Catholic Relief Services gave $64 million to pro-abort, pro-contracept groups? September 19, 2013
Posted by Tantumblogo in abdication of duty, Abortion, Basics, contraception, disaster, episcopate, error, foolishness, General Catholic, sadness, scandals, secularism, self-serving, Society.comments closed
That’s a healthy chunk of change. But most of it comes from the federal government, who in turn borrows the money from China, so maybe the Chicoms should get really upset about this? Why do I suspect the USCCB would be a lot more responsive to some threat of action from the Chinese communist government than they are from the faithful in the pews?
Kidding aside, this is ridiculous:
CRS continues to issue statements that it is being unfairly “attacked” regarding the groups it funds. A comprehensive investigative report on Catholic Relief Services grants and short video released by American Life League finds a lot of fire where CRS claims there is not even smoke.
The report documents that CRS gave $64.7 million — 86 percent of the total $75 million in domestic grants — to groups that actively subvert Catholic moral teaching as part of their ongoing work. The report lists each grantee, the funds it received from CRS, and the specific activities that make the groups unsavory partners for any Catholic agency.
The full report is here. It should really be read, because it goes to great depth demonstrating how the grantees listed do indeed embrace numerous beliefs and actions directly counter to the Catholic Faith. Once again, an arm of the USCCB is found to be little but a front for progressive causes of the worst kind, and the response of the bishops is simply to shoot the messenger. How dare the faithful demand Catholic organizations uphold Catholic beliefs?! This is how the revolution works, my friends.
The rationalist roots of modernism September 19, 2013
Posted by Tantumblogo in Basics, catachesis, Christendom, disaster, error, General Catholic, horror, persecution, scandals, secularism, self-serving, the enemy.comments closed
I read this great chapter in Michael Davies Partisans of Error: Pope St. Pius X Against the Modernists, regarding how the error of rationalism – the philosophical system of the materialist, enlightenment sophists – formed the background for modernist belief. I thought this short chapter was very worth sharing. with my own emphasis and comments:
Dogma……..demands that man submits himself to an authority external to himself. [And this is precisely what modernist, “god derives from within us” belief specifically rejects. You can see how protestant belief in private revelation, or everyman his own pope, tends towards modernist rejection of a separate, absolute God, and replaces that God with a little humanist god of our own making] God, speaking through His Church, is the arbiter of what man must believe and how he must behave. Such an attitude to life is theocentric, centered on God. From the conversion of the Roman Empire until well into the Renaissance this theocentric attitude of life permeated society. But with the Renaissance a new attitude began to emerge [but it actually wasn’t a new attitude, but the resurrection of the old pagan beliefs of pre-Christian Roman and Greek antiquity. It was a deliberate rejection of the ethos of Christendom for a self-serving humanist ethos] in which, for all practical purposes, man turned in upon himself and became his own arbiter. [his own Pope. Protestantism flowed from the Renaissance as modernism flowed from the enlightenment, which was in turn based on protestantism, and the entire aim of all this, conscious or not, is the overthrowing of a God-centered society] The story of humanism from its Renaissance roots to its logical conclusion in atheistic marxism has been accurately documented by Professor Thomas Molnar in his book Christian Humanism. He explains that:
It is the core of humanistic ideology that man is its exclusive center; in proportion as man is exalted, God is diminished in His absoluteness. We have seen that man’s self-exaltation takes the form of worshipping the “new man” whose locus of salvation is the “future.” [Oh how liberals love the future! But modernists in particular love to use terms like “the Church becoming…..” or “God becoming in us….”, meaning a perfection through human means. But liberals always fail in their promises of a better man through government, enlightenment, etc] In general, the humanistic position assumes that man is the master of his destiny, and if he is not master in the present conditions, he must do everything to remove the obstacle and assert himself. This leads to the gradual abolition of all that had been held valid before, so that the “new man” emerges as really “the first man.” [A “new Adam,” another sinless Adam, but this one is not sinless because He is the Son of God made Incarnate, but because he has achieved the height of liberal humanist perfection – a goal communists and other humanists have chased after, and only left devastation in their wake, rather than the promised, illusory, impossible “perfection.”]
Writing in 1970, Professor Louis Salleron provided a very similar analysis of the contemporary malaise in Christian society [and this is simply a brilliant excerpt]:
The common denominator of the disorders which we see today, as much in the field of doctrine as that of the liturgy, is in the last resort the progressive substitution of the Cult of Man for the Cult of God. [And that substitution, is the precise aim of the modernist revolution in the Church, whether intended or not] We overturn the traditional belief that God created man and that the Word was made flesh, to conceive a God who is nothing more than man himself in the process of becoming God. We adore the God who proceeds from ourselves. [That is a devastating critique, and it points back directly to that same old error of private interpretation. I can twist Scripture to say anything I want, to even make ME “god,” if I am free to interpret it however I see fit] Between the Humanism of science and Marxism and that of the neo-Christians, whose prophet is Teilhard de Chardin, [whom you should recall from this blog] there is no more than a semantic difference. The first announces the death of God and the second His birth. But neither the one nor the other believes in anything more than man himself who tomorrow will be the sole lord of the universe under his own name or that of God.
————-End Quote————–
Maybe all this attempted catechesis on modernism is boring. But I plan on doing a lot more, because I hope to inform readers of tendencies, code words, and ideas to be on the lookout for when they are in church, in the Confessional, in reading, or wherever. If you find yourself confronted with modernism, my advice is to run, or drop the book, or just plain get away. Modernists are extremely difficult to convert, and their arguments can be very seductive at times. They may sound “right” for a very long time. Unless you have a really solid grounding in the true Faith, I would advise simply to go away. And never expose children to modernists, especially modernist clergy, because the danger of their absorbing some error, and being led astray, are simply not worth the risk. If you have any reasonable alternative, use it! Modernism is an all-encompassing error that is devised to crush the traditional conception of God and replace it with something truly diabolical.
And yet it is incredibly prevalent, heck, predominant, in the Church today.
Woo-hoo! Cardinal Burke! September 19, 2013
Posted by Tantumblogo in awesomeness, Basics, Christendom, disaster, episcopate, error, foolishness, General Catholic, sadness, scandals, secularism, sickness, the enemy, Tradition, Virtue.comments closed
I sooooo wish this man would have been elected Pope:
“There is a crisis that most of the hierarchy doesn’t want to admit……..” But, I thought? Ohh……..
It’s good someone in the hierarchy notes that the collapse in the Faith is primarily one of catachesis, or lack thereof. Tolerance is often a mask for indifferentism and lack of true charity for other souls, just a “go along to get along” mentality. But this elevation of tolerance to the supreme “virtue” has its direct genesis in the protestant view of each man as his own pope, and the Lockean-Jeffersonian subjugation of true religion (Catholicism) to a government-directed mutual indifference, where “religious liberty” or “freedom of religion” masks a deliberate ordering of secular government over the rights of religion – especially the Church. The present state of our culture was made more or less inevitable by the choices made – or foisted on – this nation (and the worldwide culture it has so influenced) at the time of its founding, under a Lockean system of anti-Christian “liberty.”
“Dark forces…….staged a coup in the 1960s.” Great. So true. A revolution was executed against the Church by a small cabal of disaffected near-elites within the Church, in a startingly similar manner to how the American and French Revolutions were executed in different circumstances two-plus centuries ago.
The last 2 1/2 minutes of the video are such a clear and cohesive exposition on what has occurred in the Church, and how to respond to it, it is simply gold. But those revolutionaries in the Church were simply the logical heirs of early, more secular revolutionaries. The modernists simply brought the revolution into the razed bastions of Holy Mother Church. It will take perhaps centuries to repair – unless we are in the general apostasy which we know will predate the Parousia, in which case, all this must have come to pass.
Pope Francis laying groundwork…… September 19, 2013
Posted by Tantumblogo in abdication of duty, Abortion, Basics, contraception, disconcerting, episcopate, General Catholic, Latin Mass, Papa, Society, the return, Virtue.comments closed
…..for a change in how the Church deals with the Sacrament of Marriage, and its all too frequent dissolution in the lives of millions? Via Rorate Caeli, two highly pertinent comments from Pope Francis, which deserve wide review and prayerful discernment (I add emphasis and comments) :
[Q.] What did the Second Vatican Council accomplish?[A.] “Vatican II was a re-reading of the Gospel in light of contemporary culture,” says the pope. “Vatican II produced a renewal movement that simply comes from the same Gospel. Its fruits are enormous. [Another unqualified support for Vatican II, proclaiming the Church in the midst of a massive “new springtime] Just recall the liturgy. The work of liturgical reform has been a service to the people as a re-reading of the Gospel from a concrete historical situation. Yes, there are hermeneutics of continuity and discontinuity, but one thing is clear: the dynamic of reading the Gospel, actualizing its message for today—which was typical of Vatican II—is absolutely irreversible. [So, I don’t think this Pope hopes for “mutual enrichment” of the forms of the Mass, as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI did.] Then there are particular issues, like the liturgy according to the Vetus Ordo. I think the decision of Pope Benedict [his decision of July 7, 2007, to allow a wider use of the Tridentine Mass] was prudent and motivated by the desire to help people who have this sensitivity. What is worrying, though, is the risk of the ideologization of the Vetus Ordo, its exploitation.” [Without reading too much into this, I don’t think it a reach to say that Pope Francis at most tolerates the TLM, but he certainly does not embrace it, or feel it is vital to the future of the Church. I would say from this comment and many others, Pope Francis has made clear he views the TLM as something inconducive with that “re-reading of the Gospel” that came with Vatican II.]
“This is also the great benefit of confession as a sacrament: evaluating case by case and discerning what is the best thing to do for a person who seeks God and grace. The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord’s mercy motivates us to do better. [That’s certainly true. The Confessional is a great seat of mercy. But it must also be a place of very heartfelt conversion.] I also consider the situation of a woman with a failed marriage in her past and who also had an abortion. Then this woman remarries, and she is now happy and has five children. That abortion in her past weighs heavily on her conscience and she sincerely regrets it. She would like to move forward in her Christian life. What is the confessor to do? [Well, in the US, they go and get an annulment, no matter what impact that annulment has on the validity of all the marriages that do not fail. In order to liberally grant annulments, the Church in the US has essentially adopted the stance that all marriages are conditional until proven otherwise by ending only in death. But let’s look at a more realistic scenario – a women has a bad marriage, maybe even outside the Church, and gets divorced. She had a kid from her prior marriage, then meets a great guy, has in the meantime wandered back into the Church, and had another kid out of wedlock. Now, she wants to be married in the Church. She wants to receive the Blessed Sacrament. Should she be allowed to do so? What if her new paramour has a couple of divorces behind him? What if they subsequently get divorced later, assuming they marry? How long does all this go on? And what of those who make better decisions, or who just struggle through even a difficult marriage, because the Church has always counseled them to do so? Will some allowance – I know not how – to allow divorced and remarried people (without annulments, because annulments are very rare outside the US) liberty with the Blessed Sacrament only encourage more dissolution of marriages? God is infinitely merciful, but also mercifully just. There seems to be an inordinate focus on mercy, and a loss of focus on justice. I think we can see where this rhetoric is headed, whether it results in concrete action or not, who knows, but this appears to me yet another case, since the Council, of the Church not sanctifying the culture by demanding lifetime marriages, but the culture de-sanctifying the Church, forcing Her to “recognize the lived reality of many faithful.”]
“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.” [Well, a counter-argument might be that the culture is veritably shouting, screaming, and parading around naked all these errors and enticements to sin. The Church must have a very strong voice on these subjects to counter the shouts of the world, the flesh, and the devil.]
A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics 