The spirit of the anti-Christ alive and well in China. Exposes the reality of the Vatican agreement - Christ and the mother of God betrayed. A Judas deal.
I wonder does Pope Francis have even the slightest feelings of guilt over this? Does he ever feel the least bit guilty over anything? How does he live with himself? It is quite astonishing.
Letter from the Battlefront: What a Faithful Young Priest Goes Through Peter Kwasniewski October 25, 2018 https://onepeterfive.com/letter-battlefront-young-priest/ One of the many things that has disturbed me in this ecclesial turmoil through which we are living is the simple thought: what are the abusive priests thinking? What do they think of themselves and of their victims? How can they live with themselves? Do they believe anything of the Catholic Faith? The same question might be asked of the shepherds who are complicit or cowardly: does their conscience ever awaken in a quiet moment and thunder against their hypocrisy? It is hard to believe that anyone can become as callous and as corrupt as the Pennsylvania report (and, one fears, many forthcoming reports like it) shows the perpetrators and their protectors to be. I recall my many years of teaching Aristotle’s Ethics to undergraduates. Aristotle notes that the worse someone becomes morally, the less he is capable of seeing his own wickedness. The “limit case” is the state of vice, a habitual frame of reference and settled inclinations that make the vicious man incapable of seeing the world exceptviciously. He is bent on desiring what is bad and is no longer aware of an alternative. According to Aristotle, it can get even worse: there is the condition of “bestiality,” which he describes as inhuman or subhuman vice. Aristotle classifies both cannibals and sodomites as bestial – that is, worse than vicious. Is Aristotle pessimistic about the situation of the vicious and the bestial? Absolutely. He says they are stuck in a hole and cannot get out of it. While a man is still drifting toward vice, he can check himself and get back on the road of virtue, but once he is fully committed to vice, he is a lost soul. Christians believe this, as well – but Christians also believe in the transformative power of God’s grace. God can take a persecutor of the Church, like the future St. Paul, and intervene dramatically in his life, without Saul’s invitation. He can confront and blind the persecutor and lead him step by step into the Church and make him a great saint. When Augustine, after years of enthrallment to lust, picked up a copy of St. Paul’s letters and began to read, God pierced him to the heart and finally released him from that sin. From then on, Augustine was a believer and lived what he believed. Every conversion is like this, although most are less dramatic. At one period in our lives, we are comfortable with sinning, perhaps even unaware that we are sinning. Over a period of time, we become uncomfortable, we hate ourselves for what we are doing, and we want to change. There is always the hidden or open working of God’s grace, without which we cannot turn to Him and cannot be saved from the evil of our fallen nature. This is a sobering message, and it is pure Gospel truth. Without “salutary self-hatred,” as the tradition calls it, we will not turn our lives around and make the difficult sacrifices necessary to follow God’s commandments. This is not the end of the story; there is a virtuous self-love we are meant to attain, when we love in ourselves the good that God created, the good He has redeemed. If there is one thing perfectly obvious about the Church in our times, it is that evil self-love abounds, and virtuous self-love is a rare sight. Let’s face it: how many times have we, feeling exasperated, discouraged, or plain angry with evils in the world, wondered why the Lord doesn’t intervene with His outstretched arm and sweep away the enemy with a blast of the breath of His mouth, as He did with the Egyptians when delivering Israel from bondage? Why doesn’t He rid the world of the worst evildoers, like (to use an image from the prophets) a man wiping out a dish? But we seldom remember what Scripture teaches us about the worst punishment of the Lord upon sinners. This is not fire and brimstone, hail and scorching winds, the ground splitting open to swallow up rebels. It is simply God withholding the grace of conversion from the sinner, precisely as a just punishment for his sinful actions. The general consensus of Catholic theologians is that God never fails to give us “actual graces” – that is, momentary promptings and opportunities for conversion, which do not yet amount to “sanctifying grace” or the life of God in the soul. These promptings are rather in the nature of someone outside us shouting, “Hey! Look here! Come over and join me.” If we take advantage of the actual grace, our conversion is under way. But if we ignore, dismiss, or hold in contempt these actual graces when they come (and they don’t come wrapped and labeled for easy recognition), we are pushing conversion ever farther away. This should stir up humility, contrition, and holy fear in all of us. While we have faith, we should use it to ask for more; while we are sorry, we should act on that sorrow to ask for more repentance; while we are aware of our weaknesses, we should beg for conversion. Otherwise, if we squander what we have been given or keep following our disordered desires, we will have only ourselves to blame if the Lord permits us to lose what we evidently want to lose and be stuck with what we evidently want to gorge ourselves on. All this is a long preface to a letter I received from a young priest. Obviously, in writing to me, he asked for my discretion, so his name and location will not be discernible from this version, which I have his permission to publish. Nevertheless, what remains is powerful enough: a glimpse into the sick, vicious, even bestial mentality of the men causing such harm to the Mystical Body of Christ on Earth, a glimpse into their unrepentant blindness of sin. This, in keeping with Aristotle’s age-old wisdom, is the reason there is not going to be a sudden great “cleaning out” of the Church under this pope and under many of the bishops currently in office. They do not really see the evil as evil, although they may pay lip service to the opinions of the crowds from whom their funding comes. They may well be incapable of seeing the evil as evil, because the Lord is punishing them for their evil by withholding the grace of conversion from them. The worst thing that can happen to a sinner is to remain unconvicted and unrepentant of his sin, as a prelude to eternal damnation. As stark as it sounds, I believe we could describe abusive clergy and their sympathizers as “living dead,” men without sanctifying grace in their souls, without charity for God or neighbor, without desire for Heaven. Their consciences are blanketed over with years of vice or worse. They are already living in the Hell that will be theirs forever – unless they respond to the actual graces by which God is calling them back to Himself. * * * (Continues below...)
Dear Dr. Kwasniewski, I remember meeting you at – – – . I am currently a diocesan priest. I had to leave the place I was before due to rampant sexual promiscuity and its attendant cover-up and the persistent refusal to recognize it as a problem. I have never witnessed sexual abuse. But I have witnessed things like stalking, targeting, and seductive behavior by priests. One priest who was accused by others had at some point actually tried to seduce me. Being a mature adult man, I never tolerated the behavior and walked away. But the sheer quantity and persistence of this behavior eventually led to my having to tell several of them that if they ever attempted to communicate with me again, I would get the police involved. That is the only sort of language they know how to speak: victimization. They are hell-bent on making you their victim, and the only thing that will stop them is if you threaten to make them a victim. Then, after you threaten them, they crawl into a corner with tears as if you’ve wounded them unjustly. They protest: “I wasn’t doing anything wrong!” They tempt you to apologize so that in your moment of weakness, they can then victimize you. Their entire rubric for life is to seduce and victimize, all the while pretending as though this is how natural friendships are supposed to be. They play the role of victim when their seductive tactics are exposed. In this climate, there is nothing that can be done to preserve the peace of a fraternal community. There simply is no peace, no charity – only sin and sacrilege and the charred remains of Catholicism. There are now stringent rules in place at – – – to prevent predators from abusing young people. But the rubric of seduction is not limited to the sexual. There is such a thing as intellectual seduction, which is happening in a variety of ways. Those who are instructed by these men become victims of not knowing Catholic faith or morals, since they are taught gibberish in religion classes. The goal is to create adults whose consciences are malformed. The malformed conscience is easily seduced. Thus, even though the law protects these children from physical sexual abuse, it does not protect them from the intellectual abuse of having their consciences polluted and malformed, so that society will end up containing more people who are easily victimized and who will victimize others. The predators are not interested in religion except as a convenient ruse behind which to hide their sins. Even Our Lord himself is a nicety to them, an imaginary faun-like being whom they mentally flirt with, who clinks an imaginary martini glass and laughs with them at their own naughtiness and everyone else’s, waving a hand and forgiving them without repentance, even in the midst of their sin. They use biblical quotes in random ways to make excuses for their behavior. They denounce traditionalists as psychologically disturbed or full of hate. They pray only as a way of appearing pious to other people. God and faith are nothing more than anti-depressant drugs to them, and not even very effective ones at that. I used to work in the secular music world. It is the same there. Active homosexuals and their sympathizers band together and form exclusive cliques from which all others are banned. They pride themselves as artistically sensitive; thus, they must beseen to be artistic by others. In reality, they are killing arts and culture. Everything is mere appearance, fantasy, phenomena – nothing is substance. Wherever men engage in sodomy, or really, any regular unchastity, whether with boys, girls, young adults, or old adults, a culture of cover-up flourishes. Unchaste priests always feel that they are in the same exclusive club; they hate and despise all chaste priests. Each knows who the others are, and they have an unwritten agreement that they will defend and protect each other no matter what and will try to make life difficult for their chaste confreres. They will publicly decry child abuse and cover-up, but since they do not believe in natural law, they would have no qualms if child abuse and cover-up were suddenly legalized, much as some people changed their minds about the morality of marijuana when states began to legalize it. They have no virtue of charity to unite them, and they have no courage to fight for the good. They cling most desperately to their shared lusts. As long as there are large numbers of unchaste priests, this degenerate downward spiral will not go away. I recently discovered that the examination of conscience provided by my current parish to penitents never references unchastity even once. Abortion is on the list of sins, but unfaithfulness to one’s spouse is not on the list. Instead, it says “non-exclusive love of spouse,” which is rather ambiguous. Contraception is completely missing. So is immodesty in dress, speech, or behavior. So are homosexual acts, bestiality, pornography, and masturbation. The vaguely termed “disrespect of sexual dignity” is on the list. I also learned from experience that this entire “soft approach” has all been carefully calculated. The word “dignity,” in particular, is suggestive of the pro-homosexual Dignity movement. In one parish’s missal, I have seen the words “man” and “men” crossed out, and gender-neutral pronouns assigned to our beloved Savior. Deacons have been trained to say that Jesus Christ became “human” instead of “man,” and our people are told to say “for us and for our salvation” instead of “for us men and for our salvation,” as the approved text has it. Even staff members refuse to call priests “Father.” This is not uncommon in parishes, at least in the northeast USA. The response of liberals to this disgusting mess is to argue that the Church, far from needing to recover its higher standards from the past, has not changed enough. According to them, the current scandals are happening because John Paul II and Benedict XVI unreasonably prevented Vatican II from achieving the end for which it was called: to bring the Catholic Church fully “up to date” with the modern world. The problem, they say, is that the priesthood is an enclosed society, too cut off from normal people, in which vice is allowed to flourish because of a protective “old boys’ club.” “If only women were there, things would be so much better,” they plead. They also think this problem is linked to the hierarchical nature of the priesthood, that Our Lord never intended the priesthood to be hierarchical or distinct from the laity, and that this distinctness is the cause of the abuse crisis. They argue for new laws requiring transparency and accountability between bishops and laity. They want the laity more involved in the management and oversight of the Church, especially the formation of priests. In their minds, the priesthood is inherently imperialistic and power-driven, and this is harming the Church. Judging by his most recent statement about this matter, the Holy Father feels the same way. What they are really saying, underneath all of this banter, is that the law of celibacy must change. But if you ask them, “Do you mean that the law of celibacy needs to change?,” they will reply, “No,” because they fear being victimized by the current position of “strong thinking” in the Church’s teaching on celibacy rearticulated by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. They take their moral formation from the gay pseudo-philosopher Gianni Vattimo, for whom virtue means a submission of the strong thought of logic and nature to the weaker thought of inner needs. They truly believe that the law of celibacy should change, but they will not say this publicly. In fact, they want the entire Catholic teaching on the virtue of chastity to change.But before they can say this openly, they need to feel that Church authorities have reached a “weak position” on the issue of celibacy such that they can speak freely about it without fear of persecution. Under Francis’s papacy, they are starting to feel more confident. But until they reach a point where they can say this openly, they shroud their true opinion in statements like the above, using terms like transparency, oversight, accountability, lay involvement, etc. In the meantime, they allow the unchaste, secular world to wreak moral havoc on themselves and their flock. They perniciously allow the malformed consciences of their parishioners to be exposed to repeated temptations to sin, the goal being that the majority of Church members will eventually want to compromise with the unchaste principles of secularism. Meanwhile, if we are to believe Sr. Lucia of Fatima, souls are going to Hell in droves. For now, the liberal priests beat their breasts; they make generic confessions and generic absolutions, and they shout, “Enough! This must stop! I am sick of this! We have failed you, the Church has failed you, and we are collectively sorry. May God forgive us!” They treat the name of Our Lord as a general panacea, and they never once do they demand any internal repentance, never once demanding contrition for and confession of that ocean of sexual vice that pounds against the shores of so many souls. They like to foment the sense that the clergy as a whole have failed the laity, or worse, that the Church as a whole has failed them, because it makes the laity think that the essence of the priesthood and of the Church needs to be changed drastically. Liberal priests have taken the temperature of the masses, and they believe that the majority of Catholics are now almost ready for the gigantic ideological shift toward the left that the Church has been waiting for since Vatican II. This is going to be their big push for total destruction of all that you and I would recognize as Catholicism. (continues below...)
The devil is surely behind this. His ultimate goal is to wrench the Catholic Church out of itself in slow motion, so that it disintegrates into secularism by an erosion of chastity. The Novus Ordo is also part of this plot, since it was intentionally designed to foster a lack of understanding and reverence for Christ. It is an indirect attack on the immaterial object of faith itself, which is Christ Our Lord, High Priest of God and supreme model of manly virtue. The word for this is apostasy. And when the ultimate Good is unknown or obscured, it should not surprise anyone that lower material goods are sought in a disordered manner. This includes, among other things, money, power, and sex. Even the conservatives play into this system. Conservative bishops fear the power of the enormous secret homo-collective, as well as the intellectual seducers, and they survive by compromising with this system. Conservatives are not, as a rule, allowed into the system, nor do they want to be part of it. They do everything they can to avoid it. Hence, in some ways to their disadvantage, the conservatives have only suspicions, not evidence. To denounce a priest because of suspicions is very risky; even if many agree that a certain type of activity is cliquish, seductive, effeminate, sexually charged, flirtatious, or shady, one needs actual evidence for guilt. There is rarely such evidence. Hence, the valiant whistleblower becomes the boy who cried wolf, and even good priests do not want to live with someone who has denounced other priests without sufficient evidence. It is easy for the lavender mafia to destroy the priestly career of whistleblowers; all they have to do is pay someone a lot of money to accuse the whistleblower falsely (they are always well funded), and, thanks to the Dallas Charter, the whistleblower’s priestly career is over. Thanks to recent press, everyone now knows that this homosexual, protective, well financed club exists. Good priests would expose it if they could. But…they lack evidence. So they have to be compromisers, pretending not to suspect anything just to save their skin. Vast numbers of clergy have never read a single work by Aristotle or Aquinas, or any magisterial work prior to 1960 – and because they were formed in a secular, non-classical, anti-ecclesial, non-liturgical, non-literary, atheistic culture posing as Catholicism, they have absorbed its thinking and internalized its lies. Their souls are full of stumbling blocks placed there by heretics. They have become intellectually and morally bankrupt and are in no way suited to be pastors of souls. There is no rapport, no common language or common ground with them, because the very ground for knowing the real is denied by them. They think primarily with slogans. For generations, they have not been doing the primary thing they are supposed to do: uphold the apostolic traditions. Their predecessors rejected their own identity as priests and bishops a generation ago and accepted themselves as well dressed community activists and fundraisers who were content to possess priestly character and enjoy the trappings of Catholicism without the Faith. Some of them were successful at these things – so successful that they attracted the attention of the pope, who made them monsignors, bishops, even cardinals. The popes should have looked for piety in bestowing honors upon the clergy, but instead they looked for money, diplomatic skills, secular political connections, and willingness to submit to power. You call it an apostasy, and rightly so. Let us call a spade a spade. It is time to decry modernism in the clergy, and every modernist priest must be denounced, whether or not it is his fault that he is one. Culpability cannot be taken into account when so many souls are endangered. The surest way to do this is for a pope to repeal Vatican II and its attached postconciliar pronouncements. By “repeal,” of course I do not mean delete it from the list of councils; I mean to cease to render it a springboard for implementing constant change, and to relegate it to a position of impotence in the practical life of the Church. It shall no longer be quoted in catechisms or taught in schools; it shall be a quaint museum piece for scholars of the future to discuss over tea. If there is anything in it that sheds light on the Catholic faith better than any other council or pope, I would like to know what it is; surely, fifty years would have been enough time to discover it. Bishop Barron keeps saying councils take one hundred years to have any effect; people like him say this merely to evade the present disaster. This “one hundred years” statement is pure nonsense; it is not based on historical evidence. Regardless, since it was never meant to teach anything definitively or to condemn anything definitively, Vatican II as an ecumenical council stands in contradiction to its own essence, which is to be magisterial. So repeal it. If this is done, many priests and bishops who worship the holy twins (Roncalli and Montini) will form a schism. The ones who stay with the Church will truly reform her. This, and only this – not more policies and procedures, not more laws and regulations – will bring about a new flourishing of the Catholic Faith and will rid the Church of the filth that the clergy have allowed to accumulate in her spiritual granaries, mixing with her food and silently poisoning her children with hidden apostasy over these several generations. (I’m not saying everything was rosy before Vatican II; the apostasy was already fomenting for decades prior to the Council. Clergy formation in the 1940s was already abysmal, totally exposed to attack from the nouvelle théologie onslaught of the 1950s. Vatican II only provided this intellectual and liturgical cancer with the enzymes it needed to metastasize exponentially.) People will say: “Why couldn’t bishops just summon their priests one by one and ask if they are sexually active?” The priests in most need of repentance would be the ones who lie the most freely. Their loyalty to the club of “New Liturgy, New Morality, New Church” trumps their loyalty to their bishop and to God. This entire edifice of nouveau-Catholicism must be repealed in order to provoke their free departure. Gay witch hunts would not be successful. When I say my daily rosary, one of my intentions is for an end to modernism in the clergy. When Our Lady of Fatima visited us, she knew the perils we were facing. The more I meditate on this, the more I think the portion of the Third Secret not yet disclosed is about widespread clerical apostasy and its heraldic centerpiece, the Second Vatican Council. Homosexuality in the clergy is but one little part of a vast campaign to thwart the salvation of souls. We are in the middle of a chaos created by Satan, and chaos is, by nature, hard to describe, especially when one is standing amid the ruins. There is no “grand solution” for mortals such as ourselves. The work Our Lord wants us to do right now in order to clear and rebuild this ruined city starts with the removal of one piece of garbage, then another, and another, wherever and whenever we can, and the reinstallation of anything that is good, true, and beautiful, be it sound doctrine and Christian morals in our families and our schools, solemn and reverent liturgy in our parishes, good intellectual formation, a serious commitment to the traditional devotions and customs of the Church. Brick by brick. In the end, Mary’s Immaculate Heart will triumph. Oremus Pro Invicem, Father – – –
Pope Francis is allowing an atheistic government to choose bishops for the 'pretend 'Catholic Church (with a proviso that the Pope has a 'veto' on the final decision). It is like a Monty Python pantomime!
It is like the Pope in Tudor times telling Henry VIII to choose bishops for the Church of England but the Pope has a veto on the final choice. Truly it is just mind blowing and a sign that not only has the Vatican fallen but it is in league with the enemy on too many occasions.
For a split second there, the woman registered in my brain as Sinead O' Connor, God help her! There are many in the hierarchy who seem to have no clue how to deal with this. Even if this bishop is entirely blameless, it is just not right to hide from credible allegations of sin behind a shield of civil law. Maybe the Church needs to lose all its material wealth in order to recover Herself. It would then certainly lose its attraction for those who choose a bishopric for its wealth, status and 'bling'.
Yes it raises a lot of questions. The Communists must have thought Christmas had come early when the Vatican did this deal. It really does make me wonder how many in the Vatican are in actual League with the Devil..are Satanists.
They did it before. Cardinal Mindszenty got the stiletto in the back from our latest papal saint. Imagine how the ordinary Catholics behind the Iron Curtain would have thought and felt about that betrayal. Now, we have the same being done to the faithful Catholics of China, after all their sufferings and sacrifices. I don't know if it is necessarily all down directly to satanism; there's one useful idiot bishop in the Vatican who neve refrains from his mantra that Chinese communism is the closest extant secular phenomenon to the Catholic Faith. There is a grain of truth in it, in that a wolf is a much closer relation of a dog than is a sheep. This useful idiot might well be sincere, if utterly misguided, but the devil thrives on this this kind of stupidity. In Zerohedge, there have been recent articles demonstrating that the graph of future Chinese debt takes a very severe escalation, in direct negative proportion to the future young population (a consequence of a single-child policy taken too far and that the Chinese now find it very difficult to reverse, having made couples more selfish) who will have to shoulder this rising debt, a projected static GDP per head and supporting a rising population of the elderly. The enormous economic strides taken by China in recent decades look like they were illusory, a great present derived not from the wonders of communism but via robbery from the future. I suspect the authorities in China know this well and this explains their recent series of clamp-downs on those they suspect as potentially dissident. The question is, will they be able to clamp down on a billion angry Chinese when it finally dawns on them that the party is over? Please God, the Catholics can hang on 'til the roof falls in. They would find themselves with a huge opportunity for evangelisation in such an event.
We were told by Someone that the Truth would set us free. In contrast, I have just read a report unsympathetic to our pope in the Wall Street Journal describing how PF has once again condemned those who would accuse abusers as persecuting the Church. It is difficult to interpret this as meaning anything but that abusers represent the true Church and that their victims should silently accept their status. While there might be some justification for such an attitude in the face of untrue allegations, this can hardly be largely the case since various Churchmen have so often and for so long been apologising for this abuse and many millions have been paid out in compensation. Our alternatives are to believe firstly that our Church leaders have been apologising for behaviour that never happened and have been fraudulently giving Church money to liars; or we are to accept that rampant male-on-male, and other, sexual abuse by clergy must be tolerated and to complain is to be in league with satan. Is it upon the victims' necks that Our Lord would place His millstone?
When it comes to Private Revelation which is open for discernment by all...and in this case within the jurisdiction of what the Magisterium itself permits through its more experienced and "on site" knowledgeable Cardinals, Bishops and proven priests (and theologians....esp. of the eschatology specialty), I like to go to the source as much as possible rather than be sidelined by opinions only from those who even when given the Church's own outlook would never alter such already stated opinions. Once someone has attempted to set up his/her own site dedicated to just their own understanding rather than commend themselves to the Church's own permissions....even for them.....then such a one and only "advisor" seems pretty lacking in the openness permitted and then attempts to sway those into the same boat....w/o the full education coming from those others with more expertise. BTW, I never implied that this quoted priest who happens to be a Dominican was just "any old" type. I referred to him as someone else who happens to have an opinion on the subject....like many others who also may or may not have any real "up close and personal" knowledge of this whole question....including the fact of judgements NOT even made by the Church and esp. re: someone who has more of an Orthodox mission on the whole due to background but knows of the complications and willingness or lack thereof of all sides that must be included. Instead there ought to be a willingness to go to the many, much more studied and who are themselves deeply involved in the arena of Private Revelations who actually see the fruits of this mission and who have made statements re: such within this particular one. Otherwise one simply gets the usual "I've found someone from some ecclesiastically approved group to match the one you might have also discovered"....whether or not either has been personally involved or is simply, again, "remotely viewing" from afar.
Pope Decries ‘Persecution’ of Catholic Church Through Accusations Remarks, at the end of a gathering of bishops, are unlikely to mollify critics in wake of sex-abuse scandals ROME—Pope Francis told a gathering of bishops from around the world that the Catholic Church is being persecuted through accusations—an apparent allusion to clerical sex-abuse scandals that have undermined the credibility of the papacy and church hierarchy over the course of this year. Addressing the closing session of a synod of bishops at the Vatican on Saturday, the pope repeated warnings he has made in recent weeks against the “Great Accuser,” or the devil, who “in this moment is accusing us strongly, and this accusation becomes persecution,” and who seeks to “soil the church.” “This is the moment to defend our mother” the church, said the pope, in remarks unlikely to mollify critics who say he has failed to recognize the hierarchy’s responsibility for the abuse crisis. “The accuser is attacking our mother through us, and no one touches our mother.” The gathering of more than 250 bishops was dedicated to the topic of youth, exploring how the church can better engage young Catholics and help them find roles in the church, whether as priests, nuns or lay members. In a twist on the usual protocol at such gatherings, more than 30 lay Catholics below the age of 30 years attended the sessions, where they enlivened the atmosphere by clapping and cheering during some of the speeches. A published agenda for the meeting made only passing reference to sex abuse, but after months of scandals in the U.S., Latin America and Australia—and the claim by a former Vatican diplomat that Pope Francis himself had ignored sexual misconduct by a U.S. cardinal—the subject inevitably loomed over the proceedings. Bishops frequently addressed clerical sex abuse during the first week of the monthlong synod, Archbishop Eamon Martin of Ireland told reporters on Friday. The 60-page final document, released late Saturday, devoted two paragraphs to the subject of abuse, calling for “rigorous measures of prevention,” starting with the selection and education of clergy and other church employees. Quoting Pope Francis, the document lays much of the blame for sex abuse on “clericalism,” or an excessive deference to the church’s hierarchy. The final document is “frankly inadequate and disappointing on the abuse matter,” Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, a member of the council that organized the synod, said in an email. “There’s very little sense of heartfelt apology in the text.” The archbishop, who had previously called on the pope to cancel the gathering because of the sex-abuse crisis, said Saturday that “church leaders outside the United States and a few other countries dealing with the problem clearly don’t understand its scope and gravity.” Some bishops from the developing world objected that their peers from western countries were overemphasizing sex abuse at the synod, according to Cardinal Oswald Gracias of Mumbai, who helped draft the final document, which touches on topics ranging from migration to the internet and their impact on the lives of young Catholics. “To be fair to the synod, you can’t say (sex abuse is) the number-one thing,” Cardinal Gracias, who is also a top adviser to Pope Francis, told the Catholic website Crux. “The statement should answer the needs of the United States, Ireland, Australia, but not just them.” The pope has called another international meeting of bishops to discuss clerical sex abuse for four days in February. Another split between developed and developing countries at this month’s synod emerged in the debate over the church’s approach to gay people. The published agenda made news by using the term LGBT, apparently for the first time in an official Vatican document. But the African bishops at the synod overwhelmingly opposed the use of LGBT, arguing it would create ambiguity about the church’s prohibition of any sexual activity outside of marriage between one man and one woman. “We’ve got a very strong tradition in Africa of families, family life, and division of the sexes is very, very clear. If we come out with unclear statements, that same-sex attraction is OK and so on, it’s going to be completely misunderstood,” Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of South Africa, said in an interview. The term LGBT doesn’t appear in the final document, which denounces “any discrimination and violence on the basis of sex” and encourages “accompaniment in the faith of homosexual persons.” Write to Francis X. Rocca at francis.rocca@wsj.com https://www.wsj.com/articles/pope-d...atholic-church-through-accusations-1540676324
The Persecution has come from a large contingency of our clergy in the US with decades of watered down teachings at the expense of not teaching with clarity the truths of the scriptures. It took a big step when they denied Humane Vitae and chose to support contraception. St. Pope Paul VI spoke to this and it was nearly completely ignored and rejected by the clerics from the moment it came out in 1968 and the sexual perversion did not end with fornication and adultery, but it helped the pro Sodomy movement in the Church as well.
And this influence has come in a major way, for the generations who are unformed in the true Faith, through the so called "Catholic" Universities and colleges as well as the houses of "formation"! No wonder they are often the basis for the bad reputation of the Church everywhere and how it can be singled out by those looking for a scapegoat for the general immorality of the culture. It's rather ironic when such institutions call upon their civil freedoms like the catch all of "freedom of speech" for their right to spew forth garbage while teaching a basic disrespect for the country and its foundational principles in general while destroying basic morality and self respect in the young.
"Some bishops from the developing world objected that their peers from western countries were overemphasizing sex abuse at the synod, according to Cardinal Oswald Gracias of Mumbai, who helped draft the final document, which touches on topics ranging from migration to the internet and their impact on the lives of young Catholics." It sure would be nice to be somewhere where our focus would be on fixing issues like migration, the internet and their impact on young lives. In the West we are all messed up where they are calling truth lies and lies truth. Sigh. It's heartbreaking.
I read the part in the article about God withholding the grace of conversion from a sinner precisely as a just punishment for his sinful actions.....that does indeed explain why so many of us are praying for the hierarchy and feel that we are getting nowhere. I am referring to the article posted by SgCatholic, “Letter from the Battlefront” The author of that article possesses deep insight into the soul’s descent into hell and damnation.
Have you noticed that Vatican 11 hasn't been mentioned in the spin promoting the Vatican/China deal? Do you think that might be because the "God of surprises" didn't read the following paragraphs in Christus Dominus? "Since the apostolic office of bishops was instituted by Christ the Lord and pursues a spiritual and supernatural purpose, this sacred ecumenical synod declares that the right of nominating and appointing bishops belongs properly, peculiarly, and per se exclusively to the competent ecclesiastical authority. Therefore, for the purpose of duly protecting the freedom of the Church and of promoting more conveniently and efficiently the welfare of the faithful, this holy council desires that in future no more rights or privileges of election, nomination, presentation, or designation for the office of bishop be granted to civil authorities. The civil authorities, on the other hand, whose favorable attitude toward the Church the sacred synod gratefully acknowledges and highly appreciates, are most kindly requested voluntarily to renounce the above-mentioned rights and privileges which they presently enjoy by reason of a treaty or custom, after discussing the matter with the Apostolic See." http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_...t-ii_decree_19651028_christus-dominus_en.html
