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“Not a closed question”? Maybe not in the church of Wicca

Deacons: Synod puts women deacons on the table

NCR | Elizabet A. Elliott | May. 12, 2016

The ordination of women deacons gained worldwide attention in October when Canadian Archbishop Paul-André Durocher mentioned the subject during his three-minute address at the Synod of Bishops on the family. Durocher proposed three courses of action for the synod, the third relating to women in the diaconate.

“Finally, concerning the permanent diaconate, that this Synod recommends the establishment of a process that could eventually open to women access to this order, which, as tradition says, is directed non ad sacerdotium, sed ad ministerium ['not to priesthood, but to ministry'],” he said.

In an interview with America magazine, Durocher said, “Why not look at the question of ordaining women to the diaconate? It's not a closed issue. There has been no dogmatic statement saying that women cannot be ordained.”

But will these statements have any impact on this issue of women deacons? [.....]

Fr. Thomas Rosica is a militant lobbyist for the homosexual network and spokesman for the Vatican to English speaking people. Whatever he means by “rebranding” cannot be good!

Pope gets media's attention as he rebrands church, papacy, says priest

Ed Wilkinson | Catholic News Service | May. 17, 2016

Pope Francis has rebranded the Catholic Church and the papacy, and the media have taken notice.

That was the message delivered by Basilian Fr. Thomas Rosica, who delivered the keynote address May 11 at the Brooklyn Diocese's observance of World Communications Day.

Sponsored by the DeSales Media Group, the event in downtown Brooklyn drew about 250 people.

Rosica, CEO of Canada's Salt and Light Catholic Media Foundation and the English-language attache to the Holy See Press Office at the Vatican, was presented with the Brooklyn Diocese's St. Francis DeSales Distinguished Communicator Award by Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio.

“Prior to Pope Francis, when many people on the street were asked: 'What is the Catholic Church all about? What does the pope stand for?' The response would often be, 'Catholics, well they are against abortion, gay marriage and birth control. They are known for the sex abuse crisis that has terribly marred and weakened their moral authority and credibility,'“ said Rosica.

“Today I dare say that the response is somewhat different. What do they say about us now? What do they say about the pope? People are speaking about our leader who is unafraid to confront the sins and evils that have marred us,” he continued.

“We have a pope who is concerned about the environment, about mercy, compassion and love, and a deep passion, care and concern for the poor and for displaced peoples roaming the face of this earth,” he added. “Pope Francis has won over a great part of the media.”

The pontiff “has changed the image of the church so much that prestigious graduate schools of business and management are now using him as a case study in rebranding,” the priest added.

While the pope has caused more people to take notice, that doesn't mean that everyone agrees or follows the message he preaches, Rosica said. But he explained that Francis has opened up a dialogue with the world and the Catholic media is a big part of showcasing the work of the Catholic Church.

He referred to Francis' message for World Communications Day to explain how church media should go about its work.

“Our primary task is to uphold the truth with love,” he said.

That means that Catholic media should “listen” to, rather than merely “hear,” as it engages in dialogue.

It also means that church media should communicate with everyone, without exception.

It further means that “Christians ought to be a constant encouragement to communion and, even in those cases where they must firmly condemn evil, they should never try to rupture relationships and communication.”

Rosica further added that “political and diplomatic language would do well to be inspired by mercy, which never loses hope.”

“May our way of communicating help to overcome the mind-set that neatly separates sinners from the righteous,” he said. “We can and we must judge situations of sin – such as violence, corruption and exploitation – but we may not judge individuals, since only God can see into the depths of their hearts.”

Rosica said the work of the Catholic media is to build bridges that encourage encounter and inclusion and to avoid misunderstandings that add to wounds and vengeance.

He urged a prudent use of some of the new social media.

“The character assassination on the Internet by those claiming to be Catholic and Christian has turned it into a graveyard of corpses strewn all around,” he said. “Often times the obsessed, scrupulous, self-appointed, nostalgia-hankering virtual guardians of faith or of liturgical practices are very disturbed, broken and angry individuals, who never found a platform or pulpit in real life and so resort to the Internet and become trolling pontiffs and holy executioners! In reality they are deeply troubled, sad and angry people.” [.....]

“The Apostolic Exhortation is a turning-point in Catholic Doctrine”
Mortal sin is replaced with social sin and the door to Communion for the divorced and remarried is opened: the real sin is ignoring the poor
Antonio Socci | 'Libero' | April 9, 2016

Was Cardinal Kasper right when he announced “the great revolution” a month ago?  With the Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris laetitia is Bergoglio overturning the Magisterium of the Church, thus putting himself above the words of Christ and God’s commandments?
With words he says he is not changing doctrine. But with facts he has today opened up to something that until now has been forbidden by Holy Scripture and the Church.
An operation of “double-truth” is hidden in the ambiguity of vague and misleading declarations. Why?   Is it to camouflage the “revolution”, given that the law of God cannot be overturned in the Church? 
Yes, it is. However, mostly with cautious gradualism:  the ‘boiled frog’ strategy is being applied to the Church. A frog thrown into a pot of boiling water would jump out immediately.  If, instead, it is put into a pot of tepid water which is gradually heated up, it ends up being boiled without being aware of it.
So little by little for months now, we have been witnessing the continuous demolition of Catholic doctrine.  Each day a new blow.  In the end the Church will be driven to melt into a sort of United Nations of religions, with a touch of Greenpeace and the Cgil (an Italian Labour Union).
I repeat – it was Cardinal Kasper who spoke of a “first step” in the “revolution” and he was also the one used by Bergoglio at the Consistory in February 2014 to throw the “bomb” of Communion for the divorced and remarried.
This “revolution” is being carried out by cancelling the notion of “mortal sin”.  Cardinal Mueller correctly warned: “The greatest scandal the Church can give is not that there are sinners inside Her, [it is that of] ceasing to name the difference between good and evil, making them relative; i.e. ceasing to explain what sin is or claiming to justify it so as to have greater closeness and mercy towards the sinner.”
John Paul II had explained that the Church’s greatest maternal charity is precisely to sound the warning about sin and the risk of damnation.  
This should be the Pope’s fundamental mission: Jesus Christ’s mandate to Peter is that of “confirming the brethren in the faith” not to confuse, destabilize and mislead.   But this is the age of Bergoglio.  Cardinal Mueller, custodian of the faith, in an interview to a Die Zeit journalist three months ago, said he didn’t believe Bergoglio was a heretic, but added: “ [It is] something completely different when a teaching of the Church officially presented, is expressed perhaps in an unfortunate, misleading or vague manner.”
Considering the Cardinal’s role, these words seem like enormous boulders. Being “misleading” means leading astray. And is a misleading Pope admissible?
Furthermore, this Exhortation shows that this misleading ambiguity is not an involuntary accident, but a precise strategy.  So much so, that yesterday a heated debate erupted over the Exhortation’s interpretations due to the vagueness of the text and its clamorous contradictions.
So confusion is being fomented by the Pope himself, who, according to the Gospel, should be obliged to speak with absolute clarity.  “But let your speech” Jesus commands “be yea, yea: no, no: and that which is over and above these, is of evil.” (Matt. 5, 37).
In contrast to this, today the double-track and double-truth are manifest seeing that the Bergoglio Party on the ‘home front’ is trying to reassure the faithful by insisting that nothing is being changed (why then shake up the Church for two years and now produce a document of 260 pages?), while outside [the Church] they are playing a fanfare about an “epochal turning-point”.
Indeed, all of the secular ultra–Bergoglian newspapers are celebrating with these headlines “The Synod, the opening of Pope Francis: possible Communion for the divorced and remarried (Repubblica.it); “The Pope opens up to Sacraments for the remarried” (Corriere.it).[…..]
In point of fact, it does not place being in a state of Grace and the salvation of souls (the supreme law of the Church) as an absolute good,  but rather places social, sociological and sentimental considerations, thus gravely deluding and deceiving the faithful about the state of their soul before God, consequently placing their salvation in grave jeopardy.
Bergoglio avoids talking about “the moral law”, which the Church has condensed for centuries in dogmas and canonical dispositions, or he depicts it contemptuously as something “abstract” which cannot be applied to “concrete” situations. In doing so, he arrives at contesting Jesus Himself in His clash with the Pharisees on the question of divorce (Mat. 19, 3-12).  In fact Bergoglio asserts that: “a far too abstract and almost artificial theological ideal of marriage, far removed from the concrete situations and practical possibilities of real families” (36) must not be proposed.  This would be “excessive idealization”.  Even worse: “there is no need to lay upon two limited persons the tremendous burden of having to reproduce perfectly the union existing between Christ and His Church” (122).
In compensation, Bergoglio introduces new grave sins.  Those of the so-called “rigorists”, guilty of remembering God’s law, but most of all, those [of individuals] who don’t share his political ideas on social questions.
At no.186, Bergoglio finally remembers St. Paul’s passage which calls for the receiving of the Body of Christ in a worthy manner “otherwise one eats and drinks his own condemnation”.  Yet, in explaining what “a worthy manner” means he doesn’t say “in a state of Grace” as the Church has always taught. He does not sound a warning to couples in a state of mortal sin, but to families that are closed up in their own comfort… who are indifferent when faced with the sufferings of poor and needy families.”
The mortal sins are in this way reduced.  Bergoglio introduces social sins (or socialist ones).
It would seem then, that those who don’t share his ideas on immigration should be wary of receiving the Eucharist. 

A "Person" is afforded "rights" on the grounds of age and location. Those who have imposed upon us this moral standard will soon be terminated by involuntary euthanasia because of their age and location.

The unborn person doesn't have Constitutional rights. Now that doesn't mean that we don't do everything we possibly can in the vast majority of instances to, you know, help a mother who is carrying a child and wants to make sure that child will be healthy, to have appropriate medical support.

Hillary Clinton, Meet the Press

What Pope Francis has “exactly in mind” does not require a crystal ball! When he opens for examination a closed question it can only be for the purpose of finding another answer to overturn truth.

In response to a request from an international gathering of Catholic nuns on Thursday, Pope Francis said he will create a commission to study women deacons in the early church, to help answer the question of whether women could also serve as deacons today. “Constituting an official commission that might study the question?” the pontiff asked aloud as quoted by the National Catholic Reporter, “I believe yes. It would do good for the church to clarify this point. I am in agreement. I will speak to do something like this.” “I accept,” the pope said later, “It seems useful to me to have a commission that would clarify this well.”
Questioned by many, the Holy See spokesman, Fr. Federico Lombardi said the following afterwards: “I think it’s too early to say what [the pope] has exactly in mind.”

Crux Magazine

Worth a Review: Kasper's false god

An Interview with Cardinal Walter Kasper

Matthew Boudway and Grant Gallicho | Commonweal | May 7, 2014

During his first Angelus address, Pope Francis recommended a work of theology that “has done me so much good” because it “says that mercy changes everything; it changes the world by making it less cold and more fair.” That book is Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life by Cardinal Walter Kasper, which was recently published in English by Paulist Press. Before serving as president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (2001-2010), Kasper was bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart (1989-1999). He has taught theology at the University of Tubingen, the Westphalian University of Munster, and the Catholic University of America. Last week, associate editors Matthew Boudway and Grant Gallicho spoke with the cardinal in New York. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Commonweal: In your book Mercy, you argue that mercy is basic to God’s nature. How is mercy key to understanding God?

Cardinal Walter Kasper: The doctrine on God was arrived at by ontological understanding—God is absolute being and so on—which is not wrong. But the biblical understanding is much deeper and more personal. God’s relation to Moses in the Burning Bush is not “I am,” but “I am with you. I am for you. I am going with you.” In this context, mercy is already very fundamental in the Old Testament. The God of the Old Testament is not an angry God but a merciful God, if you read the Psalms. This ontological understanding of God was so strong that justice became the main attribute of God, not mercy. Thomas Aquinas clearly said that mercy is much more fundamental because God does not answer to the demands of our rules. Mercy is the faithfulness of God to his own being as love. Because God is love. And mercy is the love revealed to us in concrete deeds and words. So mercy becomes not only the central attribute of God, but also the key of Christian existence. Be merciful as God is merciful. We have to imitate God’s mercy.

CWL: Why is it so necessary to retrieve that understanding today?

Kasper: The twentieth century was a very dark century, with two world wars, totalitarian systems, gulags, concentration camps, the Shoah, and so on. And the beginning of the twenty-first century is not much better. People need mercy. They need forgiveness. That’s why Pope John XXIII wrote in his spiritual biography that mercy is the most beautiful attribute of God. In his famous speech at the opening of Vatican II, he said that the church has always resisted the errors of the day, often with great severity—but now we have to use the medicine of mercy. That was a major shift. John Paul II lived through the latter part of the Second World War and then Communism in Poland, and he saw all the suffering of his people and his own suffering. For him mercy was very important. Benedict XVI’s first encyclical was God Is Love. And now Pope Francis, who has the experience of the southern hemisphere, where two-thirds of Catholics are living, many of them poor people—he has made mercy one of the central points of his pontificate. I think it’s an answer to the signs of the times.

CWL: It was reported that Pope Francis asked a young Jesuit what he was working on, and when the man said he was studying fundamental theology, the pope joked, “I can’t imagine anything more boring!” It seems that Francis wants to emphasize the role of pastoral theology. What does that mean for the practice of theology?

Kasper: I don’t see a contradiction between dogmatic theology—which is what I studied—and pastoral theology. Theology without a pastoral dimension becomes an abstract ideology. It was always important during my time as an academic to visit parishes, hospitals, and so on. When I was responsible for Catholic relations with the Third World, I visited many slums in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. For me, those experiences were important because the word of God is not a doctrine. It’s an address to people. Pastoral work without a certain doctrinal basis is not possible. It becomes arbitrary or just good-natured behavior. Therefore dogmatic theology and pastoral theology are interrelated; they need each other.

CWL: There’s obviously a connection between mercy and forgiveness. Do you think that in the Christian understanding there can be forgiveness without reconciliation? Is forgiveness something that necessarily involves two parties—one to offer the gift and another to accept it? Or is it simply a matter of a readiness to forgive that does not depend on another person’s willingness to accept forgiveness or acknowledge the need for it?

Kasper: You can start with the Latin term misericordia, which means mercy. Misericordia means having a heart for the poor—poor in a large sense, not only material poverty, but also relational poverty, spiritual poverty, cultural poverty, and so on. This is not only heart, not only an emotion, but also an active attitude—I have to change the situation of the other as much as I can. But mercy is also not opposed to justice. Justice is a minimum that we are obliged to do to the other to respect him as a human being—to give him what he must have. But mercy is the maximum—it goes beyond justice. Justice alone can be very cold. Mercy sees a concrete person. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the neighbor was the person the Samaritan met in the street. He’s not obliged to help. It’s not a question of justice. But he goes beyond. He was moved in his heart. He bent down in the dirt and helped this man. That’s mercy.

Mercy is the fulfillment of justice because what people need is not only formal recognition but love. You ask about forgiveness: mercy is also forgiveness, but it should not be reduced to forgiveness. It goes beyond forgiveness. Often my willingness to forgive is a condition for the other to open himself, but it is not in my hands. I can offer forgiveness, or I can ask, “Please forgive me,” but I cannot do more. If his heart is closed, I cannot change it. I can pray for him, I can ask, I can show my good will. More I cannot do. Of course, without forgiveness, no reconciliation is possible. It’s a condition of reconciliation. But the other has to accept it. It’s a question of freedom. To forgive is my freedom, and the other is free to accept it or not.

CWL: In your book you refer to John Paul II’s second encyclical, in which he writes that justice alone is not enough, and that sometimes the highest justice can end up becoming the highest injustice. Has that been the case inside the church itself, especially with respect to the way the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has dealt with certain theologians?

Kasper: Mercy concerns not only individuals. It is also an imperative for the church itself. The church defined itself at the Second Vatican Council as a sacrament of God’s grace. How can the church be sacramental, a sign and instrument of mercy, when she herself doesn’t live out mercy? So many people do not perceive the church as merciful. It’s hard. John XXIII said that we must use the medicine of mercy within the church. Mercy is also a critical point for the church. She has to preach it. We have a sacrament of mercy—the sacrament of penance, but we have to reevaluate it, I think. And it has to be done in social behavior and in social works. Pope Francis has said we must become a poor church for the poor—that’s his program. In this respect, he begins a new phase of the reception of the council.

CWL: You also note that mercy and justice cannot be finally established here on earth, and that whoever has tried to create heaven on earth has instead created hell on earth. You say that this is true of ecclesiastical perfectionists too—those who conceive of the church as a club for the pure. How dominant is that view among church leadership today?

Kasper: There are those who believe the church is for the pure. They forget that the church is also a church of sinners. We all are sinners. And I am happy that’s true because if it were not then I would not belong to the church. It’s a matter of humility. John Paul II offered his mea culpas—for the teaching office of the church, and also for other behaviors. I have the impression that this is very important for Pope Francis. He does not like the people in the church who are only condemning others.

When it comes to the CDF’s criticisms of some theologians, there was not always due process. That’s evident, and here we must change our measures. This is also a problem when it comes to the question of Communion for divorced and remarried people, which is now under consideration in preparation for the Synod of Bishops this autumn. On the other hand, we have positive signs of mercy within the church. We have the saints, Mother Teresa—there are many Mother Teresas. This is also a reality of the church.

CWL: In your speech to open the consistory in March [published in English as The Gospel of the Family], you noted that, for the sake of their children, many deserted partners are dependent on a new partnership, a civil marriage, which they cannot quit without new guilt. Later in your speech, you talk about the possibility that a divorced and remarried Catholic might, after a period of penance, receive Communion again. You say this would be a small number of people, the ones who really want the sacrament and who understand the reality of their situation and are responsive to the concerns that their pastor would have. Are you envisioning a situation in which a divorced and remarried Catholic—a Catholic with a new partnership and a civil marriage—could not live with his or her new partner “as brother and sister” without destroying that partnership, since the other partner might not allow the relationship to continue on those terms. Is that the kind of scenario you had in mind?

Kasper: The failure of a first marriage is not only related to bad sexual behavior. It can come from a failure to realize what was promised before God and before the other partner and the church. Therefore, it failed; there were shortcomings. This has to be confessed. But I cannot think of a situation in which  a human being has fallen into a gap and there is no way out. Often he cannot return to the first marriage. If this is possible, there should be a reconciliation, but often that’s not possible.

In the Creed we say we believe in the forgiveness of sin. If there was this shortcoming, and it has been repented for—is absolution not possible? My question goes through the sacrament of penance, through which we have access to Holy Communion. But penance is the most important thing—repentance of what went wrong, and a new orientation. The new quasi-family or the new partnership must be solid, lived in a Christian way. A time of new orientation—metanoia—would be necessary. Not punishing people but a new orientation because divorce is always a tragedy. It takes time to work it out and to find a new perspective. My question—not a solution, but a question—is this: Is absolution not possible in this case? And if absolution, then also Holy Communion? There are many themes, many arguments in our Catholic tradition that could allow this way forward.

To live together as brother and sister? Of course I have high respect for those who are doing this. But it’s a heroic act, and heroism is not for the average Christian. That could also create new tensions. Adultery is not only wrong sexual behavior. It’s to leave a familiaris consortio, a communion, and to establish a new one. But normally it’s also the sexual relations in such a communion, so I can’t say whether it’s ongoing adultery. Therefore I would say, yes, absolution is possible. Mercy means God gives to everybody who converts and repents a new chance.

CWL: A defender of the church’s current teaching and pastoral practice would say that absolution requires penance, and that entails a firm purpose of amendment—that is, that you do not intend to go back to the sinful situation as though nothing has changed. You intend not only not to sin anymore but to avoid “the near occasion of sin.” The critics of your proposal would say, yes, we’re all for absolution for people like that, but it may require what you describe as a heroic adjustment of their lives for them to be properly disposed to receive Communion.

Kasper: I have high respect for such people. But whether I can impose it is another question. But I would say that people must do what is possible in their situation. We cannot as human beings always do the ideal, the best. We must do the best possible in a given situation. A position between rigorism and laxism—laxism is not possible, of course, because it would be against the call to holiness of Jesus. But also rigorism is not the tradition of the church.

Alphonsus Liguori was a rigorist at the beginning. Then he worked with simple people near Naples and found out that it’s not possible. And he was a confessor. Then he worked out this system of equiprobabalism—where there are arguments for and against, and in these cases you can choose. I’m very sympathetic to this. And of course Alphonsus Liguori is the patron of moral theology. We aren’t in bad company if we rely on him. And Thomas Aquinas wrote on the virtue of prudence, which does not deny a common rule, but you have to apply it to a concrete and often very complex situation. So I think there are arguments from the tradition.

CWL: So, just to be clear, when you talk about a divorced and remarried Catholic not being able to fulfill the rigorist’s requirements without incurring a new guilt, what would he or she be guilty of?

Kasper: The breakup of the second family. If there are children you cannot do it. If you’re engaged to a new partner, you’ve given your word, and so it’s not possible.

CWL: In your address to the consistory, you ask whether we can, “in the present situation, presuppose without further ado that the engaged couple shares the belief in the mystery that is signified by the sacrament and that they really understand and affirm the canonical conditions for the validity of the marriage.” You ask whether the presumption of validity from which canon law proceeds is often “a legal fiction.” But can the church afford not to make this presumption? How could the church continue to marry couples in good faith if it assumed that many of them were not really capable of entering into sacramental marriage because they were, as you put it somewhere else in your speech, “baptized pagans”?

Kasper: That’s a real problem. I’ve spoken to the pope himself about this, and he said he believes that 50 percent of marriages are not valid. Marriage is a sacrament. A sacrament presupposes faith. And if the couple only want a bourgeois ceremony in a church because it’s more beautiful, more romantic, than a civil ceremony, you have to ask whether there was faith, and whether they really accepted all the conditions of a valid sacramental marriage—that is, unity, exclusivity, and also indissolubility. The couples, when they get married, they want it because it’s stable. But many think, “Well, if we fail, we have the right.” And then already the principle is denied. Many canon lawyers tell me that today in our pluralistic situation we cannot presuppose that couples really assent to what the church requires. Often it is also ignorance. Therefore you have to emphasize and to strengthen prematrimonial catechesis. It’s often done in a very bureaucratic way. No, we have to provide catechesis. I know some parishes in Rome where couples have to attend catechesis, and the pastor himself does it. We must do much more in prematrimonial catechesis and use pastoral work and so on because we cannot presuppose that everybody who is a formal Christian also has the faith. It wouldn’t be realistic.

CWL: But you can imagine the outcry there would be if priests regularly told couples, “I can’t marry you because I don’t really think that you believe in the things people have to believe in order to get married.”

Kasper: That's why there must be dialogue between the couple and the priest, who should teach them what it means to marry in the church. You can’t presume that both partners know what they are doing.

CWL: You also talk about the difference between the Eastern Orthodox principle of oikonomia and the Western principle of epikeia. Could you explain the difference between those things, and how it’s important in questions such as how the church treats divorced and remarried Catholics?

Kasper: The Orthodox have the principle of oikonomia, which allows them in concrete cases to dispense, as Catholics would say, the first marriage and to permit a second in the church. But they do not consider the second marriage a sacrament. That’s important. They make that distinction (whether the people do is another question). I’m not sure whether we can adapt this tradition to our own, but we have similar elements. Epikeia says that a general rule must be applied to a particular situation—very often complex—taking into consideration all circumstances. We talk about jurisprudence, not jurisscience. The jurist must apply the general rule, taking account of all circumstances. For the great canonists of the Middle Ages, epikaia was justice sweetened with mercy. We can start there. We have our own resources for finding a solution.

CWL: Until recently you were president of the Pontifical Council on Promoting Christian Unity. How might this issue fit into ongoing ecumenical relations with the Eastern Orthodox. If there was a change in the way the Roman Catholic Church deals with remarried Catholics, would that make things much easier, or even a little easier, for rapprochement between the East and the West? Or no easier at all?

Kasper: It would be made easier. They have this old tradition, and their tradition was never condemned by an ecumenical council. The Council of Trent condemned the position of Luther, but did not discuss the Orthodox position. The council formulated the problem of the indissolubility in a very cautious way because Venice had some islands that were Orthodox but under the Latin hierarchy. They didn’t want to lose those islands. So we did not talk about this problem. We had more fundamental problems with the Orthodox. But if we could find a new solution on the basis of our own Western tradition, I do think it would be easier to find a concrete solution to our problem with the Orthodox.

CWL: When it comes to the issue of Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, you have your critics, some of whom have found outlets in the Italian press. Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, archbishop of Bologna, was given a great deal of space in Il Foglio to criticize your proposal. He has one question for you: “What happens to the first marriage?”

Kasper: The first marriage is indissoluble because marriage is not only a promise between the two partners; it’s God’s promise too, and what God does is done for all time. Therefore the bond of marriage remains. Of course, Christians who leave their first marriage have failed. That’s clear. The problem is when there is no way out of such a situation. If we look to God’s activity in salvation history, we see that God gives his people a new chance. That’s mercy. God’s love does not end because a human being has failed—if he repents. God provides a new chance—not by cancelling the demands of justice: God does not justify the sin. But he justifies the sinner. Many of my critics do not understand that distinction. They think, well, we want to justify their sin. No, nobody wants that. But God justifies the sinner who converts. This distinction appears already in Augustine.

I do not deny that the bond of marriage remains. But the fathers of the church had a wonderful image: If there is a shipwreck, you don’t get a new ship to save you, but you get a plank so that you can survive. That’s the mercy of God—to give us a plank so we can survive. That’s my approach to the problem. I respect those who have a different position, but on the other hand, they must see what the concrete situation is today. How can we help the people who struggle in these situations? I know such people—often women. They are very engaged in parish life; they do all they can for their children. I know a woman who prepared her daughter for First Communion. The parish priest said the girl can go to Holy Communion, but not mama. I told the pope about this, and he said, “No, that’s impossible.”

The second marriage, of course, is not a marriage in our Christian sense. And I would be against celebrating it in church. But there are elements of a marriage. I would compare this to the way the Catholic Church views other churches. The Catholic Church is the true church of Christ, but there are other churches that have elements of the true church, and we recognize those elements. In a similar way, we can say, the true marriage is the sacramental marriage. And the second is not a marriage in the same sense, but there are elements of it—the partners take care of one another, they are exclusively bound to one another, there is an intention of permanence, they care for children, they lead a life of prayer, and so on. It’s not the best situation. It’s the best possible situation. Realistically, we should respect such situations, as we do with Protestants. We recognize them as Christians. We pray with them.

CWL: And we know that they don’t consider their marriages a Catholic sacrament—

Kasper: There are other problems. We consider the civil marriage of Protestants as valid, indissoluble marriages. They don’t believe in the sacramentality. There are also internal problems in the current canon law. How do you explain this to a Protestant—“it’s a valid marriage for you, but for a Catholic it’s not”? So we should to some degree reconsider the canonical regulations.

CWL: Is it fair to say that your critics think this is a disagreement about the indissolubility of marriage, but you’re saying that the disagreement, such as it is, is about the purpose of the sacraments of reconciliation and the Eucharist?

Kasper: In no way do I deny the indissolubility of a sacramental marriage. That would be stupid. We must enforce it, and help people to understand it and to live it out. That’s a task for the church. But we must recognize that Christians can fail, and then we have to help them. To those who say, “Well, they are in a sinful situation,” I would say: Pope Benedict XVI has already said that such Catholics can receive spiritual communion. Spiritual communion is to be one with Christ. But if I am one with Christ, I cannot be in a situation of grave sin. So if they can receive spiritual communion, why not also sacramental Communion? I think there are also problems in the traditional position, and Pope Benedict reflected a lot about this, and he said that they must have means of salvation and spiritual communion. But spiritual communion goes very far: it’s being one with Christ. Why should these people be excluded from the other Communion? Being in spiritual communion with Christ means God has forgiven this person. So the church, though the sacrament of forgiveness, should also be able to forgive if God does it. Otherwise there is an opposition between God and church—and that would be a great problem.

CWL: The pope has said that the church needs a better theology of women. You’ve said that we need to find a way to give women leadership roles inside Vatican offices. Do you see that happening any time soon, and how might that work?

Kasper: I’m not in favor of women’s ordination. But there are offices in the Vatican that do not require ordination. In economic affairs, for example, there are professional women who could carry out such duties. Ordination is not required to lead the Pontifical Council for the Laity. Half of the laity are women. There is an office for laity and there are no women in leadership there. That’s a problem. What about the Council for the Family? There’s no family without women.

I have experience as a bishop. I appointed one woman to the bishop’s advisory council. From that day on the whole atmosphere changed in our dialogue. She was a very courageous woman. Women bring a richness of vision and experience that men lack. At the Vatican, that could be helpful.

At the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, for example, ordination is required to lead. But the CDF has a group of consulting theologians. They do not decide; they consult. Today we have many women who are professors of theology. Why not include their voices? Something must be done about this. It would change a certain clericalistic atmosphere.

CWL: How would you describe the atmosphere at the Vatican right now? Is there a lot of nervousness, anticipation that changes are underway or will be soon, or is there a sense that a lot of the international media hype about the new papacy is sort of trivial and not closely related to the life of the church?

Kasper: The Vatican is a plurality of people, and they are different. At the Vatican there are many of us who are very much in favor of Pope Francis because we saw at the end of the last pontificate events like Vatileaks, so something went wrong. It wasn’t functioning. Many people are in favor of some modifications, some changes—and the pope wants it. But of course to change is not easy. The Curia is the oldest continuously existing institution in Europe. Such an old institution has its ways of doing things, so it’s not easy to change from one day to another. There is some resistance. And when you change something there’s always a debate, pro and contra, which is happening at the Vatican. But I have the impression that Pope Francis is determined to make some changes. He’s already made very important ones. I think there’s already a point of no return. He made changes, for example, in financial and economic areas. He wants the church to have a more synodical structure. He wants the local churches to be taken more seriously—not in a way that denies the primacy of the universal church. Primacy and synodical structures are not opposed to each other. They are complementary, and Francis wants that. We’re not having just one synod on marriage and the family—but we’re going through a synodical process. Between the two sessions of the synod, this year and next, he goes back to the local church so this can be discussed at the parish level. He wants to bring in the voices of the faithful. These are changes that have met with some resistance, of course, but there are also many who are in favor of them. So the pope, very determined, goes on. If he's given a few years, he will do something.

CWL: The pope is seventy-seven years old. Given the fact that others will be responsible for carrying out his reforms—along with the institutional inertia that you just described—what are the prospects for success?

Kasper: Pope John XXIII only had five years, and he changed a lot. There was also a point of no return with Paul VI. Pope Francis cannot do everything by himself; he thinks in categories of process. He wants to initiate a process that continues beyond him. He will have the opportunity to appoint, I think, 40 percent of the cardinals, and they're the ones who will elect a new pope. In that way he’s able to condition a new conclave.

Of course the Holy Spirit is also present. I wouldn’t look at this only at the institutional level. The election of Pope Francis was a surprise—for us cardinals in the conclave too. This new pope is a surprise every day. During the conclave, I felt the Holy Spirit at work. So I trust more in this reality, in people. But Pope Francis’s popularity is not only hype. Many pastors in Rome told me that last year and this year many more people went to confession at Eastertime—people who for years did not go to confession. If everybody who for years did not go to confession starts going again, then that’s more than hype. That’s a very deep personal decision. And these people returned, they said, because of the way the pope speaks about mercy. There is, I think, a deeper reality going on. And this deeper reality is, for me, very important.

COMMENT:

Modernist theology is grounded upon a philosophy that rejects the Church's understanding of substance and in its place makes the accident of relationship primary. It overthrows being for becoming. It prefers the search for truth above its actual possession. All things for the Modernist are in evolutionary development. Truth is found in the dynamics of relationships that evolve. Therefore, Kasper gives only a passing nod to the philosophy of being as being just a human construct. He then immediately corrupts the literal meaning of Holy Scripture to make it conform to his heresy. The ontological understanding of God is not some man-made determination but rather the revealed Truth of God in Holy Scripture. God does not say, "I am with you," "I am for you," or "I am going with you." For the nature of God is from all eternity and not determined in an accident of relationship. God says to Moses, "I AM WHO AM.... This is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations" (Ex. 3: 14-15). Kasper is thoroughly corrupting the revealed Truth of God.

Mercy is not an attribute of God. If it were, God would necessarily have to be merciful for attributes are qualities that belong to essence of God without which God would not be the God who is God. St. Thomas teaches that there are eight attributes of God:

1) Simplicity, 2) Perfection, 3) Goodness, 4) Infinity, 5) Ubiquity, 6) Immutability, 7) Eternity, and 8) Unity.

Nor is mercy a more fundamental note of God than justice because mercy presupposes justice without which mercy would not be needed. We are indeed called upon to imitate God's mercy but that is not what Kasper, in fact, is doing. St. John the Baptist introduced the Mission of Jesus Christ saying, "Do penance: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand..... Ye brood of vipers, who hath shewed you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruit worthy of penance. And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham for our father. For I tell you that God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham. For now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that doth not yield good fruit, shall be cut down, and cast into the fire. I indeed baptize you in the water unto penance, but he that shall come after me, is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear; he shall baptize you in the Holy Ghost and fire. Whose (i.e.: Jesus Christ) fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly cleanse his floor and gather his wheat into the barn; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." Mercy of God is contingent upon repentance and doing penance for sins. Justice requires this. Kasper is just another member of the "brood of vipers," the "chaff" that "will burn with unquenchable fire."

St. Thomas says that the "virtue of penance is a supernatural habit infused by God whereby man readily inclines both to sorrow for sins committed inasmuch as they offend God, and to a firm purpose of amendment (S.T. III, q. 85, a. 2). There are three elicited acts of the virtue of penance: 1) sorrow for sin committed; 2) detestation of sin; 3) resolution not to sin again (Prummer, Moral Theology). The virtue of penance is necessary, as a necessity of means for salvation for all who have sinned. The Council of Trent definitively said: "Penance has been necessary at all times for all men who have stained themselves with mortal sin, in order to obtain grace and justification" (Sess. 14, c. I). Jesus Christ said: "No, I say to you: but unless you shall do penance, you shall all likewise perish. ..... No, I say to you; but except you do penance, you shall all likewise perish" (Lk. 13: 3, 5).

Kasper preaches the mercy of God without repentance, without penance. Unfortunately for Kasper, the god he worships is not the God who is God. Kasper has turned away for the God who IS to embrace a god who is becoming. And who is it that wants to be like God? Who is it that wants to ascend the throne of God? It is Satan. He is the god of becoming.

MAYBE HE MEANT TO SAY “ANYTHING”!

Kasper: Pope Intends “Not to Preserve Everything as it has Been”

By Maike Hickson | 1Peter5Blog | April 23, 2016

On 22 April, Cardinal Walter Kasper gave yet another interview about Pope Francis and his reforms. This time, he spoke with German regional newspaper Aachener Zietung. In this interview, the German cardinal made some candid — indeed, bold — statements which are very important in the context of the current situation of the Catholic Church.

Kasper speaks about the further Church-reform plans of Pope Francis and his intention “not to preserve everything as it has been of old.” With Pope Francis, “things are not any more so abstract and permeated with suspicion, as it was the case in earlier times” within the Church. When asked whether there is also a new tone within the Church, Kasper answers: “Yes, a new tone.” He also responds in a more positive way to the question as to whether the German Bishops’ Conference now have a “tail wind” and says: “Certainly.” And he continues, in the context of the question about ”remarried” divorcees, by saying that Pope Francis has agreed with him about making some “humane decisions.” The German cardinal recounts how he once told Pope Francis about a priest whom he knew who had decided not to forbid a “remarried” mother to receive Holy Communion on the day of the First Holy Communion of her daughter. Cardinal Kasper himself concurred with that priest’s decision, saying: “That priest was fully right.” About his further conversation with the pope, he added these words: “I told this to the pope and he confirmed my attitude [with the following words]: ‘That is where the pastor has to make the decision.’” Kasper concludes: “There is now a tail wind to help solve such situations in a humane way.”

Kasper also says in this interview with regard to the admittance of “remarried” divorcees to the Sacraments: “The door is open. … There is also some freedom for the individual bishops and bishops’ conferences. … Not all Catholics think the way we Germans think.” And he concludes: “Here [in Germany,]something can be permissible which is forbidden in Africa. Therefore, the pope gives freedom for different situations and future developments.”

In other parts of the interview, Kasper also shows how much the pope has supported him. For example, he recounts how Pope Francis – after he praised Kasper publicly on the first Sunday after his election to the throne of Peter –  told him: “I made propaganda for you!” Kasper also recounts that it was he himself who was able to convince the pope to accept the honor of receiving the Charlemagne Prize (one of the most prestigious European prizes). Kasper says: “He [Francis] shortly thereafter then further responded with these words to the question from a journalist as to why he had accepted this prize: ‘That is because of the stubbornness of Cardinal Kasper.’”

Cardinal Kasper – who himself was a member of the controversial Sankt Gallen Group – admits in this interview that, during the 2013 Conclave, Cardinal Bergoglio had once been “certainly for me also a potential candidate [for the papacy].” And he then adds that some cardinals during the Conclave had some prior mutual agreements as to who should be elected: “Some agreed in advance [about the one for whom to vote]; that is not forbidden.” Nevertheless, Kasper purportedly opposes the idea of “real factions” during a Conclave.

However, this new statement by Kasper is in opposition to what Paul Badde, a German Rome expert, had to say about such advance agreements or arrangements during a Conclave, as it had then just been revealed concerning the progressive Sankt Gallen Group itself.

When speaking about the ongoing reforms of Pope Francis, Cardinal Kasper does admit that there is some resistance within the Curia. He continues: “If in your editorial office everything would be [suddenly]turned upside down, there also would be some resistance.” It is important to note that this audacious cardinal also openly admits here that Pope Francis is doing just that with the Catholic Church, namely turning everything upside down. (As the pope once said in Southern America: “Make a mess!”)

Kasper proceeds to explain a little more about the methods of the pope’s reform: “He changes many things – but not only structurally. He aims especially at the mentality. Only if that [mentality]changes, will structural reforms bear fruit. But that takes time. Francis is working on it.” This acute and illuminating comment might also now be read in light of a quote just published a few days ago by the Rome Correspondent Edsward Pentin in the context of Amoris Laetitia itself:

“It’s very Gramscian,” said one Church philosophy scholar, referring to the 20th-century Italian Marxist who advocated spreading Communist ideology through cultural infiltration. “The defiance of traditional orthopraxy is also an attack on orthodoxy, for every principled change of practice necessarily entails a change in principles.”

As many know, the Gramscian strategic approach (deftly invented by the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci) was to gain political influence by slowly changing the culture – or, in the words of Kasper, the overall mentality. In Kasper’s eyes, the pope especially wants “to change the face of the Church – not its essence. He wants a more humane, a merciful face of the Church.”

To live together as brother and sister? Of course I have high respect for those who are doing this. But it’s a heroic act, and heroism is not for the average Christian. I would say that people must do what is possible in their situation. We cannot as human beings always do the ideal, the best. We must do the best possible in a given situation.

Cardinal Kasper, interview with Commonweal, May 7, 2016

If a divorced and remarried person is truly sorry that he or she failed in the first marriage, if the commitments from the first marriage are clarified and a return is definitively out of the question, if he or she cannot undo the commitments that were assumed in the second civil marriage without new guilt, if he or she strives to the best of his or her abilities to live out the second civil marriage on the basis of faith and to raise their children in the faith, if he or she longs for the sacraments as a source of strength in his or her situation, do we then have to refuse or can we refuse him or her the sacrament of penance and communion, after a period of reorientation? [.....]

Cardinal Walter Kasper, The Gospel of the Family

Pope Francis makes the error of Kasper his own!

49. In such difficult situations of need, the Church must be particularly concerned to offer understanding, comfort and acceptance, rather than imposing straightaway a set of rules that only lead people to feel judged and abandoned by the very Mother called to show them God’s mercy. Rather than offering the healing power of grace and the light of the Gospel message, some would “indoctrinate” that message, turning it into “dead stones to be hurled at others.”

122. We should not however confuse different levels: there is no need to lay upon two limited persons the tremendous burden of having to reproduce perfectly the union existing between Christ and his Church, for marriage as a sign entails “a dynamic process…, one which advances gradually with the progressive integration of the gifts of God.”

Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia

Council of Trent, Session VI, decrees on Justification

· CANON XVIII -If any one saith, that the commandments of God are, even for one that is justified and constituted in grace, impossible to keep; let him be anathema.

· CANON XIX -If any one saith, that nothing besides faith is commanded in the Gospel; that other things are indifferent, neither commanded nor prohibited, but free; or, that the ten commandments nowise appertain to Christians; let him be anathema.

· CANON XX -If any one saith, that the man who is justified and how perfect soever, is not bound to observe the commandments of God and of the Church, but only to believe; as if indeed the Gospel were a bare and absolute promise of eternal life, without the condition of observing the commandments ; let him be anathema.

· CANON XXI -If any one saith, that Christ Jesus was given of God to men, as a redeemer in whom to trust, and not also as a legislator whom to obey; let him be anathema.

· CANON XXII -If any one saith, that the justified, either is able to persevere, without the special help of God, in the justice received; or that, with that help, he is not able; let him be anathema.

COMMENT: Conservative Catholics recognize the heresy of Pope Francis/Bergoglio and his lapdog, Cardinal Walter Kasper, only in the practical moral application of their doctrinal errors. They apparently never recognized that Kasper was just as much a heretic during his curial days with John Paul II and Benedict XVI. He has been promoting situation ethics in an effort to overturn Catholic doctrinal and moral truths for a long, long time. How is it that they now find the moral relativism of Francis/Bergoglio so offensive while never complaining about the doctrinal relativism of the Assisi Prayer Meetings and the interfaith events in Jewish synagogues invoking their “common god”? Now they muse about the good-old-days under less radical conciliar popes as if that offers a safe-harbor. To invoke the concilarist popes, John Paul II's Familiaris Consortio and Benedict XVI's Sacramentum Caritatis against Francis/Bergoglio's corrupting the sacrament of Marriage is not just futile, but stupid, for all of them, without exception, embraced the heresy as a first principle of their Modernist faith that Catholic dogma does and must necessarily evolve. Francis/Bergoglio has done nothing that could possible offend John Paul/Wojtyla or Benedict/Ratzinger. Are we expected to employ the same Novus Ordo salami techniques that were used by concilarists to corrupt the Catholic faith in order to help conservative Catholics recover it? It does not work that way. Either conservative Catholics will repent and conform themselves to the “rule of faith” which is Catholic dogma or they will continue to do what they have done over the last fifty years – that is, nothing beyond attacking those whose acts condemn their effeminacy. They, along with Francis/Bergoglio and Kasper need to understand that when God abandons anyone to their “reprobate sense” they will no longer be able to recognize Truth.

But yet the Son of man, when he cometh, shall he find, think you, faith on earth? (Luke 18:8)

The survey of 1,007 self-identified adult Catholics was commissioned by the U.S. bishops' Department of Communications and conducted by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University in Washington. A 178-page report on the results was released April 13…. Only 2 percent of Catholics across all generations said they participated in the sacrament of reconciliation once a month or more, 12 percent said they did several times a year, 12 percent said they did once a year, 30 percent said less than once a year and 45 percent said they never made a sacramental confession… However, the study found that only 36 percent of the younger Catholics attend Mass at least once a month, compared with 64 percent of the older generation. Sixty-eight percent of all Catholics surveyed said they agreed that they believed they could be in good standing with the Church without going to weekly Mass. Only 43% of Catholics say they look to Church teachings, the pope and their bishops “in deciding what is morally acceptable.”

Nothing new here: Francis accuses Novus Ordo clerics of creating “obstacles in the paths of people who want to be reconciled to God,” of making the Sacrament of Confession an “interrogation” and a “torture chamber,” of failing to “receive” and “welcome” the faithful, of not being a “father” to penitents.

Francis: Confessors must not put obstacles in the paths of people who want to be reconciled to God

iacopo scaramuzzi | vatican city | 30/04/2016

“No one should be distant from God because of obstacles placed by men,” Pope Francis said during the Jubilee Audience in St. Peter’s Square, which he presided over in St. Peter’s Square this morning. The Pope focused his reflection on the concept of “reconciliation”, continuing a series of catecheses on mercy, addressing confessors in particular: “Please, do not put obstacles in the paths of people who want to be reconciled to God.” Confession is “not a torture chamber or an interrogation”. At the end of the Audience, Francis greeted participants of the Jubilee for members of the police and armed forces. 

“Let us be reconciled with God!” the Pope told the 60,000 pilgrims who attended this Saturday’s extraordinary Audience. “This Jubilee of Mercy is a time of reconciliation for all. Many people would like to reconcile with God but do not know how, or do not feel worthy, or will not admit it even to themselves. The Christian community can and must encourage a sincere return to God for those who feel his nostalgia. Especially those who carry out the ministry of reconciliation are called to be docile instruments of the Holy Spirit, so that where sin abounded the mercy of God may abound. No one should be distant from God because of obstacles placed by men! And this is also true – and I underline this – for confessors, it is valid for them: please, do not put obstacles in the paths of people who want to be reconciled to God. The confessor is to be a father! He takes the place of God the Father! The confessor must welcome people who come to him to be reconciled to God and help them walk this path of reconciliation. It is a beautiful ministry: it is not a torture chamber or an interrogation, no, it is the Father who receives and welcomes and forgives this person. Let us be reconciled with God! All of us!” [.....]

It is a work of mercy to correct those who are wrong; and be sure that it is a great sin not to chastise sinners, especially when they cause scandal to others.

St. Francis Xavier

Hermeneutics of Continuity/Discontinuity

Catholic Church Teaches:

“That the mystical body of Christ and the Catholic Church in communion with Rome are one and the same thing, is a doctrine based on revealed truth”

Pius XII, Humani Generis

(Modernism teaches that) “the formulas which we call dogma must be subject to these vicissitudes, and are, therefore, liable to change. Thus the way is open to the intrinsic evolution of dogma. Here we have an immense structure of sophisms which ruin and wreck all religion.”

Pope St. Pius X, Pascendi, 1907

With truly lamentable results, our age, casting aside all restraint in its search for the ultimate causes of things, frequently pursues novelties so ardently that it rejects the legacy of the human race. Thus it falls into very serious errors, which are even more serious when they concern sacred authority, the interpretation of Sacred Scripture, and the principal mysteries of Faith. The fact that many Catholic writers also go beyond the limits determined by the Fathers and the Church herself is extremely regrettable. In the name of higher knowledge and historical research (they say), they are looking for that progress of dogmas which is, in reality, nothing but the corruption of dogmas.

Pope St. Pius X, Lamentabili Sane, 1907

The Vatiacan II Church Opines:

“Church of Christ…subsits in the Catholic Church.” Lumen Gentium, Vatican II

NOTE: The author of this term, “subsist in,” was Pastor Wilhelm Schmidt, a Protestant minister who made the suggestion to Cardinal Augustin Bea, the ecumenist, modernist biblical scholar, patron of Fr. Annibale Bugnini, and confessor to Pope Pius XII, who in turn recruited the support of Fr. Joseph Ratzinger who then convinced Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne to bring the matter to the Council. This story was personally verified by Fr. Franz Schmidberger, First Assistant to the Superior General of the SSPX, by directly contacting Pastor Schmidt.

The problem remains if Lumen Gentium strictly and exclusively identifies the Mystical Body of Christ with the Catholic Church, as did Pius XII in Mystici Corporis. Can we not call it into doubt when we observe that not only is the attribute “Roman” missing, but also that one avoids saying that only Catholics are members of the Mystical Body. Thus they are telling us that the Church of Christ and of the Apostles subsistit in, is found in the Catholic Church. There is consequently no strict identification, that is exclusive, between the Church of Christ and the “Roman” Church. Vatican II admits, fundamentally, that non-Catholic Christians are members of the Mystical Body and not merely ordered to it.

Yves Cardinal Congar

Church of Christ is not exclusively identical to the Roman Catholic Church. It does indeed subsist in Roman Catholicism but it is also present in varying modes and degrees in other Christian communities. (Bold face in original).

Avery Cardinal Dulles, a member of the International Theological Commission

It is difficult to say that the Catholic Church is still one, Catholic, apostolic, when one says that the others (other Christian communities) are equally one, Catholic and apostolic, albeit to a lesser degree. ---- at Vatican Council II, the Roman Catholic Church officially abandoned its monopoly over the Christian religion.

Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx

Concretely and actually the Church of Christ may be realized less, equally, or even more in a Church separated from Rome than in a Church in communion with Rome. This conclusion is inescapable on the basis of the understanding of Church that emerges from the teaching of Vatican Council II.

Fr. Gregory Baum

And we now ask: What does it mean to restore the unity of all Christians?... This unity, we are convinced, indeed subsists in the Catholic Church, without the possibility of ever being lost (Unitatis Redintegratio) the Church in fact has not totally disappeared from the world. On the other hand, this unity does not mean what could be called ecumenism of the return: that is, to deny and to reject one’s own faith history. Absolutely not! Pope Benedict XVI, addressing Protestants at World Youth Day, August 19, 2005

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Offers Clarification (?):
QUESTION: What is the meaning of the affirmation that the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church?
RESPONSE:
Christ “established here on earth” only one Church and instituted it as a “visible and spiritual community”, that from its beginning and throughout the centuries has always existed and will always exist, and in which alone are found all the elements that Christ himself instituted. “This one Church of Christ, which we confess in the Creed as one, holy, catholic and apostolic […]. This Church, constituted and organized in this world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the successor of Peter and the Bishops in communion with him”.
In number 8 of the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium ‘subsistence’ means this perduring, historical continuity and the permanence of all the elements instituted by Christ in the Catholic Church, in which the Church of Christ is concretely found on this earth.

REPLY:

Lutherans, Methodists, Anglicans, and many other Protestant groups recite the Nicene Creed professing a belief in the “one, holy, catholic, apostolic Church.” They clearly do not define the word “catholic” in the same sense as Roman Catholics do. Is the CDF giving a Catholic or Protestant meaning to the word “catholic” when it explains the word “subsist”? Is the comment of Cardinal Congar explaining the significance of the failure to use the word “Roman” important to our understanding of the CDF’s response? Is this a cleaver corruption of dogmatic truth through corruption of language? Should we be grateful to Cardinal Congar for his open and honest comments? Since the “ecumenism of return” is rejected then, do Protestants that do not have to “return” to the Roman Catholic Church already belong to the “Church of Christ”? Is there salvation in the “Church of Christ” separated from the Roman Catholic Church?

“When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.”

- G. K. Chesterton

U. S. Bishops - 'faith' in global warming (climate change) ideology with its necessary corollaries of population control and world government.

USCCB : “St. Francis Pledge”

PRAY and reflect on the duty to care for God’s Creation and protect the poor and vulnerable.

LEARN about and educate others on the causes and moral dimensions of climate change.

ASSESS how we—as individuals and in our families, parishes and other affiliations—contribute to climate change by our own energy use, consumption, waste, etc.

ACT to change our choices and behaviors to reduce the ways we contribute to climate change.

ADVOCATE for Catholic principles and priorities in climate change discussions and decisions, especially as they impact those who are poor and vulnerable.

Vatican Sees No Impediment to Dialogue With Freemasonry

Letter written by Gianfranco Cardinal Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture…to “Brother Masons”!

IL SOLE 24ORE | Sunday, February 14, 2016 [Excerpts]

“…These various declarations on the incompatibility of the two memberships in the Church or in Freemasonry, do not impede, however, dialogue, as is explicitly stated in the German Bishops’ document that had already listed the specific areas of discussion, such as the communitarian dimension, works of charity, the fight against materialism, human dignity and knowledge of each other.

“Further, we need to rise above that stance from certain Catholic integralist spheres, which – in order to hit out at some exponents even in the Church’s hierarchy who displease them – have recourse to accusing them apodictically of being members of Freemasonry. In conclusion, as the German Bishops wrote, we need to go beyond reciprocal “hostility, insults and prejudices” since “in comparison to past centuries the tone and way of manifesting [our]differences has improved and changed” even if they [the differences]still remain in a clearly defined way.”

1Peter5 Blog | Steve Skojec | February 16, 2016

Abortion law: "A symbol of the improvement of man and society, in the Masonic work."

Masonleaks - Leak of Documents from the Grand Lodge of France

Katholisches | Giuseppe Nardi | April 27, 2016

(Paris) The news is startling, and yet the mass media hardly takes notice of it. The data leak was concerned this time not with the US State Department (Wikileaks) and not the Vatican (Vatileaks), but Freemasonry. There is talk of a Masonleaks. The analysis of thousands of secret documents of the lodge will likely take months to complete.

The Grand Lodge of France filed a complaint with the prosecution in Paris against  unknown persons. Hackers cracked the server of the Grand Lodge and were able to gain access to membership lists and internal documents. Several thousand confidential documents of the lodges have already been published on the Internet. The  data leak was made public by the weekly magazine L'Express .

The file containing the confidential boxes of papers was published for first time last April 10 on the website Stop Mensonges. The site wrote: "Revelations about the secret government, which determines the new world order." [....]

It is a data volume of six gigabytes of secret documents. It's about decades of secret rituals, directories, projects, programs, statements,  internal publications, membership applications, thousands of detailed CVs of neophytes who applied for initiation or of which they were granted. We have also found hundreds of criminal records, of which it is suspected  not only that they are adepts, but may serve  information gathering or the exertion of pressure. In addition, copies of identity documents, internal correspondence and those with other Grand Lodges around the world. The daily Le Monde was allowed to inspect the data.[.....]

In the Grand Lodge of France there seems be a mole, a lodge brother who stole the documents. Publicly, the Grand Lodge does not want to comment on the incident. It seems that it is the Internet pirates failed to gain possession of the complete list of the 34,000 members of the Grand Lodge. The names of many lodge brothers seem, however,  to  appear in the cracked documents.[.....]

The Grand Orient of France gave, last April 8, just four days after becoming aware of the data leaks by the "brother"-obedience,  the Marianne de Jacques France award to the 88 year old Simone Veil. It stresses the importance that the Grand Orient attaches to the practice of abortion.  Under Simone Veil's administration as the Minister of Health, the French abortion law, the 1975 Loi Veil was decided. Grandmaster Daniel Keller personally bestowed, in the presence of Senate President Gerard Larcher,  an honor to the coveted figure represented by her two sons, Jean and Pierre-François Veil who received this on her behalf. The figure will "bear witness to the solidarity and the recognition of the Grand Orient by Simone Veil, our sister from the heart".

Keller went straight to the point. He praised Veil's "republican activism," her  "struggle for the emancipation of women," which was a "child of secularism". While  secularism is "the linchpin of the Masonic use". He also praised the abortion law as "a symbol of the improvement of man and society, in the Masonic work". Keller added: "This law is a pillar of our society."

Our “Open Letters” to the Dioceses of Harrisburg and Philadelphia, and to Rome illustrate the results of Aggiornamento: The “Modern Mind” subsumes the Novus Ordo Cleric!

The third and far the most formidable element of Main Opposition to the Faith today, is what I propose to call by its own self-appointed and most misleading title: “The Modern Mind.” [.....] Upon dissecting it we discover the “Modern Mind” to contain three main ingredients and to combine them through the force of one principle. Its three ingredients are pride, ignorance, and intellectual sloth; their unifying principle is a blind acceptance of authority not based on reason. Pride causes those who suffer from this disease to regard whatever they think they have learned, whatever they have absorbed, through no matter how absurd a channel, as absolute and sufficient. Ignorance forbids them to know with any thoroughness what men have discovered about these things in the past, and how certainly. Intellectual sloth forbids them to examine an argument, or even to appreciate the implications of their own assertions.

With most men who are thus afflicted the thing is not so much a mixture of these vices as the mere following of a fashion; but these vices lie at the root of the mental process in question. As to the principle of blindly accepting an authority not based on reason, it runs through the whole base affair and binds it into one: Fashion, Print, Iteration, are the commanders abjectly obeyed and trusted. [.....] The color in which the whole of the “Modern Mind” is dyed is essentially stupidity: it will not think—and that is a very strange weakness for anything which calls itself a “mind”!

If it were an active enemy, its lack of reason would be a weakness: being (alas!) not active, but a passive obstacle, like a bog, it is none the weaker for being thus irrational.

Hilaire Belloc, Survivals and New Arrivals, The Modern Mind

Novus Ordo Churchmen are Deconstructionists!

The most fashionable philosophy today is Deconstructionism, and that’s the explicit denial of the very essence of language: “intentionality”. That’s the technical, traditional term for the quality that words have that makes them meaningful, significant, signs that point beyond themselves to objective reality. There is no objective reality to these Deconstructionists, no world beyond texts. Texts are worlds, and worlds are texts. It makes morality as arbitrary as penmanship.

Peter Kreeft, Ph. D., A Refutation of Moral Relativism

Of all divine things, the most godlike is to co-operate with God in the conversion of sinners.

St. Denis the Areopagite

But would it not be enough for one to be a Catholic in heart only, without professing his religion publicly?

No, for Jesus Christ has solemnly declared that, “He who shall be ashamed of Me and My words, of him the Son of Man shall be ashamed when He shall come in His majesty, and that of His Father, and of the holy angels.” (Luke 9:26) Fr. Michael Muller, C.SS.R, Questions and Answers on Salvation

And since Jesus Christ, the Son of God, morally obliges every Catholic the duty to profess his faith in the public forum, every Catholic possesses by right the use of the ecclesiastical traditions of our Church which constitute the perfect outward expression of our holy faith.

Admission of Heretical Ambiguity introduced into Vatican II Documents

In many places, [the Council Fathers] had to find compromise formulae, in which, often, the positions of the [conservative] majority are located immediately next to those of the [modernist] minority, designed to delimit them. Thus, the conciliar texts themselves have a huge potential for conflict, open the door to a selective reception in either direction.

Walter Cardinal Kasper, who was a bishop at Vatican II, April 12, 2013, L'Osservatore Romano

The World of Instability that Vatican II Attempts to Conform the Church: “Artificial and Mechanical”

Western civilization at the present day is passing through a crisis which is essentially different from anything that has been previously experienced. Other societies in the past have changed their social institutions or their religious beliefs under the influence of external forces or the slow development of internal growth. But none, like our own, has ever consciously faced the prospect of a fundamental alteration of the beliefs and institutions on which the whole fabric of social life rests ... Civilization is being uprooted from its foundations in nature and tradition and is being reconstituted in a new organisation which is as artificial and mechanical as a modern factory.

Christopher Dawson, (1889-1970), Catholic Historian, Enquiries into Religion and Culture, 1947

Amazing! Martyrdom “sets them off against the others” and therefore, is a barrier to ecumenical unity!

If you have a Church that considers martyrs, that sets them off against the others, this in itself contains the pebbles of a rocky road to disunity. Sure I appreciated [Cardinal Joseph Zen’s] concerns and sufferings… You have to be proud of the Church that suffers, but also worried that a Church that suffers allows that suffering to be a barrier to the common union to which the Lord has called us.

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, criticizing Cardinal Zen and the faithful Catholics of China for resisting a forced unity with the Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA) founded by the communist government.

COMMENT: Fr. Brian Harrison has spent a good part of the last 30 years not defending the Novus Ordo Church so much as excusing its errors. Maybe he has had enough. Although Fr. Harrison appeals to the teaching of conciliarist popes against Francis, he does make it clear that Francis is going down a road that no one in the history of the Church has gone. All of Francis' conciliarist predecessors forged their own breaks with “2,000 years of tradition.” There is nothing new except that Francis is just heading a little further down the same revolutionary road. The truth is Francis has worn out his version of the novelty of scandal. He is in fact boring, very boring. Traditional Catholics do not listen to him and liberal Catholics, already committed to sin, have no intention of returning to or supporting a Church only because it no longer preaches repentance. It is only the spineless Conservative Catholic, scratching his head, wondering why everybody's telling him, “I told you so!”

Priest: Pope Francis’ pastoral revolution goes against 2,000 years of tradition

LifeSiteNews | Rev. Brian Harrison | April 13, 2016

Pope Francis’ long-awaited Apostolic Exhortation on the Family, Amoris Laetitia (AL), was finally been released on Friday, April 8, 2016.

A proper understanding, appreciation and evaluation of this lengthy document will require considerable time, study and prayerful reflection. But it is already quite clear from certain key passages that, with carefully crafted language, plausible arguments and persuasive rhetoric, the Holy Father is quietly introducing revolutionary change into the heart of the Catholic Church’s moral teaching and pastoral/sacramental practice. He is not repudiating in principle the objective truth of any revealed dogma or moral norm; but at the level of praxis he is shifting the emphasis away from objective standards of right and wrong behavior and placing it instead on presumed subjective sincerity and individual conscience. Thus, in the name of Christ’s ‘mercy’, the exhortation tends to downplay the gravity of sin instead of maintaining the uncomfortable bipolar tension between the two that runs through the Gospels.[.....]

The tendency to gloss over grave sins against chastity first shows itself in the way contraception is treated in this document. In #80-82 the Pope recalls the importance of Humanae Vitae and reaffirms the objective immorality of this practice: “From the outset, love refuses every impulse to close in on itself; it is open to a fruitfulness that draws it beyond itself. Hence no genital act of husband and wife can refuse this meaning even when for various reasons it may not always in fact beget a new life”. However, in the section on family planning (#222), this is not restated, and the subjective dimension predominates: “[F]amily planning fittingly takes place as the result [of] a consensual dialogue between the spouses”. A heavy emphasis is then placed on the role of their own consciences in this decision-making process, but without reaffirming that Catholic consciences must be formed in accordance with the Church’s magisterium. At a time when violation of the divine law against unnatural birth control has reached tsunami proportions among Catholics, Francis goes no further than saying that “methods based on the law of nature and the incidence of fertility are to be promoted”; but he doesn’t add that contraceptive methods are not to be “promoted”, and much less that they are to be reprobated as intrinsically immoral. Thus, many contracepting readers of AL will feel their consciences soothed, rather than pricked, at this point. For the Pope himself seems to insinuate that the objective moral norm is just an ‘ideal’, so that if your own inter-spousal dialogue tells you pills or condoms are OK in your situation, you’re not guilty of serious sin in using them.

Next, we find a seriously inadequate treatment of sex education. In the six full paragraphs of AL (280 – 285) dedicated to this topic, we do not find even a passing nod to the Church’s constant teaching about the primary responsibility of parents in this area (cf., for example, Familiaris Consortio, 37 and the Pontifical Council for the Family’s 1995 document, “The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality”). Instead, right after quoting Vatican II’s brief statement about the need for an age-appropriate “positive and prudent” education in sexual matters (Gravissimum Educationis, 1), Pope Francis seems to take it for granted that classrooms are the main place for this to be given: “We may well ask ourselves,” he comments, “if our educational institutions have taken up this challenge”.

The most troubling aspect of AL, however, is its treatment in Chapter 8 of those living in irregular sexual relationships. Not a few stalwart champions of the magisterium are reassuring us that, basically, all is well. Canonist Ed Peters insists that the exhortation effects no change in church law. That is true, but it misses the point. For in paragraphs 302 (last section), 304 and 305 Francis has sent a clear message to priests that in individual cases they can and should bypass, rather than apply, the law, making ‘pastoral’ exceptions to it according to their own ‘merciful’ discretion. Robert Moynihan and George Weigel assure us that there is no change of doctrine embodied in the new document. But that’s only half true. Moral doctrine (i.e., teaching proposed as divine law) will be effectively changed not only if the Pope directly contradicts it, but also if he undermines it by relaxing disciplinary measures needed to protect it. Lamentably, like a tiny mustard seed full of massive potential, this kind of change has now been carefully planted in the fertile soil of two footnotes to an Apostolic Exhortation.

In notes 336 and 351 to paragraphs 300 and 305 respectively, the Holy Father breaks with the teaching and discipline of all his predecessors in the See of Peter by allowing at least some divorced and civilly remarried Catholics (with no decree of nullity and no commitment to continence) to receive the sacraments. Since “discernment can recognize that in a particular situation no grave fault exists” owing to a variety of mitigating psychological and other factors, Francis affirms in n. 351 that the Church’s “help” to these Catholics living in objectively illicit relationships can “in certain cases . . . include the help of the sacraments”. The context indicates that this means mainly Penance and Eucharist. Commentators of all beliefs and none have almost universally interpreted the footnote in that sense, and their widely trumpeted claims have been confirmed by eloquent silence from the See of Peter.

I have addressed this issue of mitigating factors in my article, “Divorced and Remarried Catholics: Diminished Imputability?” in The Latin Mass, Summer 2015, pp. 6-12.

In allowing exceptions to the ‘no-Communion’ law for sexually active Catholics in invalid marriages, Pope Francis is departing from the clear bimillennial teaching confirmed by Pope St. John Paul II in Familiaris Consortio #84, and reaffirmed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (nos. 1650, 2384 and 2390). Also under John Paul‘s authority, a Declaration of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts (6/24/2000) has asserted that the obligation to exclude such Catholics from Communion “is by its nature derived from divine law and transcends the domain of positive ecclesiastical laws” (#1), so that ”no ecclesiastical authority may dispense the minister of Holy Communion from this obligation in any case, nor may he issue directives that contradict it” (#4). According to the Declaration, it’s irrelevant whether the subjective imputability of remarried divorcees might in some instances be diminished. Why? Because, it says, the admission to Communion of those who are publicly living in a situation which Jesus himself calls adultery will send a clear message that the Church doesn't really take too seriously this teaching of our Lord. And this will inevitably cause scandal – in the theological sense of tempting and leading others into similar sins. Pope Francis nods briefly to this PCLT Declaration, but only by uncritically reproducing a selective and deceptive citation found in the 2015 Synod Relatio (#85). Thus, both the Relatio and Amoris Laetitia omit altogether the main point of the 2000 Declaration, which is that the obligation of priests and other ministers to refuse Communion to civilly remarried divorcees “is by its nature derived from divine law and transcends the domain of positive ecclesiastical laws: the latter cannot introduce legislative changes which would oppose the doctrine of the Church” (section 1).

Also, this Declaration points out that logically, a concession to some remarried divorcees on the grounds that their subjective conscience may not be gravely guilty will open the way for further concessions, on the same grounds, to many who are living publicly in other objectively immoral situations. For instance, now that some civilly remarried divorcees are to be admitted to sacramental absolution and Communion, will not at least some same-sex couples have to be admitted these two sacraments on the same grounds (i.e., ‘diminished imputability’)? 

Must we believe that Francis alone is right on this issue, and that all his predecessors, including the still living Benedict XVI, as well as the Catechism promulgated by St. John Paul II, have been wrong and ‘unmerciful’ in allowing no exceptions in this area? Isn’t it far more likely that, as in the 1330s under John XXII, just one pope is wrong, and that all the others popes have been right? And that, as in that critical situation, respectful public “resistance” to Peter (cf. Gal. 2: 11), from cardinals, bishops, theologians and other faithful, is now urgently needed?

This priest remains anonymous, he has gone alone with every change in our ecclesiastical traditions and although he recognizes that our traditions are necessary attributes of the faith he remains “a priest in good standing” with those who are destroying the faith.

“No doctrine has changed”…..
When they ripped out the Communion rails throughout our Churches, we were comforted by our shepherds and leaders, who assured us: “No doctrine has changed ...”
When they turned Communion in the hand into the “norm” for the Church, we were comforted by our shepherds and leaders, who assured us: “No doctrine has changed ...”
When all the “extraordinary” ministers of Holy Communion were given the go-ahead to distribute Communion, even in “ordinary” circumstances, we were comforted by our shepherds and leaders, who assured us: “No doctrine has changed ...”
When the Tabernacles were removed from the altars and placed somewhere off in corners and alcoves and little rooms distanced from the sanctuary, we were comforted by our shepherds and leaders, who assured us: “No doctrine has changed ...”
When the priests were told to turn around and face the people at Mass, rather than remaining turned toward God, Ad Orientem, we were comforted by our shepherds and leaders, who assured us: “No doctrine has changed ...”
When altar girls and altar women became more common than altar boys, we were comforted by our shepherds and leaders, who assured us: “No doctrine has changed ...”
No doctrine has changed ...
So, let us ask ourselves just what has changed? And more importantly, how did that change take place in spite of the fact that “no doctrine has changed?”
This, of course, is what we are up against, isn't it?
No doctrine has changed — and yet ...
No doctrine has changed ... as blustering, pro-abortion Catholic politicians continue to receive Communion at the Holy Mass.
No doctrine has changed ... as contracepting Catholic couples continue to receive Holy Communion at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
No doctrine has changed ... as homosexuality and sexual misconduct in general, in the priesthood multiplied in number and misdeeds over the last 50 years.
No doctrine has changed ... as the number of declarations of nullity sky-rocketed in the Church over the last 50 years.
No doctrine has changed — and yet ...
Yes indeed, no doctrine has changed. Are we all feeling better about it all now?
And yet, an awful lot HAS, very unfortunately and very negatively, changed — but then, how could that have happened?
Because as we all know: “No doctrine has changed ...”
~ Anonymous Priest in Good Standing

“The pope has made clear that the role of formation of consciences and not replacing them is for all Catholics.” Blasé Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago

IS it? What about the kind of Catholic who forms a Catholic conscience according to the fixed principles of Catholic doctrine and the moral law? That is, a Catholic with a “true and certain Catholic conscience”? They are called traditional Catholics. When ever have the likes of Bergoglio and Cupich shown any respect for the “true and certain” Catholic conscience? For the Novus Ordo Church, “principles” are only “principles” if they can be used as weapons against the truth.

Chicago archbishop says pope makes clear doctrines are to serve people

Amoris Laetitia | NCR | Elizabeth A. Elliott | April 8. 2016

Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich welcomed Pope Francis’ reflection on marriage and family life released today, saying that while not changing any church doctrine, the apostolic exhortation “makes clear that doctrines are at the service of the pastoral mission.”

Cupich, whom Francis appointed as a delegate to the Synod of Bishops on the family last October, called Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”) “an authoritative teaching document” that was faithful to what the bishops had approved with a two-thirds majority vote at the synod.[…..]

Describing marriage as a journey, a dynamic path to personal development and fulfilment, Francis speaks of the importance of discernment in those situations in which we fall short of what the Lord asks of us with profound respect for people, the archbishop said.

“The church has to ‘make room for the consciences of the faithful, who very often respond as best they can to the Gospel amid their limitations, and are capable of carrying out their own discernment in complex situations,’ “ said Cupich, quoting Francis’ document.

Cupich quoted again from the document, reminding pastors, “We have been called to form consciences, not to replace them.”

Cupich noted that Francis made no changes to doctrine but the pope “makes clear that doctrines are at the service of the pastoral mission. He also knows that this call for a more compassionate, pastoral outreach, tenderness, compassion, accompaniment, will leave some perplexed.”[……]

When asked about divorced and remarried people, and gays in the church, Cupich said he has had discussions representatives of these communities since arriving in Chicago to get to know their lives. “I have found that those conversations are really great starting points for having them be accompanied as individuals. I think that’s what the pope is asking us to do here.”

“The pope has made clear that the role of formation of consciences and not replacing them is for all Catholics, it’s not just for people who are in situations of being divorced and remarried,” he said. “I think that’s a very liberating part of the document because what we see here is that the pope is really calling us to an adult spirituality.”

Comment: Ss. Peter & Paul Roman Catholic Mission professes as a matter of faith that the immemorial ecclesiastical traditions are necessary attributes of the faith without which is cannot be known or communicated to others and which every baptized Catholic has an inalienable right because they are necessary in the fulfillment of our duties to God.

Now Pope Francis says that we are correct when he admits "that there must be an intimate coherence between the Church's doctrine and praxis." What this means in the Novus Ordo world is that Novus Ordo praxis must conform to Novus Ordo doctrine and therefore prescribes communions for those living in public adultery. We should be thankful for Francis making the obvious obvious.

The Post-Synod Exhortation, Amoris laetitia: First reflections on a catastrophic document

Roberto de Mattei | Corrispondenza Romana | April 10, 2016

With the post-synod Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris laetitia, published on April 8th, Pope Francis has officially given his opinion on marital moral issues which have been under discussion for two years now.

At the Consistory of 20th and 21st of February 2014, Francis had entrusted the task of introducing the debate on this theme to Cardinal Kasper.  Cardinal Kasper’s theses, according to which the Church must change Her matrimonial praxis, formed the leit motiv of the two Synods on the Family in 2014 and 2015 and now forms the basis of Pope Francis’ Exhortation.

In the course of these two years, illustrious cardinals, bishops, theologians and philosophers have intervened in the debate to demonstrate that there must be an intimate coherence between the Church’s doctrine and praxis. Pastoral care in fact, is based on dogmatic and moral doctrine. “There cannot be pastoral care that is in dissonance with the Church’s truths and morality, in contrast with Her laws and not oriented to the ideal achievement of the Christian life!” revealed Cardinal Velasio De Paolis, in his opening address at the Umbrian Ecclesiastical Tribunal on March 27th 2014.

In the weeks preceding the post-synod Exhortation, public and private interventions to the Pope from cardinals and bishops intensified, in the aim of averting the promulgation of a document crammed full of errors, revealed by the great number of amendments that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had made to the draft. Francis did not back off, and seems to have entrusted the last re-writing of the Exhortation, or at least some of its key passages, into the hands of  some of his trusted theologians who attempted to reinterpret St. Thomas in the light of Hegelian dialectic.

From this a text has emerged that is not ambiguous, but clear - in its vagueness. The theology of praxis in fact excludes any doctrinal affirmation, by leaving the outlining of human conduct and acts to history. For this, as Francis affirms, “it is understandable” that on the crucial issue of the divorced and remarried, “that neither the Synod nor this Exhortation could be expected to provide a new set of general rules, canonical in nature and applicable to all cases” (no.300). If we are convinced that Christians, in their conduct, need not conform to absolute principles, but should listen to “the signs of the times” it would be contradictory to formulate rules of any kind.

Everyone was expecting the answer to one basic question: Can those who have remarried civilly after a first marriage, receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist? The Church has always given a categorical no to this question. The divorced and remarried cannot receive Communion since their life situation objectively contradicts the natural and Christian truth on marriage, signified and effected by the Eucharist (Familiaris Consortio 84).

The answer of the post-synod Exhortation is, instead: along general lines -- no, but “in certain cases” -- yes. (no.305, note 351). The divorced and remarried in fact must be: “integrated” and not excluded (299). Their integration “can be expressed in different ecclesial services, which necessarily requires discerning which of the various forms of exclusion currently practiced in the liturgical, pastoral, educational and institutional framework, can be surmounted” (no 299) without excluding sacramental discipline (no.336).

What is obvious is this: the prohibition to receive Communion for the divorced and remarried is no longer absolute. The Pope does not authorize, as a general rule, Communion to the divorced, but neither does he prohibit it.

In an interview with “Il Foglio”, March 15th 2014, Cardinal Caffarra, against Kasper, stressed: “Here doctrine is being touched. Inevitably. It can be said that this is not so, on the contrary, it is so. A practice is introduced, that in the long run, determines, not only in Christian people, this idea: there is no marriage that is absolutely indissoluble. And this without question is against the will of the Lord. There is absolutely no doubt about it”.

For the theology of praxis, rules don’t count, only concrete cases. And what is not possible in the abstract, is possible in the concrete. However, as Cardinal Burke noted well: “If the Church permitted the reception of the sacraments (even in one case only) to a person who is in an irregular union, it would mean that, or marriage is not indissoluble and thus the person is not living in a state of adultery, or that Holy Communion is not communion with the Body and Blood of Christ, which instead necessitates the person’s correct disposition, that is to say, contrition for the grave sin and a firm resolution to sin no more.” (Interview with Alessandro Gnocchi, IL FOGLIO, October 14^th, 2014).

Furthermore, the exception is destined to become the rule, since the criteria to receive Communion in Amoris laetitia, is left to the “personal discernment” of the individuals. This discernment takes place through “conversation with the priest, in the internal forum” (no. 300), “case by case”.  However, which pastors of souls will dare forbid the reception of the Eucharist, if “the Gospel itself tells us not to judge or condemn (no.308) and if it is necessary “to integrate everyone” (no. 297) and “[appreciate] the constructive elements in those situations which do not yet or no longer correspond to [the Church’s] teaching on marriage?”(no.292).

The pastors wishing to refer to the Church’s commandments, would risk acting – according to the Exhortation -- “as arbiters of grace rather than its facilitators” (no 310). “For this reason, a pastor cannot feel that it is enough simply to apply moral laws to those living in “irregular” situations, as if they were stones to throw at people’s lives.  This would bespeak the closed heart of one used to hiding behind the Church’s teachings, “sitting on the chair of Moses and judging at times with superiority and superficiality difficult cases and wounded families.”

This unprecedented language, harsher than the hardness of heart that reproaches “the arbiters of grace”, is the distinctive trait of Amoris laetitia, which, not by chance, Cardinal Schonborn defined as “a linguistic event” during the press conference of April 8th. “My great joy for this document” the Cardinal from Vienna said, is in the fact that it “coherently goes beyond the artificial, exterior, clean division between regular and irregular”.

Language, as always, expresses content. The situations the post-synod Exhortation defines as” the so-called irregular” are those of  public adultery and extramarital cohabitations.  For Amoris laetitia, they fulfill the Christian marriage ideal, even if “in a partial and analogous way” (no. 292). “Because of forms of conditioning and mitigating factors, it is possible that in an objective situation of sin – which may not be subjectively culpable, or fully such – a person can be living in God’s grace, can love and can also grow in the life of grace and charity, while receiving the Church’s help to this end (no.305), “In certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments”(note 351).

According to Catholic morality, circumstances, which comprise a context wherein an action is carried out cannot modify the moral nature of the acts, thus rendering right and just an intrinsically evil action. Yet the doctrine of absolute morality and of the intrinsece malum  is neutralized by Amoris laetitia, which is conformed to the “new morality” condemned by Pius XII in numerous documents and by John Paul II in Veritatis splendor. Situation ethics allow the circumstances and, in the final analysis, the subjective conscience of man, to determine what is good and what is evil. Extramarital sexual union is not considered intrinsically illicit, but inasmuch as it is an act of love, assessable according to the circumstances. More  generally, evil does not exist in itself just as grave or mortal sin does not exist. The leveling-out between people in a state of grace (regular situations) and people in a state of permanent sin (irregular situations) is not only linguistic: it seems to be subject to the Lutheran theory simul iustus et peccator, condemned by the Decree on justification at the Council of Trent (Denz-H, nn. 1551-1583).

The post-synod Exhortation is much worse that Cardinal Kasper’s report, against which there has rightly been directed much criticism in books, articles and interviews. Cardinal Kasper had asked some questions; the Exhortation, Amoris laetitia, offers an answer: open the door to the divorced and remarried, canonize situation ethics and begin a process of normalization of all common-law cohabitations.

Considering that the new document belongs to the non-infallible ordinary Magisterium, it is to be hoped that it is object of an in-depth analytical critique, by theologians and Pastors of the Church, under no illusion of applying “the hermeneutic of continuity” to it.

If the text is catastrophic, even more catastrophic is the fact that it was signed by the Vicar of Christ. Even so, for those who love Christ and His Church, this is a good reason to speak and not be silent.  So, let’s make ours, the words of a courageous Bishop, Athanasius Schneider:

“Non possumus!” I will not accept an obfuscated speech nor a skilfully masked back door to a profanation of the Sacrament of Marriage and Eucharist. Likewise, I will not accept a mockery of the Sixth Commandment of God. I prefer to be ridiculed and persecuted rather than to accept ambiguous texts and insincere methods. I prefer the crystalline “image of Christ the Truth, rather than the image of the fox ornamented with gemstones” (Saint Irenaeus), for “I know whom I have believed”, “Scio, Cui credidi!” (2 Tim 1: 12). (Rorate Coeli, 2 Novembre 2015).

COMMENT: Catholic doctrines are truths of our faith revealed by God which men, for their salvation, must believe because they are revealed by God “who can neither deceive nor be deceived.” But to be saved man must not only believe what God has revealed, he must also do what God has commanded in conformity with the moral law. All moral acts are derived from specific ideological doctrines. The moral law of God is derived from God’s doctrine. Doctrines are “at the service of the pastoral mission” only in the sense that they serve as anchors of truth that mark the channels that every faithful Catholic must uses to navigate safely through the course of his life as a child of God by grace that he may obtain salvation. In the Gospel our Lord describes the Last Judgment based upon the conformity to the moral law, especially that of Charity. Keeping the moral law of God presupposed the belief in His doctrine which governs and directs moral acts. What Blase Cupich says is wrong because it turns the moral order on its head. He wants doctrines not to determine but to be determined by sinful moral acts. His praise for Francis the ‘Pastor’ is misplaced. Bergoglio’s pastoral record, evidenced by the number of conversions and vocations during his tenure as bishop in Buenos Aires, is one of failure. He now wants to impose his failures on the universal Church. His behavior is consistent with all liberal nominal Catholics. They constantly talk about their merciful love for humanity but are not merciful to individual humans. Catholic faithful are on the contrary merciful to individual humans while denouncing the pretentions of humanity's humanism. Look at the number of vocations to and merciful act of religious communities throughout the centuries. It is a record that finds no parallel in any moral system at any time in history. Even at the time of Vatican II there were hundreds of thousands Catholic religious dedicating their lives to the corporal works of mercy in hospitals, nursing homes, orphanages, schools, institutions that cared for the poor, and countless other religious committed to the spiritual works of mercy. They are all gone because the Novus Ordo Church has abandoned the doctrinal truths that make this kind of dedication possible. Kasper’s theology two years ago claimed that the early Church practice permitted divorce and remarriage. Francis called this tripe doing “theology on one’s knees.” All Francis is doing is bring Novus Ordo morality in conformity with Novus Ordo doctrine. He like us at Ss. Peter & Paul recognize that doctrine and praxis are like a pair of shoes - one without the other will not do.

At the end of the Old Santa Fe Trail stands the Loretto Chapel. Inside the Gothic structure is the staircase referred to as miraculous, inexplicable, marvelous and is sometimes called St. Joseph’s Staircase. The stairway confounds architects, engineers and master craftsmen. It makes over two complete 360-degree turns, stands 20’ tall and has no center support. It rests solely on its base and against the choir loft. The risers of the 33 steps are all of the same height. Made of an apparently extinct wood species, it was constructed with only square wooden pegs without glue or nails. It was built by an unknown carpenter in 1852 after a novena by the nuns to St. Joseph

Modernism and Neo-odernism, built upon linguistic Deconstructionism which denies the intentionality of language, “fabricates a fictitious reality.” The Novus Ordo Church can only offer just another “pseudo-reality” to modern man and not the Absolute Truth of God's revelation. The worst thing of all is that most Novus Ordo Catholics are “satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language.” No wonder Pope Francis hates the “Absolute Truth” and declared it to be “idolatrous” and “godless”!

Plato's literary activity extended over fifty years, and time and again he asked himself anew: What is it that makes the sophists so dangerous? Toward the end he wrote one more dialogue, the Sophist, in which he added a new element to his answer: “The sophists,” he says, “fabricate a fictitious reality.” That the existential realm of man could be taken over by pseudo-realities whose fictitious nature threatens to become indiscernible is truly a depressing thought. And yet this Platonic nightmare, I hold, possesses an alarming contemporary relevance. For the general public is being reduced to a state where people not only are unable to find out about the truth but also become unable even to search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language. This, says Plato, is the worst thing that the sophists are capable of wreaking upon mankind by their corruption of the word.

Josef Pieper, Abuse of Language - Abuse of Power

Christ the King

As long as the dark foundation of our nature, grim in its all-encompassing egoism, mad in its drive to make that egoism into reality, to devour everything and to define everything by itself, as long as that foundation is visible, as long as this truly original sin exists within us, we have no business here and there is no logical answer to our existence. Imagine a group of people who are all blind, deaf and slightly demented and suddenly someone in the crowd asks, "What are we to do?"... The only possible answer is "Look for a cure". Until you are cured, there is nothing you can do. And since you don't believe you are sick, there can be no cure. But if the faith communicated by the Church to Christian humanity is a living faith, and if the grace of the sacraments is an effectual grace, the resultant union of the divine and the human cannot be limited to the special domain of religion, but must extend to all Man's common relationships and must regenerate and transform his social and political life.

Vladimir Solovyov, Minding the Monarchical Church, Russian Philosopher and Orthodox convert to the Catholic Church, friend of Dostoyevsky, died 1900, pauper and homeless.

To some of the saints power is granted to succor us in particular necessities; but to St. Joseph power is granted to succor in all necessities, and to defend all those who, with devotion, have recourse to him.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux

Pope emphasizes flexibility over rules for modern families

Associated Press | Nicole Winfield and Rachel Zoll | April 8, 2016

VATICAN CITY (AP) — In a sweeping document on family life that opened a door to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics, Pope Francis insisted Friday that church doctrine cannot be the final word in answering tricky moral questions and that Catholics must be guided by their own informed consciences.

Francis didn't create a churchwide admission to Communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics as some progressives had wanted. But in the document “The Joy of Love,” he suggested that bishops and priests could do so on a case-by-case basis in what could become a significant development in church practice.

The pope also strongly upheld the church's opposition to same-sex marriage.

The 256-page document, two years in the making and the product of an unprecedented canvassing of ordinary Catholics and senior churchmen, is a plea from Francis' heart for the church to stop hectoring Catholics about how to live their lives and instead find the redeeming value in their imperfect relationships.

“I understand those who prefer a more rigorous pastoral care which leaves no room for confusion,” he wrote. “But I sincerely believe that Jesus wants a church attentive to the goodness which the Holy Spirit sows in the midst of human weakness.”

The document is cleverly worded: Francis selectively cited his predecessors, making clear he is working within their tradition but omitting the sometimes harsh, definitive language that is an anathema to his mercy over moral priorities. He cited himself repeatedly, making some of his most significant points in strategically placed footnotes, rather than the text itself.

“It's the classic case of an organic development of doctrine,” said Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, the archbishop of Vienna who presented the document at a Vatican news conference. “There is innovation and continuity. There are true novelties in this document, but no ruptures.”

Gay Catholics were highly critical, saying Francis had failed them. The document offered nothing significant beyond existing church teaching that gays are not to be discriminated against and are to be welcomed into the church with respect and dignity. It repeated the church's position that same-sex unions can in no way be equivalent to marriage between a man and woman.

“He has ignored submissions and appeals by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Catholics,” said British gay rights advocate Peter Tatchell. “Gentler words do not assuage Vatican opposition to gay equality.”

On thorny issues such as contraception, Francis stressed that a couple's individual conscience educated in church teaching — and not just dogmatic rules imposed on them across the board from above — must guide their decisions and the church's pastoral practice.

“We have been called to form consciences, not to replace them,” he said.

He insisted the church's aim is to reintegrate and welcome all its members. He called for a new language to help Catholic families cope with today's problems. And he said pastors must take into account mitigating factors — fear, ignorance, habits and duress — in counseling Catholics who fail to live up to the ideal.

“It can no longer simply be said that all those in any irregular situations are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace,” he wrote. Even those in an “objective situation of sin” can be in a state of grace, and can even be more pleasing to God by trying to improve, he said.

Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago, a Francis appointee, said the pope was telling Catholics they should cultivate their consciences “with the light of the Gospel” as their guide.

“He's recovering something that we may have lost sight of,” Cupich said at a news conference in his archdiocese.

The document's release marks the culmination of a divisive consultation of ordinary Catholics and the church hierarchy that Francis initiated in hopes of understanding the modern problems facing Catholic families and providing them with better pastoral care.

The most controversial issue that arose in two meetings, or synods, of bishops was whether Francis would loosen the Vatican's strict opposition to letting Catholics who divorce and remarry receive Communion. Church teaching holds that unless these Catholics receive an annulment, or a church decree that their first marriage was invalid, they are committing adultery and cannot receive the sacrament.

Conservatives had insisted the rules were fixed and there was no way around Christ's teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. Liberals had sought wiggle room to balance doctrine with mercy and look at each couple on a case-by-case basis, creating a path to reconciliation that could lead to them eventually receiving the sacraments.

Francis took a unilateral step last year and changed church law to make it easier to get an annulment. On Friday, he said the rigorous response proposed by the conservatives was inconsistent with Jesus' message of mercy.

“By thinking that everything is black and white, we sometimes close off the way of grace and of growth and discourage paths of sanctification which give glory to God,” he said. “Let us remember that a small step in the midst of great human limitations can be more pleasing to God than a life which appears outwardly in order but moves through the day without confronting great difficulties.”

Francis didn't explicitly endorse the “penitential path” of bringing such civilly remarried Catholics to Communion that was advocated by leading progressives such as Cardinal Walter Kasper. But he repeated what the synod had endorsed of the need for pastors to help individual Catholics over the course of spiritual direction to ascertain what God is asking of them.

And he went further by explicitly linking such discussions of conscience with access to the sacraments.

In a footnote, Francis cited his previous document “The Joy of the Gospel” in saying that confession should not be a “torture chamber,” and that the Eucharist “is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”

The Rev. James Bretzke, a Boston College theologian, said the document will give cover to and empower those priests and bishops who want to apply a broader understanding of the confidential discussions between priests and divorced and civilly remarried Catholics — a concept known as the “internal forum solution.”

“He does not outlaw that, whereas John Paul II specifically outlawed (it),” he said.

Still, Mark Brumley, president of Ignatius Press, an English-language publisher of the writings of retired Pope Benedict XVI, said Francis' emphasis on conscience “doesn't mean this is a free pass to do whatever you want.”

He said the document tries to navigate the difficult path of upholding church teaching while allowing the civilly remarried to participate in the life of the church.

“It's a very tricky thing,” Brumley said. Such recourse to the use of a “well-formed conscience” and the internal forum in negotiating moral issues is not new by any means. But it has been de-emphasized by the past two popes.

“This is not about a reform of rules. It's about reform of the church,” Cupich said. In many ways, the document is most significant for what it doesn't say.

While Francis frequently cited John Paul, whose papacy was characterized by a hard-line insistence on doctrine and sexual morals, he did so selectively. Francis referenced certain parts of John Paul's 1981 “Familius Consortio,” which until Friday was the guiding Vatican document on family life, but he omitted any reference to its most divisive paragraph 84, which explicitly forbids the sacraments for the divorced and civilly remarried.

In fact, Francis went further than mere omission and effectively rejected John Paul's suggestion in that document for people in civil second marriages to live as brother and sister, abstaining from sex so they can still receive the sacraments. In a footnote, Francis said many people offered such a solution by the church “point out that if certain expressions of intimacy are lacking, it often happens that faithfulness is endangered and the good of children suffer.”

Similarly, in discussing the need for “responsible parenthood” and regulating the number of children, Francis made no mention of the church's opposition to artificial contraception. He squarely rejected abortion as “horrendous” and he cited the 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” which deals with the issue.

But Francis made no mention of the “unlawful birth control methods” cited and rejected in “Humanae Vitae.” Instead, he focused on the need for couples in their conscience to make responsible decisions about their family size.

Francis made a single reference to church-sanctioned family planning method of abstaining from sex during a woman's fertile time. He said only that such practices are to be “promoted” — not that other methods are forbidden — and he insisted on the need for children to receive sex education, albeit without focusing on “safe sex.”

The document devoted an entire chapter to love and sex in marriage — at times explicitly. Schoenborn acknowledged that Francis dared address such issues even though bishops and cardinals in two separate synods essentially ignored the question. Schoenborn suggested the celibacy of the synod fathers was perhaps responsible for the omission in synod documents.

A Catholic Assessment:

Pope Francis Departs from Church Teaching in New Exhortation

By Maike Hickson | April 8, 2016

[…..] What this means concretely is that the pope is sending a deeply troubling message: those who are living in the objective state of adultery (since they are still sacramentally and validly married to their real spouse, not the person they are living with) and have children from this second “marriage” are essentially bound to stay in this relationship, living as husband and wife (which they are not) and continuing to engage in acts proper only to spouses, and thus, adulterous in nature. Otherwise, the pope reasons, their new relationship – and the welfare of the children involved – could be put at risk! In this, Pope Francis undermines Catholic moral teaching at its core, and puts supposed practical concerns over the higher concern of the salvation of souls.

In paragraph 299 of Chapter 8, which deals in general with “irregular” unions, Pope Francis also claims that “remarried” divorcees should be more “integrated” into the life of the Church, “not only to realize that they belong to the Church as the body of Christ, but also to know that they can have a joyful and fruitful experience in it.” He proposes removing “forms of exclusion” with regard to “the liturgical, pastoral, educational and institutional framework”.

In this context, in Paragraph 300, Pope Francis brings up this idea of a “process of accompaniment and discernment” with the help of the “internal forum” in which the “remarried” divorcees may discern their own special situation with the help of a priest. “Discernment,” “pastoral accompaniment” and “integration” are key words here. In this context, the pope also calls for the humility, discretion, the love for the Church and her teaching and for the search for God’s will on the side of those taking counsel with a priest, and says that:

“These attitudes are essential for avoiding the grave danger of misunderstandings, such as the notion that any priest can quickly grant ‘exceptions’, or that some people can obtain sacramental privileges in exchange for favours.”

This question of access to the sacraments for the divorced and remarried is taken up again in paragraph 305:

“Because of forms of conditioning and mitigating factors, it is possible that in an objective situation of sin – which may not be subjectively culpable, or fully such – a person can be living in God’s grace, can love and can also grow in the life of grace and charity, while receiving the Church’s help to this end.”

At the end of that sentence, footnote 351 clarifies: “In certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments,” and then refers to both Confession and the Eucharist. He writes: “I would also point out that the Eucharist ‘is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.’”

 These statements call to mind the substance of the so-called Kasper proposal. The language of the Eucharist as “not a prize” is something both Kasper and Francis have used in public statements on this topic since the Synod process began in 2014. There is no specific prescription on whether the divorced and “remarried” can have access to the sacraments in this, but one sees the opening of a door.

The second grave scandal comes in paragraph 301. In the context of the question of “discernment” for those “irregular” relationships, Pope Francis does away with the claim that those who do not live according to God’s law are living in the state of mortal sin! He says:

“Hence it is [sic] can no longer simply be said that all those in any “irregular” [to include homosexual relationships?]  situations are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace. More is involved here than mere ignorance of the rule. A subject may know full well the rule, yet have great difficulty in understanding “its inherent values” [?], or be in a concrete situation which does not allow him or her to act differently and decide otherwise without further sin.”

Among other mitigating factors in this regard, the pope mentions “affective immaturity” and “force of acquired habit” and “conditions of anxiety,” as well as other “psychological or social factors” that would alleviate a person’s culpability.

This statement of the pope seems to do away with any moral foundation on the question of marriage and divorce. It breaks apart the very basis of moral law, and opens the door to a lax and relativistic approach to the sanctity of marriage. […..]

From One Peter Fiver Blog

Regina Coeli - ANTHEM TO THE BLESSED VIRGIN

There is a venerable tradition connected with this joyous anthem. It is related that a fearful pestilence raged in Rome, during one of the Easters of the pontificate of St. Gregory the Great. In order to propitiate the anger of God, the holy Pope prescribed a public procession of both people and clergy, in which was to be carried the portrait of our blessed Lady painted by St. Luke. The procession was advancing in the direction of St Peter’s; and as the holy picture, followed by the Pontiff, was carried along, the atmosphere became pure and free from pestilence. Having reached the bridge which joins the city with the Vatican, a choir of angels was heard singing above the picture, and saying: ‘Rejoice, O Queen of heaven, alleluia! for He whom thou didst deserve to bear, alleluia! hath, as he said risen from the grave, alleluia!’ As soon as the heavenly music ceased, the saintly Pontiff took courage, and added these words to those of the angels: ‘Pray to God for us, alleluia!’ Thus was composed the Paschal anthem to our Lady. Raising his eyes to heaven, Gregory saw the destroying angel standing on the top of the Mole of Hadrian, and sheathing his sword. In memory of this apparition the Mole was called the Castle of Sant’ Angelo, and on the dome was placed an immense statue representing an angel holding his sword in the scabbard.

Dom Gueranger, The Liturgical Year, Easter

Bright Queen of Heaven! thy joy declare; Alleluia. For He, whom thou deserved to bear; Alleluia.

Hath, as He said, rose from the grave; Alleluia. Petition God our souls to save; Alleluia.

V. Rejoice and be glad O Virgin Mary. Alleluia.

R. For He is truly risen. Alleluia.

Let Us Pray

O God, Who by the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, hast vouchsafed to rejoice the world, grant, we beseech Thee, that by the intercession of His Virgin Mother, Mary, we may receive the joys of eternal life, through the same Christ, our Lord. Amen

COMMENT: This article was published last year. It is worth reviewing on the eve when Pope Francis prepares to publish the final report on the synod on the family. It makes clear that Pope Francis is wholly a product of John Paul II's "The Church of the New Advent." He has no foot standing in tradition that might cause him to soberly reflect before his acts. He is a destroyer and that is all that can be expected from whatever he publishes. There is no more middle ground.

Like a drunken driver who argues a few more drinks will straighten out the road!

Pope Francis and the New Rome

The most radical part of Francis’ papacy is his embrace of the liberalizing principles of Vatican II—from poverty and sexual ethics to church governance.

By Francis X. Rocca : April 3, 2015

One Saturday last month, Pope Francis celebrated Mass at Ognissanti (All Saints’) Church in one of Rome’s working-class neighborhoods. Little known to tourists or art historians, Ognissanti was the site of a momentous event in the modern history of the Catholic Church: Exactly 50 years earlier, Pope Paul VI had gone there to celebrate the first papal mass in Italian rather than in the traditional Latin.

In marking that anniversary, Pope Francis made plain his view of the vernacular Mass, one of the most visible changes ushered in by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). The practice still pains Catholic traditionalists who mourn the loss of churchwide unity that came with a common language.

Allowing Catholics to pray in their local languages “was truly a courageous act by the church to draw closer to the people of God,” Pope Francis told a crowd gathered outside. “This is important for us, to follow the Mass this way. And there is no going back…Whoever goes back is mistaken.”

In his two years in office, the pontiff has drawn attention for his unconventional gestures—such as personally welcoming homeless people to the Sistine Chapel last month—but those gestures matter most as signs of the radical new direction in which he seeks to lead the Catholic Church: toward his vision of the promise of Vatican II. Both the acclaim and the alarm that Francis has generated as pope have been responses to his role in the long struggle over the council’s legacy.

For a half century, ordinary Catholics and their leaders have debated, often passionately, whether the changes that followed the council went too far or not far enough. Pope Francis’ immediate predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, devoted much of their pontificates to correcting what they deemed unjustified deviations from tradition in the name of Vatican II I (i.e. Hermeneutic of Rupture).

Now Pope Francis has effectively reversed course. In word and deed, he has argued that the church’s troubles reflect not recklessness but timidity in interpreting and applying the principles of Vatican II, especially the council’s call for the church to open itself to the modern world. “It usually takes half a century for a council to begin to sink in,” says Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York. “Now we have a pope who says, ‘Look, we just had five decades of internal debates and controversy about the meaning of Vatican II, and now it’s time to do it.’ And that’s what he’s doing.”[.......]

The changes were dramatic. Rome absolved the Jewish people of collective guilt for the death of Jesus Christ and declared that God’s covenant with them had never been abrogated. Catholics began to hear Orthodox and Protestants described as “separated brethren,” while church leaders spoke of a “fellowship” with non-Christians.

The years following the council brought cultural change to the church, blurring many aspects of Catholic identity. Women ceased to wear veils in church, and Catholics started eating meat on Fridays. Nuns moved from convents to apartments. Interfaith marriage ceased to be taboo. Priests moved from hearing confessions in darkened booths to more conversational settings.

At the same time, the church in Europe and the U.S. saw a steep decline in attendance at Mass and in adherence to traditional morality, with the sexual revolution and the spread of contraception and legalized abortion. A half-century after the council, the population of nuns in the U.S. has declined by more than 70% and the annual number of priestly ordinations by 50%.

Popes John Paul and Benedict, who had played key roles at Vatican II, concluded that the church had gone too fast and too far in innovations ranging from the abandonment of religious garb to the acceptance of liberal ideas on sexual morality. [.....]

He has said that the church should show “mercy” toward divorced and remarried Catholics (whom church law forbids from receiving Communion), flouted liturgical rules to wash the feet of Muslims and women, and received a transsexual at the Vatican.

“This pope is very much a man of [Vatican II],” says Archbishop Blaise J. Cupich of Chicago. “He has an understanding of how the church ought to be positioned at the service of the world, in which we don’t impose but we propose.” [.....]

The pope’s relative silence on certain widely contested moral teachings has left some worried that these questions are now of secondary importance. The pope roused concerns in summer 2013, for instance, when he told the editor of a Jesuit journal that “we cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods.”

Six months into his papacy, Pope Francis had not yet made a major statement on abortion, not even during his homily at a special Vatican Mass with antiabortion activists. “I’m a little bit disappointed in Pope Francis that he hasn’t…said much about unborn children, about abortion,” said Rhode Island Bishop Thomas J. Tobin in September 2013. “Many people have noticed that.”

Church leaders have privately complained that the pope’s oft-quoted comment about gay priests—“Who am I to judge?”—has made their job more difficult in upholding church teachings. In November 2013, Catholic legislators in Illinois cited those words to explain their support for a same-sex marriage bill. [......]

Modernism and Neo-Modernism, built upon linguistic Deconstructionism which denies the intentionality of language, "fabricates a fictitious reality." The Novus Ordo Church can only offer just another "pseudo-reality" to modern man and not the Absolute Truth of God's revelation. The worst thing of all is that most Novus Ordo Catholics are "satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language." No wonder Pope Francis hates the "Absolute Truth" and declared it to be "idolatrous" and "godless"!

Plato's literary activity extended over fifty years, and time and again he asked himself anew: What is it that makes the sophists so dangerous? Toward the end he wrote one more dialogue, the Sophist, in which he added a new element to his answer: "The sophists," he says, "fabricate a fictitious reality." That the existential realm of man could be taken over by pseudo-realities whose fictitious nature threatens to become indiscernible is truly a depressing thought. And yet this Platonic nightmare, I hold, possesses an alarming contemporary relevance. For the general public is being reduced to a state where people not only are unable to find out about the truth but also become unable even to search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language. This, says Plato, is the worst thing that the sophists are capable of wreaking upon mankind by their corruption of the word.

Josef Pieper, Abuse of Language - Abuse of Power

“Bear in mind this feature of the last days…. deceitfulness arises from good men being on the wrong side….”

Naturalism consists in the negation of the possibility of the elevation of our nature to the Supernatural Life and order, or more radically still, in the negation of the very existence of that Life and order. In our day, owing to the progress of the anti-Christian revolt, the more radical meaning has become common. Naturalism may be defined, therefore, as the attitude of mind which denies the reality of the Divine Life of Grace and of our Fall therefrom by Original Sin. It rejects our consequent liability to revolt against the order of the Divine Life, when this Life has been restored to us by our Membership of [in] Christ, and maintains that all social life should be organized on the basis of that denial….. Naturalism means complete sterility in regard to salvation and eternal life……. There is unorganized opposition to the Supernatural Life in each one of us, owing to the Fall. This unorganized opposition of individuals inevitably leads to the formation of little anti-supernatural groups here and there, even without the concerted action of vast organized forces. But the fact that there exists concerted anti-supernatural action on the part of organized bodies is so far removed from the preoccupations of the average Catholic that it needs to be specially stressed and its aims made clear….. It is the good men, good once, we must hope, good still, who are to do the work of anti-Christ and so sadly to crucify the Lord afresh…. Bear in mind this feature of the last days, that this deceitfulness arises from good men being on the wrong side…. It is a challenge to the Catholic Church of a duel to the death.”

Rev. Denis Fahey

Dead Men Talking -

So that faith can exist, it needs the evidence of the empty tomb. It is necessary, like Peter and John, to lose one's own artificial certainties: then you will have the courage to enter into the void. It is necessary that we find the courage to enter into the "grave of God," which we built as the alleged possession of the truth. The faith in the resurrection  in and with Christ is the basis for the emptiness of ourselves.

Easter Greetings to the Franciscans of the Immaculate from Fr. Sabino Ardito, SDB (Salesian) commissar over the Franciscans, who replaced the dead Fr. Volpi, together with his vice-commissars, Fr. Carlo Calloni, OFM and Fr. Gianfranco Ghirlanda, SJ

“Strictly Speaking” - Catholics cannot, without sin, “celebrate Protestant Revolt”!

Cardinal Müller: Catholics Have No Obligation to Celebrate Protestant Revolt

March 29, 2016: “Strictly speaking we Catholics have no reason to celebrate October 31, 1517, the date that is considered the beginning of the Reformation that would lead to the rupture of Western Christianity.
If we are convinced that divine revelation is preserved whole and unchanged through Scripture and Tradition, in the doctrine of the faith, in the sacraments, in the hierarchical constitution of the Church by divine right, founded on the sacrament of holy orders, we cannot accept that there exist sufficient reasons to separate from the Church.”

Eponymous Flower Blog taken from Infocatolica and Chiesa

Church Teaching Reduced to a “Historical Attitude”

Pope Francis Is Good for the Jews

A repair process that began with John Paul II just might be completed by the new pope.

By Francis X. Rocca : Vatican City : June 13, 2013

Nearly half a century ago, the Second Vatican Council corrected the Roman Catholic Church's historical attitude toward Jews with the document “Nostra Aetate,” which exonerated the Jewish people of any collective guilt for the killing of Jesus and affirmed that God's covenant with them had never been abrogated. The document remains a source of controversy among Catholics......

All who have not believed that Jesus Christ was really the Son of God are doomed. Also, all who see the Sacrament of the Body of Christ and do not believe it is really the most holy Body and Blood of the Lord . . . these also are doomed!

St. Francis of Assisi

· Religious Liberty is the doctrinal validation of “Religious Consciousness.”

· Ecumenism is the collectivization and synthesis through dialogue of the individual's “Religious Consciousness.”

· Novus Ordo “faith” is the affirmation of the subjective “Religiousness Consciousness” on the authority of the believer.

· Novus Ordo “dogma” is the historical and transitory expression of “Religiousness Consciousness” for a particular age.

· Novus Ordo “tradition” is the historical experience from which the present “Religious Consciousness” has evolved.

[Modernism is the] synthesis of all heresies [whose] system means the destruction not of the Catholic religion alone, but of all religion.... [Modernists] partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church's open enemies; but what is to be most dreaded and deplored, in her very bosom, and are all the more mischievous the less they keep in the open.... They put themselves forward as reformers of the Church [though they are] thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church.... They assail all that is most sacred in the work of Christ.... [They are] the most pernicious of all the adversaries of the Church... They lay the axe not to the branches and shoots, but to the very root, that is, to the Faith and its deepest fibers.... The most absurd tenet of the Modernists, that every religion according to the different aspect under which it is viewed, must be considered as both natural and supernatural. It is thus that they make consciousness and revelation synonymous. From this they derive the law laid down as the universal standard, according to which religious consciousness is to be put on an equal footing with revelation, and that to it all must submit, even the supreme authority of the Church.

St. Pius X, Pascendi

Regardless of what the next Synod does - The damage is done!

Most certainly, it is. I hear it myself: I hear it from Catholics, I hear it from bishops. People are claiming now, for instance, that the Church has changed her teaching with regard to sexual relations outside of marriage, with regard to the intrinsic evil of homosexual acts. Or people who are within irregular matrimonial unions are demanding to receive Holy Communion, claiming that this is the will of the Holy Father. And we have astounding situations, like the declarations of the bishop of Antwerp with regard to homosexual acts, which go undisciplined, and so we can see that this confusion is spreading, really, in an alarming way.

Cardinal Raymond Burke

“Nothing under the sun is new”

The Arian heresy when it makes its profession of faith confesses much in the same words indeed as we do but not in the same sense. For in the same words as we do, it proclaims God the Father and God the Son, and that by the Son all things were made by God the Father, and that the Son was begotten before time was. But although it agrees with us in using these words, nevertheless, by a sacrilegious interpretation of them it departs from the orthodox sense of the Catholic Church, calling God Father, but not in the sense that He begot the Son; making use of the word Son also, but meaning Son by adoption not by nature, in the sense that He was reckoned as such, not really begotten by the Father.

St. Faustinus, Bishop of Bresica, De Fide, Against the Arians, 380 A.D.

It is better to be on the side of the saints than on the side of the theologians!

Earth has no privilege equal to that of being a member of His Church; and they dishonor both it and Him who extenuate the dismal horrors of that outer darkness in which souls lie that are aliens from the Church. The greatness of our privilege, and, therefore, of the glory of the Sacraments, is necessarily diminished by anything that makes less of the unutterable miseries, and most appalling difficulties of salvation outside the Church. This is the reason why the Saints have ever been so strong in the instincts of their sanctity, as to the wide, weltering, almost hopeless deluge which covers the ruined earth outside the ark. Harsh, to unintelligent, uncharitable kindness, intolerably harsh, as are the judgments of stern theology, the saints have ever felt and spoken more strongly and more peremptorily than the theologians.

Fr. Fredrick William Fabre, On the Blessed Sacrament

COMMENT: Cardinal Kasper began this revolt against the Catholic doctrine regarding the sacrament of marriage two years ago with a heretical declaration and a gross perverse historical distortion to justify his crime which Pope Francis described as “doing theology on one’s knees.” Those who claim that Kasper’s declaration was not heretical do not understand the nature of faith and the standing of the Church’s immemorial ecclesiastical traditions which are necessary attributes of the Faith. Now Kasper cannot suppress his exhilaration before the publication of the document next week that will revolutionize Church praxis under the direction of Pope Francis the Destroyer.

The Novus Ordo Church has treated Church immemorial traditions as matters of mere discipline open to the free and independent will of the legislator. They are reduced to matters of mere “ecclesiastical faith,” not revealed by God, but invented by the Church and left to her authority to create or destroy at will. Ss. Peter & Paul Roman Catholic Mission has rejected this belief as incompatible with the Catholic Faith. We have declared formally our belief that the immemorial traditions are not matters of simple discipline but necessary attributes of the Faith by which alone it can be known and communicated to others. We have done all that is required of us by placing our profession of our Catholic Faith before the Holy Father in Rome through the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. We have received no reply beyond the 1989 Profession of Faith, which profession contains the heretical third addendum demanding from Catholic faithful an unconditional, unqualified obedience to the “authentic magisterium.” Unconditional obedience can be given to God alone therefore the 1989 Profession of Faith is a form of idolatry.

Now the Novus Ordo Church is waking up to the problem that has been endemic since the Vatican Council II. Pray God that they realize that this current corruption in God’s sacraments is as nothing compared to the corruption in His divinely ordained worship and thus, become militant defenders of Catholic truth.

Catholic Faithful are beginning to see clearly the relationship between doctrine and praxis. It is a short step to a full understanding that our immemorial ecclesiastical traditions are not, and never were, matters of mere discipline but rather, they are necessary attributes of the faith without which it cannot be known or communicated to others!

The apprehension of Catholics on the eve of the Post-Synod Exhortation

Roberto de Mattei | Corrispondenza Romana | March 23, 2016

In this Holy Week of 2016, the sentiments and pain of Christ’s Passion being renewed is mingled with deep apprehension about the distressing situation the Church is in. The greatest worries regard the impending Apostolic Post-Synod Exhortation Pope Francis signed on March 19th and which will be published just after Easter. According to the Vatican journalist Luigi Accattoli “rumors foresee a text of no striking doctrinal or juridical affirmations, but rather will include many innovative practical choices regarding marriage preparation and couples in irregular situations: not only for the divorced and remarried but also for cohabiters, marriages with a believer and non-believer and for those only civilly-married.” (Corriere della Sera, March 20th 2016)

What will these “innovative practices” be? The document’s key word is “integration”. Those who are in an irregular situation will be “integrated” into the community: they could become catechists, liturgical animators, godparents for Baptism and Confirmation, best men/bridesmaids at weddings and so on; all activities the traditional praxis of the Church to this day has forbidden them owing to their state of public sin. Yet, Alberto Melloni writes in “La Repubblica”, March 19th “on Communion for the divorced and remarried no novelties are expected. Seeing as the problem is to legitimize a praxis (…), not establish it theologically”. The document does not anticipate a “general rule” of access to the Eucharist, but would allow confessors and individual bishops to permit admission to the Sacraments “case by case”. The novelty, Melloni explains, is based on facts not on words, “by giving responsibility and restoring effective powers to bishops, marking, as Cardinal Kasper said, a real “revolution”.

Let’s imagine someone said: morality exists, but let’s act as if it didn’t. Morality being the norm of human conduct, this would be an invitation to a society without rules: a veritable Far-West morality, in which everything is allowed, as long as it not theorized. Jesus said, “Whoever loves me keeps my commandments” (John 14, 21). In a case like this, in the name of a false, merciful love, God’s commandments would be violated and we would make a mockery of Him. And yet this is exactly the “legitimatizing of praxis” scenario that Melloni hopes for.

If the rumours are true, those who are in a situation of public and permanent sin, could rise to the role of witnesses, guides and educators in the Christian community. This would evidently mean not only for the divorced and remarried but for public cohabiters of every kind, heterosexual or homosexual, indiscriminately. Will it be possible to apply “the hermeneutic of continuity” to a document of this type, meant as an attempt to retain every act or word from the ecclesiastic hierarchy conformable with Tradition, whatever they are? For there to be continuity with the past it is not enough to reaffirm the indissolubility of matrimony. The continuity of doctrine is demonstrated through facts not words. Confronted with these novelties in praxis, how can it be said nothing will change? And how can the hermeneutic of continuity be proposed when it has already failed as far as the Vatican II documents are concerned? [……]

Two years have passed since Cardinal Kasper initiated the synod-debate and the same Kasper is chanting victory today by using the same formula he offered on February 20th 2014: “Doctrine doesn’t change, the novelty regards only pastoral praxis”. Has Kasper really won his battle? In the next few days, we hope with all our heart that our worries are proved wrong by the papal document. Yet should they be confirmed, we hope fervently that those Shepherds of the Church who have sought, over the last two years, to block the way to Kasper’s ideas, now express their opinion clearly on the Post-Synod Exhortation. The text to be published is a pastoral document with no intention of formulating doctrine, but rather, of giving indications for actions.

Should these indications (for actions) not correspond to traditional Catholic praxis, this will need to be said with respectful candour. More than a million Catholics addressed a “Filial Appeal” to Pope Francis, asking him for a clear word on the grave moral problems currently on the table. If this word does not come from the Apostolic Exhortation, we ask the Cardinals who elected him to pronounce it; they have the power to reprimand him, correct him and admonish him, given that nobody may judge a Pope, unless, as the Medieval canon lawyers taught, he departs from the right path of the orthodox faith (Gratianus, Decretum, Pars I, Dist. XL, c. 6).

As we have already said, this heresy will end conservative Catholicism!

“The document will mark the start of the greatest revolution experienced by the Church in 1500 years.”

Cardinal Walter Kasper, comment on the final document of the Synod on the Family to be released directly

This is the reporter that Pope Francis should be calling for advice - He’s Catholic!

“Yet you, Holy Father, who are always cold and detached regarding the dogma of the Church, have uncritically wed yourself to absurd ecological dogmas … making a granitic profession of faith in that absurd climatist ideology… [I]t is improper and ridiculous that a Pope makes the climate and the environment (to which he dedicated the first encyclical he penned) the heart of his preaching… The Lord did not say: 'Convert and believe in global warming,' but rather: “Convert and believe in the Gospel.” And He never commanded: 'Separate your refuse' but rather 'Go and baptize all peoples'“ (p. 134)..... “But above all, Father Bergoglio [a reference to the Pope’s penchant for introducing himself thus], how is it possible that you do not notice and do not indicate other emergencies than those of the climate, or at least with equal insistence? The apostasy of entire peoples from the faith of the true God is not a drama that merits your most ardent appeals? The war against the family and against life? The neglect of Christ and the massacre of Christian communities? It seems that only the environment and other themes of the religion of political correctness merit your passion.
“A great French intellectual, Alain Finkielkraut, has described you as “Supreme Pontiff of the world journalistic ideology.” Is he wrong? Does he exaggerate?
“In effect, in 'your' Church it seems that the themes of separating refuse and recycling take precedence over the tragedy of entire peoples who, in the turn of a few years, have abandoned the faith. You sound the alarm over “global warming” while the Church for two millennia has sounded it concerning the fire of Hell” (p. 142).

“Before the spiritual catastrophe of the eternal perdition of multitudes, which induced the mother of God to come earnestly to Earth, I find it frankly incomprehensible that you preoccupy yourself for the most part—as you did in your encyclical Laudato si —with biodiversity, the fate of worms and little reptiles, the lakes, and the abuse of plastic bottles and air-conditioning” (p. 148).

“I invite you, reread attentively these words because they describe dramatically what is occurring during your pontificate. In fact, it is precisely you personally, Holy Father, who accuse of 'fundamentalism' those who have a clear and certain faith and bear witness to their fidelity to Catholic doctrine….
“You, curiously, are convinced that the danger for the Church of today is Christians fervent in their faith and those pastors who defend the Catholic creed. In your Evangelii gaudium you attack “some who dream of a monolithic doctrine” and those who “use a language completely orthodox.”
“Should we then prefer those who are carried here and there by every ideology and use heretical language? Evidently yes, seeing that they are never attacked by you.
“If one chooses any day, one will almost always find that you, in your discourse, attack those you call 'rigorists,' 'rigid,' that is, men with fervent faith, whom you identify with 'Scribes and Pharisees'“ (p. 153-155).
“(You)should overcome your personal resentment toward those who have studied; you should know that, in the Christian horizon, it is completely absurd to oppose mercy to Truth, because both are incarnated in the same Jesus Christ. Thus it is false to oppose doctrine to the pastoral, because that would be to oppose the Logos (doctrine) to the Good Shepherd (the Truth made flesh): Jesus is the Logos (the Truth made flesh) and, at the same time, the Good Shepherd” (p. 159).

“… closed hearts that often hide even behind the teaching of the Church, or behind good intentions, to sit in the chair of Moses and judge, sometimes with superficiality and superiority, to judge difficult cases and wounded families….
“The true defenders of doctrine are not those who defend the letter but the spirit; not the idea but the man; not the formula, but the gratuitous love of God and of his pardon.”
“So doing, do you not think that you have disqualified your predecessors and all the Magisterium of the Church, in order to affirm your strictly personal concept of mercy different from the doctrine of the Church?...
“Evidently, even Jesus would have been, according to you, doctrinaire, a rigorist, one who defends the idea instead of the man.
“In effect—applying your criterion—we would have to say that Jesus would not have been accepted to a seminary during your pontificate because he was the most fundamentalist of all; in fact, not only was he certain of the truth, but he proclaimed himself the Truth made flesh ('I am the way, the truth, and the life.' Jn 14, 6).” [……….]

Antonio Socci’s La Profezia Finale

Hermeneutics of Continuity/Discontinuity

Doctrina: (Latin) “teaching, body of teachings, learning,”

Catholic Truth Teaches:

It is a common complaint, unfortunately too well founded, that there are large numbers of Christians in our own time who are entirely ignorant of those truths necessary for salvation. … And so Our Predecessor, Benedict XIV, had just cause to write: “We declare that a great number of those who are condemned to eternal punishment suffer that everlasting calamity because of ignorance of those mysteries of faith which must be known and believed in order to be numbered among the elect. [……] There can be no doubt, Venerable Brethren, that this most important duty rests upon all who are pastors of souls. On them, by command of Christ, rest the obligations of knowing and of feeding the flocks committed to their care; and to feed implies, first of all, to teach. "I will give you pastors according to my own heart," God promised through Jeremias, "and they shall feed you with knowledge and doctrine." Hence the Apostle Paul said: "Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel," thereby indicating that the first duty of all those who are entrusted in any way with the government of the Church is to instruct the faithful in the things of God. [……] What We have said so far demonstrates the supreme importance of religious instruction. We ought, therefore, to do all that lies in our power to maintain the teaching of Christian doctrine with full vigor, and where such is neglected, to restore it; for in the words of Our Predecessor, Benedict XIV, “There is nothing more effective than catechetical instruction to spread the glory of God and to secure the salvation of souls.” […….] On every Sunday and holy day, with no exception, throughout the year, all parish priests and in general all those having the care of souls, shall instruct the boys and girls, for the space of an hour from the text of the Catechism on those things they must believe and do in order to attain salvation.[…….] And now, Venerable Brethren, permit Us to close this letter by addressing to you these words of Moses: "If any man be on the Lord's side, let him join with me." We pray and entreat you to reflect on the great loss of souls due solely to ignorance of divine things. You have doubtless accomplished many useful and most praiseworthy works in your respective dioceses for the good of the flock entrusted to your care, but before all else, and with all possible zeal and diligence and care, see to it and urge on others that the knowledge of Christian doctrine pervades and imbues fully and deeply the minds of all. Here, using the words of the Apostle Peter, We say, "According to the gift that each has received, administer it to one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God."

St. Pius X, Acerbo Nimis (On Teaching Christine Doctrine)

Pope Francis Opines:

Joy comes from faith, not doctrine, pope says

Carol Glatz | CatholicNewsService | Mar. 26, 2015 | The Francis Chronicles | Vatican City

"God's law is about love for God and for others, not cold, abstract doctrine," Pope Francis said at a morning Mass.

"It's sad to be a believer without joy and there is no joy when there is no faith, when there is no hope, when there is no law, but only rules and cold doctrine," he said at the Mass Thursday in the Domus Sanctae Marthae.

"The joy of faith, the joy of the Gospel is the touchstone of a person's faith. Without joy, that person is not a true believer," he said, according to Vatican Radio.

In his homily, the pope pointed to Abraham as a model of faith, hope and joy in God's covenant. But such joy was absent in the doctors of the law described in the day's Gospel reading; they threw stones at Jesus after he told them how Abraham "rejoiced to see my day."

"These doctors of the law didn't understand," Pope Francis said. "They didn't understand the joy of the promise; they didn't understand the joy of hope; they didn't understand the joy of the covenant."

The doctors of the law "didn't know how to rejoice because they had lost the sense of joy that only comes from faith," he said. Not only did they lack faith, "they had lost the law. Because at the heart of the law is love -- love for God and for one's neighbor."

"They only had a system of clear-cut doctrines," he said.

As "men without faith, without law and attached to doctrine," they lived in a world that was "abstract, a world without love, a world without faith, a world without hope, a world without trust, a world without God. And this is why they could not rejoice," the pope said. "Their hearts had petrified."

He asked that people pray for "the grace to be jubilant in the hope" of knowing and encountering Jesus and for the "grace of joy."[…….]

The Holy Office Letter of 1949 –

The Novel Doctrine of Salvation by Implicit Desire

This Heretical Letter Is the Doctrinal Foundation for Modernist Ecclesiology and Ecumenism

It is not always required that one be actually incorporated as a member of the Church (for salvation), but this at least is required: that one adhere to it in wish and desire. It is not always necessary that this be explicit . . . but when a man labors under invincible ignorance, God accepts even an implicit will, called by that name because it is contained in the good disposition of soul in which a man wills to conform his will to the will of God.

Holy Office letter to Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston, August 9, 1949, DS 3870

NOTE: The Holy Office letter of 1949 was never entered into the Acta Apostolicae Sedis and therefore it has no greater authority than a private letter from one bishop to another. The quote provided authoritatively referenced a citation from the encyclical of Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis. The citation was mistranslated to entirely corrupt the meaning of what Pope Pius XII said. The 1949 Letter was then published by Cardinal Cushing of Boston, MA in 1952, one year after the death of its author, Francesco Cardinal Marchetti-Selvaggiani. The letter was included in the 1962 edition of Denzinger, not by virtue of the authority of the letter, but rather by the modernist agenda of its editor, Rev. Karl Rahner. This letter has come to be the doctrinal foundation for the new Ecumenical Ecclesiology being cited in the decree Lumen Gentium at Vatican II. The new Ecumenical Ecclesiology has replaced St. Robert Bellarmine’s traditional definition that the Catholic Church “is the society of Christian believers united in the profession of the one Christian faith and the participation in the one sacramental system under the government of the Roman Pontiff.” It is this new Ecclesiology that is the underpinning for the Ecumenical transmutation of nearly every Tradition in the Latin rite since Vatican II, the most important of which is the traditional Roman rite of the Mass. The 1949 letter is the foundation of sand on which John Paul II’s ecumenical prayer meeting at Assisi stands.

Fr. Waters - persecuted by those who hope that “true Liturgy shall become extinct.”

The holy Fathers who have written upon the subject of anti-Christ, and of the prophecies of Daniel, without a single exception, as far as I know - and they are the Fathers both of the East and of the West, the Greek and the Latin Church - all of them unanimously say that in the latter end of the world, during the reign of anti-Christ, the Holy sacrifice of the Altar will cease. In the work of the end of the world ascribed to St. Hippolytus, after a long description of the afflictions of the last days, we read as follows: "The Churches shall lament with a great lamentation, for there shall be offered no more oblation nor worship acceptable to God. The sacred buildings of the churches shall be as hovels; and the precious Body and Blood of Christ shall not be manifest in those days; the true Liturgy shall become extinct.... Such is the universal testimony of the Fathers of the early centuries."

Cardinal Henry Edward Manning

“On those who continue in Sin, trusting in the Mercy of God”

You say that God’s mercy is great, since He died on the cross for the salvation of sinners. It is indeed great, and a striking proof of its greatness is the fact that He bears with the blasphemy and malice of those who so presume upon the merits of His death as to make His cross, which was intended to destroy the kingdom of evil, a reason for multiplying sin. Had you a thousand lives you would owe them all to Him, yet you rob Him of that one life which you have and for which He died. This crime was more bitter to Our Saviour than death itself. For it He reproaches us by the mouth of His prophet, though He does not complain of His sufferings: “The wicked have wrought upon my back; they have extended their iniquity.” (Ps. 128:3).

Who taught you to reason that because God was good you could sin with impunity? Such is not the teaching of the Holy Spirit. On the contrary, those who listen to His voice reason thus: God is good; therefore, I must serve Him, obey Him, and love Him above all things. God is good; therefore, I will turn to Him with all my heart; I will hope for pardon, notwithstanding the number and enormity of my sins. God is goods therefore, I must be good if I would imitate Him. God is good; therefore, it would be base ingratitude in me to offend Him by sin.

Thus, the greater you represent God’s goodness the more heinous are your crimes against Him. Nor will these offenses remain unpunished, for God’s justice, protects His mercy, cannot permit your sinful abuse of it to remain unavenged.

This is not a new pretext; the world has long made use of it. In ancient times it distinguished the false from the true prophets. While the latter announced to the people, in God’s name, the justice with which He would punish their iniquities, the former, speaking in their own name, promised them mercy which was but a false peace and security.

You say God’s mercy is great; but if you presume upon it you show that you have never studied the greatness of His justice. Had you done so you would cry out to the Lord with the psalmist: “Who knoweth the power of thy anger, and for thy fear who can number thy wrath?” (Ps. 89:11-12).

But to dissipate your illusion, let me ask you to contemplate this justice in the only way in which we may have any knowledge of it — that is, in its effects here below.

Besides the result we are seeking, we shall reap another excellent advantage by exciting in our hearts the fear of God, which, in the opinion of the saints, is the treasure and defence of the soul. Without the fear of God the soul is like a ship without ballast; the winds of human or divine favor may sweep it to destruction. Notwithstanding that she may be richly laden with virtue, she is in continual danger of being wrecked on the rocks of temptation, if she be not stayed by this ballast of the fear of God. Therefore, not only those who have just entered God’s service, but those who have long been of His household, should continue in this salutary fear; the former by reason of their past transgressions, the latter on account of their weakness, which exposes them to danger at every moment.

Venerable Louis of Granada, The Sinner’s Guide, On Those who Continue in Sin Trusting in the Mercy of God

High Treason: “The betrayal of your sovereign by acts of aid and comfort to the monarch’s enemies.”

On the one hand, therefore, it is necessary that the mission of teaching whatever Christ had taught should remain perpetual and immutable, and on the other that the duty of accepting and professing all their doctrine should likewise be perpetual and immutable. “Our Lord Jesus Christ, when in His Gospel He testifies that those who not are with Him are His enemies, does not designate any special form of heresy, but declares that all heretics who are not with Him and do not gather with Him, scatter His flock and are His adversaries: He that is not with Me is against Me, and he that gathereth not with Me scattereth” (S. Cyprianus, Ep. lxix., ad Magnum, n. I).

The Church, founded on these principles and mindful of her office, has done nothing with greater zeal and endeavour than she has displayed in guarding the integrity of the faith. Hence she regarded as rebels and expelled from the ranks of her children all who held beliefs on any point of doctrine different from her own. The Arians, the Montanists, the Novatians, the Quartodecimans, the Eutychians, did not certainly reject all Catholic doctrine: they abandoned only a tertian portion of it. Still who does not know that they were declared heretics and banished from the bosom of the Church? In like manner were condemned all authors of heretical tenets who followed them in subsequent ages. “There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by our Lord and handed down by Apostolic tradition” (Auctor Tract. de Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos).

Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum, On the Unity of the Church

Religious Liberty: The belief that the dignity of the creature voids the First Commandment

The great achievement of the Second Vatican Council and those who deny it Fabrizio Mastrofini, Rome 3-21-13

The Austrian theologian Jan-Heiner Tück, born in 1967 and professor of Dogmatic Theology in Vienna, has cut short the debate on whether the Council has brought continuity to the Church or not.…..What is the Council’s fundamental achievement? The clear, precise and irrefutable affirmation of religious freedom and freedom of conscience as basic human rights. Tück insisted: “Above all the Council explicitly recognized the right to freedom of religion and conscience, that not even 100 years before had been listed as one of ‘the errors of our time’ by Pius IX”. The Austrian theologian explained further: “One of the greatest achievements of the Council is to recognize freedom of religion and conscience as human rights.” This is what is at stake in the negotiations with the Lefebvrians and in the relations with all ultra-conservative Catholic groups. However the achievement of the Second Vatican Council cannot be doubted and this ought to be the starting point for the Church to look to the future and to stop looking backwards to the past.

Voice of the Family analysis reveals serious dangers posed by synod final report March 13, 2016

Voice of the Family is pleased to publish a comprehensive analysis of the Final Report of the Synod of Bishops to the Holy Father. Our analysis argues that the Final Report, which was approved by the Ordinary Synod on the Family on 24 October 2015, undermines the teaching of the Catholic Church on matters relating to human life, marriage and the family. By striving towards bringing Catholic moral teaching in line with the norms prevailing in the modern world, the report pursues an approach that runs contrary to divine revelation and the natural moral law.

The Final Report:

· endorses a central aspect of “gender theory” by asserting that biological sex and socio-cultural “gender” can be distinguished (paragraph 58)

· threatens the rights of parents as the primary educators of their children by asserting that the family “cannot be the only place for formation in matters of sexuality” with regard to “young people at the age of puberty and adolescence” (paragraph 58)

· undermines the Church’s teaching on the nature and the ends of marriage through the use of ambiguous language and by failing to adequately express central doctrines (paragraphs 1, 4, 39, 40, 47, 49, 84, 85, 86)

· attempts to prepare the way for “divorced and remarried” Catholics to receive Holy Communion without true repentance and amendment of life through the use of ideological language in place of the Church’s traditional terminology, by distorting Catholic teaching on the nature and effects of mortal sin, and by obscuring previous Church teaching by means of omission and selective quotation (paragraphs 84, 85, 86)

· undermines Catholic teaching as regards contraception by failing to restate the Church’s teaching while simultaneously presenting a confused exposition on the nature of conscience (paragraph 63)

· undermines the Church’s teaching on artificial methods of reproduction by failing to restate that the primary reason for the immorality of such practices is the separation of procreative and unitive elements of human sexuality, thus implying that methods that do not cause destruction of human embryos might be permissible (paragraph 33)

· states that the Church “collaborates in the development of a new ecological culture” which includes “a new mentality, new policies, new educational programmes, a new manner of living and a new spirituality”. The analysis demonstrates that the path of collaboration is leading Vatican bodies to collaborate with the promotion of abortion and contraception and with attempts to undermine parental rights and authority (paragraph 16).

The analysis discusses the relationship between these attempts to conform Catholic teaching to modern ideology with the heresy of modernism (see Chapter IV). It also draws attention to further problems in the Final Report, including:

· a distorted and naturalistic presentation of the gospel, which neglects its fundamentally supernatural nature, while emphasising its association with “values” such as “open to a diversity of people”, “the protection of creation” and the “transformation of unjust social structures” (Chapter I)

· an anthropocentric understanding of the gospel that alleges, for example, that the gospel is about “the dignity of the person, his/her freedom and respect for his/her rights” (Chapter I)

· the omission of any discussion of the fundamental vocation of the family with regards to man’s final end, which is union with God in the beatific vision of heaven (Chapter I)

· a misleading presentation of the nature of mercy due to lack of proper consideration of divine and human justice (Chapters I & V)

· a confused understanding of the relationship between the Church and the processes of historical development (see Chapters I & II)

· the omission of any discussion of the natural law, which leads to the conflation of the natural and supernatural orders and threatens the understanding that moral principles are immutable (Chapter III)

· a call for changes to the terminology which the Church uses to communicate her teachings, which threaten the Church’s ability to effectively transmit the divine revelation entrusted to her (Chapter VI).

The Final Report of the Ordinary Synod gravely endangers the most vulnerable members of the human family through its omissions and distortions of Catholic doctrine. It is clearly the duty of all who are concerned about the protection of the family to resolutely oppose the approach adopted by both synods. To fail to oppose doctrines and actions harmful to the integrity of the Catholic faith and to the family, because of a false sense of obedience, would be a grave betrayal of our duty of fidelity to God and to the weakest amongst us.

Now it can be said briefly that those who defend blindly and indiscriminately any judgment whatsoever of the Supreme Pontiff concerning every matter weaken the authority of the Apostolic See. They do not support it; they subvert it. They do not fortify it. Peter has no need of our lies; he has no need of our adulation.

Fr. Melchoir Cano, O.P., First Chair of Theology at the University of Salamanca, Theologian at the Council of Trent

The Novus Ordo Church by any other name would smell the same!

Pope John Paul II’s first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, was addressed primarily to members of the “sons and daughters of the Church.” So, exactly what Church is this that he was addressing? Not once does the word “Roman” appear in the letter. Not once does the word “Catholic” occur. The letter is addressed to the “Church of the New Advent.” This Church is referenced by name four times in the document. The Church of the New Advent traces its roots to Vatican II Council. Pope John Paul II said in the letter that, “I am entering into the rich inheritance of the recent pontificates. This inheritance has struck deep roots in the awareness of the Church in an utterly new way, quite unknown previously, thanks to the Second Vatican Council.” The Church of the New Advent in “an utterly new way, quite unknown previously” has its own worship, doctrines, morality and traditions which are entirely foreign to the Roman Catholic Church. This Church of the New Advent has not “struck deep roots.” In fact, it has no roots at all. We should be thankful to God that Pope Francis, who is entirely divorced from any Catholic traditional doctrinal and moral formation that might mask his actions, should make evident to all the “utterly new” moral implications of the Church of the New Advent’s “utterly new” doctrines in a manner in which no faithful Catholic can fail to recognize as utterly foreign to the Church founded by Jesus Christ.

Germany “will end up like Syria or worse.”

Twenty percent of the German population is now made up of foreigners. The boat is full to everyone but these humanitarians who control politics and the media and the universities. I'm talking about the dumb as rocks German girls who stand at the train stations bellowing, "Welcome refugees.".... But I don't feel sorry for these sluts.... Because, unless there is a dramatic course correction politically, this country is going to split right down the middle. We are going to have a civil war with thousands of casualties. I am sure of this because I have been listening to Muslims in the Ghetto since the year 2000 and they see the future more clearly than the Germans. They see nothing but weak, ugly humanitarians, who give the immigrants everything they want, but at the same time are too weak to defend their own wives and their own country. For decades now, there have been imams in the ghetto who have been calling for jihad against the unbelievers: "Not now, but soon. Soon, boys. Before long we will be in the majority in this town. The dumb Germans aren't having any children. They are the only ones who don't know what is going on. The Islamists among us have known for a long time that a storm is brewing. In a few years it will arrive and 'we' will take over the Land of the Germans." But I am not part of the "we." I don't want this to happen because I'm a patriot. Not that I like Germans particularly. Not at all. I don't consider myself a German, but rather an Arab. But I also don't hate Germans. I don't want to deprive them of anything and don't want to do them harm and most of all don't want to see Germans and Muslims fighting to the death. Because if things continue as they are now going, we are soon going to have a war. I'm telling you now; a lot of people are going to die. The Islamists are going to start lopping off heads and will raise the black flag in Berlin, and Nazis will be shooting women wearing the hijab or people with dark hair because they don't like their looks. That's why I'm a patriot. I want to preserve Germany from destruction. This crazy politics of tolerance and open borders is going to lead to the opposite state of affairs. It will lead to mass murder, and you end up like Syria or worse.

Sajad, an Arab Muslim raised in Germany, excerpt from his article published in Culture Wars Magazine

Meanwhile, Pope Francis lobbies for the destruction of our homes, countries and the West while not offering so much as a word about the Zionist inspired wars that have created the refugee crisis.

Francis urges nations to open their hearts and welcome immigrants

vatican city | iacopo scaramuzzi | 16/03/2016

“I like to see nations and leaders who open their hearts and their doors" to migrants. Pope Francis said this during today’s General Audience in St. Peter’s Square which focused on the Book of Consolation in which the Prophet Jeremiah speaks about the return of the people of Israel from exile “as a great symbol of consolation given to the heart that repents”.

Not a single western nation has a birth rate to replace existing populations

Pope says 3 children per family is about right. Catholics don’t need to breed ‘like rabbits.’

By Lindsey Bever| January 20, 2015
Here’s Pope Francis' exact words from the Vatican Insider:

"I believe that three children per family, from what the experts say, is the key number for sustaining the population. The key word here is responsible parenthood and each person works out how to exercise this with the help of their pastor. … Sorry, some people think that in order to be good Catholics we have to breed like rabbits, right? Responsible parenthood: This is why there are marriage support groups in the Church with people who are experts on such issues; and there are pastors and I know that there are many acceptable solutions that have helped with this. And another thing: For poor people, children are a treasure, prudence is needed here too, it is true. Responsible parenthood but also recognizing the generosity of that father or mother who see their child as a treasure."

Benedict/Ratzinger Repents - Pray that it is sincere!

Former Pope Benedict Says Church is Now Facing a Two-Sided Deep Crisis
Maike Hickson | LifeSiteNews | March 16, 2016

On March 16, speaking publicly on a rare occasion, Pope Benedict XVI gave an interview to Avvenire, the daily newspaper of the Italian Bishops' Conference, in which he spoke of a “two-sided deep crisis” the Church is facing in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. The report has already hit Germany courtesy of Vaticanist Guiseppe Nardi, of the German Catholic news website Katholisches.info.
Pope Benedict reminds us of the formerly indispensable Catholic conviction of the possibility of the loss of eternal salvation, or that people go to hell:
"The missionaries of the 16th century were convinced that the unbaptized person is lost forever. After the [Second Vatican] Council, this conviction was definitely abandoned. The result was a two-sided, deep crisis. Without this attentiveness to the salvation, the Faith loses its foundation."
He also speaks of a “profound evolution of Dogma” with respect to the Dogma that there is no salvation outside the Church. This purported change of dogma has led, in the pope's eyes, to a loss of the missionary zeal in the Church – “any motivation for a future missionary commitment was removed.” Pope Benedict asks the piercing question that arose after this palpable change of attitude of the Church: “Why you should try to convince the people to accept the Christian faith when they can be saved even without it?” As to the other consequences of this new attitude in the Church, the Catholics themselves, in Benedict's eyes, were less attached to their Faith: If there are those who can save their souls with other means, “why should the Christian be bound to the necessity of the Christian Faith and its morality?” asked the pope. And he concludes: “But if Faith and Salvation are not any more interdependent, even Faith becomes less motivating.”
Pope Benedict also refutes both the idea of the “anonymous Christian” as developed by Karl Rahner, as well as the indifferentist idea that all religions are equally valuable and helpful to attain eternal life. He says: “Even less acceptable is the solution proposed by the pluralistic theories of religion, for which all religions, each in its own way, would be ways of salvation and, in this sense, must be considered equivalent  in their effects.” In this context, he also touches upon the exploratory  ideas of the now-deceased Jesuit Cardinal, Henri de Lubac, about Christ's putatively “vicarious substitutions” which have to be now again “further reflected upon.” That is to say, Christ's own acts in the place of others in order to save them eternally.
With regard to man's relation to technology and to love, Pope Benedict reminds us of the importance of human affection, saying that man still yearns in his heart “that the Good Samaritan come to his aid.” He continues: “In the harshness of the world of technology – in which feelings to not count anymore – the hope for a saving love grows, a love which would be given freely and generously.” Benedict also reminds his audience that: “The Church is not self-made, it was created by God and is continuously formed by Him. This finds expression in the Sacraments, above all in that of Baptism: I enter into the Church not by a bureaucratic act, but with the help of this Sacrament.” Benedict also insists that, always, “we need Grace and forgiveness.”

So now we are to understand that only a “theologian” can know the fundamental Catholic doctrines and moral laws necessary to save our soul?

Vatican’s doctrine chief: Pope is not a ‘professional theologian’

LifeSiteNews | ROME | March 14, 2016 – In a recent interview, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), acknowledged that he must sometimes correct Pope Francis on matters of dogma, noting that the pope is not a “professional theologian.”

In a March 1 interview with the German newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, Cardinal Müller was asked about his relationship with the pope and whether he is his strongest opponent. Müller first explains that he had been appointed by Pope Benedict XVI. Concerning Benedict, he adds: “With him, I was closely connected due to the fact that we are both academic theologians, we have the same [German] nationality and share the same world-view.”

However, with the current pope, the relationship is different. “Pope Francis is not a 'professional theologian', but has been largely formed by his experiences in the field of the pastoral care, which is very different here with us [in the West].” Müller stresses that the current pope has “a highly spiritual and theological power of judgment which follows the spirituality of the founder of his own [Jesuit] order, St. Ignatius of Loyola.” In Müller's eyes, it is “absolutely legitimate” that the pope lets his own life experience influence his papacy. And, he adds: “Thanks be to God, I have lived myself in Southern America for a long time, and so I can understand and assess well all of this [the special pastoral approach of the pontiff].”

The Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger then asked whether Müller must sometimes dogmatically correct what the pope says in his charismatic enthusiasm. Cardinal Müller answers: “That is what he [Pope Francis] has said already three or four times himself, publicly (laughs); and then he gave me a hug so that – as he said – the gossip ceases with regard to this matter.”

Müller also says that one should not underestimate the theological understanding of the pope. Müller adds: “Again and again, he [the pope] refers to the teaching of the Church as the framework of interpretation, also in his spontaneous remarks in interviews.” Therefore, Cardinal Müller also considers the idea that he himself is the “number one enemy of the pope” to be a “fairy tale.”

In Müller's eyes, there is “some intentional disinformation on the side of those who want to claim the pope for their own ideologies instead of understanding him in the light of the teaching of the Church.”  He then continues by saying that it must be clear to any clear mind that

…the pope – according to the Catholic Faith – has been established by Christ Himself; and the Congregation for the Faith with its 25 cardinals who are appointed by the pope is the instrument legitimized by the pope in order to help him – and thereby to partake – in the exercise of his universal teaching office. But we [at the CDF] are not called to exercise the art of flattery but, rather, to use our expert knowledge.

If Religious Liberty were true, those who profess it as true would have to respect the rights of anyone who denies it as true. That is, liberals would have to respect the liberty of traditional Catholics to practice Catholic tradition. But that is not what they do. It is never applied indiscriminately; therefore, the doctrine has nothing to do with truth. It is simply a political tool of coercion to permit the accommodation of error. The hypocrisy of these liberals would make a Pharisee blush.

The “light of Faith will be extinguished” because of the “corruption of customs.” These “customs” are our ecclesiastical traditions without which the Faith cannot be known or communicated to others! Those who keep the Faith will be those who keep and defend the “customs”!

At the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, various heresies will be propagated in this land. As these heresies spread and dominate, the precious light of Faith will be extinguished in souls by the almost total corruption of customs. During this period, there will be great physical suffering and moral calamities, both public and private. The small number of souls who, hidden, will preserve the treasure of the Faith and the virtues will suffer an unspeakable cruel and prolonged martyrdom. Many of them will succumb to death from the violence of the suffering, and those who sacrifice themselves for Church and Country will be counted as martyrs. In order to free men from bondage to these heresies, those whom the merciful love of my Most Holy Son will destine for that restoration will need great strength of will, constancy, valor and much confidence in God. To test this faith and confidence of the just, there will be occasions when everything will seem to be lost and paralyzed. This will be the happy beginning of the complete restoration.

Blessed Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Good Success to Mother Mariana de Jesus Torres

True Doctrinal Development –

If you sow wheat, you get an increase in wheat; if you sow lies, you get an increase in lies.

"The growth of religion in the soul must be analogous to the growth of the body, which, though in process of years it is developed and attains its full size, yet remains still the same. There is a wide difference between the flower of youth and the maturity of age; yet they who were once young are still the same now that they have become old, insomuch that though the stature and outward form of the individual are changed, yet his nature is one and the same, his person is one and the same. An infant's limbs are small, a young man's large, yet the infant and the young man are the same. Men when full grown have the same number of joints that they had when children; and if there be any to which maturer age has given birth these were already present in embryo, so that nothing new is produced in them when old which was not already latent in them when children.

This, then, is undoubtedly the true and legitimate rule of progress, this the established and most beautiful order of growth, that mature age ever develops in the man those parts and forms which the wisdom of the Creator had already framed beforehand in the infant... In like manner, it behooves Christian doctrine to follow the same laws of progress, so as to be consolidated by years, enlarged by time, refined by age, and yet, withal, to continue uncorrupt and unadulterate, complete and perfect in all the measurement of its parts, and, so to speak, in all its proper members and senses, admitting no change, no waste of its distinctive property, no variation in its limits...

This rather should be the result,--there should be no discrepancy between the first and the last. From doctrine which was sown as wheat, we should reap, in the increase, doctrine of the same kind--wheat also; so that when in process of time any of the original seed is developed, and now flourishes under cultivation, no change may ensue in the character of the plant. There may supervene shape, form, variation in outward appearance, but the nature of each kind must remain the same."

St. Vincent Lerins, Commonitory

“More souls have been sent to Hell by the mercy of God, than by His justice.”

The Devil brings sinners to Hell by closing their eyes to the dangers of perdition. He first blinds them, and then leads them with himself to eternal torments. (...) ‘Commit this sin, and confess it afterwards’. Behold the deceitful artifice by which the Devil has brought so many thousands of Christians to Hell. We scarcely ever find a Christian so sunk in despair as to intend to damn himself. All the wicked sin with the hope of afterwards going to Confession. But by this illusion, how many have brought themselves to perdition! ‘But God is merciful,’ behold another common delusion, by which the Devil encourages sinners to persevere in a life of sin! A certain author has said that more souls have been sent to Hell by the mercy of God, than by His justice. This is indeed the case; for men are induced by the deceits of the Devil to persevere in sin, through confidence in God’s mercy; and thus they are lost. ‘God is merciful,’ they say. Who denies it? But, great as His mercy, how many does He every day send to Hell? God is merciful, but he is also just, and his mercy is to them that fear Him. But with regard to those who abuse His mercy and despise Him, he exercises justice.

St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori

What could be more evil than sending a sincere penitent away from the confessional without forgiveness or failing to help an insincere penitent to become sincere? Only the sacrament validly received confers the forgiveness of sins without perfect contrition, and perfect contrition requires as a necessary attribute the determined intention to worthily receive the sacrament of confession.

The Latest Bergoglian Novelty: Confession without Confession

by Christopher A. Ferrara | 03/07/16

If only it were possible to avoid what has become an almost continuous commentary on the sayings and doings of Pope Francis. But one does not ignore the public statements of a Pope, especially from this Fatima perspective. And at this point in the Bergoglian pontificate, the landscape of the Church is cratered by the bombshells Francis has been dropping almost weekly in off- the-cuff homilies, meditations, press conferences and other settings outside the four corners of an encyclical or other formal papal pronouncement.

Here is one bombshell from February, on Ash Wednesday. It was dropped in a sermon given to the “Missionaries of Mercy” during the Mass at which they received their “mandate,” which includes “faculties to absolve certain sins reserved to the Holy See” (all of which can already be absolved by any parish priest). The Missionaries were told incredibly, but perhaps not surprisingly at this point that they ought to grant absolution even to penitents who are too ashamed to speak and have not expressed any firm purpose of amendment because they expect to sin again:

“If someone comes to you and feels something must be removed from him, but perhaps he is unable to say it, but you understand it’s all right, he says it this way, with the gesture of coming. First condition. Second, he is repentant. If someone comes to you it is because he doesn’t want to fall into these situations, but he doesn’t dare say it, he is afraid to say it and then not be able to do it. But if he cannot do it, ad impossibila nemo tenetur [no one is held to do the impossible]. And the Lord understands these things, the language of gestures. Have open arms, to understand what is inside that heart that cannot be said or said this way somewhat because of shame ... you understand me. You must receive everyone with the language with which they can speak.”

Leaving no doubt of his intentions in this regard, Francis said the same thing the day before Febmary 9) to a group of Capuchins, thus suggesting that he wishes every priest in the Church to grant absolution to mute penitents:

“There are so many languages in life: the language of word, and there are also languages of gestures. If a person approaches me, at the confessional, it is because he feels something that weighs on him, which he wants to remove from himself. Perhaps he does not know how to say it, but this is his gesture. If such a person approaches, it is because he wishes to change, not to do something anymore, to change, to be another sort of person, and he says it with the gesture of approaching, he says it with the gesture of approaching.... It is not necessary to ask questions: ‘But you, you . . .?’

“If a person comes [to Confession], it is because in his soul he does not want to do something anymore. But so often they cannot, because they are conditioned by their psychology, by their life, by their situation ... Ad impossbilia nemo tenetur.”

First of all, this flatly erroneous advice amounts to the destruction of the sacrament because it eliminates confession from Confession, thus eliminating the very matter of the sacrament, leaving only the form. No citation to Church teaching should be necessary for such an obvious point, but one could cite simply the new Catechism (§ 1456), which affirms unequivocally: “Confession to a priest is an essential part of the sacrament of Penance: ‘All mortal sins of which penitents after a diligent self-examination are conscious must be recounted by them in confession, even if they are most secret...”

Secondly, as for the notion that “shame” excuses one from the duty to recount one’s mortal sins in the confessional, such shame is born of pride: the penitent does not wish to be humiliated by revealing his wave sins to the priest. It is utterly astounding that a Roman Pontiff— even this one — could declare that a sinner afflicted by pride, who cannot bear to speak of his sins to his own confessor, can receive absolution while pridefully avoiding embarrassment.

Lastly, equally destructive of the sacrament, and equally astounding, is Francis’ idea that to ask a sinner to express a firm purpose of amendment when he doubts that he can amend his life is to ask the impossible because “psychology.., their life.., their situation” make it impossible to stop sinning. Who wouldn’t be covered by that excuse for sinning, and what then becomes of the requirement of a firm purpose of amendment without which absolution is invalid? Francis apparently thinks he can dispense with it, although neither he nor any confessor has the power to do so.

As Saint Alphonsus, a Doctor of the Church, teaches, a firm purpose of amendment “is the inseparable companion of true contrition” and “a necessary condition to the forgiveness of sin... It is impossible for God to pardon the sinner who still retains the will to offend Him.... Who can doubt the confession of such a man is a mockery of penance? Who can believe that his absolution was of any value?”

Perhaps I am being overly suspicious. but it seems to me that this unbelievable call for the granting of absolution to mute sinners who are not willing or able to commit to an amendment of life is yet another move toward the endgame of admitting public adulterers in second or third “marriages” to Holy Communion. People living in adulterous unions need only insist that the confessor follow Francis’ advice and not ask them any questions about their sins because they are “too ashamed” to discuss them and find it “impossible” to cease committing them because of their “psychology.., their life.., their situation.” Many priests will do just that and may have done so for decades, but without the benefit of a papal wink and nod. The resulting mockery of the Sacrament of Confession will lead to who knows how many invalid absolutions.

The Catholic mind is all but overwhelmed by the ongoing debacle of this pontificate. Surely it indicates the nearness of an approaching, and quite dramatic, resolution of our situation. May Our Lady of Fatima protect us in the storms ahead!

And just where are the Modernist Liturgists going “forward” to? They won’t tell you because they don’t really know! We should just “Let them alone: they are blind, and leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into the pit.” Matt. 15:14

First of all they lay down the general principle that in a living religion everything is subject to change, and must change, and in this way they pass to what may be said to be, among the chief of their doctrines, that of Evolution. To the laws of evolution everything is subject - dogma, Church, worship, the Books we revere as sacred, even faith itself, and the penalty of disobedience is death. The enunciation of this principle will not astonish anybody who bears in mind what the Modernists have had to say about each of these subjects. Having laid down this law of evolution, the Modernists themselves teach us how it works out.

Pope St. Pius X, Pascendi, On the Doctrines of the Modernists.

Reform of the Reform of the Reform of the Reform of the Reform of the Reform of.........

The Last 50 years of Liturgical Wasteland is not enough for the New Barbarians-

“More progress must be made, there is a long way yet to go.... We must always go forward, always forward.....”

The liturgy is not something strange, there, distant, and while it is being celebrated I am thinking of many things, or I pray the Rosary. No, no. There is a correspondence between the liturgical celebration, which I then carry into my life; and on this more progress must be made, there is such a long way yet to go. [.....] Thank you so much, thank you so much for your hospitality, for the prayer with me in the Mass; and we thank the Lord for what He has done in the Church in these 50 years of liturgical reform. It was in fact a courageous gesture of the Church to draw close to the People of God, so that they could understand well what she does, and this is important for us, to follow the Mass in this way. And we cannot go back; we must always go forward, always forward and whoever goes back is mistaken. We go forward on this way.

Pope Francis, March 7, celebrating the 50th anniversary 1965 Bugnini transitional Missal which is remembered by almost no one. Even the papal documents that imposed this "reform" were formally revoked by Benedict XVI so that the evolutionary changes between the 1962 "extra-ordinary" and the 1969 "ordinary" Bugnini transitional missals would appear as an example of liturgical punctuated equilibrium.

“Beware of disturbing settled questions!”

King Henry VIII, interrupting Cardinal Thomas Wolsey when Wolsey first broached his opinion to King Henry that his marriage to Queen Catherine was invalid thus sowing the seed that led to heresy, schism and the martyrdom of many, many Faithful Catholics.

The Providence of God - Poetic Justice

“Oh, that I had been as guiltless of treason against His Divine Majesty! Now, indeed, while intent only on the serving the king, I have offended God, and have not pleased the king.”

Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, comment upon being arrested in York for "High Treason" for his failure to secure the promised divorce for Henry VIII. Wolsey died on the road to Leicester while being brought to London for trial, November 29, 1530.

The greatness of contemplation can be given to none but those who love….Whoever wishes to hold the fortress of contemplation must first of all train in the camp of action….We ascend to the heights of contemplation by the steps of action….He who would climb to a lofty height must go by steps, not leaps.

Pope St. Gregory the Great

Custody of the Eyes

He who through these windows of the body, recklessly looks abroad, very often falls, even against his will, into the sweetnesses of sin, and being fast fettered by desires, begins to will what before he had never willed.

St. Gregory the Great

Pope Francis – his “most gentle manner”!

They (our most holy predecessors) knew the capacity of innovators in the art of deception. In order not to shock the ears of Catholics, the innovators sought to hide the subtleties of their tortuous maneuvers by the use of seemingly innocuous words such as would allow them to insinuate error into souls in the most gentle manner. Once the truth had been compromised, they could, by means of slight changes or additions in phraseology, distort the confession of the faith that is necessary for our salvation, and lead the faithful by subtle errors to their eternal damnation. This manner of dissimulating and lying is vicious, regardless of the circumstances under which it is used. For very good reasons it can never be tolerated in a synod of which the principal glory consists above all in teaching the truth with clarity and excluding all danger of error. Moreover, if all this is sinful, it cannot be excused in the way that one sees it being done, under the erroneous pretext that the seemingly shocking affirmations in one place are further developed along orthodox lines in other places, and even in yet other places corrected; as if allowing for the possibility of either affirming or denying the statement, or of leaving it up the personal inclinations of the individual – such has always been the fraudulent and daring method used by innovators to establish error. It allows for both the possibility of promoting error and of excusing it. It is a most reprehensible technique for the insinuation of doctrinal errors and one condemned long ago by our predecessor St. Celestine, who found it used in the writings of Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, and which he exposed in order to condemn it with the greatest possible severity. Once these texts were examined carefully, the impostor was exposed and confounded, for he expressed himself in a plethora of words, mixing true things with others that were obscure; mixing at times one with the other in such a way that he was also able to confess those things which were denied while at the same time possessing a basis for denying those very sentences which he confessed.

Pope Pius VI, Auctorem Fidei, 1794 papal bull addressed to all the faithful condemning 85 propositions from the Council of Pistoia, 1786

“We have to look at people, at what they do.” - Yes, we have to “look at what they do”! And what she ‘does’ is promote the killing of infants in their mother’s wombs! At least Francis admits that “what we do” professes what we believe.

Pope Francis calls Italy's foremost abortion promoter one of nation's “forgotten greats”

February 25, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) –In a February 8 interview with one of Italy’s most prominent dailies, Corriere Della Serra, Pope Francis praised Italy’s leading proponent of abortion – Emma Bonino -- as one of the nation’s “forgotten greats,” comparing her to great historical figures such as Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman.  Knowing that his praise of her may be controversial, the Pope said that she offered the best advice to Italy on learning about Africa, and admitted she thinks differently from us. “True, but never mind,” he said. “We have to look at people, at what they do.”

At 27, Bonino had an illegal abortion and then worked with the Information Centre on Sterilization and Abortion which boasted over 10,000 abortions. There are famous photos of Bonino performing illegal abortions using a homemade device operated by a bicycle pump.  Arrested for the then-illegal activity she spent a few days in jail and was acquitted and entered politics.

When she was appointed Italy’s foreign minister in 2013 there was a general outcry from life and family leaders at the appalling situation.

Responding to the Pope’s praise of Bonino, pro-life leaders in Italy expressed disbelief.  “How can the pope praise a woman that is best known in Italy for practicing illegal abortion and promoting abortion?” commented Msgr. Ignacio Barreiro, who was until last year the head of the Rome office of Human Life International.

Luca Volonte, an Italian politician and the president of the pro-life Novae Terrae Foundation, told LifeSiteNews he believed the Pope “was not really informed about how much Mrs. Bonino has done in Italy and at the international level to promote abortion and euthanasia.”  Even though he admits “she did well in Egypt,” he adds that even there “she promoted her anti-life values.”  The Pope, said Volonte, “was wrong and worse were the members of His secretariat for not informing him.”

The Pope’s possible ignorance of Bonino’s stance is unlikely given his justifications in the interview.  She has been for decades the most prominent supporter of abortion in Italy.  Moreover, the Pope already received criticism for his contact with Bonino in 2015 when he called her about her cancer and invited her to the Vatican.

What's New About This? It is another first for Francis/Bergoglio overturning Vatican Protocol! President Macri's “wife” is not his wife. He divorced his wife to marry this woman in a civil ceremony. Before this meeting the pope would not greet a Catholic head of state in the company of a “woman” who was not his wife.

President of Argentina Visits Pope

During Cordial Discussions, Acknowledged Positive Contributions of Catholic Institutions in Argentine Society

ZENIT | Deborah Castellano Lubov | February 29, 2016

Saturday morning, Pope Francis received the President of Argentina in audience in the Vatican.

According to a statement released by the Holy See Press Office, Francis received President Mauricio Macri, accompanied by his wife, Juliana Awada, and little girl, and their discussions were cordial.

According to the statement, their talks “demonstrated the good bilateral relations between the Holy See and the Argentine Republic.

It also noted that themes of common interest were considered, such as assistance for integral development, respect for human rights, the fight against poverty and drug trafficking, justice, peace and social reconciliation.

“In this context,” it added, “the positive contribution of the episcopate and Catholic institutions in Argentine society was reiterated, especially in the fields of human promotion and the formation of the new generations, and particularly in the current economic climate.”

Reference was also made to various issues of broader significance and interest at regional and global level.

After meeting with the Pope, the president met with Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, accompanied by Secretary for Relations with States, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher.

17 years ago – and still nothing has done!

But even in Chicago, the ring of predators about whom I wrote in the paperback edition of “Confessions” remains untouched. There is no evidence against them because no one has complained about them and none of their fellow Priests have denounced them. Those who have been removed are for the most part lone offenders who lacked the skill to cover their tracks. The ring is much more clever. Perhaps they always will be. But should they slip, should they get caught, the previous scandals will seem trivial…. They are a dangerous group. There is reason to believe that they are responsible for at least one murder and may perhaps have been involved in the murder of the murderer. Am I afraid of them? Not particularly. They know that I have in safekeeping information which would implicate them. I am more of a threat to threat dead than alive.

Fr. Andrew Greeley, Archdiocese of Chicago, Furthermore! Memories of a Parish Priest, 1999, pg. 80, died 5-29-2013

A total of $21,667,000.00 for 92 speeches paid to someone who has nothing to say!

It’s largely a choice of style, not substance, dirty business, as usual, continuing no matter who succeeds Obama. Still, Snowden has a point. Hillary Clinton, like husband Bill, got super-rich through speechmaking, lucrative book deals, and other Big Money handouts. Lots came from Wall Street and other corporate supporters – a rogue’s gallery of crony capitalist interests buying influence. Her public financial disclosures show she earned $2,935,000 from 12 speeches to Wall Street banks alone from 2013 – 2015, five for $225,000 (her usual fee). Deutsche Bank paid her $485,000, Goldman Sachs, an astonishing $675,000 for a single speech. Wall Street banks are her leading campaign contributors. Over the same period, her financial disclosures show she earned $21,667,000 for 92 speeches to private organizations, mainly crony capitalist interests – expecting handsome dividends from their investments, the way dirty business in Washington works.[…..]

Stephen Lendman, comment on: Edward Snowden: “US Presdential Campaign, a Choice Between Trump and Goldman Sachs.”

PEW POLL: 95% of Jewish Leaders support abortion and “same-sex marriage.”

Why? Because, “In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word (Logos) was with God, and the Word (Logos) was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made.” (John 1:1-3) Therefore, anyone who rejects Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, the Logos by whom everything that has been made was made, must necessarily reject the natural order of all creation and the moral law.

The Jewish question of our time does not differ greatly from the one which affected the Christian peoples of the Middle Ages. In a foolish way it is said to arise from hatred towards the Jewish tribe. Mosaism in itself could not become an object of hate for Christians, since, until the coming of Christ, it was the only true religion, a prefiguration of and preparation for Christianity, which, according to God’s Will, was to be its successor. But the Judaism of the centuries [after Christ] turned its back on the Mosaic law, replacing it with the Talmud (ii.), the very quintessence of that Pharisaism which in so many ways has been shattered through its rejection by Christ, the Messiah and Redeemer. And although Talmudism is an important element of the Jewish question, it cannot be said, strictly speaking, to give that question a religious character, because what the Christian nations despise in Talmudism is not so much its virtually non-existent theological element, but rather, its morals, which are at variance with the most elementary principles of natural ethics.

On the Jewish Question in Europe; La Civiltà Cattolica, Series XIV, Vol. VII, 23;10; October 1890

Pope Francis, admired by all for whom political correctness is a sign of character.

I understand that a lot of people use religion as a reason to be against gay people, but there was no ‘Thou shall not be gay’. God never said that, and I really think that our Pope now is boss. He was saying something the other day that religion should be all-encompassing and should be about loving everyone. And I think sometimes people take the wrong message.

Ronda Rousey, female cage fighter

Pope Francis - His Rank Hypocrisy is getting to be Common Knowledge

The Latest Papal Eruption on the Plane

Christopher A. Ferrara February 18, 2016

Wherein the Pope who lives behind walls condemns walls, gives another thumbs-up to contraception, folds on “gay marriage” and blatantly contradicts himself—as usual.
Another day, another blabbering press conference on the return flight from another useless, blabber-filled papal voyage.
And, as is so often the case, Francis has condemned others for precisely what he himself is guilty of. Speaking of Donald Trump’s vow to build a wall along the entire US border with Mexico, Francis declared:

"He who thinks only of building walls and not bridges is not Christian. This is not the Gospel. Vote for him or not vote for him? I say only that if that is what he said, this man is not Christian."

That’s rich. Last time I was there, the Pope’s entire city-state was surrounded by (a wall).
I doubt that any wall Trump could build at the Mexican border would be as impressive as these fortifications. Ah, but the neo-Catholic defenders of the indefensible have a way out! You see, Francis did not actually build the Vatican walls himself. They were already there, having been built in the days when the Pope was under attack by barbarians, Muslims and other enemies—with whom the Church now dialogues as they destroy our civilization without firing a shot. Francis merely benefits from the walls that were already there. Big difference.
Also already there when Francis arrived were the heavily armed Swiss guards keeping everyone out, along with one of the world’s strictest immigration policies, according to which only “a very select few, who meet strict criteria, [are] admitted as residents or citizens” of the Vatican, so that “only about 450 of its 800 or so residents actually hold citizenship…”
Ah, but the Vatican is so small. There is no room for any needy immigrants to be granted citizenship. Really? Not even one? No, not even one. But what about the Muslim “refugees” Francis insists must be allowed to invade Europe in unlimited numbers? Is there no room in the Vatican for, say, a dozen or two Muslims in special housing that might be built for them amidst all those splendid gardens? Be serious! We are talking about the Vatican, not a regular country or anything.
Responding to Trump’s suggestion that the Pope is too “political,” Francis offered this clever riposte: “Thank God he said that I am political, because Aristotle defined the human person as a political animal, and this means that at least I am a human person.”   Wow. Devastating. Except that when Aristotle says that man is by nature a zôion politikòn, he is not referring to politics in the modern sense, but rather man’s natural inclination to life in the polis or city-state emerging from a community of families.
Funny, isn’t it, how the same Pope who refuses involve himself in political affairs when it comes to the mass murder of unborn children or the legalization of “unions” based on sodomy—precisely where he should be involved—not only wants to talk politics but also to suggest how Catholics in America should vote when it comes to ending all state barriers to illegal immigration (except in the Vatican State, of course).
Concerning Francis and politics, something good did come out of this press conference. Only one question later, Francis was finally smoked out on “gay marriage.” Asked for his position on the movement for approval of “civil unions” for sodomites in Italy, where a bill legalizing this abomination is now moving through parliament, Francis refused to comment because “the Pope does not place himself into the concrete politics of a country. Italy is not the first country to have this experience.” This from a Pope who, only a moment earlier, had boasted of being “a political animal” and who is constantly meddling in concrete political issues concerning the environment, wealth distribution, immigration, housing, education, clean water, prison conditions, the death penalty, the Scottish independence movement, and anything else that arouses his always politically correct ire. The duplicity was stunningly shameless.
Francis refused to take a stand even when the next questioner confronted him with the 2003 document of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, specifically approved and ordered to be published by the very Pope he canonized, which declares: “When legislation in favour of the recognition of homosexual unions is proposed for the first time in a legislative assembly, the Catholic law-maker has a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it. To vote in favour of a law so harmful to the common good is gravely immoral.”
Backed into a corner, Francis pleaded a lack of memory: “I don’t remember that document well…” The most he would say is that “a Catholic parliamentarian must vote according to a well-formed conscience, this I would say, only this, and I speak of a well formed conscience, not what I think or want.” Having reduced to a mere matter of conscience the Catholic legislator’s positive duty, under pain of sin, to vote against the diabolical scheme of “civil unions” for homosexuals, Francis has essentially given the Italian parliament a green light.
During the same press conference Francis also condoned contraception —again. The first time was during the return flight from Africa last year. This time he suggested quite clearly that women may use contraception to avoid contracting the Zika virus (last time it was the AIDs virus). According to Francis, contraception, being “the lesser evil, that of avoiding pregnancy,” can be justified when there is “a conflict between the Fifth and the Sixth Commandment.” According to Francis’s muddled moral theology, not to protect against the Zika virus by means of contraception would violate the commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” which is the greater evil, and therefore the commandment “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery,” the lesser evil, must yield to this imaginary conflict.
First of all,Francis seems unaware that the Zika virus, while it may be implicated in the birth defect of microcephaly, does not kill or even permanently disable infected women, but either causes no symptoms at all or produces an illness that “is usually mild with symptoms lasting for several days to a week.”
At any rate, neither a risk of death nor a potential for birth defects can justify contraception because contraception is intrinsically evil and thus can never be justified under any circumstances. Francis does not seem to have a handle on this basic principle of moral theology. Rather, he told the press that “avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil” like abortion, thus conflating the terms intrinsic and absolute. Cardinal Sarah and the African bishops, on the other hand, who understand what “intrinsically evil” means, have condemned as “immoral and misguided” the use of condoms even to stop the spread of the potentially deadly AIDS virus, noting that the proffered motive of “defense of life” does not justify the use of an inherently immoral means to defend it.
Here Francis appears to have fallen prey to the error of consequentialism, which seeks to justify an evil act by the supposed greater good its consequences will entail. My erstwhile debate opponent Mark Shea has rightly described this error as “the most popular moral heresy in the world.” Well, Francis is nothing if not popular. But any well-catechized child knows that it is never permissible to violate one Commandment on the pretense of following another, and that such “conflicts” in reality do not exist. We may never “do evil that good may come (Romans 3:7-8).” Francis, alarmingly enough, appears not to recognize that the ends of an action can never justify the means, but rather both means and ends must always conform to the moral law.
Francis, whose divinely imposed duty is to defend the Church’s moral teaching without compromise, even during press conferences, continues to display his disdain for such “rigorism.” But at this juncture, really, whatever. Does any observant Catholic still take Francis’s prattling seriously? All we need to know is that whenever we see this—
we must brace ourselves for yet another barrage of exploding blunders. Meanwhile, we can only pray for deliverance from this absurd pontificate and the manic cult that surrounds it, surely one of the greatest debacles in Church history.

O Mary, my sweet love, you opened to the eternal Divinity the door of your will, and the Word immediately became incarnate within you. By this you teach me that God, who created me without my help, will not save me without it… but knock at the door of my will and waits for me to open it to Him.

St. Catherine of Siena

The Jesuit spiritual formation given to Pope Francis - The rejection of Truth!

He is the first of the conciliar popes who suffers no inhibitions of conscience from Catholic training. He is no worse than his conciliar predecessors, but in him we see Modernism unmasked by his shameless arrogance. Religion “is the moral virtue which inclines man to give due worship to God as his supreme Creator.” This is virtue unknown to Francis. In him it becomes, “sensitivity to human experience,” which as religion is nothing more than pagan humanism.

Jesuit head: Religion isn't doctrine, but sensitivity to human experience

Joshua J. McElwee | Rome | Mar. 18, 2014

Religion is less a code of doctrines and teachings than a sensitivity to the "dimensions of transcendence" that underlie the human experience, the head of Pope Francis' Jesuit order said Friday.

Likening the religious experience to a person who can appreciate the intricacies and variations of classical music, Jesuit Fr. Adolfo Nicolás said "religion is first of all very much more like this musical sense than a rational system of teachings and explanations."

"Religion involves first of all a sensitivity to, an openness to, the dimensions of transcendence, of depth, of gratuity, of beauty that underlie our human experiences," Nicolás said. "But of course, this is a sensitivity that is threatened today by a purely economic or materialist mindset which deadens this sensitivity to deeper dimension of reality."

Nicolás, who as the superior general of the Society of Jesus leads approximately 17,000 Jesuits worldwide, spoke during an event Friday through Saturday at the Pontifical Gregorian University to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Jesuit-run Sophia University in Tokyo.[......]

The Jesuit superior, who counts among his members the pope, urged Japanese Catholics to promote religious sensitivity in their country and not to lose hope because they represent a small minority of the country's population.

Comparing how many people have lost attentiveness to music because of the many other distractions of the modern technological age, Nicolás said, "Just as this musical sense is being eroded and weakened by the noise, the pace, the self-images of the modern and postmodern world, so is religious sensitivity."

"I suggest that mission today in Japan and Asia must first of all work toward people helping discover or rediscover this musical sense, this religious sensibility," he said. "This awareness and appreciation of dimensions of reality that are deeper than instrumental reason or materialist conceptions of life allow us." [....]

"We are not in education for proselytism, but for transformation," Nicolás continued. "We want to form a new kind of humanity that is musical, that retains this sensitivity to beauty, to goodness, to the suffering of others, to compassion."

"We offer a Christian education because we are convinced that Christ offers horizons beyond the limited interests of economy or material production, that Christ offers a vision of a fuller humanity that takes the person outside himself or herself in care and concern for others," he said. [....]

Yoshiaki Ishizawa, who led Sophia University as president from 2005 to 2011, spoke of efforts initiated by the university to send missions and personnel to help preserve and restore the Angkor monuments in Cambodia.

The monuments, including the Hindu/Buddhist Angkor Wat temple, one of the largest religious monuments in the world, have experienced significant decay since their 12th-century building.

Along with others, Ishizawa founded in 1996 a branch of Sophia University in the Cambodian city of Siem Reap, called the Asia Center of Research and Human Development, which has focused on preserving the country's heritage sites.

This “Perverse Opinion” of the “wicked” is the accepted ‘wisdom’ of the Novus Ordo World.

Now We consider another abundant source of the evils with which the Church is afflicted at present: indifferentism. This perverse opinion is spread on all sides by the fraud of the wicked who claim that it is possible to obtain the eternal salvation of the soul by the profession of any kind of religion, as long as morality is maintained. Surely, in so clear a matter, you will drive this deadly error far from the people committed to your care. With the admonition of the apostle that "there is one God, one faith, one baptism" may those fear who contrive the notion that the safe harbor of salvation is open to persons of any religion whatever. They should consider the testimony of Christ Himself that "those who are not with Christ are against Him," and that they disperse unhappily who do not gather with Him. Therefore "without a doubt, they will perish forever, unless they hold the Catholic faith whole and inviolate." Let them hear Jerome who, while the Church was torn into three parts by schism, tells us that whenever someone tried to persuade him to join his group he always exclaimed: "He who is for the See of Peter is for me." A schismatic flatters himself falsely if he asserts that he, too, has been washed in the waters of regeneration. Indeed Augustine would reply to such a man: "The branch has the same form when it has been cut off from the vine; but of what profit for it is the form, if it does not live from the root?"

Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism, August 15, 1832

Pope Francis the Marxists, denounces Catholic Fundamentalism, the belief that there exists an Absolute Truth that can be known and communicated to others, and describes Catholic Truth as “impersonal recitations of doctrine” which are nothing more than “provisional certainties” that must be replaced by “a mystagogical catechesis that treasures the popular religiosity of the people.”

Pope Francis invokes themes of liberation theology during Mexican visit

The pontiff denounces “triumphalism” and “fundamentalism” in religious practice, and emphasizes the importance of a personal familiarity with Christ on the part of bishops.

CWR | Matthew Cullinan Hoffman | February 16, 2016

[....] The pope’s homily to the nation’s bishops hammered on themes that have become familiar to the Francis pontificate. The pontiff denounced “triumphalism” and “fundamentalism” in religious practice, and emphasized the importance of a personal familiarity with Christ on the part of bishops, who are called to represent the living presence of God to their flock, rather than impersonal recitations of doctrine. God makes himself known, according to Francis, not by a show of force, but through his own humble offering of love. [....]While warning against “venturing into expressions of fundamentalism, thus holding onto provisional certainties while forgetting to nest its heart in the Absolute,” the pope encouraged the bishops to embrace a sort of religious populism by way of “a mystagogical catechesis that treasures the popular religiosity of the people.” [.....]

Prayer at the tomb of controversial bishop

However, in his direct addresses to the Mexican people, the pope has touched less on universal themes and more on ideologically-charged issues that tend to fall under the rubric of liberation theology, a tendency that was fought vigorously by Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger during the papacy of the former.

On Monday, the pope prayed before the tomb of Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia, former prelate of the diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas, a controversial figure famous for his perceived support for neo-Marxist movements in the state of Chiapas, where a military uprising allegedly inspired by his highly politicized pastoral approach took place in the mid-1990s. Ruiz was reputed to encourage a syncretistic approach to indigenous cultural practices, seeking to promote indigenous traditions rather than teaching the gospel to the locals, and resulting in a mixture of pagan and Catholic practices among the Maya of the region that remains to this day. His emphasis on politics was so strong that the sacraments were reportedly neglected by his activist clergy; membership in the Catholic Church plummeted and 30% of children in his diocese were reportedly unbaptized when he left office. He also publicly associated with notorious condemned exponents of liberation theology, such as ex-priest Leonardo Boff and others.

Ruiz’s activities were regarded as so subversive of Catholic doctrine that he was denounced in a letter to the Apostolic Nuncio to Mexico by Cardinal Bernadin Gantin, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Bishops, and consequently asked to resign by the nuncio in 1993. However, he refused to do so and held out until his 75th birthday, submitting his resignation in accordance with the Code of Canon Law in 1999.

The pope’s embrace of one of the major figures of liberation theology in Mexico follows his eyebrow-raising acceptance of Marxist symbols mixed with the figure of Christ in July 2015, when President Evo Morales of Bolivia gave the pope an image of Christ crucified on a hammer and sickle, the traditional symbol of communism embraced by the former Soviet Union. The pope, who brought the image back with him to the Holy See, explicitly acknowledged in a press conference during the trip that the image was the creation of the neo-Marxist Fr. Luis Espinal, who had embraced a form of liberation theology in the 1980s that was later condemned. Although Francis seemed to distance himself from the Marxist intentions of the symbol, his acceptance of the gift was the cause of much consternation in Latin America. [....]

Emphasis on social justice and environmental themes

The themes of economic and political oppression of the poor and the redistribution of wealth loomed large in the pope’s address to the working-class Mexico City suburb of Ecatepec. The pope presented an economic interpretation of the temptation of Christ by the devil, asserting that “Lent is a time for reconsidering our feelings, for letting our eyes be opened to the frequent injustices which stand in direct opposition to the dream and the plan of God.” The first temptation, in which the devil encourages Christ to make bread out of stones, means “seizing hold of goods destined for all, and using them only for ‘my own people.’ That is, taking the ‘bread’ based on the toil of others, or even at the expense of their very lives. That wealth which tastes of pain, bitterness and suffering. This is the bread that a corrupt family or society gives its own children.”

According to the pope, the second attempt by the devil to tempt Christ by offering him power in exchange for worshipping him, is really about social exclusion: “Vanity: the pursuit of prestige based on continuous, relentless exclusion of those who ‘are not like me.’ The futile chasing of those five minutes of fame which do not forgive the ‘reputation’ of others.”

The pope’s homily at a mass in the predominantly indigenous state of Chiapas on Monday was focused on themes of liberation from socioeconomic oppression and environmental degradation. The pope appeared to compare the indigenous crowd’s condition to the slavery of the Hebrews by the Egyptians, a theme that had also been invoked by Samuel Ruiz. “And here the true face of God is seen, the face of the Father who suffers as he sees the pain, mistreatment, and lack of justice for his children. His word, his law, thus becomes a symbol of freedom, a symbol of happiness, wisdom and light.” Francis then quoted the mythological text of the Maya known as the Popol Vuh: “The dawn rises on all of the tribes together. The face of the earth was immediately healed by the sun,” explaining that “The sun rose for the people who at various times have walked in the midst of history’s darkest moments.”

The pope told the assembled crowd that “we can no longer remain silent before one of the greatest environmental crises in world history,” and added that “in this regard, you have much to teach us,” asserting that the indigenous “know how to interact harmoniously with nature, which they respect as a ‘source of food, a common home and an altar of human sharing’ (Aparecida, 472).”

“And yet, on many occasions, in a systematic and organized way, your people have been misunderstood and excluded from society.” added Francis. “Some have considered your values, culture and traditions to be inferior. Others, intoxicated by power, money and market trends, have stolen your lands or contaminated them. How sad this is! How worthwhile it would be for each of us to examine our conscience and learn to say, ‘Forgive me!’ Today’s world, ravaged as it is by a throwaway culture, needs you!” [......]

After congratulating a couple that had been faithful to their marriage for 50 years, the pope was introduced to Humberto Gómez Espinoza and Claudia Castellón Leal, “divorced and remarried, from the Archdiocese of Monterrey,” who have been in a civil marriage for 16 years. Gómez Espinoza explained that while he had never been married, his wife had married in the Church and had several children by her previous marriage. “Our relationship has been one of love and understanding, but we were alienated from the Church,” he told the pope. Recognizing that as “divorced and remarried we can’t receive the Eucharist, but we can receive communion through our brothers in need, our sick brothers, those who are deprived of freedom, and for that reason we are volunteers.”

Gómez Espinoza claimed that “we are blessed because we have a marriage and a family where the center is God,” and Pope Francis seemed to agree. “You pray and you are with Jesus. You are so integrated into the life of the Church.” He approached the couple and gave them a long hug, as sentimental music played in the background. [.....]

Pope Francis the Fatuous - claims to be morally superior to all previous popes who were too stupid to know anything about the Fifth Commandment!

Pope Francis appeals for global end to capital punishment

Pontiff tells crowd in St Peter’s Square that ‘You shall not kill’ applies to the innocent as well as the guilty

REUTERS | 21 February 2016

Pope Francis has called for the worldwide abolition of the death penalty, saying the commandment “You shall not kill” is absolute and valid for the guilty as well as the innocent.

Using some of his strongest ever words against capital punishment, he also called on Catholic politicians worldwide to make “a courageous and exemplary gesture” by seeking a moratorium on executions during the church’s current holy year, which ends in November.

“I appeal to the consciences of those who govern to reach an international consensus to abolish the death penalty,” he told tens of thousands of people in St Peter’s Square in the Vatican on Sunday.

“The commandment ‘You shall not kill’ has absolute value and applies to both the innocent and the guilty,” he told the crowd. [....]

John Boyle O’ Reilly and Cardinal Manning: It is wondrous how those who are close to God can say nothing more than what another man says and yet bring the effective grace of God to bear upon the soul of another.

John Boyle O’Reilly was a very colorful Irishman and faithful Catholic who was born in Ireland just before the great famine and ended his life in Boston as a minor poet, author, public speaker and editor of the Boston Catholic daily newspaper called The Pilot which was started by a Jesuit bishop. Under Boyle’s leadership The Pilot became one of the most widely read newspapers in the country. The fame of Boyle O’Reilly is testified by a prominent public monument in Boston.

As a young man in Ireland Boyle joined the British military where he was recruited by John Devoy with other Irishmen to join the Fenians (Irish Republican Brotherhood). He was arrested with six others, charged and convicted for being a member and propagator of the Fenian movement. He was convicted of treason and sentenced to death but this sentence was later commuted to life in penal servitude. He and his six military comrades, who were treated with particular cruelty, were sent as prisoners to Australia in 1868 as part of a group of 63 Fenians. After becoming despondent and attempting suicide, Boyle with the help of a good priest and the merciful providence of God, effected a harrowing escape from the penal colony and came to the United States in 1869. Boyle working with John Devoy, who was now the head of the Clan na Gael in New York after having spent five years in English prisons before being exiled to the U.S., hatched the plot to rescue the remaining six.

John Devoy wrote that, “Most of the evidence on which the men were convicted related to meetings with me. I felt that I, more than any other man then living, ought to do my utmost for these Fenian soldiers.” At a Clan na Gael meeting in New York, Devoy read a letter he received from one of the prisoner, James Wilson, in which Wilson described himself as a “Voice from the tomb,” and said, “we think if you forsake us, then we are friendless indeed.” Devoy put the letter down and in his most persuasive voice, shouted, “These men are our brothers!” Thousands of dollars were quickly raised to mount a rescue.

In 1875 a whaling ship Catalpa, captained by the remarkably brave and constant George Anthony, a New Bedford Protestant whaling man, was sent on a secret year long expedition for their escape and rescue from the penal colony at Freemantle Prison in western Australia. The exciting and perilous story is related in every detail in Peter F. Stevens’ book, The Voyage of the Catalpa: A Perilous Journey and Six Irish Rebels’ Escape to Freedom. The story is also the subject of four other novels and historical accounts have been written on the subject: one by Vincent McDonnell, another by John Devoy, another by Sean O’Luing, and lastly, William Laubenstein.

Which brings me to the point of this story, while Boyle was held in an English prison awaiting transfer to the penal colony in Australia, he met Cardinal Henry Edward Manning. Boyle said that the Catholic prisoners were attended by a different priest each Sunday and on every Sunday, almost without exception, the subject of the sermon was the parable of the Prodigal Son. The prisoners typically would sigh and fall asleep. When Cardinal Manning attended the prison, the subject of his sermon was again the Prodigal Son. When he began his sermon the groans were audible from all but before he finished there was not a man among them who did not shed tears of true repentance and receive the sacraments with great devotion. Cardinal Manning because of his union of heart and will with Jesus Christ by charity spoke with the effect of grace of Jesus himself. The memory of Cardinal Manning made a great impression on Boyle for the rest of his life. Boyle eventually turned away from supporting the violent overthrow of the British and continued to work for a political and peaceful removal of the British invader from Irish soil.

Separation of Church and State is impossible. Every state has an established religion with a creedal profession containing articles of faith that it demands its citizens profess. These articles of faith cannot be proven to be true or even demonstrated as consistent with natural law. The U.S.A. is no exception to this rule. We have a state religion but it is called by another name. The secular dogma, ‘Separation of Church and State’, is nothing more than a tool to prevent competition against the state religion in the public forum. The state demands a “faith” in “general values” that are always “relative and changing.”

All organization is action and all action is rude. […..] There is a hierarchy of values which have been expressed in nearly every revolutionary slogan in history…. These values are up on top. The democratic way of life is nothing more than a process, a device, a modus operandi, designed as the best way, we believe, of achieving those values, of growing into them so to speak. Now, those values that I have mentioned cannot be discussed, they cannot be argued, they cannot be debated, they are articles of faith. [..…] In a free and open society, equality is a value you cannot discuss or debate or put on a ballot. If you do not accept our values then you can have no voice in a democratic process. Then get out of our system and go someplace else. [……] These values and goals, out of necessity, are always stated in general terms. Every literate revolutionary knows that you cannot be any more than general (in your) terms because all values are relative and are changing.

Saul Alinsky, Jewish revolutionary, explaining the ‘religion’ of the modern democratic state, 1/17/69, UCLA

German Bishops Declare Independence from Catholic Church and Rome

We are no subsidiaries of Rome. Each conference of bishops is responsible for pastoral care in its culture, and must, as its most proper task, preach the Gospel on our own. We cannot wait for a synod to tell us how we have to shape pastoral care for marriage and family here.

Reinhard Cardinal Marx, Archbishop of Munich and Chairman of the German Bishops Conference

Society has already reached a sense of being “defeated” and “futureless.” The crime of the Novus Ordo Church is that they are a cause and contributor to this sense rather than a light of hope of union with Jesus Christ!

[You must help]  the people in the community… feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. [An] organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives –agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate. [You must] fan the embers of hopelessness into a flame of fight.

Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

While Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was enjoying a lake outing with his particular (married) girl friend in communist Poland, Cardinal József Mindszenty was in prison in communist Hungry in defense of the Catholic faith. It was JP II who got rid of the Devil’s Advocate for Novus Ordo canonization processes so these kinds of problems could be overlooked!

Pope John Paul II had intense friendship with married woman: BBC

AFP : February 15, 2016

LONDON: Pope John Paul II had a close relationship with a married woman which lasted over 30 years, according to letters which feature in a documentary being shown by the BBC on Monday.

While the documentary does not claim he broke his vow of celibacy with Polish-born philosopher and writer Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, the tone of some of his letters to her points to intense feelings between them, the broadcaster says.

The two spent camping and skiing holidays together and went on country walks.

In one letter from September 1976, he calls her a “gift from God”.
“My dear Teresa,” he writes. “You write about being torn apart, but I could find no answer to these words.”

Also in September 1976, he writes: “Already last year I was looking for an answer to these words, ‘I belong to you’, and finally, before leaving Poland, I found a way – a scapular.”

A scapular is a piece of cloth worn as part of the habit of monastic orders and the then Cardinal Karol Wojtyla gave Tymieniecka his.

“The dimension in which I accept and feel you everywhere in all kinds of situations, when you are close, and when you are far away,” he adds.

Edward Stourton, the senior BBC journalist who made the documentary, said more than 350 letters were found at the National Library of Poland, the first dated in 1973 and the last a few months before his death in 2005.

“I would say there were more than friends but less than lovers,” he said.

“One of the fascinating stories that comes out of these letters is of a struggle to contain what was certainly a very intense relationship which mixed emotions and philosophical ideas in proper Christian boundaries.”

The BBC has only seen John Paul II’s letters, not Tymieniecka’s side of the correspondence. She died in 2014.

John Paul II was pope from 1978 to 2005 and was made a saint by the Catholic Church after his death.

Blessed Mary, Mother of God, pray for me, a poor sinner, a poor sinner.

St. Bernadette Soubirous, Last Words

Pope Francis betrays faithful eastern rite Catholics

“The 'historical' meeting between Francis and Kirill”

Roberto de Mattei | Corrispondenza Romana | February 17, 2016

Among the many successes the mass-media attributes to Pope Francis, is the “historical meeting” with the Patriarch of Moscow, Kirill, which took place on February 12th in Havana. An event, it is written, that saw the collapse of the wall which has divided the Church of Rome from the Eastern Church for a thousand years. The importance of the meeting, according to the words of Francis himself, was not in the document - of a merely “pastoral” nature - but in the convergence towards a common destination, not political nor moral, but religious. As for the traditional Magisterium of the Church, articulated in documents, Pope Francis seems to want it substituted by a Neo-Magisterium, transmitted through symbolic events. The message the Pope aims to give is that this is a turning-point in the history of the Church. Yet it is precisely the history of the Church we need to start with to understand the significance of the event. Historical inaccuracies are indeed many and need to be corrected, since it’s exactly upon false historians that doctrinal deviations are frequently built.

First of all, it is not true that a thousand years of history separate the Church of Rome from the Patriarchate of Moscow, seeing that this came about only in 1589. In the preceding five centuries, and even before that, Rome’s Eastern interlocutor was the Patriarch of Constantinople.

During the Second Vatican Council, on January 6th 1964, Paul VI met Patriarch Athenagoras in Jerusalem to initiate “ecumenical dialogue” between the Catholic world and the Orthodox world. This dialogue could not move forward because of the Orthodox thousand-year opposition to the Primate of Rome. Paul VI himself, admitted this in a speech to the Secretariat for the Unity of Christians on April 28th 1967, affirming: “The Pope, we know this well, is without doubt the greatest obstacle on the path of ecumenism” (Paul VI, Teachings, VI, pp.192-193).

The Patriarchate of Constantinople constituted one of the five principle Sees of Christianity established by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The Byzantine Patriarchs sustained however, that after the fall of the Roman Empire, Constantinople, See of the reborn Roman Empire in the East, should have become the religious capital of the world. Canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon, abrogated by Leo the Great, contains the seed of the entire Byzantine Schism, as it attributes to the Roman Pontiff’s supremacy a political and not divine foundation. For this, in 515, Pope Hormisdas (514-523) made the Eastern Bishops sign a Formula of Union, in which they acknowledged their submission to the Chair of Peter (Denz-H, n.363).

Between the V and X centuries, while the West was affirming the distinction between spiritual authority and temporal power, in the East, in the meantime, so-called “Caesaropapism” was born, in which the Church was de facto subordinated to the Emperor who considered himself the head, inasmuch as delegated by God, in both the ecclesiastical and secular field. The Patriarchs of Constantinople were de facto reduced to functionaries of the Byzantine Empire and continued to ferment a radical aversion for the Church of Rome.

After the first rupture, caused by Patriarch Photios in the IX century, the official schism occurred on July 16th 1054, when the Patriarch Michael Cerularius declared Rome fallen into heresy for reason of the “Filioque” and other pretexts. The Roman legates then deposed the sentence of excommunication against him on the altar of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. The Princes of Kiev and Moscow, converted to Christianity in 988 by St. Vladimir, followed the Patriarchs of Constantinople into schism, and acknowledged their religious jurisdiction.

The discords seemed insurmountable but an extraordinary event occurred on July 6th 1439 in the Florentine Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, when Pope Eugene IV, solemnly announced, with the Bull Laetentur Coeli (“that the heavens rejoice”) the recomposition of the schism between the Churches of the East and the West.

During the Council of Florence (1439), in which the Emperor of the East, John VIII Palaiologos and the Patriarch of Constantinople Joseph II participated, an agreement was reached on all the problems, from the Filioque to the Roman Primacy. The Pontifical Bull concluded with this solemn dogmatic definition, signed by the Greek Fathers: “We define that the Holy Apostolic See and the Roman Pontiff have primacy over the entire universe; that the same Roman Pontiff is the successor of Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles; he is the authentic Vicar of Christ, Head of the entire Church, Father and Doctor of all Christians; that Our Lord Jesus Christ has transmitted to him, in the person of Blessed Peter, full power to nourish, sustain and govern the Universal Church, as is attested also in the Acts of the Ecumenical Councils’ and in the Sacred Canons” (Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, Centro Editoriale Dehoniano, Bologna 2013, pp. 523-528). This was the only true historical embrace between the two Churches in the course of the last millennium.

Among the most active participants at the Council of Florence, was the Metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia, Isidore. As soon as he returned to Moscow, he made a public announcement on the reconciliation under the Roman Pontiff’s authority, but the Prince of Moscow, Vasily The Blind, declared him a heretic and substituted him with a bishop subject to himself. This action marked the beginning of the Church of Moscow’s autocephaly, independent not only from Rome but also from Constantinople.

Shortly afterwards, in 1453, the Byzantine Empire was conquered by the Turks and in its collapse, the Patriarchate of Constantinople was swept away. The idea arose then that Moscow had to pick up the legacy of the Byzantium and become the new centre for the Orthodox Christian Church. After his marriage to Zoe Palaiologos, the last Eastern Emperor’s niece, the Prince of Moscow, Ivan III, gave himself the title of Czar and introduced the symbol of the two-headed eagle. In 1589 the Patriarchate of Moscow and all Russia was formed. The Russians became the new defenders of “orthodoxy”, announcing the advent of a “Third Rome”, following the Catholic and Byzantine ones.

Faced with these events, the Bishops of that area, which was called Ruthenia at that time, (today Ukraine and part of Belorussia) met, in October 1596, at the Synod of Brest and proclaimed union with the Roman See. They are known as Uniates, because of their union with Rome, or Greek-Catholics, seeing that, even if subordinated to the Roman Primate, they conserve the Byzantine liturgy.

The Russian Czars embarked on a systematic persecution of the Uniate Church, which, among its many martyrs, numbered the monk, Josaphat Kuncewicz (1580-1623), Archbishop of Polotsk and the Jesuit, Andrew Bobola (1592-1657), the apostle of Lithuanian. Both were tortured and killed in hatred of the Catholic faith and today are venerated as Saints. The persecution became even more rigorous under the Soviet Empire. Cardinal Josyf Slipyj (1892-1984) deported for 18 years in the Communist lagers, was the last intrepid defender of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. Today the Uniates constitute the most numerous group of Catholics in the Eastern Rite and represent a living witness to the universality of the Catholic Church. It is ungenerous to state, as Francis and Kirill’s document does, that the “method of “uniatism”, understood “as the union of one community to the other, separating it from its Church, is not the way to establish unity” and that “it cannot be accepted that disloyal means be used to incite believers to pass from one Church to another, denying them their religious freedom and their traditions.”

The price Pope Francis had to pay for these words from Kirill is very high: the accusation of “betrayal” is now directed at the Uniate Catholics who have always been very faithful to Rome.

In any case, Francis’ meeting with the Patriarch of Moscow goes way beyond Paul VI’s and Athenagoras’. This embrace with Kirill tends particularly, to accept the Orthodox principal of sinodality, needed “to democratize” the Roman Church.

As regards the [actual] substance of the faith and not the Church’s structure itself, the most important symbolic event of the year will be perhaps Francis’ commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, scheduled for next October in Lund, Sweden.

Pope Francis: “Miss Lonelyhearts Advice Column for the Restless”

Pope: “I prefer a wounded family to a closed and narcissistic society”

Francis has met with a huge crowd of 40,000 families at the “Víctor Manuel Reyna” Stadium in Chiapas, where he listened to a series of testimonies. “Laws and personal commitment make good duo that can break the spiral of uncertainty”

Vatican Insider | mauro piñata | 16/02/2016

“I prefer a wounded family that makes daily efforts to put love into play, to a society that is sick from isolationism and habitual afraid of love. I prefer a family that makes repeated efforts to begin again, to a society that is narcissistic and obsessed with luxury and comfort. I prefer a family with tired faces from generous giving, to faces with makeup that know nothing of tenderness and compassion.”

A public profession of Faith by the traditional Franciscans in France. What it missing? The affirmation that our immemorial ecclesiastical traditions are not, and never were, matters of mere Church discipline but constitute necessary attributes of the faith without which it can neither be known or communicated to others which every Catholic by his baptism is obligated to defend.

Profession of Faith Against Present Day Errors Fr. Jean, OFM Capuchin, (Morgan) France

The main duty of every priest is not only to profess and to teach the true Catholic Faith, but also to defend it against the attack of the enemy whoever they may he, therefore:

1. I profess the traditional definition and Catholic Faith. i.e.. that it is a supernatural virtue, a gift of God by which my entire soul, intellect and will submits to every truth revealed by God and transmitted by His one Church, which can neither deceive nor be deceived.

Also, I condemn and reject the neo-modernist doctrine, which presents the Faith as being "born in the depths of my own self" (John Paul II, "M'ayez pas peur!" [Fear not !] Laffont, p. 39) or as an "experience" that can only be "community" (Prof. Ratzinger, The Christian Faith, p. 110 and Principles of Theology, p. 35).

2. I profess the traditional Catholic doctrine of the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the necessary implication of a harmonious union between Church and State, so that Divine and Ecclesiastical law governs all human institutions, for the glory of God and the salvation of souls, a doctrine based on Scripture (lsaias 55:4; 1Tim. 6:15: Ap. 1:5) and Tradition, particularly the Encyclical "Quas Primus" of Pope Pius Xl.

I also condemn and reject the liberal doctrine of Vatican II. "Gaudium et Spes" (Ch. 4) proclaiming the autonomy of the state from the Church by the false principle of religious liberty, a doctrine which the current Pope has already previously described as “a kind of anti-Syllabus,” and more recently, in a public speech to ambassadors, as a great leap in human progress” (13 December 2008).

3. I profess the Traditional Catholic doctrine of true ecumenism, which is to say the return of lost souls to the one fold of Christ, a doctrine based on Scripture (John 10: 16: Acts 2:38 ) and constant Tradition, in particular the Encyclical "Mortalium Animos" of Pope Pius XI.

I also condemn and reject the contrary doctrine of the conciliar churchmen, who teach that the ecumenism of return is "obsolete" (Balamand Agreement. 24 June 1993), that we must no longer seek to "convert" others (Cardinal Kaspar, 22 January 2001), and that to do so "would be to destroy their own heritage of faith" (Benedict XVI, 18 July 2005).

4. I profess the traditional definition of the Roman Catholic Church as the Mystical Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and only Ark of Salvation, to which one cannot belong without Baptism and the Faith: doctrine revealed by God (Col. 1:18; John 3:5; Mk. 16:16) and Transmitted by Tradition, in particular the encyclical "Mystici Corporis" of Pope Pius XII.

I also condemn and reject the divergent doctrine of Vatican II that "The Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church (LG 8) and made explicit by the New Catechism (836), that "All men are called to this catholic unity of the People of God... And to it, in different ways, belong or are ordered."

Furthermore. I condemn and reject the new conciliar doctrine (UR 3) reiterated in the New Catechism (819) that "Christ’s Spirit uses these [separated] Churches and ecclesial communities as means of salvation." For these false religions are not inspired by the Good Spirit but by the Evil One (Ps. 95:5; 1 Cor. 10:20; Ap. 2:9).

5. I profess the Traditional Catholic doctrine of the substitution of the Old Covenant by the New Covenant, the former being by that very fact revoked, which is explicitly affirmed by the Word of God (2 Cor. 3:14; Hb. 8:13) and by Tradition, as for example "Hebraeorum Gens" of Pope St. Pius V (1569). This traditional understanding of this belief is that the Judaic religion has been revoked by Almighty God, but without excluding the possibility of Israelites converting to Him, individually over time, or en masse at the end of the world (Rom. 11:25).

I also condemn and reject the contrary doctrine of Vatican II (Nostra Aetate), subsequently reiterated by John Paul II (17 September 1980) and the New Catechism (121) in this statement which is offensive to Our Lord Jesus Christ, divine Founder of the Church of the New and Everlasting Covenant: "The Old Covenant has never been revoked."

6. I profess the Traditional Catholic doctrine that hell exists, and that all those who die unrepentant in mortal sin are eternally damned: doctrine revealed by God (1 Cor. 6:10; Ap. 21:27), and constantly transmitted by Tradition, in particular the Second Council of Lyons (1274). I also believe what Our Lord has revealed, that many take the broad way which leads to perdition (Matt. 7:13; Luke 13:24), revelation confirmed by Our Lady at Fatima that many souls, especially in our era, are damned, and that we must pray and do penance for their salvation.

I also condemn and reject the opposite theory, that hell exists but is empty (Hans Urs Von Balthasar, quoted by John Paul II in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, p. 200) or that the judgment and damnation mentioned in the Gospel concerns only Satan and the fallen angels (John Paul II, encyclical, Dominum Vivificantem, 18 May 1986, no. 27-28), or that hell contains "only a few characters from history" (Benedict XVI, encyclical, Spe Salvi, 30 November 2007, no. 45).

7. Finally, as it would be tedious to enumerate all the serious post-conciliar errors committed, encouraged or endorsed by churchmen in positions of authority, following Archbishop Lefebvre and the other bishops and priests loyal to the Church of all time. I condemn and reject any and all theories and practices which work gradually to undermine the Faith in souls, not only in matters of doctrine, but also in matters of morals (inverting the ends of marriage and approving tens of thousands of annulments every year), the liturgy (the New Mass concocted with the help of six Protestant pastors), canon law (Archbishop Lefebvre said that they are destroying the Church with laws which are fundamentally inspired by modernism in the New Code of Canon Law of 1983), ecumenism (Assisi, John Paul II kissing the Koran on 14 May1999; Benedict XVI getting "blessed" by a Rabbi on 11 May 2007), biblical (overcritical exegesis, new ecumenical translations of the Bible), sacramental (no more genuflection in front of the Blessed Sacrament, which weakens faith in the Real Presence), etc.— theories and practices which I condemn and therefore reject, in as much as they are contrary to the spirit of the Catholic Church, offensive to God and scandalous to souls.

“Temptation of stressing the... moral rules”? Like the ten commandments? “God is... Mother?” From what Creed was this taken? Francis forgets that God's love is conditional. The forgiveness of sins requires Faith, the sacraments and repentance. Is the “Year of Mercy” a dispensation from these “moral rules”?

The world is in need of discovering that God is Father, that there is mercy, that cruelty isn’t the way, that condemnation isn’t the way, because the Church herself sometimes follows a hard line, she falls into the temptation of following a hard line, into the temptation of stressing only the moral rules, many people are excluded.[.......] Therefore, I prefer to use (the word) tenderness, proper to a mother, the tenderness of God, tenderness born from the paternal insides. God is Father and Mother. [.......]The revolution of tenderness is what we have to cultivate today as the fruit of this Year of Mercy: God’s tenderness towards each one of us. Each one of us must say: "I am an unfortunate man, but God loves me thus, so I must also love others in the same way."

Pope Francis, 12-2-15, Interview on Year of Mercy

Francis “who am I to judge” keeps making unjust judgments!

“He (Trump) who thinks only of building walls and not bridges is not Christian. This is not the Gospel. Vote for him or not vote for him? I say only that if that is what he said, this man is not Christian.”

Pope Francis, speaking from Mexico at the U.S. boarder

“Regarding Walls and Popes, it would indeed be most interesting to know what Pope Bergoglio thinks of the famous Leonine Walls, erected by his predecessor Pope St. Leo IV in 847 to defend Rome and the Pope’s residence from the Saracens, the Muslims of that time. Was Pope Leo, sainted and responsible of many a miracle during his lifetime, not ‘a good Christian’?”

Dr. Enrico Maria Radaelli, professor of philosophy, taken from Rorate Caeli

No Church Father, Doctor or Saint has ever interpreted Matthew 11:3 to mean that St. John the Baptist “doubted” that Jesus was the Messiah. Is Pope Francis this stupid or this vicious? Is it surprising that Pope Francis, who has undermined the sacrament of marriage, would undermine the moral authority of the man who was martyred defending it?

Pope’s Morning Homily: John the Baptist Was Humble Even in Doubt

At Casa Santa Marta, Reflects on Depths of Last Prophet’s Self-Abasement

Kathleen Naab | Pope's Morning Homily | February 5, 2016

John the Baptist lived his attitude of “he must increase, I must decrease” until the end, even suffering in prison the “interior torture of doubt,” says Pope Francis. [.....]

“The greatest saint: Thus Jesus canonized him. And he ended his life in jail, beheaded, and the final phrase [of the Gospel reading] seems almost one of resignation: ‘When his disciples heard about it, they came and took his body and laid it in a tomb.’ This is the end of ‘the greatest man born of a woman.’ A great prophet. The ultimate, the last of the prophets. The only one to whom it was granted to see the hope of Israel.”

The Holy Father invited the congregation to enter into John’s cell, to look into the soul of the “voice crying out in the desert,” of the one who baptized the crowds in the name of Him who was to come.

“But he also suffered in prison – let us say the word – the interior torture of doubt: ‘But maybe I made a mistake? This Messiah is not how I imagined the Messiah would be.’ And he invited his disciples to ask Jesus: ‘But tell us, tell us the truth: are you He who is to come?’ because that doubt made him suffer. ‘Was I mistaken in proclaiming someone who isn’t [who I thought]?’ The suffering, the interior solitude of this man. ‘I, on the other hand, must diminish, but diminish thus: in soul, in body, in everything…” [.....]

Scientists affirm that first generation artificial intelligent robots can now perform all the functions of a Novus Ordo conciliarist pope including daily homilies that will keep the average Novus Ordite awake.

“This month I make a special request: That we may take good care of creation, a gift freely given cultivating and protecting it for future generations. Caring for our common home.” Pope Francis, prayer intentions for the month of February.

In case you have already forgotten, Pope Francis’ January intention was that Religious Indifferentism becomes a dogma of faith the denial of which would be regarded as a hate crime against the marginalized poor punishable by the state.

Pope’s Address to Italian National Committee for Bioethics

The ecclesial and the civil community meet in this area and are called to collaborate, according to their respective various competencies

January 28, 2016 | ZANIT | StaffFrancis

I am happy to be able to express the Church’s appreciation for the fact that the National Committee for Bioethics has been instituted for the past 25 years in the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.  Noted by all is how sensitive the Church is to ethical subjects, but perhaps it is not as clear to all that the Church does not claim any privileged space in this field, rather, she is satisfied when the civil conscience is able to reflect, discern and work, at various levels, on the basis of free and open rationality and of the constitutive values of the person and of society. In fact, this responsible civil maturity is precisely the sign that the sowing of the Gospel — this yes, revealed and entrusted to the Church — has borne fruit, succeeding in promoting research of the true, the good and the beautiful in the complex human and ethical questions. In essence, it is about serving man, the whole man, all men and women......

COMMENT: This is the opening comment made to the Italian National Committee for Bioethics by Pope Francis. The Church founded by Jesus Christ was established by God to "teach all nations" but Francis' Novus Ordo Church is reduced to one voice among many expressing only a natural philosophy. His Novus Ordo Church is "satisfied" when "civil conscience is able to reflect.... on the basis of free and open rationality." He even says that "responsible civil maturity is precisely the sign" that the Church "sowing of the Gospel... has borne fruit." The philosophy of Francis has nothing to do with the "true, good and beautiful." It is a philosophy that is antithetical to the Gospel message because the "essence" of the Gospel message is not about "serving man" but rather, it is the Good News of the revelation by God about God for the purpose that man may know, love and serve God, be adopted as his children by grace, and be happy with Him for all eternity. It is because Francis has turned his face from God that the world has plastered his image on the cover of countless magazines. But Jesus Christ addressed His Father for those who believed in His revelation saying, "I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them whom thou hast given me: because they are thine" (John 17:9). Pope Francis prays with the "world" because it is his. "Woe to you when men shall bless you: for according to these things did their fathers to the false prophets" (Luke 6:26).

Only last October Pope Francis characterized those who defended the Catholic sacrament of marriage and opposed homosexual unions as having “closed hearts”!

Pope Francis, ending synod, excoriates bishops with ‘closed hearts’

Reuters | Philip Pullella | October 26, 2015

Pope Francis, ending a contentious bishops’ meeting on family issues, on Saturday excoriated immovable Church leaders who “bury their heads in the sand” and hide behind rigid doctrine while families suffer.

The pope spoke at the end of a three-week gathering, known as a synod, where the bishops agreed to a qualified opening toward divorcees who have remarried outside the Church but rejected calls for more welcoming language toward homosexuals.

It was the latest in a series of admonitions to bishops by the pontiff, who has stressed since his election in 2013 that the 1.2 billion-member Church should be open to change, side with the poor and rid itself of the pomp and stuffiness that has alienated so many Catholics.

In his final address, the pope appeared to criticize ultra-conservatives, saying Church leaders should confront difficult issues “fearlessly, without burying our heads in the sand.”

He said the synod had “laid bare the closed hearts which frequently hide even behind the Church’s teachings or good intentions, in order to sit in the chair of Moses and judge, sometimes with superiority and superficiality, difficult cases and wounded families”.

He also decried “conspiracy theories” and the “blinkered viewpoints” of some at the gathering, and said the Church could not transmit its message to new generations “at times encrusted in a language which is archaic or simply incomprehensible”. [....]

Pope Francis will soon deliver his final draft on the Synod on the Family that addressed Holy Communion for Catholics living in adultery and homosexual unions. An indication into what will be coming can be seen in this recent strained gospel reflection. Francis offers a descriptive definition of those with “closed hearts”: they are not “forward-looking,” they are not “courageous,” they do not possess “strong faith,” they are unable to “understand Jesus,” they would turn away from Jesus because He “forgives sins.” Any guesses where this is leading?

Pope’s Morning Homily: You Can’t Have a Closed Heart If You Want to Understand Jesus

Urges Faithful to Examine: ‘How Is My Faith in Christ?’

ZENIT | Deborah Castellano Lubov | January 15, 2016

In order to understand Jesus, we cannot have closed hearts, but rather need those that are courageous and forward-looking. Pope Francis stressed this during his daily morning Mass at Casa Santa Marta as he asked those gathered to ask themselves to consider their own faith in Christ, reported Vatican Radio.[......]

Must Open Our Hearts: In order to really understand Jesus, he underscored, we cannot have a “closed heart,” and rather, need to follow the path of forgiveness and humiliation. [......]

Need for Courageous, Forward-looking Hearts: “Strong faith, courageous, forward – looking,” the Holy Father said, “hearts to faith.”

Closed Hearts Cannot Understand Jesus: In the paralytic’s story, the Jesuit Pope said, “Jesus goes a step further,” of not just healing, but forgiving. “There were those there who had their hearts closed, but accepted – up to a point – that Jesus was a healer – but forgiving sins is strong! This man is over the top! He has no right to say this, because only God can forgive sins.” [.....]

It was God who gave man dominion over all His material creation which is therefore a duty imposed upon man which he has no right to “reject”!

Why Is Pope Francis PETA’s 2015 Person of the Year?

Michelle Kretzer | December 1, 2015

He is the first pope to take the name of St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of all animals, who said, “Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission—to be of service to them wherever they require it.” And he is also the first religious leader to be picked as PETA’s Person of the Year, a title previously held by Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and Ricky Gervais. Pope Francis was chosen for asking the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics and all citizens of the world to reject human domination over God’s creation, treat animals with kindness, and respect the environment—something PETA views as a call to turn toward a simple, plant-based diet, given the now well-established role of animal agriculture in climate change.

In his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, His Holiness talked of the importance of treating animals with kindness, writing, “Every act of cruelty towards any creature is ‘contrary to human dignity'” and “We are not God. … [W]e must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures.”

Pope Francis is also known for his focus on environmental stewardship, and according to the United Nations, a global shift toward vegan eating is necessary in order to slow the most dangerous effects of climate change, including the extinction of wildlife.

As the pontiff said, “If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously.”

The Heresy of Ecumenism first denies Truth and then seeks an Accommodation of Error with other Liars!

As the Holy Office affirms, there is no unity without truth. Truth first, unity afterwards, truth the cause, unity the effect. To invert this order is to overthrow the Divine procedure. The unity of Babel ended in confusion; the union of Pentecost fused all nations into one Body and one dogma of the Faith…. Truth alone generates unity.

Cardinal Henry Edward Manning

The ‘Bergoglio Business Plan’! Now that “apologetics” is nothing more than "subtle theoretical discussions" over "opinions" and “proselytism is solemn nonsense,” how do they measure “strong Christian witness,” “effective evangelization,” “fruitful ecumenical spirit,” and “constructive dialogue”? If the “Mission of the Church in the World” is the supreme law… the salus animarum, how does any of this contribute towards fulfilling this “Mission”? It is never “easy to achieve such a goal” under the best of conditions because to obtain salvation is to enter by the “narrow gate.” Now that every material sign to measure success toward this goal has been destroyed by the modern Church how can they possibly have any idea what they are doing?

Today we will present a summary of the work done in recent months to develop the new Apostolic Constitution for the reform of the Curia. The goal to be reached is always that of promoting greater harmony in the work of the various Dicasteries and Offices, in order to achieve a more effective collaboration in that absolute transparency which builds authentic synodality and collegiality.

The reform is not an end in itself, but a means to give a strong Christian witness; to promote a more effective evangelization; to promote a more fruitful ecumenical spirit; to encourage a more constructive dialogue with all.

The reform, strongly advocated by the majority of the Cardinals in the context of the general congregations before the conclave, will further perfect the identity of the same Roman Curia, which is to assist the Successor of Peter in the exercise of his supreme pastoral office for the good of and in the service of the universal Church and the particular Churches. This exercise serves to strengthen the unity of faith and communion of the people of God and promote the mission of the Church in the world.

Certainly, it is not easy to achieve such a goal. It requires time, determination and above all everyone’s cooperation. But to achieve this we must first entrust ourselves to the Holy Spirit, the true guide of the Church, imploring the gift of authentic discernment in prayer.

It is in this spirit of collaboration that our meeting begins, which will be fruitful thanks to the contribution which each of us can express with parrhesía, fidelity to the Magisterium and the knowledge that all of this contributes to the supreme law, that being the salus animarum. Thank You.

Pope Francis, on the agenda of the Consistory for the Reform of the Roman Curia

“If there be no enemy, no fight; if no fight, no victory; if no victory, no crown.”

“Whoever excommunicates me, excommunicates God.”

Fra Girolamo Savonarola, excommunicated by Pope Alexander VI and burned to death as a heretic

“Now we know that God doth not hear sinners: but if a man be a server of God, and doth his will, him he heareth…. Unless this man were of God, he could not do any thing.” John 9:31-33

St. Philip Neri was reaching the summit of his renown, and filling the capital of the Christian world with the good odour of his virtues and his apostolic zeal. As is well known, having been born in Florence and brought up under the influence of the San Marco friars, he had the greatest esteem and affection for the Domincan Order; and hence, in Rome, kept up a close intercourse with the Minerva. It was through this priory, and the constant visiting between the Roman fathers and their brethren both Florence and Prato, and especially through Fra Angelo da Diacceto, a friend of both, that St Philip and St. Catherine de’ Ricci had early learnt to know and to appreciate one another. To all his wonderful virtues and holy deeds, Philip Neri added a further title to her respect and affection, in Catherine’s eyes, by his ardent devotion to Fra Girolamo Savonarola. From his childhood he had religiously preserved the memory of this great servant of God. He venerated his relics (ashes from his place of execution), kept his picture in his cell, and invoked him with affection as a father and a powerful protector in heaven. Pope Benedict XIV reports a vision of St Philip’s in connection with this devotion of his, which seemed to give it divine sanction. He says that when a great assembly of theologians, under Pope Paul IV, was debating the question condemning certain doctrines of Savonarola, Philip being in ecstasy before the blessed Sacrament at the Minirva surrounded by Dominican fathers saw and heard the conclusion of the debate and the announcement of victory for Fra Girolamo’s friends; which was confirmed shortly afterwards by an official message from the Vatican.

Fr. F. M. Capes, O.P., Life of St. Catherine de’ Ricci, Both St. Catherine and St. Philip kept a picture of Fra Girolamo Savonarola in their cells. Both attributed many miracles to the intercession of Fra Girolamo Savonarola

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