bloody regime of the Marxist Sekou Touré, with the bishop of Conakry, the capital, imprisoned and tortured.

He studied theology in Rome, at the Gregorian and especially at the Biblicum, with rector Carlo Maria Martini and professors like Lyonnet, Vanhoye, de la Potterie. He spent a year at the prestigious École Biblique in Jerusalem.

And then he returned as a humble pastor to his Guinea, going on foot into the savanna to reach the very last of the faithful, amid a majority Muslim population. Until Paul VI made him a bishop in 1978, the youngest in the world at the age of 33. And he entrusted him with Conakry, as Sekou Touré became ever more infuriated with this new pastor and undaunted defender of the faith. After the tyrant’s sudden death in 1984, they would discover that Sarah was the first on the list of enemies to be eliminated.

John Paul II called him to Rome in 2001 and made him secretary of the congregation for the evangelization of peoples, to care for the more than one thousand dioceses of missionary countries. And when its prefect fell ill he became, beginning in 2008, the effective first-in-command of Propaganda Fide [Cardinal Ivan Dias of India, who was Prefect, was largely disabled physically during his last years as Prefect], in personal contact with Benedict XVI, who in 2010 made him a cardinal and the president of “Cor Unum.”

Sarah has boundless admiration for Pope Joseph Ratzinger. [The subtitle for his interview book, 'Entretien sur la foi', seems to be a homage to Cardinal Ratzinger's first interview book, RAPPORTO SULLA FEDE (Report on the faith) published in English as THE RATZINGER REPORT and in French as ENTRETIENS SUR LA FOI.] He shares his idea that for the Church of today, the absolute priority is to bring God into the heart of civilizations, both those of ancient Christian tradition that has been obfuscated or denied, and those that are still pagan.

It is the same objective that he attributes to Vatican Council II. This and no other, because the eclipse of God is the decline of man. Dieu ou rien, God or nothing, is the title of his book, more than four hundred pages that dazzle with their profundity and clarity.

Charity for the world’s rejects must also reveal God. Without shortcuts. It is not acceptable, Sarah says, that “while Christians are dying for their fidelity to Jesus, in the West there are churchmen who are discussing how to reduce the Gospel’s demands to a minimum.”

Cardinal Walter Kasper, foremost of the great electors of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, is already thinking about what comes next and is growing uneasy. He asked in his latest interview: “Will his pontificate remain only a brief interlude in the Church’s history?"

---

Recall that the publishers initially promoted the book advertising a Preface by Benedict XVI on the book cover, but it ended up published without the Preface and with no explanation for why the Preface was omitted. I am still hoping Cardinal Sarah will make the text available to the public.

]PAGES SELECTED FROM “DIEU OU RIEN”
by CARDINAL ROBERT SARAH
From "Dieu ou rien. Entretien sur la foi"
Robert Sarah avec Nicolas Diat
Fayard, Paris, 2015, pp. 424

MERCY WITHOUT CONVERSION
There is now no mistake that there exists a form of rejection of the dogmas of the Church, or a growing distance among men, the faithful and dogmas.

On the question of marriage, there is a chasm between a certain world and the Church. The question is ultimately very simple: is it the world that must change its attitude, or the Church its fidelity to God? Because if the faithful still love the Church and the pope, but do not apply its doctrine, not changing anything in their lives, not even after coming to listen to the successor of Peter in Rome, what kind of future should we expect?

Many faithful rejoice to hear about the divine mercy, and they hope that the radical nature of the Gospel could also mitigate in favor of those who have made the decision to live in rupture with the crucified love of Jesus. They think that because of the Lord’s infinite goodness everything is possible, even while deciding not to change anything about their lives.

For many, it is normal that God should pour his mercy upon them while they dwell in sin. They do not understand that light and darkness cannot coexist, in spite of the many appeals of St. Paul: “What should we say then? That we should remain in sin so that grace may abound? Of course not!" […]

This confusion demands rapid responses. The Church cannot go forward as if reality did not exist: it can no longer content itself with ephemeral enthusiasms, which last for the duration of great gatherings or liturgical assemblies, as beautiful and rich as they may be. It can no longer hold back from a practical reflection on subjectivism as the root of most of the current errors.

What use is it that the pope's Twitter account is followed by hundreds of thousands of persons if men do not concretely change their lives? What use is it to tally up the figures of the crowds that throng before the popes if we are not sure that the conversions are real and profound? […]

In the face of the onslaught of subjectivism that seems to be overrunning the world, churchmen must guard themselves from denying reality while basking in misleading appearances and glory. […] In order to set a radical change of concrete life into motion, the teaching of Jesus and of the Church must reach man’s heart. Two millennia ago, the apostles followed Christ. They left everything and their existence was never the same. Still today the journey of the apostles is a model.

The Church must rediscover a vision. If its teaching is not understood, it must not be afraid of putting its capacities to the test a hundred times. This is not a matter of softening the demands of the Gospel or of changing the doctrine of Jesus and the apostles to adapt it to the shifting fashions, but of radically bringing into focus the manner in which we ourselves live the Gospel of Jesus and present dogma....

NO ONE, NOT EVEN THE POPE…
Pope Francis entitled one chapter of his exhortation: “The reality is more important than the idea.” […] I think that the pope ardently desires to give the Church the savor of the real, in the sense that Christians and even the clergy can sometimes be tempted to hide behind ideas in order to forget the real situations of persons.

On the other hand, some fear that this conception of the pope endangers the integrity of the magisterium. The recent debate on the problem of the divorced and remarried has often been charged with this kind of tension.

For my part, I do not believe that the pope’s thought is to endanger the integrity of the magisterium. In effect, no one, not even the pope, can demolish or change the teaching of Christ. No one, not even the pope, can oppose pastoral care to doctrine. This would be to rebel against Jesus Christ and his teaching....

A NEW FORM OF HERESY
According to my experience, in particular after twenty-three years as archbishop of Conakry and nine years as secretary of the congregation for the evangelization of peoples, the question of divorced or civilly remarried believers is not an urgent challenge for the Churches of Africa and Asia.

On the contrary, this is an obsession of certain Western Churches that want to impose solutions that are called "theologically responsible and pastorally appropriate," which radically contradict the teachings of Jesus and the magisterium of the Church. […]

In the face of the moral crisis, in particular that of marriage and the family, the Church can contribute to the search for just and constructive solutions, but it has no other possibility than to participate in it by making reference in a very vigorous way to the distinctive and unique contribution of faith in Jesus Christ to the human enterprise.

In this sense it is not possible to imagine any sort of rupture between magisterium and pastoral care. The idea that would consist in putting the magisterium in a pretty box, separating it from pastoral practice, which could evolve according to circumstances, fashions, and passions, is a form of heresy, a dangerous schizophrenic pathology.

I therefore solemnly affirm that the Church of Africa will firmly oppose any rebellion against the teaching of Jesus and of the magisterium. […]

How could a synod review the constant, unanimous, and extensive teaching of Blessed Paul VI, Saint John Paul II, and Benedict XVI? I place my trust in the fidelity of Francis [to preceding Magisterium]. [Inshallah! May God will it!]...


THE TRUE SCANDAL, IN THE AGE OF MARTYRS
The martyrs are the sign that God is alive and still present among us. […] In the cruel death of so many Christians who are shot, crucified, decapitated, tortured, and burned alive is fulfilled “the overturning of God against himself” for the solace and salvation of the world. […]

[But] while Christians are dying for their faith and for their fidelity to Jesus, in the West there are churchmen who are seeking to reduce the demands of the Gospel to a minimum.

We even go so far as to utilize the mercy of God, stifling justice and truth, to “welcome” - in the words of the ‘Relatio post disceptationem’ of the October 2014 synod on the family - “the gifts and qualities that homosexual persons have to offer to the Christian community.” This document went on to say that “the question of homosexuality leads to a serious reflection on how to elaborate realistic paths of affective growth and human and evangelical maturity integrating the sexual dimension.”

In reality, the true scandal is not the existence of sinners, since mercy and forgiveness always exist for them, but rather the confusion between good and evil that is made by Catholic pastors. If men consecrated to God are no longer capable of understanding the radical nature of the Gospel, seeking to anesthetize it, we will lose our way. Because then comes the true absence of mercy.

While hundreds of thousands of Christians live every day in bodily fear, some want to prevent suffering for the divorced and remarried, who are said to feel discriminated against in being excluded from sacramental communion.

In spite of a state of permanent adultery, in spite of a state of life that bears witness to a refusal to adhere to the Word that elevates those who are sacramentally married to being the sign revelatory of the paschal mystery of Christ, certain theologians want to give access to Eucharistic communion to the divorced and remarried.

The suppression of this ban on sacramental communion for the divorced and remarried, who have authorized themselves to go beyond the Word of Christ - “Let man not divide what God has joined” - would clearly signify the negation of the indissolubility of sacramental marriage. […]

There exists today an opposition and a rebellion against God, an organized battle against Christ and his Church. How can it be understood that Catholic pastors should submit to a vote the doctrine, the law of God and the teaching of the Church on homosexuality, on divorce and remarriage, as if the Word of God and the magisterium must now be endorsed, approved by the vote of the majority?

The men who build and structure strategies for killing God, demolishing the age-old doctrine and teaching of the Church, will themselves be swallowed up, plunged by their victory into the eternal Gehenna.

---

The ever-reliable Samuel Gregg has read Sarah's book and has this commentary:

Cardinal Kasper could learn
from this African bishop
by SAMUEL GREGG

April 13, 2015

“But they should not tell us too much what we have to do.” Such were the words used by the German theologian Cardinal Walter Kasper to describe what he thought of African contributions during the 2014 Synod on the Family as Catholic bishops and laity gathered to discuss challenges facing the family in the modern world.

It was hard not to recall that sentence while recently reading a book requiring translation into English as soon as possible. For in his best-selling 424-page Dieu ou Rien [God or Nothing] (Fayard, 2015), Cardinal Robert Sarah, the newly-appointed Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, illustrates in conversations with the French journalist Nicolas Diat (author of a revealing book on Benedict XVI’s pontificate) precisely why the universal Church should be listening more to Catholics who come from cultures where the faith is flourishing, and much less to those preoccupied with the concerns of particular Western European churches: churches that are fabulously wealthy in material terms but spiritually-moribund by any standard.

The book’s title underscores Sarah’s central theme: societies that lose a sense of God — and not just any god, but the God who is simultaneously Caritas, Logos, Misericordia, and Veritas — and opt for nothingness cannot help but experience profound decline.

This death of God/death of man theme is hardly new. It’s implied in Plato’s discussion of the three versions of atheism, and was spelt out centuries later by Nietzsche. What, however, makes Sarah’s contribution different is the sophistication with which he makes his argument. This is a man equally at home discussing the finer points of animist religions as he is with explaining the Galileo case’s more obscure dimensions.

“Man’s greatest difficulty is not,” Sarah writes, “what the Church teaches on morality; the hardest thing for the post-modern world is to believe in God” [my translation].

Drawing on sources ranging from the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, Greek philosophers, the Church Fathers, Jewish references, Russian literature to modern French thinkers, Sarah outlines a powerful case to suggest that choices against the God who reveals Himself in the Bible are laying waste to much of the world, especially the West and even more specifically Western Europe.

And in doing so — for, as anyone who has met Sarah will attest, he’s a genuinely humble man — the Cardinal born in the obscure African village of Ourous inadvertently reveals a formidable intellect that’s matched by years of pastoral experience and a profound knowledge of, and direct personal contact with, the many different challenges confronting the Catholic Church throughout the world.

For Sarah, it matters little whether the nothingness is expressed via militant atheism, Marxist materialism, secular liberalism, or the politically correct non-entity worshiped by what another Cardinal, Blessed John Henry Newman, famously condemned as “the spirit of Liberalism in religion.”

The denial of God, Sarah maintains, can only lead to one thing: an enormous void that’s invariably filled in destructive ways. These include self-absorption, hedonism, and techno-utopianism. Sarah isn’t afraid to draw an analogy between these trends in the West and the ways that he believes animist African religions fabricated false gods to help people divert themselves from the fear that grips man when he thinks he’s truly alone in the universe.

Significantly, Sarah suggests that another way of filling the emptiness is through the relentless embrace of egalitarianism, whether in the economy or through promoting gender theory. Making such an argument is unlikely to win Sarah many friends in our equality-obsessed world: a fixation that includes more-than-a few Catholics. [Starting with the man at the top!]

Given, however, that Sarah spent much of his life as an archbishop in the former French colony of Guinea facing down one of the worst post-colonial Marxist despots ever to inflict himself on Africa, Ahmed Sékou Touré (who placed Sarah on a death-list just prior to the dictator’s death in 1984), Sarah’s unlikely to be especially worried by the fulminations of Western liberals.

Sarah’s faith-journey exemplifies in many ways African Catholicism’s twentieth-century odyssey. Born in 1945, Sarah is a beneficiary of the dynamic missionary impulse that characterized French Catholicism between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. An only child whose animist parents converted to Catholicism, Sarah speaks movingly and affectionately of the Spiritain Fathers who left France, in many cases forever, to live in some of Africa’s most desolate regions.
Baptized by a Spiritain priest in 1947, Sarah makes a point of mentioning that he was ordained as a priest by a Spiritain bishop in 1969.

Reflecting upon Catholicism’s impact upon the Africans he knew as a boy and young man, Sarah notes that it was a liberating force inasmuch as Catholicism de-divinized the natural world, thereby freeing people from fear and superstition.

To Sarah’s mind, this is a practical illustration of how the Church’s dogmas and doctrines are not in fact oppressive but rather free people by revealing to them the truth about ultimate realities. [Umm, the very point made by Fr. Schall in his essay, and which JMB/PF seemingly shrugs off with his dubious statement that "Reality is more important than ideas".]

That’s not only an important message to those who imagine that turning Catholicism into something as doctrinally incoherent as, say, today’s Church of England, represents progress. It also helps explain why Sarah is so insistent that pastoral practice must conform to doctrine — not the other way around.

Sarah’s vocation to the priesthood came at an early age. Embracing it involved significant hardships that would try the most fervent of believers. Apart from having to journey hundreds of miles by foot, road, and boat just to attend seminary, Sarah had to overcome illnesses that almost resulted in his dismissal from the seminary.

Nor can it have been easy for a young Guinean to be sent to Sénégal, France, Rome and Jerusalem for higher studies, not knowing if he would see his father and mother again: parents who, Sarah stresses, put the security of their old age at risk by supporting their only child’s path to priesthood.

Sarah, it seems, intellectually absorbed a great deal of theology, philosophy, and scriptural exegesis during his studies in Europe and Israel. He wasn’t, however, so absorbed that he didn’t see the chaos that engulfed Western life from the mid-1960s onwards. Sarah isn’t at all shy about highlighting what he regards as the deeply negative effects of May 1968 upon the West and the Church more generally, including, he observes, in his native Guinea.

It was quite a shift for Sarah to return from some of the Church’s best educational institutions and be sent by his bishop to serve as a parish priest in one of Guinea’s most inaccessible areas. Sarah also found himself in a society whose economy was being destroyed by socialist policies and living under a government that was ruthless in its efforts to terminate any sign of opposition.

At one point, Sarah was sent to reform a seminary that he describes as totally lacking in spiritual formation and in which the regime, in an effort to undermine the Church, took the rebellious seminarians’ side.

When Sarah was confirmed as archbishop of Conakry in 1979 at the incredibly young age of 34, his predecessor Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo had just been released from eight years in what was effectively a concentration camp: an experience that included regular torture.

Sarah served as Conakry’s archbishop until 2001. His twenty-two years of pastoral work involved navigating not just Sékou Touré’s Marxist regime and the only marginally better governments that followed, but also the fact that he lived in a majority-Muslim country. Here Sarah stresses his good personal relations with Muslims and mentions that Muslims in Guinea viewed the Catholic Church as the one institution that enjoyed some independence during Sékou Touré’s dictatorship.

But Sarah isn’t naïve about Islam. He doesn’t hesitate, for instance, to use the expression “Islamic terrorism” when reflecting upon the turmoil plaguing today’s Middle East. Sarah underscores that Catholicism and Islam operate from largely incompatible premises. This, he claims, limits opportunities for meaningful dialogue at the level of ideas.

Instead, Sarah suggests, practical cooperation in the face of common problems — one of which he singles out as the neo-Malthusian population-control programs promoted by Western NGOs and governments — is perhaps the best way forward.

In 2001, John Paul II called Sarah to service in Rome as Secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. It’s evident from the book that Sarah wasn’t especially happy about this move. What, however, the change did do — as did Sarah’s subsequent transfer in 2010 to become President of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, which oversees the Church’s charitable work throughout the world — was to place Sarah in a position whereby he could deepen his knowledge of the life of the universal Church.

Thus his analysis of the different streams of liberation theology is nuanced, and separates out the Marxist clap-trap from genuinely sound theology. Sarah’s criticisms of Western European Catholicism — the deep crisis of faith, the endless bureaucratization, the sentimental humanitarianism/NGO-ism that substitutes for religious belief — are clear, direct, and, it must be said, hard to refute.

Nor does Sarah hold back when describing the difficulties facing African Catholicism. He highlights not just external threats, such as the increasingly-violent forms taken by Islam, but also internal problems. The latter include liturgical-styles that occasionally degenerate into self-worship, and priests abandoning their vocation to enter esoteric semi-animist sects.

Then there is what Sarah poignantly calls “the heresy of activism” that afflicts many priests around the world. They have forgotten, he says, that the heart of life is only found in God. Above all, Sarah is alive to the presence of evil in the world. He singles out the Holocaust (for which, revealingly, he uses the word preferred by many religious Jews—“Shoah”) as perhaps the worst iniquity of modern times.

When it comes, however, to addressing these problems, Sarah returns again and again to people’s primordial need for the one true God. Meeting people’s material requirements, Sarah argues, is good but it’s simply not enough.

To illustrate his point, Sarah tells of meeting a young Muslim boy in a Jordanian refugee camp. The boy, Sarah said, had all his material needs provided for by the camp. Yet, Sarah stresses, all the material assistance in the world couldn’t answer the boy’s doubting of God’s existence: a crisis brought on by the fact that the boy’s father had been slaughtered by Islamic terrorists.

This leads Sarah to critique those Christians who would reduce evangelization to political engagement or the promotion of socio-economic development. At one point, Sarah strongly criticizes those Westerners and international organizations that use expressions such as “eliminating poverty.” [An avowed utopian aim of Cardinal Maradiaga to whom, it seems, nothing is impossible. JMB/PF no less naively calls for 'income redistribution' as if making the rich less rich would necessarily make the poor less poor - a fallacy that has been shown for what it is again and again!]

The Christian understanding of poverty, Sarah points out, differs radically from that of the secular mind. There are types of poverty, he specifies, that all Christians are actually supposed to embrace, such as detachment from material possessions. For Christians, Sarah says, it is better to speak of fighting against misery, lest one risk buying into secular conceptions of progress or pursuing utopian schemes, such as Sékou Touré’s unapologetically socialist programs which laid waste to Guinea’s economy and brought misery and death in their wake.

Much more could be said about this remarkable book. Though surely not intended as a reply to Cardinal Kasper’s now-infamous comment about Africans, Dieu ou Rien illustrates that African Catholicism has more than come of age and has profound things to say to the universal church.

This especially matters in light of projections, such as suggested by the recent Pew-Templeton study, that four out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa by 2050.

As world Catholicism’s gravity shifts away from Western Europe and towards the developing world, listening to Africans like Cardinal Robert Sarah may be something that even the most hidebound of liberal German theologians won’t be able to avoid in the future.

Next to Cardinal Sarah's remarks and analysis, the much-ballyhooed platitudes of John Allen's #1 papabile, Cardinal Tagle, sound downright juvenile, being progressivist (now more Bergoglio-oriented) reflex-speak!

Not many Catholics, even among the devotees of Francis of Assisi (1181-1226), may realize that he had a Portuguese contemporary who joined his order and whom he came to know in Italy, and would be a saint just as renowned as Francis. Indeed, he also became a Doctor of the Church, outdoing Francis in this respect. [But I don't rule out that Pope Francis may decide to make Francis of Assisi, not to mention the Jesuit founders Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier and Pierre Favre, Doctors of the Church as well.]

St. Anthony of Padua (San Antonio da Padova) (1195-1231) was ordained an Augustinian friar in his native Lisbon, but decided to join the Franciscan order, then just 11 years in existence, because he was attracted by their simple evangelical life and was inspired by the first five Franciscan missionaries sent to Africa who were beheaded in Morocco. He volunteered to go to Morocco himself but there, he fell seriously ill, and had to be sent home. His ship was blown off course returning to Portugal and he landed in Sicily instead.

Eventually he made his way to central Italy where he came to the attention of Francis, who made him take charge of the theological formation for his friars. Before that, Francis had feared that theological studies would deflect his friars from their simple life - perhaps he did not think of St. Benedict's 'ora et labora' monastic regimen - but Anthony's example changed his mind.

In Italy, Anthony quickly established himself as a great preacher, exposing his listeners to the grandeur of Christianity through allegory and symbolical explanation of Scripture, which he had studied thoroughly as an Augustinian priest. He also taught at the universities of Montpellier and Toulouse in France. In 1228 he served as envoy from the Franciscan order to Pope Gregory IX. At the Papal court, his preaching was hailed as a "jewel case of the Bible" and he was commissioned to produce his collection of sermons, Sermons for Feast Days (Sermones in Festivitates). Always a sickly man, he died of a condition called ergotism when he was only 35. He was canonized in 1232 less than a year after his death, and only four years after Francis of Assisi himself (who died in 1226 and was canonized in 1228).

"The richness of spiritual teaching contained in the Sermons was so great that in 1946 Venerable Pope Pius XII proclaimed Anthony a Doctor of the Church, attributing to him the title Doctor Evangelicus ["Evangelical Doctor"], since the freshness and beauty of the Gospel emerge from his writings."

In any case, a blogsite devoted to the saint featured this from Anthony's sermon for the Third Sunday after Easter, and it is incredibly apropos...

St. Anthony: Man's action needed
to make God's mercy effective
[Or, words I wish we could hear from Pope Francis]
Translated from


St. Anthony of Padua says that "the balsam of Divine Mercy" must go along with three ingredients that come from man's actions to render God's gift of mercy effective.

These ingredients are: repentance for one's sins, confession, and reparation (penance) for the bad consequences of one's sins. Only then, he says, can 'the great pharmacist', the Holy Spirit, make the necessary reconstitution that will heal the soul of the penitent: "It is the optimal 'medicinal preparation', when these three excellent ingredients - repentance from the heart, confession, and reparation for one's sins - united with the balsam of divine mercy, which the Holy Spirit reconstitutes for the soul that repents".

I must confess that St. Anthony has always been one of my favorite saints, and that other than St. Peter's Basilica, I have visited his shrine in Padova more often than any other shrine, if only because the city is a convenient train stop anytime one travels to northern Italy...

That, through Anthony, Francis of Assisi recognized the importance of theological formation even for friars living a mendicant life is perhaps another lesson that his namesake Pope might learn, instead of castigating intellectuals and theologians who do not think as he does.

As our beloved Benedict is about to turn 88, his private secretary, Mons. Gaenswein, brings up the subject of death in an interview broadcast last night in Italy. I think two reasons I have not felt particularly distressed when thinking of the inevitable is that I am sure Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is in God's hands in a very special way, and that St. Joseph, his name saint, is the patron of a happy death. And so I end every daily prayer and thought about B16 with "God grant you more years of a quiet, prayerful and happy life in his service". AD MULTOS ANNOS, SANCTE PATER!

New interview with Mons. Gaenswein:
Benedict XVI at 88 'preparing to meet God',
and Francis is not intimidated by ISIS threats

April 14, 2015

"Pope Benedict XVI thinks about death and is preparing for it - obviously, as he is a man about to turn 88, he thinks of this," says Mons. Georg Gaenswein, private secretary to the emeritus Pope and prefect of the Francis's Pontifical Household.

"We have spoken about this many times, he and I, although he is usually very discreet and reserved. But his attitude is very Christian - to prepare for death means to prepare to meet God, which is, obviously, the conclusive meeting".

Mons. Gaenswein spoke to Mediaset (Italian Channel 4) for the initial presentation of a series called "La Strada dei Miracoli" (The street of miracles) premiering tonight (April 14).

He also spoke about the threats of ISIS against Pope Francis, saying: "The Pope has no fears for himself. He fears for the faithful [wherever they are threatened or actually persecuted], but certainly, the ISIS threat must be taken seriously. He has spoken several times about persons who are persecuted just because they are Christians - they are killed, burned, crucified, or beheaded. For himself, I don't think he has any fear at all of the fundamentalists".

On the question of miracles, Gaenswein said:

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At various times we get letters from persons thanking Benedict XVI - because they had asked him to pray for them in a situation of great difficulty or a serious health crisis, which they subsequently overcame. And they say this was thanks to Pope Benedict's prayers... And so they thank him. I think faith produces miracles, and if the prayer is strong, it can produce miracles. I think that is an experience with all believers....

The most important thing about these phenomena is to distinguish the false from the true - a 'mystic' experience from a true miracle. There are also varied cases of apparitions and private revelations...

Personally, I am very cautious. We must not forget that even Lucifer, the angel of light turned Satan, can deceive masterfully.
Therefore, it is best to keep calm, be prudent and trust in prayer...

However, anyone who prays to receive a private revelation or a special experience is looking for something extraordinary rather than trusting in the power of prayer.

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Gaenswein also talks of the little free time that he has: "I go to the mountains. Certainly I read, I listen to music... I especially like the songs of Gianna Nannini and Eros Ramazzoti [popular Italian songwriter/singers who rose to fame in the 1980s - I liked their music, too!]. Of course I would like to take up tennis again, which I stopped after Pope Benedict retired, but I still have not found the time to do that".