Francis versus the Church, or Francis versus Jesus Christ? October 20, 2014
Posted by Tantumblogo in abdication of duty, Basics, disaster, episcopate, error, foolishness, General Catholic, Papa, persecution, scandals, secularism, self-serving, SOD, the return.comments closed
The writer at That The Bones You Have Crushed May Thrill (a sublime bit of Scripture, but I’m not so sure as a blog name) has two excellent posts up on the aftermath of the Synod and Pope Francis. I will quote extensively from one, you can go read the other.
First, is it really in the “God of surprises” to contradict Himself and change eternal Truth? How can we reconcile this belief with the idea that one is “a loyal son of the Church?” The post below starts out with an excerpt from Pope Francis’ “media via,” or “middle way” approach in his closing speech to the Synod, in which the Holy Father posits a path between the “extremes” of adherence to the Faith handed down to us and rank apostasy:
“And since it is a journey of human beings, with the consolations there were also moments of desolation, of tensions and temptations, of which a few possibilities could be mentioned:
One, a temptation to hostile inflexibility, that is, wanting to close oneself within the written word, (the letter) and not allowing oneself to be surprised by God, by the God of surprises, (the spirit); within the law, within the certitude of what we know and not of what we still need to learn and to achieve.
From the time of Christ, it is the temptation of the zealous, of the scrupulous, of the solicitous and of the so-called – today – “traditionalists” and also of the intellectuals.”
In his speech at the close of the Synod it is true that Francis talked of other temptations, but it is noteworthy that ‘traditionalists’ were first in the line of fire. So I guess that before the ‘liberals and progressives’ (Cardinals Kasper, Madriaga, Schoenborn etc) are punished, we can assume Cardinals Mueller and Napier as well as the already demoted Burke will be first for the chop. [It is the actions that speak much more loudly than words. Pope Francis may proclaim the need for a “middle way” in the Church, but his actions show that he sees the middle far, far more to the modernist/progressive side than any of his predecessors. The modernists are promoted and given influential sinecures, while the more faithful prelates are railroaded out of office and banished to the hinterlands. So the “middle way” seems a farce, a rhetorical tool at most, a hypocrisy at worst.]
…… It is only in the reign of Francis that to hold fast to the Magisterium of Holy Mother Church, to defend with one’s speech the Church’s teaching, as Cardinal Burke has done, on the Sacrament of Marriage and the institution of the family, that it has been posited, by the Pope himself, that to do so is a ‘temptation’. The Church, in her teachings and her law has never been ‘flexible’ with sin. It has always shown leniency to repentant sinners. [Repentant being the key word, meaning recognizing one’s actions as evil, having true contrition for them (meaning willing to remove oneself from the occasion of sin and do one’s utmost to avoid that sin in future), and having a firm purpose of amendment. Remaining in your adulterous situation with your third “spouse” indicates none of the above. I know those situations are very difficult, there are probably a few souls who have been divorced and remarried w/o annulment who now have happy relationships, possibly even with children, and who would like to be faithful Catholics. But they remain in sin, and by endorsing their sin, permitting the Blessed Sacrament to be blasphemed, would be only to further encourage more such terrible situations. We must also recognize, at the same time, that many divorces are made simply for convenience or due to a great deal of flippancy. The basic problem with the Pope’s position, however, is that it is no charity to permit people to add sin upon sin, that no matter what he says or what disastrous “pastoral” approach is adopted, the sin will remain, and these souls will be judged accordingly. It is truly frightening to contemplate how far von Balthasar’s destructive errors regarding Hell: Population Zero have reached into the minds of even great prelates.]
In his condemnation of the ‘temptation’ to uphold marriage, the moral law, and the sanctity of marriage, presumably Pope Francis is also rather annoyed with Jesus Christ Who said, “Anyone who puts away his wife and marries another commits adultery” and Who said to the woman caught in adultery, “Go and sin no more.”……. [And that is the point of this equally important post. This second post notes that it is not Francis versus the Church, by which secularists mean the “rigid hierarchy,” but it is Francis versus Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom espoused for all eternity to His Church. And then we get back to all the false mercy which just happens to accord perfectly with what the world – or the self-anointed elites – demand from the Church. I do not think anyone, even a Pope, can trust themselves to be truly unbiased or uninfluenced by this utterly dominant worldly view, unless they know without doubt they are clinging with all their might to the Doctrine of the Faith. Anything else carries the greatest danger, if not the moral certainty, or worldly self-seeking.]
Clearly, once Francis has purged the episcopate and Roman Curia of liberals, progressives and traditionalists, he will be there, all alone, because he alone can embody the Holy Faith of Christ! Nobody else gets it but him!
And that’s a pretty funny point, which I think is true in the sense that I have increasingly felt over the past year or more that Pope Francis seems to think nobody quite understands the Church like he does, that all of the rest of us – perhaps excluding Kardinal Kasper – are deficient to various degrees in our understanding and practice of the Faith.
So often Pope Francis’ rhetoric is very negative. He has castigated almost every variation in the practice of the Faith imaginable. He very rarely seems positive and uplifting when describing the efforts of millions of pious souls. He seems much more comfortable with those outside the Church, than within. He seems to think, especially, that those of us who adhere to the traditional practice of the Faith are the worst enemies the “Church” – or his reductive vision of the same – has. It is interesting to contemplate how that mentality has seeped into those now leading the Franciscans of the Immaculate. Or maybe it was there all along.
I do bear in mind that I think the rhetoric in Pope Francis’ closing address regarding the errors of progressives/modernists was pretty much just that – he criticized faithful Catholics, and probably felt obliged to throw those pious souls a bone by criticizing the other side. But as I said above, actions speak much louder than words, and Pope Francis’ actions have all been of one kind – advancing and aiding the most egregious modernists, and punishing and inhibiting the more faithful – in proportion to their faithfulness! And that says a lot.
It reminds me of our own leftist President’s dictum to reward his friends and punish his enemies.
I want to maintain that in spite of the criticism and the increasing clarity of my comments I do have a strong filial love for Pope Francis. He remains my father in the Faith. He is the Pope. I find much of what he does and believes disconcerting and destructive, I pray he changes many of his beliefs and practices, but I am in union with him as the Vicar of Christ. God permitted him to be elected Pope, probably to remind us all how short we fall in our practice of the Faith. I am a Catholic, he is my father, and I love and pray for him, even if I disagree with him. But that does not mean I am blind to reality, or have to behave as a sycophant and pretend everything he does or says is just wonderful and the very embodiment of Catholicity.
That kind of hyper-montanism, on even the most trivial of prudential issues, is how we have gotten into this mess. God could be chastising the Church and bishops for turning the Holy See into a cult of personality over the past 120 years or so.
Now I’m just spitballing. I’ll stop.
Helpful tips for our times…….. October 20, 2014
Posted by Tantumblogo in awesomeness, catachesis, episcopate, error, foolishness, fun, General Catholic, Grace, Holy suffering, manhood, Papa, persecution, scandals, secularism, sickness, silliness, Society.comments closed
…….I thought at least the male readers might find this useful:
Maybe it’s just better to wear pants.
This is more romantic:
Whatever the motivation, we’ve got to keep up the fight. The Synod, whatever it was – minor setback, major defeat, or pre-planned retrenchment after the introduction of soul-destroying novelties – will be back next year. We’ll see much more that is disturbing and upsetting between now and then. So keep ’em girt, strap on your armor, or whatever you need to do to be ready to fight.
That didn’t take long – Idaho preachers threatened with jail if they don’t perform sodo-weddings October 20, 2014
Posted by Tantumblogo in Abortion, Basics, disaster, error, foolishness, General Catholic, persecution, scandals, secularism, self-serving, sexual depravity, sickness, Society, unadulterated evil.comments closed
A federal court just last week overturned Idaho’s law defining marriage as it has always been understood (can we even comprehend anymore how INSANE it is that such laws were even necessary, but not only that, are now being overturned by judicial fiat!?!). We denizens of the 5th Circuit Court are now, I believe, the only part of the nation that have not had sodo-marriage foisted on them, yet. But it’s only a matter of time.
OK, so a judge contradicts probably the teachings of his own “faith” and 10,000 years of human civilization and decides that Idaho must allow sodomites and lesbians to pretend marry, and then recognize that pretension as actual marriage. But we’ve always been assured that our “religious freedom” enshrined in the 1st Amendment would mean that Christian churches would have an out.
Ha! That’s so yesterday, bible-humper! Get with the program! They will force themselves on the churches, just wait and see:
City officials in Coeur d’Alene Idaho have told a married couple who are both ordained ministers that they will go to jail if they refuse to perform wedding ceremonies for gay couples.
The Alliance for Defending Freedom has filed suit against the city and asked for a temporary restraining order to prevent officials from carrying out their threat…..
……City officials told Donald Knapp that he and his wife Evelyn, both ordained ministers who run Hitching Post Wedding Chapel, are required to perform such ceremonies or face months in jail and/or thousands of dollars in fines. The city claims its “non-discrimination” ordinance requires the Knapps to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies now that the courts have overridden Idaho’s voter-approved constitutional amendment that affirmed marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
The couple would face 180 days in jail and up to $1000 in fines per day if they dared to adhere to their religious beliefs………
….This is a law that manifestly violates the Constitution so I wouldn’t expect any court in America to uphold the city statutue.
Oh please! 20 years ago not a judge in the country would have found a law defining marriage as between one man and one woman UNconstitutional, so don’t tell us how much protection that piece of paper gives us now! It gives none! It fact, it is often used as a pacifier to lull us to sleep, believing the Constitution really will protect religious believers, the family, etc, etc, until one day, like magic, it doesn’t. That’s another damnable aspect of this so-called representative democracy.
According to the state of Idaho, if a person or church marries anyone, it must “marry” these people who define themselves according to their perversion. How long will the Church herself be able to refuse?
This ludicrous redefinition of marriage will be the law of the land in all 50 states within 6 months. Then what? It won’t be five minutes before the Catholic Church is sued for refusing/failing to “marry” these poor lost souls. And how many parishes/dioceses will cave without a fight?
I know a large number of nominal conservative Christians who think this issue is no big deal. They think it doesn’t really affect them, so they don’t really care. Well, guess what? They will be made to care? This sodo-lobby will not stop until they receive unending adulation from everyone, or at the very least have the obvious ability to bend whomever they desire to their will. Resistance will be crushed. Disagreement will not be tolerated.
Thus, the vehicle of the persecution. With how many agents already not just in the Church, but serving as Her priests and prelates?
Post-Synod Notes: Kasper’s “Replacement” and reward, the German’s motivation, and the punishments will continue until morale improves October 20, 2014
Posted by Tantumblogo in abdication of duty, Basics, disaster, episcopate, error, foolishness, General Catholic, horror, persecution, sadness, scandals, secularism, self-serving, shocking, Society, SOD, the return.comments closed
There has been copious coverage since Friday on the Synod and its after-effects. I’m sure we will still be processing this most disconcerting and tempestuous of fortnights for some time to come. I did see a few notes I wanted to bring to your attention. Some may be old news. Taken together they do start to reveal a certain picture, if you will.
First, while Cardinal Kasper’s reputation seems badly damaged publicly (one would hope, in fact, he would be finished), it seems the Germans are ready to continue advancing “his” errors to the end. In fact, the head of the German bishop’s conference, Cardinal Marx, seems to have happily taken the mantle of revolution upon himself (my emphasis and comments)
Speaking to reporters in Rome on October 16, Cardinal Reinhard Marx defended the interim report released by the Synod of Bishops and reiterated his early statement of support for a change in Church teaching regarding the reception of Communion by Catholics who are divorced and remarried.
“Saying that the doctrine will never change is a restrictive view of things,” the cardinal told reporters at a Vatican press office briefing. [St. Vincent of Lerins: “To announce, therefore, to Catholic Christians anything besides that which they have received has never been lawful, is lawful nowhere, and never will be lawful; and to anathematize those who announce anything besides that which has been once received has always been necessary. This being the case, is there anyone of such audacity as to teach other than that which has already been taught in the Church, or anyone of such levity as to receive anything besides that which he has once received from the Church? Sadly, Saint Vincent, there is.] Cardinal Marx, who is president of the German bishops’ conference, said that most of the country’s bishops backed the proposal by his fellow German, Cardinal Walter Kasper.
“We cannot change the Church,” Cardinal Marx said, “but we have not understood everything yet.” He stressed that the Church should serve all of the faith, not dividing them “into first class or second class or third class.” [You know, Cardinal Marx is quite right. Which is why I fail to understand why he wants to relegate those few faithful souls who do abide by all the Church’s belief – or strive to do so to their utmost – to a “third class” equivalence to those who persist in manifest states of grave sin. Having a marriage fall apart is not a small “oopsie,” it is a first class disaster for all involved, horribly wounds children (often irrevocably), and inflicts serious damage on the Church and the entire culture. But that is forgotten in this headlong rush to inflict leftist revolution on the Church.]
I guess I cannot say that Kardinal Kasper’s reputation is that sullied….he is being feted and awarded by the Catholic University of America. The party is Nov. 6 and all are invited. Perhaps some faithful Catholics could let this soul – in such desperate straits, whether he will acknowledge it or not – hear some charitable correction. I think it would be quite hilarious for a large number of African-American Catholics to show up and question him.
So what is up with the German bishops? Why are they so hell bent on inflicting revolution on the Church? While Pope Francis may be the ultimate author of this revolutionary push, it is the bishops of the Germanic countries that make up the core of his support and backing, intellectually, politically, and, especially, economically. So is this just more evil from that most perverse of races (apparently), which has brought us little but error for the past 500 years (Lutheranism, rationalism, modernism, Hegelianism, Heidegger, Nietzsche , Marx, Hitler, etc)? Or is it something else? Hint:
In Germany, Catholics are leaving the Church in droves, as an average of 140,000 formally abandon the Faith annually.* This is easy to track, because numbers are publicly reported in a system where Germans pay 8-9% of their income tax to receive the Sacraments. The church tax is administered by the State on behalf of the Church through a payroll deduction, for a lucrative 2-3% processing fee.
Apparently, more and more German Catholics resent this tax (and especially, the firm declaration that those who refuse to pay it WILL be denied the Sacraments, no exceptions allowed. Thus, most Germans view the Catholic Church as a cold, hard, self-interested bureaucracy that only cares for its own comfort and convenience:
First, the ordinary Germans are correct. The Catholic Church is Germany’s second-largest employer with 690,000 employees. (That’s 7 times the size of Mercedes Benz, folks.) Bishops take home between $10,000 and $15,000 per MONTH, and they don’t pay for their residence, their cars or their upkeep. You can read all about it here, but suffice to say that the German Catholic Church has been a gravy train for clerics for the last 60 years. [Think about that. 700,000 employees. That is twice as many as GM, Ford, and Chrysler – combined. Over $6 billion a year in direct income for the German bishops from the tax, much of which winds up in secular investments, with the bishops themselves the recipients of much of the windfall. The German episcopate is about the most disconnected from the Apostolic example in the entire world. But money buys lots and lots of influence.]
Second, the gravy train is about to come to an end. Fully 140,000 Germans leave the Church every year. Plus, a demographic cliff looms, and the Germans — world masters at corporate planning — can see the end coming very clearly. Estimates vary, but basically in 15-20 years the well will run dry. The old people will die. The young people won’t pay.
And so the whole “mercy” gambit is just a desperate hope that they can keep that gravy train rolling on, that they can woo people to separate with a very substantial part of their income in exchange for happily confirming them in their error and sin. I have no word for it, but disgusting. They are attacking Jesus Christ for filthy lucre.
Finally, I have held out a silent, pious hope that the events of late last week might have shocked Pope Francis out of his present……..support for novelty. I mentioned that to a few folks, who told me they thought my hope forlorn. Well, unfortunately, they were probably right. Rather than reconsider his position viz a viz the mind of the Church after the setback at the Synod, it appears the revolutionaries plan to double down on the authoritarian repression and deform the makeup of the hierarchy even more in their favor:
A couple of Italian papers have mentioned it during the weekend and also this Monday (Il Messaggero; Corriere della Sera). As a punishment for his defense of the orthodox faith against the subversive and heretical attempts of his fellow countryman Walter “A Good African is a Quiet African” Kasper and his position of firm resistance before and during the Synod, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Müller, would be sent to Siberia. Sorry, to Germany.
There are at least two major Sees available in Kirchensteuerland: Berlin, vacant, and his own hometown of Mainz, whose bishop, the Kasperite Cardinal Lehmann, is almost 79 by now.
This should open a wide path for the also widely rumored complete dismantling of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith so that it might become an inefficient ornament…….
……….Speaking of Papa Wojtyla, all reports (also in Il Messaggero this Monday) and rumors also converge in one direction: the new stage of the current purge will not stop at the Ratzingerians (such as Burke or Müller), but would now reach the Wojtylians as well. All conservative Poles in the Curia, and their allies, will be removed when the Curial reform takes place. Their offices could be simply extinguished or merged, and the new leadership would certainly be of a new (actually old liberal) kind.
Some may say “oh, it’s just a rumor!” Yeah, but on how many “rumors” has the Italian press been right in the past 6-12 months? Pretty much every one of any significance. But it’s all my fault for reporting it. Whatever.
Final final thought: Oh Father AG, is this the wagon you have hitched yourself and your order to? Is this what you expected and desired? Are you happy with the direction in which the Church is being led? Or is all this again just the fevered imaginings of us poor lost evil trads, the very worst people in the universe, according to you?
Quick post: Michael Matt on the Synod October 20, 2014
Posted by Tantumblogo in abdication of duty, Basics, catachesis, disaster, episcopate, error, foolishness, General Catholic, horror, scandals, secularism, self-serving, shocking, Society, SOD, the return.comments closed
This came out on Thursday and I meant to post Friday but did not get to it, as usual. Some pretty good comments below. Even with the “triumph” of the “orthodox?” at the Synod and the (temporary?) blocking of the agenda of Pope Francis (from this point forward, I will attribute this synodal gambit to its obvious author), there is still much to be dismayed over the course of events this past two weeks. The disastrous relation is out there, confirming souls in error, millions have been scandalized, radical errors put forward, sin abounds, etc., etc……so perhaps we should not be too cheered that at the 11th hour the wound to the Church turned out not to be life-threatening, but only very serious. We are still in unprecedented times, the threat of schism is real, and it has become perfectly obvious that we have perhaps the most doctrinally radical Pope in the history of the Church.
That is to say, we have a very great deal to still be concerned and vigilant about.
I do think Matt may go a bit too negative at times. I’m not sure what time of day this video was recorded, I tend to think it was before the “revolt” that occurred on Thursday was clear. I am certain he was unaware of some of the vote tallies that have now been leaked on some of these matters – the scandalous comments about sodomites were opposed more than 2:1, and the admission of the divorced and remarried to the Blessed Sacrament by a large majority. So it was not just a small but vocal minority opposing these destructive novelties – it was the large preponderance of the prelates. And further commentary over the weekend implies that this papacy may be badly weakened as a result of being shown to be so distant from the mind of the Church. But we shall see.
I will add this little bit – I do not know how many people answered Cardinal Burke’s call to prayer, and specifically the Chaplet of the Holy Face, but I know we prayed it as a family intently. I am convinced that to whatever extent Doctrine has been preserved and the forces of relative orthodoxy strengthened, it was due to the prayers of the faithful, so please do not stop even though the Synod is over for now. The threat remains.
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