Enemies of the Church

This article from Crisis Magazine reminds us that we cannot forget them.

An excerpt.

The 1960s were extremely hard on the Catholic Church. The damage done by relativism, contraception, abortion, no-fault divorce (summed up as the Sexual Revolution) and Cultural Marxism has resonated for five decades. When dissident priests such as Fr. Charles Curran advocated for a distorted version of social justice in Catholic colleges and universities, the prophetic teaching of Humane Vitae and the true intent of the Vatican II documents were mutilated by the secular media as well as by many Catholic writers and theologians who misused their skills to attack the kingdom of God.

At a time when sound catechesis and evangelization could have impacted the largest generation of high school and college aged Catholics in the history of the US, misinformation, confusion and outright heresy prevailed in many classrooms and too many Catholic churches across the country.

“Catholic” schools have now churned out hundreds of thousands of graduates who have little or no concept of what the Church actually taught, much less the sound reasoning, science and scriptural basis for her teachings. Some of these graduates are now tenured teachers, department chairs at colleges and universities, some are in the hierarchy of the Church in the US, and some are at very high levels of our state and federal governments. Many more are the parents and grandparents to generations who received their catechesis and evangelization through the words and deeds of people who live lives of little or no witness to an orthodox Catholic faith.

Some faithful Catholics made it through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s with a firm and authentic Catholic faith, but as we look back on the decline of Christianity in the US since 1960, we see that these Catholics are the exception to the rule. Yet these faithful Catholics have been our lifeline to orthodox Catholicism.

In 1965, there were about 46 million Catholics in the United States and 55 percent of whom attended Mass on a weekly basis. Today, we have about 73 million Catholics in the country and only 23 percent of us attend Mass on a weekly basis. If you do the math, you will find that there are over 8 million fewer Catholics at Mass this weekend, than there were on the same weekend in 1965. If you compare today to 1950, the numbers are even more depressing. Some sources say the weekly Mass attendance in the 1950s was more than 70 percent.

Catholicism has been on a 70-year slide in the US. We have more people who identify as Catholic than at any time in our history, but we have less than ½ of the sacramental marriages and baptisms we had in 1965. There has also been a 37 percent decrease in the number of priests since 1965 and a 75 percent decrease in religious sisters (nuns). If the American Catholic Church was a publicly traded company on the stock exchange, our shares would be extremely cheap if they had any value at all.

Retrieved April 12, 2018 from https://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/vulnerable-church-can-not-forget-enemies

Communism & the Church, Part II

Superb historical information, from Roberto de Mattei.

An excerpt.

Among the staunchest opponents of the Vatican Ostopolik, a figure of remarkable cultural and moral stature should be remembered: Father Alessio Ulisse Floridi (1930-1986).

 

A member of the Company of Jesus at a very young age, Father Floridi studied at the Pontifical Russian College, where he learned Russian perfectly and, in 1949, he was ordained a priest in the Byzantine Rite His hope was to be part of an underground apostolate in Russia, just like some of his confreres, but his superiors wanted him at La Civiltà Cattolica, the journal which was the pride and joy of the Company. Father Floridi became the sovietologist par excellence of this journal, collaborating with articles written from first-hand reading of newspapers, journals and documents coming [directly] from the Soviet Union. His articles rich in notes and personal comments, were read and appreciated for their accuracy by the Communists themselves, both in Italy and abroad.

The election of John XXIII and the calling of the Second Vatican Council were a turning point in the lives of the writers at La Civiltà Cattolica. In the obituary written for Father Floridi, on December 20 1986, the Jesuit journal writes that he had left La Civiltà Cattolica because the life of a writer was too “static and sedentary”. In reality, as Father Floridi informed me personally, he was abruptly liquidated for not bending to his superiors’ impositions. They had asked him to apply the St. Francis de Sales maxim to Communism, “a spoonful of honey attracts more flies than a barrel of vinegar”. The same discourse had been made to Father Giovanni Caprile (1917-1993), who, on the other hand, had accepted the suggestion, and from being an implacable critic, he became an apologist for Freemasonry.

Father Floridi recalled that the Jesuit vow of obedience was not indiscriminate, as many suppose, but simply obliges: “to go wherever His Holiness sends them among the faithful and the infidels.” (Constitution § 7). And he didn’t back off when, from high places, it was decided he should be sent as far away as possible from Villa Malta, the headquarters of La Civiltà Cattolica in Rome. So he ended up first in Brazil, among the Russian refugees, and afterwards, in the United States, where he lead a fruitful mission among Ukrainian Catholics of the Oriental Rite, without ever giving in to the new trend.

When I met him in 1977, Father Floridi was an imposing fifty-seven year old, with a black beard framing his open, jovial, good-humored face, typical of authentic “Romani de Roma ”. In 1976 he published the book Moscow and the Vatican for La Casa Matriona, afterwards translated into various languages and which is still a text of capital reference for the study of the relations between the Vatican and the Kremlin. On November 28th 1977, he gave an extensive interview to the monthly, Cristianità, which I will reproduce here in its entirety. Re-reading it, it seems to me that his historical analysis helps us understand in-depth the Ostpolitik of both yesterday and today (On the Theme of Dissent and Ostpolitik, in Cristianità, 32 (1977). Pp. 3-4).

The Interview

Q. The slant of the volume you dedicated to Moscow and the Vatican is unusual. It carries as a subtitle: The Soviet Dissidents Faced with “Dialogue”. The politics of “the easing of tensions”[détente]between the Holy See and the Kremlin, appraised, that is to say, by Soviet dissent. What is the reason for your interest in “the Soviet dissidents”?

A. It’s very simple. I have continuously studied the Soviet Union and “The Soviet Man”, a man whose nature is no different from ours, despite the “unnaturalness” of the regime in which he lives. As a result I [began] to realize that there was something happening in this world, which was starting to produce a reaction.

Q. Is this reaction limited to a cultural elite or does it extend to the Soviet people? There is in fact, the suspicion that it is not a sufficiently deep-rooted phenomenon, but almost a cultural “fashion”…

A. The phenomenon is absolutely not limited to an intellectual elite. The religious dissent especially, is diffused in large segments of the population. I’m thinking, for example, of the Ukrainian and Lithuanian Catholics, the Baptists, the underground Orthodox Church, the followers of Father Dudko, or even what is happening in Poland, where dissent is growing and spreading among the workers. It should be said, however, that the reality of dissent doesn’t always coincide necessarily with the image that is projected in the West. In fact, only a certain kind of dissent is known in the West, the one which is filtered through intellectual channels. Whereas much less is known about the reality of the religious dissent of the peoples.

Q.So then, what is the judgment of the “dissidents” with regard to the “dialogue” between Moscow and the Vatican?

A. Extremely negative. The dissidents have no trust whatsoever in this dialogue of which they actually experience the consequences. They should be the beneficiaries of these politics of détente but they are in fact its victims. Let me add that it seems inconceivable to me that, from the Catholic part there is this desire to cast a shadow of diffidence and suspicion over them. I’m referring to an article by one of my Swiss confreres, Father Hotz, which appeared in La Civiltà Cattlolica and which, for that matter, was brilliantly refuted by your journal. To me it seems paradoxical that while the dissidents are entreating Western Catholics to distrust this dialogue, it is precisely the Catholics in the West who are inviting suspicion and distrust of the dissidents.

Q. What are the Kremlin’s interests in this “dialogue”?

A. Through dialogue the Soviet Union attains the Vatican’s silence. And this silence weakens the internal and external opposition to the Communist regime, thus contributing to the consolidating of the Soviet empire’s internal positions and favoring its international expansion. It’s clear that Moscow seeks support from Rome to increase its “credibility” on the international level. The more a détente is sought the more internal tensions are intensified.

Q. In your view, on the other hand, what are the motives impelling the Vatican to seek “dialogue” with the Kremlin?

A.Here the question is more complex. I’d say that we can identify at least two strategic lines. The first is diplomatic, of concordat, and aims at attaining a modus vivendi between the Vatican and the Communist State with the goal of safeguarding international “peace” as well as the Catholic ecclesial structure in the Soviet empire’s territories. The Vatican prefers, then, to ignore the underground Church, which has been conducting a heroic apostolate behind the Iron Curtain, to establish new types of relations “in the open” with the Communist authorities. This means, for example, that Catholic bishops must have the Soviet “placet” for their nomination. This strategy is under the direction of Archbishop Casaroli and his Secretariat. Casaroli himself drew up a sufficiently explicit program in his discourse on The Holy See and Europe, delivered in Milan on January 20th 1972.

Retrieved March 24, 2018 from http://www.robertodemattei.it/en/2018/03/07/opponents-of-ostpolitik-part-2-father-alessio-ulisse-1920-1986/

Women Priests

This is an excellent article from America—though the author cannot follow his own reasoning to its obvious conclusion—about this potent subject and the focus on the impact of evangelization is exactly the focus I took in my book about it, Women in the Church, St. Catherine of Siena, Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, & Criminal Reformation, which inclues in its opening pages:

“The Church stands in the world as a sign of contradiction and as the world since time immemorial excluded women from full personhood; the Church must ensure that within her embrace, woman’s full personhood is deeply rooted and complete; which can only be accomplished by priestly ordination and full equality with men in the leadership of the Church on earth as that equality is certainly so in Heaven.

“I have come to believe, fully and completely, that the institutional Church has been wrong in not ordaining women to be priests; just as the Church was wrong for centuries in seeing the earth as the center of the solar system, and slavery as acceptable and usury not; and this wrongness, in the treatment of women, will become obvious to criminals being evangelized, for they know, better than most, the pain and sorrow of being marginalized, even though their marginalization is self-imposed while that of the women in the Church comes from the Vatican and twisted history.” (p. 10)

Excerpt from the America article:

A Matter of Evangelization 

Wherever you stand on the matter, it should be clear to all of us that the doctrine represents a problem for evangelization. Even if the teaching is not unjust—even if it is not the result of the church’s failure to fully appreciate the dignity and equality of women—the perception by many, if not most people in the United States today is that it is. And the very perception of an unjust church handicaps its ability to witness effectively to the world. By way of analogy, if rumors circulate throughout town about a particular restaurant having a filthy kitchen, then no matter how clean the kitchen actually is or how good the food is, no one will care what is on the menu.

If evangelization is the central priority that we say so often it is, then even the most self-consciously orthodox among us, even those convinced no woman ever should or will be ordained a priest, should be intensely concerned with ensuring that the church is absolutely and obviously committed to the equality and dignity of women. Given this, efforts to expand the role of women in the church should not be a source of conflict among the faithful at different places along the theological spectrum but a point of contact and cooperation. How might we join together around this issue? Here are a few ideas:

1. We should cry out together for greater roles for women in church administration and leadership at all levels. The gift of being a good leader is not a grace of the sacrament of orders. And since many women today are not only theologically trained but have reached levels of theological accomplishment that far surpasses that of most priests, there is no reason that women should not serve as officials at all ecclesial levels, from the Roman Curia on down. There is also no theological reason faithful women who have attained the highest accomplishments in church, business, social services and other areas could not be named cardinals.

Retrieved March 9, 2018 from https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/03/08/when-my-daughter-whispered-me-i-wish-girls-could-be-priests-i-didnt-know-what-say

Teilhard, Doctor of the Church?

Yes, it is time and I have believed, ever since deeply studying his ideas, that he should be made a Doctor of the Church.

This article from NCR is excellent, and makes the case.

Philadelphia — Naming Jesuit Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin a doctor of the church — or at least removing the “warning” from his writings — would give the Jesuit scientist and philosopher more legitimacy in the church, his supporters say. And two separate petitions to the Vatican aim to do just that.

At a meeting of scientists and church leaders from around the world in November, members of the Pontifical Council for Culture unanimously approved a petition asking Pope Francis to waive the “monitum” against Teilhard de Chardin’s writings that has been in effect since 1962.

Teilhard’s work was only published after his death in 1955, because of disciplinary measures from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Office) during his life. The popularity of his books Human Phenomenon and The Divine Milieu led to the monitum, or warning, in 1962 for “ambiguities and indeed even serious errors.”

However, scholars from the Pontifical Council for Culture said this past fall that while some of his writings may be open to constructive criticism, his “seminal thoughts” and “prophetic vision” have been “inspiring theologians and scientists,” America magazine reported.

They also noted that four popes — Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI and now Francis — had made explicit references to his work, including a mention in a footnote in Francis’ encyclical “Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home.”

Meanwhile, a Sister of St. Joseph in Philadelphia has been gathering signatures — more than 1,200 so far — for a petition asking Teilhard to be named a doctor of the church.

“I think he deserves it,” said Sr. Kathleen Duffy, professor of physics at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia and director of its Institute for Religion and Science.

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Editor’s Note: Learn more about the petition to make Teilhard a doctor of the church.

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The designation “doctor of the church” honors individuals, usually theologians or scholars, whose teaching or thought has greatly benefited the church. The title has been bestowed on 36 people so far.

Duffy believes Teilhard’s attempts to bring together theology and science have a particular relevance for the church and the world today and that his ideas about “evolutionary Christianity” can provide hope in what many see as a chaotic time.

 “There is a scientific theory of chaos that says you can’t have any new creation without disequilibrium,” said Duffy. “But we can’t just sit back and say, ‘God will take care of it.’ There has to be some motivation on our part.”

Teilhard, who read the Christian Scriptures through the lens of the evolutionary story, took the process of how the universe came about (“cosmogenesis”) and projected it into the future, where increasing complexity would call for increasing unity (“Christogenesis”), Duffy explained.

“He had the big picture and could see eons ahead where everything was converging,” she said, adding that this convergence would require people to come together with an increased love of God and neighbor. “So even when we’re discouraged, Teilhard de Chardin can give us hope in chaos.”

Retrieved February 14, 2018 from https://www.ncronline.org/news/people/time-rehabilitate-teilhard-de-chardin

 

 

Andy Warhol, Devout Catholic

Wow, who knew, great story from the Catholic Herald.

An excerpt.

On April 1, 1987, the most popular artists, actors, fashion designers, writers and musicians in America converged on St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Liza Minnelli showed up, along with Calvin Klein, Tom Wolfe and George Plimpton. Yoko Ono arrived a bit early; she was giving a speech.

One could have easily mistaken Andy Warhol’s memorial service for a society event rather than a religious one, were it not for the eulogy given by the artist’s friend John Richardson. He spoke of Warhol’s “secret piety”, which “inevitably changes our perception of an artist who fooled the world into believing his only obsessions were money, fame and glamour, and that he was cool to the point of callousness. Never take Andy at face value.”

It is this secret piety that the Vatican Museums hope to uncover in their major exhibition of his work next year. Indeed, the Catholic faith is the only constant theme in his strange life.

Warhol’s parents were born in a village on the northern border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They were Ruthenians: members of a small Byzantine Catholic Church that grew out of Cyril and Methodius’s mission to the Carpathian Mountains. In 1909, his father moved to Pittsburgh, home of the largest Ruthenian community outside Europe. His mother followed in 1921, and their son Andrew was born seven years later. His father worked as a coal miner until he died when Warhol was 13.

In 1955, the shoe brand I. Miller hired Warhol to illustrate its advertisements in the New York Times. Critics compared the results to Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters. This drawing upon commercial themes in the pursuit of high culture came to define the Pop Art movement. It also placed Warhol at the centre of the New York avant garde, and his studio (nicknamed “the Factory”) became its headquarters.

The contrast with his working-class, immigrant Catholic boyhood could not be starker. All the hallmarks of the Sixties were there: drugs, sex, radical politics, more drugs. Several of the Warhol Superstars – minor artists whose work he promoted – overdosed or committed suicide in their twenties or thirties.

Religion kept Warhol from going over the brink. He attended Mass almost daily. Other days he would just slip into St Vincent Ferrer on Lexington Avenue, drop into the back pew and pray. He spent his Thanksgivings, Christmases and Easters volunteering at a soup kitchen, and befriended the homeless and poor whom he served. He put his nephew through seminary. Though openly gay, he endeavoured to remain celibate throughout his life. When he refused to support the gay rights movement, many of his friends blamed his faith.

He lived with his mother until she died, and every morning they would pray together in Old Slavonic before he left for the Factory. He always carried a rosary and a small missal in his pocket.

Retrieved February 8, 2018 from http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/issues/february-9th-2018/andy-warhols-devotion-was-almost-surreal/

Stand-up Leaders will fill Sit-down Pews

Which is the theme of this article by George Weigel from Catholic World Report.

An excerpt.

If ministers of the Gospel cannot challenge the world’s distortions of the Gospel with the truth of the Gospel, but fall back instead on penny-ante pseudo-Marxist clichés, is it any wonder that their church pews are empty?

Europe’s wholesale abandonment of its Christian faith is often explained as the inevitable by-product of modern social, economic, and political life. But there is far more to the story of Euro-secularization than that, as three ecclesiastics, a Presbyterian minister and two Italian priests, demonstrated this past Christmas.

The minister in question was the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Derek Browning. In his Yuletide message to his disappearing flock, Dr. Browning confessed that in his “darker moments,” he sometimes wondered whether “…the world have been a better place without [Jesus]. If there was no Jesus, and therefore no Christianity, would there have been no Crusades? Would there have been no Spanish Inquisition?” (Dr. Browning didn’t contemplate the possibility that, without Jesus, there would have been no iconoclastic destruction of Scotland’s ancient and beautiful Catholic churches, or no mass burnings of “witches” by his forebears in the kirk; but that, perhaps, would have been cutting a bit too close to the bone.)

Then there was Father Fredo Olivero of the Church of San Rocco di Torino in the Archdiocese of Turin. At Christmas midnight Mass, Don Fredo substituted the syrupy Italian pop-religious tune, Dolce sentire, for the Creed, explaining, “Do you know why I do not say the Creed? Because I do not believe it….after many years I understood that it was something I did not understand and that I could not accept. So let’s sing something else that says the essential things of life…”

Which, evidently, do not include the confession of faith that Jesus is Lord and Savior.

Not to be outdone by those uppity Piedmontese in Turin, a priest of Genoa, Father Paolo Farinella, announced in the leftist Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, that he had canceled his parish Masses for January 1 (the Octave of Christmas and the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God) and January 6 (the Epiphany). Why? Because, according to Don Paolo, Christmas is now “a fairy tale from the nativity scene with lullabies and bagpipes, the exclusive support of a capitalist and consumerist economy, transforming the whole of Christianity into civil religion.”

So there. No Mass.

These three episodes illustrate a larger point: “secularization” is not something that just happened to western Europe, like the Black Death. The radical secularization that has transformed Christianity’s heartland into the most religiously arid half-continent on the planet has at least as much to do with the craven surrender of ministers of the Gospel to theological and political fads, and their consequent loss of faith, as it does with the impact of urbanization, mass education, and the industrial revolution on Europeans’ understanding of themselves.

If the Gospel is not preached with conviction – the convictions that humanity is in need of salvation and that Jesus is the Savior who liberates us into the fullness of our humanity and gives us eternal life – then the Gospel will not be believed.

Retrieved February 8, 2018 from http://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/02/07/men-without-conviction-churches-without-people/

Paradigm Shifts & Development of Doctrine

An excellent article from one of my favorite Catholic thinkers, George Weigel, which, while discussing Amoris Laetitia, is also directly applicable to capital punishment.

An excerpt.

Ever since Thomas Kuhn popularized it with his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the notion of a “paradigm shift” has led to fascinating arguments about whether this or that break with previous scientific understanding counted as one. But that a “paradigm shift”—like the “shift” from Sir Isaac Newton’s cosmology to Albert Einstein’s, or the shift from the miasma theory of disease to the germ theory of disease—is a rupture in continuity is not in much dispute. A “paradigm shift” signals a dramatic, sudden, and unexpected break in human understanding—and thus something of a new beginning.

So are there “paradigm shifts” in the Church?

We seem to have biblical evidence for one in the first chapter of the Letter to the Galatians, where St. Paul describes, very telegraphically, how he came to grasp an astonishing truth: that the salvation promised to the People of Israel in the covenants with Abraham and Moses had been extended to the Gentiles. Some might find another “paradigm shift” in the first chapter of John’s Gospel, in which Jesus of Nazareth is identified as the “Word” who “was in the beginning with God.”

These are matters of divine revelation, however, and as the Church has long believed and taught, revelation ended with the death of the last apostle. So the evolution of the Church’s understanding of the gospel over the centuries is not a matter of “paradigm shifts,” or ruptures, or radical breaks and new beginnings; it’s a question of what theologians call the development of doctrine. And as Blessed John Henry Newman taught us, authentic doctrinal development is organic and in continuity with “the faith once . . . delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3). The Catholic Church doesn’t do rupture: that was tried 500 years ago, with catastrophic results for Christian unity and the cause of Christ.

So it was unfortunate that Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State of the Holy See, recently described Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation on marriage and the family, as a “paradigm shift.”

Perhaps Cardinal Parolin meant “paradigm shift” in some other sense than Thomas Kuhn’s (although Kuhn’s notion of paradigm-shift-as-rupture is the common understanding of the term). Perhaps the cardinal was suggesting that Amoris Laetitia asked all the people of the Church to treat those who have not been married in the Church but who wish to be part of the Catholic community with greater sensitivity and charity (a worthy proposal, although compassion is the norm in the situations with which I’m most familiar). But whatever he may have intended, the cardinal cannot have meant that Amoris Laetitia is a “paradigm shift” in the sense of a radical break with previous Catholic understandings. For the Catholic Church doesn’t do “paradigm shifts” in that sense of the term, and the Pope himself has insisted that Amoris Laetitia does not propose a rupture with the Church’s settled doctrines on the indissolubility of marriage and worthiness to receive Holy Communion.

Where something similar to a Kuhn-type “paradigm shift” is underway, however, is in the reception of Amoris Laetitia in various local churches—and this is ominous. The pastoral implementation of Amoris Laetitia mandated in Malta, Germany, and San Diego is quite different than what has been mandated in Poland, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Portsmouth, England, and Edmonton, Alberta. Because of that, the Catholic Church is beginning to resemble the Anglican Communion (itself the product of a traumatic “paradigm shift” that cost John Fisher and Thomas More their heads). For in the Anglican Communion, what is believed and celebrated and practiced in England is quite different from what is believed, celebrated, and practiced in Nigeria or Uganda.

Retrieved January 31, 2018 from https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/01/the-catholic-church-doesnt-do-paradigm-shifts

 

Sexual Abuse Horror Continues

This damning article from the Remnant Newspaper is, if accurate, horrible in its implications.

An excerpt.

This month has been quite a spectacle, even for this pontificate; an apparently unending stream of outrages and embarrassments, with the pope and his Vatican media support jumping from one scandal to the next. But among secular reporters the sex abuse issue trumps all others and the fallout continues to blaze down on the Bergoglian pontificate in response to his amazing accusation earlier this month that victims of sexual abuse by clergy were engaging in “calumny,” in their accusations against a Chilean bishop, Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid.

The incident was brief: on the Thursday of the pope’s week-long South American trip, in response to an impromptu question tossed out by a Chilean reporter, the pope responded in what one reporter described as a “snippy tone”: “The day I see proof against Bishop Barros, then I will talk. There is not a single piece of evidence against him. It is all calumny. Is that clear?”

It seems the shine is coming off the papal penny among leftist secular journalists, his natural constituency. Writing for the Boston Globe, the paper that first broke the clerical sex abuse scandals all the way back in 2001, Kevin Cullen wrote, “Let the record show that the promise of Pope Francis died in Santiago, Chile, on Jan. 18, in the year of our Lord 2018… he has revealed himself like no one else could.”

But it gets worse than this. When a “leftist” pope pressing a secularist agenda on the Church starts to lose the support of Michael Sean Winters and the National Catholic Reporter, he must know he’s in trouble. Though he’s “sticking with Francis” for now, Winters wrote, “I wish I knew what it was about Pope Francis that makes him fail to grasp the situation with Bishop Barros, the pain caused to the victims and the damage done to the church. I am gobsmacked that the pope twice declined to accept the bishop’s resignation.”

On January 23rd, an unsigned NCR editorial opined, “Within the space of four days, Pope Francis twice slandered abuse survivors.”

“These remarks are at the least shameful. At the most, they suggest that Francis now could be complicit in the cover-up. The script is all too familiar: Discredit the survivors’ testimony, support the prelate in question, and bank on public attention moving on to something else.

“The insistence with which Francis defends Barros is mystifying. Three separate journalists on the papal flight gave the pope opportunity to say why exactly he believed the bishop instead of the survivors accusing him. The second journalist to ask Francis about Barros on the flight was a Chilean woman. As she spoke to the pope, her voice cracked with nervousness at questioning the church’s top leader. She asked: ‘Why are not the victims’ testimonies proof for you? Why do you not believe them?’ The pope gave no satisfying answer, only repeating a claim of ‘no evidence’ against the bishop.”

Indeed, it was understood, as the Washington Post said, that Francis’ trip to Latin America – dogged by protests over Barros both in person at the pope’s appearances and in the press – was in part intended as “an apology tour” to abuse survivors. Which is why his accusation of calumny against those same victims the next day came as such a shock to observers unused to Bergoglio’s ability to turn on a dime.

All was going as planned. On Wednesday, January 17, the pope met as scheduled with selected survivors of sexual abuse by priests. He made all the right noises, talking about his “pain and shame,” and reportedly even crying, at what happened. “I know the pain of these cases of child abuse and I am following how much is needed to overcome this serious and painful evil,” he said.

24 hours later he was calling them liars.

James Hamilton, 49 and now a doctor, was one of the Barros accusers. He told the BBC at a press conference, “What the Pope has done today is offensive and painful, and not only against us, but against everyone seeking to end the abuses.” The lead voice of the victims in Chile, Juan Carlos Cruz, tweeting to one of Francis’s leading apologists, Austen Ivereigh, said, “Does he need a photo, a selfie, as proof? Sorry Austen, we didn’t think of it as we were being abused and Juan Barros watching.”

Although the issue came to the attention of a much broader audience during the most recent papal trip, the outcry has been ongoing since his appointment to the southern Chilean diocese of Osorno in 2015. Barros was a student protégée of the charismatic homosexual/pederast predator Fernando Karadima, and went on to be ordained in 1984, made bishop in 1995 and appointed as bishop of the armed forces.

Barros claimed in court that the first he knew of Karadima’s offenses was on a Chilean television programme in 2010. This is refuted by Karadima’s victims – deemed credible both by the secular courts and the Vatican tribunal – who testified that he personally witnessed the abuse at Sacred Heart of Jesus church in Santiago.

Last Thursday, however, was not the first time Francis, confronted unexpectedly in public over the Barros question, has responded testily and with insults. In 2015 the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano published a video of him scolding two women who spoke with him in St. Peter’s Piazza, asking that he reconsider the appointment, citing the “suffering” of the Church in Chile over the issue.

The pope told the women, “The Church has lost its freedom, letting its head fill with politicians and accusing a bishop without having any proof, after twenty years of service, so think with your head.” He warned them not to allow themselves to be led by “leftists who have set up this thing.”

“The only charge against this bishop has been discredited by the Court of Justice, so please do not lose your serenity, you suffer, but because you are foolish…I am the first to judge and punish those accused of similar crimes, but in this case there is not even a proof.”

The insults were not forgotten. Among the signs held by protesters in Chile last week were those reading, “Ni zurdos, ni tontos,” (Neither lefties nor stupid). The jab certainly wasn’t lost on Francis, since the signs were being held by protesters the full length of his auto route to Santiago from the airport. One of the protesters told the BBC, “He doesn’t even know us, so how can he accuse us of being such things? He thinks we are politically motivated even though we come from different parishes in Osorno and are doing this because we are against priests being allowed to abuse children.”

Apparently His Holiness was informed that the “calumny” comment had caused some blow-back because a couple of days later we got something touted – though somewhat skeptically – as a “contrite” papal apology. This also followed an astonishing public rebuke of the pope by Sean Cardinal O’Malley – a member of the C9 council of cardinals and the former head of the pope’s sex abuse commission – who said, “It is understandable that Pope Francis’ statements yesterday in Santiago, Chile were a source of great pain for survivors of sexual abuse by clergy or any other perpetrator.”

“Pope Francis fully recognizes the egregious failures of the Church and its clergy who abused children and the devastating impact those crimes have had on survivors and their loved ones,” O’Malley said.

Of course, Francis being Francis the apology was banked around with assertions of how right he was. “I have to ask forgiveness because the word ‘proof’ wounded,” he said. “It wounded many people who were abused…I ask them for forgiveness because I wounded them without realizing it, but it was an unintended wound. And this horrified me a lot, because I had received them.”

“And I know how much they suffer, to feel that the Pope says in their face ‘bring me a letter, a proof.’ It’s a slap. And I agree that my expression was not apt, because I didn’t think.”

He doubled down, saying, “I have not heard any victim of Barros. They did not come, they did not show themselves, they did not give evidence in court. It’s all in the air. It is true that Barros was in Karadima’s group of young people. But let us be clear: if you accuse someone without evidence with pertinacity, that is calumny.”

“This is what I can say with sincerity. Barros will remain there if I don’t find a way to condemn him. I cannot condemn him if I don’t have – I don’t say proof – but evidence. And there are many ways to get evidence. Is that clear?”

This “contrite” papal apology didn’t fly well even with the regular news reporters. Philip Pullela, a reporter on the plane for Reuters, described it as “an extremely rare act of self-criticism,” for the “unusually contrite” Bergoglio, and noted that, “While the pope has vowed ‘zero tolerance’ for sexual abuse, his efforts have sputtered.”

Indeed, Francis claim that he met with and heard the “pain” of the victims is untrue in the specific case in hand. CBS News reports that though the Osorno group had tried to obtain a meeting during the trip they were refused. Greg Burke, the pope’s press officer, confirmed that “no papal meetings were planned with the Osorno group, which had formally requested to meet with the pope in July but were told by Vatican organizers that his schedule was already final, some six months before the trip.”

Who is Barros?

ome may remember a video that made the internet rounds of an uproar in a Chilean cathedral at the installation ceremony of a bishop. At the time it didn’t draw much attention from the English language press – mostly at that time distracted by the ongoing battle of the notorious Kasper Proposal and the oncoming Synods. But despite the pope’s claim, the charges against Barros are serious and have been deemed credible by a judge.

He is accused of having covered up sexual abuse, including destroying evidence, committed by Karadima in the ‘80s and ‘90s. In fact – and this point has tended to get glossed over in the press – Barros is accused by the victims of having been in the room, watching at the time, and of engaging in sexual activity with Karadima. This is not, therefore, merely a matter of a bishop or colleague discovering the abuse after the fact, but of being a voyeuristic participant.

Juan Carlos Cruz, told the press in 2015 that he and another boy – both in their teens at the time – “would lie down on the priest’s [Karadima’s] bed, one resting his head at the man’s shoulder, another sitting near his feet. The priest would kiss the boys and grope them, he said, all while the Rev. Juan Barros watched.” Cruz, now a 51-year-old “gay” journalist, told The Associated Press, “Barros was there, and he saw it all.”

Retrieved January 26, 2018 from https://www.remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/3684-special-report-pope-francis-accused-of-inaction-in-notorious-sex-abuse-cases

 

The Church in Communist China

Very sad news from China, as reported by Fatima Perspectives.

An excerpt.

Almost daily, a new scandal erupts from the Vatican. The situation has become so outrageous that now even decidedly mainstream journals such as The Catholic Herald are pulling no punches in telling the truth about the increasingly alarming course of this pontificate.

Thus, the Herald now unsparingly reports the revolting news that “The Holy See has reportedly asked two Chinese bishops to stand aside to make way for illicitly ordained, Chinese government-backed counterparts.”

Note well: a mainstream Catholic newspaper does not flinch from reporting, precisely for what it is, the Vatican’s betrayal of the true bishops of the Catholic Church in China by connivance with the corrupt atheist regime in Beijing, which has presided over the illicit consecration of “government-backed” puppets, which is to say blatant schismatics.

Citing the outlet Asia News, the Herald further reports that one of the two Catholic prelates, 88-year-old Bishop Peter Zhuang, a validly consecrated successor of the Apostles of the “underground” (i.e., true) Church in China, has “received a letter dated 26 October asking him to resign to make way for the government-backed Bishop Huang Bingzhang.” Huang had been excommunicated in 2011, during the reign of Benedict XVI, after being consecrated without the required papal mandate, an offense that results in automatic excommunication. Huang, the Herald notes, “is also a member of the National People’s Congress, the Chinese parliament.” That is, he is a politician of the Communist regime in China.

Further sickening details are reported by the Herald via Asia News: “Bishop Zhuang was escorted to Beijing, where he met Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, former president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, who told him to retire – but with the proviso that he could nominate three priests, one of whom Bishop Huang would appoint as his vicar general. Sources said Bishop Zhuang burst into tears on hearing the demand, adding that ‘it was meaningless to appoint a vicar general, who is still a priest that Bishop Huang could remove him [] anytime.’”

As for the other true Catholic bishop, Joseph Guo Xijin of Mindong, he was told to “accept demotion to coadjutor bishop under the government-backed Vincent Zhan Silu,” which is essentially a Vatican demand that a true Catholic bishop subordinate himself to a schismatic Communist puppet.

Let it not be thought that this betrayal has originated entirely with Pope Francis. It has been a long time in the planning, with the final execution of the plan coming only now. Some seventeen years ago, when this column was in its infancy, I wrote: “The Vatican refuses to condemn the schism of the 100 communist-controlled bishops of the Red Chinese CPA, yet Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who was instrumental in the conversion of much of West Africa, was immediately cast into outer darkness for consecrating four bishops in an effort to preserve some semblance of Catholic tradition — as we all knew it before ‘the great renewal of Vatican II’ began. This is the essence of the liberal’s double-standard: no enemies to the left, and nothing but enemies to the right.”

We are now witnessing the final outcome of the Vatican policy of Ostpolitik, the folly that Father Gruner never ceased to condemn in the light of Fatima. That is, the Vatican’s diplomatic accommodation of Communist regimes, which began with the Second Vatican Council’s shameful refusal to condemn or even to mention Soviet Communist and Chinese Communist tyranny while absurdly claiming that the Council was “scrutinizing the signs of the times” that the Council, at that very moment, was resolutely ignoring. All proposed conciliar schemas and other interventions condemning Communism, including a petition by 450 of the Fathers, were systematically suppressed.

As my friend and colleague Hilary White has put it: “The Vatican has been trying to ‘regularize’ the schismatic CPA since the time of the ‘Ostpolitik’ project of Cardinal Casaroli under Paul VI.” The same project was carried forward under Cardinals Sodano and Bertone, who by no coincidence were also involved in attempting to bury the supremely anti-communist Message of Fatima. Cardinal Parolin, the current Vatican Secretary of State, now seems poised to lower the true Church in China into its grave.

Retrieved January 25, 2018 from http://www.fatimaperspectives.com/fo/perspective1146.asp

Catholicism, Buddhism, and Mysticism

Good article—an interview with a book’s author on the subject—about this from Catholic World Report.

An excerpt.

CWR: Mindfulness, as you noted, draws on Buddhist ideas. What are the key problems with this approach? In what ways are Catholicism and Buddhism incompatible?

Susan Brinkmann: As Dr. Anthony E. Clark says in the foreword of the book, the direction one drives a car determines the place one arrives at, and our spiritual practice is no different. “When one understands well the intentions of Christian prayer and mindfulness, it is clear that, at their root, they point in contrasting directions,” he writes.

Many Catholics believe Buddhism is not really a religion because it doesn’t involve the worship of a god. It’s more of a philosophy or system of ethics, they say, and is harmless. However, upon closer inspection, we quickly realize that this is just one of many diverging philosophies that make Catholicism and Buddhism completely incompatible.

For example, on the most basic level, Buddhists do not believe in the existence of the soul. They believe people who think they have a soul are rooted in ignorance and in a desire to please one’s “self” and that we become truly enlightened only after we come to the realization that there is no such thing as a soul. Christians not only believe in the existence of the soul, but that the soul can achieve eternal life through Jesus Christ.

Christians believe suffering brings us closer to God and unites us with our Suffering Lord. Buddhists believe suffering is something to be escaped from.

Christ teaches that He is the “Way, the truth and the life,” (John 14:6), but the Buddha teaches that every person must find their own path to enlightenment.

Both faiths teach love but the Christian agape love is personal, individual and free-willed. The Buddhist teaches karuna, an impersonal feeling of compassion. The best way to understand what a stark difference this makes between the two faiths is found in the Buddhist story of the saint who gave his cloak to a beggar. The Christian gives his cloak to the beggar because of Christ’s love for the beggar. The Buddhist gives his cloak to the beggar because it’s the enlightened thing to do. In other words, the Buddhist’s concern is not for the welfare of the beggar, as is the Christian, but for the liberation of the giver from the burden of self.

Another problem I have seen stems from erroneous interpretations of Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. This document says that we are permitted to adopt what is good from other religions because it believes that other religions “often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.” What is often overlooked, however, is that a reflection of a ray is not truth that is directly from the source, but only a reflection of the source that is found in the Catholic faith.

This is why prominent theologians such as Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, warned that the poorly-catechized Christian should not engage in any kind of interreligious dialogue because this is only for doctrinally equipped Christians.

And in regard to incorporating eastern meditation techniques into Christian prayer, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger teaches in A Letter to the Bishops on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation that we can adopt what is good from other religions “so long as the Christian conception of prayer, its logic and requirements are never obscured.” Herein lies the problem. Buddhist meditation techniques such as mindfulness, by their very nature, are diametrically opposed to the Christian conception of prayer, which is “the raising of one’s heart and mind to God.” Buddhist meditation focuses on the self, while Christian meditation focuses on God.

In lieu of all of the above, St. John Paul II issues a well-founded warning in Crossing the Threshold of Faith that because the Buddhist and the Catholic have an essentially different way of perceiving the world, the Christian who wants to embrace ideas originating in Eastern religions needs to “know one’s own spiritual heritage well” before deciding whether or not to set the Faith aside.

Retrieved January 10, 2018 from http://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/01/07/catholicism-and-mindfulness-compatible-practices-or-contrary-spiritualities/