This is horrible news The only upshot at all is that everything is becoming more and more stark. Lines are being drawn. Those who stay with what the Church has always taught and those who want a modernist Church that compromises all it once believed and walks in lockstep with the world. Things seem to be speeding up as well. This is a blessing of sorts. It might mean the agony will be shorter lived. Perhaps we are at the point in the Passion of the Church where the timeless words of Our Lord have been uttered again: ...That which thou dost, do quickly. -John 13:27
May 19, 2017, 12:04 am Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal, a Venezuelan Communist and Modernist, is carrying out Francis’s agenda. Understanding the adage that personnel is policy, Pope Francis has been planting Marxists throughout the Church, including at the top of the troubled religious order to which he belongs. In 2016, the Jesuits, with the blessing of Pope Francis, installed as its general superior a Venezuelan, Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal, whose communist convictions have long been known. Sosa has written about the “Marxist mediation of the Christian Faith,” arguing that the Church should “understand the existence of Christians who simultaneously call themselves Marxists and commit themselves to the transformation of the capitalist society into a socialist society.” In 1989, he signed a letter praising Fidel Castro. Turn down any corridor in Francis’s Vatican, and you are likely to run into a de facto communist: Francis has a communist running his order, a communist running his Council of Cardinals (the Honduran cardinal, Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga), a communist running the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (Margaret Archer, a British sociologist who has said that she represents the “Marxian left”), and communists such as the renegade Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff and the Canadian socialist Naomi Klein drafting his encyclicals. It is no coincidence that the only U.S. presidential candidate who made a visit to the Vatican during the campaign was a socialist who had honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Bernie Sanders turned up at the Vatican in April 2016, having received an invitation from Pope Francis’s close Argentine friend, Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo. “We invited the candidate who cites the pope most in the campaign, and that is Senator Bernie Sanders,” explained Sorondo, who added that Sanders’s agenda is “very analogous to that of the pope.” In this smug leftist atmosphere in Rome, Sosa’s elevation to the head of the Jesuits was inevitable. In the past, the Jesuits had been called the pope’s marines. Under Sosa, they are more like the pope’s Marxists, peddling his climate-change propaganda as a pretext for global socialism. But Sosa’s ambitions, like Pope Francis’s, go well beyond meddling in economies. He is also pushing a moral revolution in the Church, evident in his astonishing claim that, since none of the Apostles tape-recorded Jesus Christ, his words on adultery can be elastically re-interpreted. “You need to start by reflecting on what exactly Jesus said,” Sosa told an Italian interviewer in February. “At that time, no one had a tape recorder to capture the words. What we know is that the words of Jesus have to be contextualized, they’re expressed in a certain language, in a precise environment, and they’re addressed to someone specific.” In other words, Sosa is confident that he understands Jesus’s meaning better than the Gospel writers. Like Francis, Sosa can’t resist the mumbo-jumbo of Modernist biblical scholarship, which always manages to dovetail conveniently with liberal views. The Council of Trent explicitly condemned the claim that the Gospel writers were just making stuff up when recounting the words of Jesus Christ. But Sosa has no problem trafficking in that heresy. “Over the last century in the Church there has been a great blossoming of studies that seek to understand exactly what Jesus meant to say,” he said. The presumption here is extraordinary but typical of a Francis acolyte. The new orthodoxy is heterodoxy, and Sosa is wallowing in it. He is given to little sermonettes on relativism, such as this whopper: The Church has developed over the centuries, it is not a piece of reinforced concrete. It was born, it has learned, it has changed. This is why the ecumenical councils are held, to try to bring developments of doctrine into focus. Doctrine is a word that I don’t like very much, it brings with it the image of the hardness of stone. Instead the human reality is much more nuanced, it is never black or white, it is in continual development. Were St. Ignatius of Loyola alive today, the order he founded wouldn’t ordain him, and he would have wondered how a de facto Protestant ended up on the chair of St. Peter. Nor would St. Ignatius have believed the sheer sophistry that now passes for theological “sophistication” in his order. Fr. Antonio Spadaro, another Jesuit close to Pope Francis, tweeted out earlier this year this profundity: “Theology is not #Mathematics. 2 + 2 in #Theology can make 5. Because it has to do with #God and real #life of #people.” Gobsmacked by the relentless leftism of Francis and his aides, Al Gore asked in 2015, “Is the pope Catholic?” The question is no longer a joke.
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/05/burying-benedict Burying Benedict Though Benedict is still living, Francis is trying to bury him. Upon his election in 2013, Francis began to pursue an agenda that Joseph Ratzinger had opposed throughout his career. A stress on the pastoral over against the doctrinal, a promotion of diverse disciplinary and doctrinal approaches in local churches, the opening of communion to the divorced and remarried—all these proposals were weighed and rejected by Ratzinger more than ten years ago in a heated debate with Walter Kasper. For better or worse, Francis now seeks to reverse Ratzinger. The conflict began with a 1992 letter concerning “the fundamental elements that are to be considered already settled” when Catholic theologians do their work. Some theologians had suggested that while doctrine might be universal and unchanging, it could be bent to meet discrete pastoral realities—allowing for a liberal approach, say, in Western Europe and a more conservative one in Africa. In order to guard against this idea, Pope John Paul II and Ratzinger, then head of the Inquisition, insisted that the universal Church was “a reality ontologically and temporally prior to every individual particular Church.” There would be no Anglican-style diversity for Catholics—not under John Paul. Behind this seemingly academic debate about the local and universal Church stood a disagreement over communion for the divorced and remarried. In 1993, Kasper defied John Paul by proposing that individual bishops should be able to decide whether or not to give communion to the divorced and remarried. Stopping short of calling for a change in doctrine, he said that there ought to be “room for pastoral flexibility in complex, individual cases.” In 1994, the Vatican rejected Kasper’s proposal with a letter signed by Ratzinger. “If the divorced are remarried civilly, they find themselves in a situation that objectively contravenes God’s law. Consequently, they cannot receive Holy Communion as long as this situation persists.” Kasper was not ready to back down. In a festschrift published in 1999, he criticized the Vatican’s 1992 letter and insisted on the legitimate independence of local churches. Ratzinger responded in a personal capacity the following year. It is because of such responses that he gained his reputation as a rigid doctrinal enforcer, but this caricature is unfair. Benedict has always been a poet of the Church, a man in whose writing German Romanticism blooms into orthodoxy. We see it here in his defense of Christian unity. He describes the Church as “a love story between God and humanity” that tends toward unity. He hears the gospel as a kind of theological ninth symphony, in which all humanity is drawn together as one: The basic idea of sacred history is that of gathering together, of uniting human beings in the one body of Christ, the union of human beings and through human beings of all creation with God. There is only one bride, only one body of Christ, not many brides, not many bodies. The Church is not “merely a structure that can be changed or demolished at will, which would have nothing to do with the reality of faith as such.” A “form of bodiliness belongs to the Church herself.” This form, this body, must be loved and respected, not put on the rack. Here we begin to see how the question of the universality of the Church affects apparently unrelated questions, such as communion and divorce and remarriage. Ratzinger cited 1 Corinthians, where Paul describes the unity of the Church in terms of two sacraments—communion and matrimony. Just as the two become one flesh in marriage, so in the Eucharist the many become one body. “For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.” The connections Paul draws between marriage, the Eucharist, and Church unity should serve as a warning for whoever would tamper with one of the three. If the one body of the universal Church can be divided, the “one flesh” of a married couple can be as well. And communion—the sign of unity of belief and practice—can turn to disunion, with people who do not share the same beliefs joining together as though they did. Kasper’s rejoinder came in an essay published in English by America. It is the earliest and most succinct expression of what would become Pope Francis’s program. It begins with a key distinction: “I reached my position not from abstract reasoning but from pastoral experience.” Kasper then decries the “adamant refusal of Communion to all divorced and remarried persons and the highly restrictive rules for eucharistic hospitality.” Here we have it—all the controversies of the Francis era, more than a decade before his election. (It should be noted that overwrought terms like adamant and highly restrictive, for which Kasper has sometimes been criticized, were introduced by an enthusiastic translator and have no equivalent in the German text.) Hovering in the background of this dispute, as of so many Catholic disputes, is the issue of liturgy. Ratzinger was already known as an advocate of the “reform of the reform”—a program that avoids liturgical disruption, while slowly bringing the liturgy back into continuity with its historic form. Kasper, by contrast, uses the disruption that followed Vatican II to justify further changes in Catholic life: “Our people are well aware of the flexibility of laws and regulations; they have experienced a great deal of it over the past decades. They lived through changes that no one anticipated or even thought possible.” Evelyn Waugh described how Catholics at the time of the Council underwent “a superficial revolution in what then seemed permanent.” Kasper embraces that superficial revolution, hoping that it will justify another, profounder one. He laments that Ratzinger does not see things his way: “Regrettably, Cardinal Ratzinger has approached the problem of the relationship between the universal church and local churches from a purely abstract and theoretical point of view, without taking into account concrete pastoral situations and experiences.” Ratzinger has failed to consult what Kasper calls the “data” of experience: “To history, therefore, we must turn for sound theology,” where we will find many examples of a commendable “diversity.” Though Kasper’s language is strewn with clichés (“data,” “diversity,” “experience”), it has genuine rhetorical appeal. We want to believe that there can be peace, peace, though there is no peace between Church and world. Just as we can be moved by visions of unity, we can be beguiled by promises of comfort. The contrast between the two men is thus rhetorical as well as doctrinal: Ratzinger inspires; Kasper relieves.
Con't America’s editors invited Ratzinger to respond, and he reluctantly agreed. His reply notes that we are baptized not merely in but into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. We are not made members of one of various local Christian associations, but are united with God. For this reason, “Anyone baptized in the church in Berlin is always at home in the church in Rome or in New York or in Kinshasa or in Bangalore or wherever, as if he or she had been baptized there. He or she does not need to file a change-of-address form; it is one and the same church.” Kasper closed the debate in 2001 with a letter to the editor, in which he argued that it “cannot be wholly wrongheaded … to ask about concrete actions, not in political, but in pastoral life.” There the controversy seemed to end. Ratzinger became pope and Kasper’s proposal was forgotten. Twelve years later, a newly elected Pope Francis gave Kasper’s proposal new life. In his first Angelus address, Francis singled out Kasper for praise, reintroducing him to the universal Church as “a good theologian, a talented theologian” whose latest book had done the new pope “so much good.” We now know that Francis had been reading Kasper closely for many years. Though he is usually portrayed as spontaneous and non-ideological, Francis has steadily advanced the agenda that Kasper outlined over a decade ago. In the face of this challenge, Benedict has kept an almost perfect silence. There is hardly any need to add to the words in which he resoundingly rejected the program of Kasper and Francis. And yet the awkwardness remains. No pope in living memory has so directly opposed his predecessor—who, in this instance, happens to live just up the hill. This is why supporters of Francis’s agenda become nervous whenever Benedict speaks, as he recently did in praise of Cardinal Sarah. Were the two men in genuine accord, partisans of Francis would not fear the learned, gentle German who walks the Vatican Gardens. And so the two popes, active and emeritus, speaking and silent, remain at odds. In the end, it does not matter who comes last or speaks most; what matters is who thinks with the mind of a Church that has seen countless heresies come and go. When Benedict’s enraptured words are compared to the platitudes of his successor, it is hard not to notice a difference: One pope echoes the apostles, and the other parrots Walter Kasper. Because this difference in speech reflects a difference in belief, a prediction can be made. Regardless of who dies first, Benedict will outlive Francis. Matthew Schmitz is literary editor of First Things
I think this is true of many "rigid" people including myself. I actually much prefer to be an easygoing, loving, tender person. This is my natural state. It is only when heterodoxy rears it's head that I find myself forced into a mode of being "rigid" in defending Truth. In essence it is the heterodoxy of the left that causes orthodox Catholics to become intransigent in defending the faith lest it be despoiled.
That's the modus operandi of the promoters of the anti-Christian agenda in the secular world. Having watched it play out for decades and seen them destabilise the fabric of society by destroying the very meaning of marriage and family as soon as they gained a grip on power, I'm amazed that people don't recognise it being replicated within the Church. Perhaps they don't want to see it and that's why they try passing it off as Ignatian spirituality. St. Ignatius must be turning in his grave.
http://throwthebumsoutin2010.blogsp...s-more-interested-in-saving.html?spref=fb&m=1 "This Pope is more interested in saving the planet than saving souls." Did you see that while Trump was in Rome, they were drilling him on 'climate change'? Tillerson later told reporters that climate change did not come up in the meeting with the Pope, but that U.S. officials had "a good exchange on the climate change issue" with Cardinal Parolin... "It is hoped that there may be serene collaboration between the state and the Catholic Church in the United States, engaged in service to the people in the fields of health care, education and assistance to immigrants," the Vatican said. They are engaged in service to the people in the fields of health care, getting degrees and illegal immigration. The mission of saving souls is not on their radar. Boy, does this ever nail the papacy: "This Pope is actually more interested in saving the planet than saving souls. He’s turned the Vatican into, almost, an annex of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club. He’s also been a great advocate for La Raza style open borders and, of course, he’s a strong voice for the global left in terms of promoting socialism.” Update: Our friend Michael Dowd recommended reading this interview with George Neumayer.
“Trump is very pragmatic and he’s flexible, whereas the Pope tends to be a very rigid left-wing ideologue. He is very committed to open borders. He’s very committed to climate change activism. He’s committed to abolishing, not only the death penalty but life time imprisonment, which is a position to the left of the Democratic party. No Democrat even takes that position. He’s very committed to his left-wing ideology, whereas Trump tends to be very pragmatic.” Neumayer “Doctrine unites ---- “ideology divides.” Pope Francis
http://the-american-catholic.com/2017/05/26/popewatch-black-swan/ PopeWatch: Black Swan Posted by Donald R. McClarey Carl Olson at The Catholic World Report has a keen summing up of this Pap Ironically, while Francis talks about clarifying doctrine, there’s simply no doubt that Amoris Laetitia, despite all protests and posturings, has instead confused, disturbed, and confounded with its ambiguities and problematic assertions. Insistence that this is all about “pastoral” issues is misleading, at best, since doctrine and practice go hand in hand; you need not be a theologian to see the essential relationship between what you believe and how you live (it might even be that not being a theologian is helpful in this regard). This pontificate has been divisive in ways few could have imagined prior to 2013. In addition, while Francis likes to talk about the “people”, it’s fairly evident that he has little patience for those people who dare question his questionable statements and actions, no matter how carefully, formally, or respectually they do so. His impatience with theological precision and doctrinal clarity is unsettling. As I noted back in December 2015: I can only conclude that, for whatever reason, this pope has a deep aversion to theological precision (and, thus, clarity) and is quite impatient with how “doctrine” and “dogma” impede his vision of how things should be in the Church. This is troubling on several counts … First, following the logic of Francis’ various remarks, the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI (for starters) were pharisaical and unnecessarily complex, and thus stand opposed to his vision of mercy. Whether or not Francis cares about such a logical progression and conclusion is, of course, an entirely different matter. And it’s not just about burying Benedict; it’s also about ignoring St. John Paul II. In the meantime, there is the name-calling, the scolding, and the vague appeals to the Holy Spirit. Go here to read the rest. This pontificate has been divisive in ways few could have imagined prior to 2013. Preach it Mr. Olson! This papacy is a Black Swan event, and a quarrelsome and divisive Swan it has proven to be. Sent from my iPhone
Don't get too caught up in the negative in these things . Whilst perceiving the truth, simply and with confidence turn to God in prayer for the relief of the Church. Pray my sisters and brothers and be at Peace. Be at Peace. Be at Peace. Pray for the Pope and the Church. Let us leave these things in the Hand of the Good God and move on. We ourselves cannot cure them . Let us leave them , prayerfully in the Hands of God and move on....we are so helpless what can we do? Prayer Prayer Prayer Prayer For Our Holy Father and the Church. Prayer, Prayer Prayer, Sigh Prayer, prayer So sad, so sad, sad, Let us leave them in the Hand of God.
http://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.com/2017/05/clio-and-pope-francis.html?m=1 Clio and Pope Francis I am not a historian; and the time has perhaps not yet come to write the history of this pontificate. But a hypothesis has occurred to me which could easily be subjected to Freddy Ayer's Falsification Principle. I propose that we have, so far, experienced two main periods in this pontificate: (1) the Parrhesia period, in which our Holy Father repeatedly called for Parrhesia, a Greek word meaning "Speaking boldly without fear or favour"; and (2) the "The Holy Spirit is guiding the Church through Francis" period. My theory is this. At first, Papa Bergoglio really believed that a large majority within the Church and in the Ordo episcopalis secretly thought as he did, but were afraid to assert their views publicly. To achieve the 'reforms' he desired, all he had to do (he felt) was to enable and encourage them frankly and freely to speak out. This part of my theory is supported by the report that his friend and ghost-writer Archbishop 'Tucho' Fernandez glossed 'Parrhesia' as meaning "Mueller won't come after us". Then there came that moment in the first Synod when a lot of the Fathers started ... er ... shouting because they realised that they were being manipulated. At this point, the Sovereign Pontiff realised that Parrhesia is very uncertain and unreliable as an instrument for advancing an agenda; and so, instead, the message began to come from his closest supporters that the Holy Spirit is leading the Church into things new and surprising, and doing it specifically through the mouth and person of the Holy Father. The Parrhesia-strategy had been discarded to be replaced by the Holy-Spirit-strategy. This newer line had two practical advantages for its user: that no objective evidence could be or needed to be produced to demonstrate that particular proposed innovations really do come from the Holy Spirit rather than from one of those other busy spirits against which the pages of Holy Scripture so wisely warn us ... all one needed to do was to assert it loudly and portentously (e.g. Mgr Pinto); and that unruly dissident bishops and theologians can be condemned and dismissed as "rigid" and a few other rather unkind things as well. So ... let us wrap this up ... after all, it's no more than an hypothesis adduced by a naive non-historian ... and can easily be binned by the production of contrary evidence. Accordingly I ask: (a) Have there been any sightings of the now rara avis Parrhesia Parrhesia since the Synod; and (b) were there any clear exempla of the topos "the Holy Spirit which speaks through Francis" before that moment?
BrianK, This will be the last time, barring issues surrounding the Dubia, that I will post on the subject of Holy Communion for the divorced. The article by Matthew Schmitz demonstrates without a doubt that Cardinal Ratzinger made clear in his 1994 and 1995 rebukes of Cardinal Kasper the Church's stand on this now heated topic. To allow a diversity of opinions to stand would lead to disunity. The answer is no. It is obvious that the debate has been resurrected once more with virtually no variation in the arguments for change. Therefore, the answer must still be no. Mueller, who now holds Ratzinger's former position agrees, but, Pope Francis refuses to reiterate. I pray and I wait for it to be brought to a head. And it will because Christ has not abandoned His Church. Safe in the Barque of Peter!
How many have read Matthew Schmitz demonstrations? I have only read that Pope Francis recommends Kasper. Doing theology on ones knees ring a bell?
Mon May 29, 2017 - 2:59 pm EST Pope Francis names pro-LGBT priest as auxiliary bishop in San Diego SAN DIEGO, California, May 29, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – Last month, Pope Francis named the pastor of an avowedly pro-LGBT Catholic parish as San Diego’s newest auxiliary bishop, to serve under prominent liberal Bishop Robert McElroy. Father John P. Dolan, 54, expressed his gratitude to Pope Francis in a statement to the Times of San Diego, and said he looked forward to “accompanying” Bishop McElroy in his ministry to the diocese. In November 2016, Bishop McElroy praised Fr. Dolan’s parish, St. John the Evangelist in Hillcrest, for its “welcoming” attitude towards “LGBT worshippers.” According to the Times of San Diego, Dolan will continue to serve as pastor at St. John the Evangelist. He will also continue to serve as Vicar for Clergy and as pastor of St. Vincent de Paul Parish. In December, LifeSiteNews reported that the director of young adult ministry at the St. John the Evangelist was an openly gay man who worked for the radical dissident group Call to Action. At the time St. John’s pictured a cross superimposed on a rainbow flag in its social media pages. The LGBT activist group New Ways Ministry celebrated Fr Dolan’s appointment on its blog on Wednesday. Associate Editor Robert Shine quotes the bishop-elect as saying, “There are two different forms of doing church… One is very dialogical, from a dialogical sense, and the other is from a monological sense. And we have dealt with that monological world: Things come from on high, they get shelved in some pastor’s corner, then there’s some thought that comes down, but ultimately it’s all ‘We’re going to tell you what to think…’” “Young adults have an acceptance of the LGBT experience. It is simply a part of their world, and they look at us, and say, ‘What is the problem?’” Bishop McElroy told the San Diego Union Tribune that Dolan’s appointment is in line with Pope Francis’ emphasis on appointing “pastors” rather than theologians. “Less abstraction, and more knowledge of the nitty, gritty of life,” McElroy said. Fr. Dolan had the first clue to his appointment when he checked his cell phone in the confessional and saw that he had missed a call from the papal nuncio in Washington D.C. “Then I heard, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Dolan told the Union Tribune. “Let me just say, that was the longest hour of confessions I’ve ever had.” A lifelong resident of San Diego, the future auxiliary bishop went to local Catholic schools before attending St. Francis Seminary and the University of San Diego. He earned both a Master of Divinity and a Master of Theology degree at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park. He was ordained a priest in 1989 by Bishop Leo T. Maher. Bishop Maher was an early critic of pro-LGBT Catholic “Dignity” and forbade his priests from celebrating Masses for the group. Nevertheless during his episcopacy, San Diego was rocked by scandals, including allegations by former seminarian Mark Brooks of homosexual orgies in St. Francis Seminary and his own eventual rape in 1982 by Father Nicholas Reveles. Reveles, who left the priesthood, always denied the story. According to New Ways Ministry, the “Francis Effect” can be seen in recent episcopal appointments: Francis appointee Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky participated in the organization’s national symposium, and Francis appointee Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago has said both that LGBT people must “follow their consciences” and that the Church must be open to “new avenues and creativity when it comes to accompanying [non-traditional] families.” Stating that “the pope’s influence on the U.S. episcopate is continuing to grow,” New Ways Ministry observes, hopefully, that “there are presently eight vacant dioceses, and several dozen bishops approaching the age of mandatory retirement.” RELATED Catholic bishop’s blistering rebuke of Trump: ‘Now we must all become disruptors’ San Diego bishop praises pro-gay parish as model for welcoming ‘LGBT worshippers’ San Diego bishop bans outspoken pro-life priest from writing bulletin columns San Diego bishop to priests: Embrace ‘LGBT families’, give Communion to ‘remarried’
More prophecy coming to pass before our very eyes... "The Final Confrontation between the Lord and Satan will be over Family and Marriage." Sister Lucia.
McElroy is the bishop neighboring my diocese. It's so unfortunate, as there are many faithful Catholics who live in the San Diego diocese who adhere to Church teachings.
I wonder, if as Pope Francis says the church laity should not be proselytizing but that the church should be one of attraction just what and who are we attracting and what expense? One one hand, his statement I understand completely in the sense that the catholic life ought be one that is open to all, a witness to our faith and a message of hope and in turn is one that is attractive to those who are seeking our Lord. I get this, it is what brought me to our Lord and eventually conversion. On the other hand, what attraction is it that we are enamoring others with by pushing these social justice issues especially when they conflict not only with that of the doctrine of the church but are in direct contradiction to those of our Lord's spoken words and truth. I have thought much about what Pope Francis says as well as does because I struggle with understanding it. Now, however, I am not sure that I want to understand.
