Today’s Leftist Extremism and ‘Cancel Culture’ Was Baked Into ‘Liberal Democracy’ From the Outset November 15, 2019
Posted by Tantumblogo in Basics, catachesis, cultural marxism, different religion, disaster, error, General Catholic, history, Revolution, scandals, secularism, sickness, Society, the struggle for the Church.comments closed
One of the most disturbing trends in American, and broader Western, culture today, is the fact that any deviation from leftist orthodoxy, from ‘woke politics,’ can get one’s life destroyed in a matter of minutes. An offhand joke made waiting on the tarmac for a flight can lead to a reaction that means no job, no friends, and no home by the time one lands at their destination. Holding to beliefs that were completely unremarkable and widespread a mere 5 or 8 years ago can do the same. Merely standing in a public space waiting for a bus and minding your own business can, with the right kind of propaganda, lead to a nearly life-destroying episode before one’s life has even begun.
Most people wonder what in the heck has happened. How have we gone from the free speech extremism of the 1960s to the totalitarian speech policing of today? I might argue that all have been part of the same overarching movement, a movement intended to destroy Christendom, that uses different tools at different points of its long march through the institutions, and which has no problem at all in contradicting itself, or spouting literal double-think almost constantly.
Still, most would conclude that there was a sunny, happy time in liberal democracy, a golden age we’ve somehow lost. Many people believe the closer one gets to the roots of today’s liberal free market state’s founding, the closer one is to an ostensible ideal.
But this may not be the case. In fact, many of the intellectual framers of today’s liberal state, from back in the time of the endarkenment, realized some of the tragic implications of the godless, at-war-with-the-Church system they were proposing. In fact, several of the most key “enlightenment” thinkers realized that what they were doing was proposing a contrary religious-cultural system to the then-existent Christendom, and that they looked forward to war with Christendom, and that to the hilt. Some of these thinkers were very explicit about this, as you will see below.
From Rousseau’s The Social Contract, an exegesis on how those who rebuffed the new order would have to be treated, and that quite savagely:
While the civil profession of faith (in the civil authority) can compel no one to believe them, it can banish him, nor for impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing at need his life to his duty. If anyone, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does nto believe them, let him be punished by death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law. [These same liberals supposedly hated blasphemy laws, and yet here is one of their leading lights publicly calling for death for blasphemy against the “sacred” state’s “sacred” laws!]
The dogmas of civil religion ought to be few, simple, and exactly worded, without explanation or commentary……..Its negative dogmas I confine to one, intolerance, which is a part of the cults we have rejected……Now that there can be no longer an exclusive national religion, tolerance should be given to all religions that tolerate others, so long as their dogmas contain nothign contrary to the duties of citizenship. But wheover dares to say: “Outside the Church there is no slavation,” ought to be driven from the State, uless the State is teh Church, and the prince the pontiff.
So much for the tolerance of the new religion! Let no one think to be joined to Christ who is not prepared to be crucified under Pontius Pilate, for the godless state is ever satan’s arm.
And the revolution made clear from the beginning that any deviation from it’s orthodoxy, no matter how slight, would eventually be brutally punished, even with death. It was politic for the revolution, for a time, to pretend otherwise, to pretend open-mindedness and magnanimity, but no longer. As it nears its Omega point, the revolution drops the mask, and even schoolchildren can be crushed and destroyed – and that, for doing nothing at all wrong – solely for the ease of the revolution.
It was the same, of course, in the Soviet Union, and Maoist China, and Ortega’s Nicaraugua, Venezuela, etc., etc.
The only force capable of resisting this always advancing secularist onslaught is Catholicism – traditional Catholicism, since there are so many fake varieties today.
No, You Cannot “Partially Confess” Mortal Sins……. September 28, 2019
Posted by Tantumblogo in asshatery, different religion, disaster, Domestic Church, error, General Catholic, horror, Interior Life, paganism, Revolution, Sacraments, sadness, scandals, sickness, Society.comments closed
…….and the matter addressed in this post raises major issues with Novus Ordo Church.
I initially used the Youtuber’s name in the post, but went through and removed it, since it’s not really the point.
There is a particular Youtube channel with a particular female “host.” This woman formerly lived in Seattle and now lives in the Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, area. She’s what’s called a “based” or “red-pilled” Youtuber, which means she strongly rejects leftist social justice warrior ideology and adheres much more to conservative viewpoints. In fact, she plays at being attracted to fascist ideologies at times. I’m not sure how serious that attraction is, most of my viewership of her material comes through the weekly livecasts she does with another Youtuber.
In many respects she’s great. She’s very conservative and we align on a number of points. In spite of these many points of agreement, however, like Michael Knowles, there is a serious problem with her attitude regarding the Church and the moral law Christ has given to guide us in this life, be pleasing to Him, and enable us to spend eternity worshipping Him in Heaven.. Like so many of us, this fair haired woman has a lot of baggage. Lord knows, I do, too. I’ve been pretty open about that over the years. One thing I have striven most mightily to do is to conform myself to the mind of the Church in all aspects of my life of which I am aware. This does not mean I have succeeded in all fronts, but I continue to try.
In this day and age, however, that can be a difficult thing to do. What should be the simplest, most straightforward thing in the world – for Catholics to know the moral law and live in accord with it (I didn’t say easiest) – has become a labyrinthe of difficulty, due to the error and outright heresy rife in the Church of the past 100 years or so, extending in recent times right to the highest level. While the Doctrine of the Faith is still out there to be found by souls who are willing to put forth the effort – in books, on website, at traditional parishes, etc – there is a huge mass of error to lead poeple astray, and especially to tempt them in the most trying (marriage, chastity, procreation) aspects of their lives to find the wide, easy road to destruction, instead of the hard, narrow way our Blessed Lord told us would be our lot if we chose to take up our cross and follow Him.
All I say below has been publicly revealed by this Youtube personality herself, so I am not revealing any confidences. This woman is married to a non-Catholic. She was married outside the Church. As she became much more conservative over the past several years, she began to feel an attraction towards the Church again. From what she has said, her initial return to the Church was to the SSPX. I am guessing this is the Immaculate Conception priory the SSPX has near the Washington/Idaho border. Upon approaching the priests there regarding regularzing her marriage and being able to receive the Sacraments, as she terms it, she was told that she would have to wait 6 months in order to have her marriage reviewed and the process of investigation completed. During that time, she would have to remain chaste with her husband, living as brother and sister. Now, this Youtuber is in her early 30s and is attempting to conceive her first child. She has been married for at least a few years.
This was undoubtedly a huge cross to bear. I asked some local priests about this period of continence, and they indicated that it seemed rather longer than their experience indicated but that each case was different, and not knowing the particulars it was difficult to comment. They absolutely agreed that this woman and her husband would need to live as brother and sister until the marriage was made right in the eyes of God and Holy Mother Church, and that she could not receive Communion during this waiting period, either. It should be noted that, prior to the 1950s, getting a sacramentally invalid marriage to a non-Catholic validated was all but impossible. Whether such marriages should even be available for validation is a huge question, one which I won’t go into at this time.
The Youtuber was not amenable to this direction, done for the good of her soul, and that of her husband’s, I’m sure. She sought out a Novus Ordo parish, my guess would be St. Thomas the Apostle because she described this as a relatively conservative and orthodox parish. There are only two or three Novus Ordo parishes in the area, and this one is definitely the most orthodox by all appearances. Apparently, from what she has said, this parish somehow regularized her marital situation, or gave her some kind of leave to continue to live as husband and wife while the matter was being resolved (and allowing her to receive the Sacraments). After discussing this situation on their Youtube livestream, I reached out directly to this woman and I suggested she seek out the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter parish in the area, because I feared that she may have been getting some worldly, feel-good kind of direction that is all too common in the Novus Ordo world. I do not know if she contacted good Father Gordon up there, but she did say she was going to Mass and receiving Sacraments and seemed satisfied.
Now, I have no knowledge of the details, so perhaps this resolution of her non-sacramental marriage was perfectly legitimate. But I was concerned that this could be evidence of the kind of extremely lackadiasical attitude towards the Sacraments and their right administration that is all too common in essentially all Novus Ordo parishes. Subsequent events gave strong evidence of this. The Youtubing woman related that as she had been away from the Church for years, she had accumulated numerous sins, including a number of mortal ones, and that confessing these was difficult. She stated that the priest of this parish had advised that she could just confess one or two as she felt moved to do at each Confession, and then continue to receive Communion as she gradually went through her history of sins. She indicated this was the course she was following.
This is obviously a grave offense against God and His Church, and is an absolutely disastrous pastoral practice. Objectively speaking, every one of these Confessions has been invalid, devoid of the Grace of reconciliation with God, and each subsequent reception of the Blessed Sacrament has been unspeakably sacrilegious. Now, the Youtuber received absolutely disastrous direction from her priest, so I’m not certain how much guilt accrues to her, and how much to him, but the entire situation is a catastrophe. If she becomes aware of this grave offense against God, she would have to go re-confess all these sacrilegious confessions and all the other, original mortal sins, besides. What a nightmare.
And this brings me to the point of this post. If I am right about the parish in question, by all external appearances it looks like a quite faithful, orthodox parish. There is frequent public Rosary and Confession most days. It could be she attends the other parish in Coeur d’Alene, St. Pius X (please don’t harrass either parish since I/we don’t know with certainty). But either way, this situation highlights something I have learned at great cost over the past decade or so – that, one priest aside, there are virtually no Novus Ordo priests in this country who can be relied upon in every situation, no matter how difficult, to adhere to the Doctrine of the Faith and guide souls along these ancient, constant lines. Even in seemingly conservative/faithful Novus Ordo parishes/chapels, I have universally encountered error to one degree or another, with the exception of one priest, Father Paul Weinberger. He is a rock. But even in Hanceville, when Mother Angelica was still alive, I got some very unfortunate direction in the confessional, which fortunately I knew better than to follow. There are other priests in the Novus Ordo church that I believe are also quite solid, like Father Ryan Erlenbush, but I do not have enough direct personal knowledge to confirm. If you have such a priest, thank God, for you are truly fortunate.
The seemingly very quick and convenient, with little or no moral consequence, regularization of the sacramentally invalid marriage was frankly a huge warning sign. But this matter of the advice given with regard to Confession is beyond the pale, and puts the woman’s soul in the gravest of jeopardy. I have spoken with several priests on this matter – confidentially, of course – and all were utterly aghast at this hideous direction.
It is a tragedy, but is one of the strongest reasons why I now pretty much advocate exclusively for souls to avail themselves of priests of traditional priestly societies if at all possible (up to an including driving an hour or so each way if possible), or of priests offering the TLM in the next case. If absolutely no TLM is available, especially from a society of men deliberately formed according to the constant belief and practice of the Faith, search out the best priest you can find, but I think in such a case you have a particular duty to exert great effort to form yourself in the Faith to the degree that you will not be influenced by poor catechesis and destructive direction.
It just reinforces my growing opinion that the future of the Church is entirely in her past. She must return to herself in all ways, most especially those related to the moral virtues and the Liturgy. That’s not just about saving souls. It’s about giving God the glory He deserves.
Voris Obliterates AmChurch, and Challenges those Blase’ Souls that Sustain It July 19, 2019
Posted by Tantumblogo in abdication of duty, Dallas Diocese, different religion, disaster, episcopate, error, foolishness, General Catholic, Revolution, secularism, sexual depravity, sickness, the struggle for the Church, unadulterated evil, Voris.comments closed
Amchurch, Novus Ordo land, the Great Facade………..whatever one wants to call it, Michael Voris obliterates it in the video below (h/t to reader Dismas).
Sort of……..frankly, he doesn’t go far enough. For Bernadin and McCarrick, Dearden and Hallinan, Hunthausen and Mahony, didn’t fall out of the sky and land in their cathedras. They were chosen and assigned, by popes dating back to Pius XII in some cases. These are the popes Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton, regarded by several traditonal priests as the greatest theologian this country has ever produced, described as the popes between Saint Pius X and Paul VI as “weak and liberal……..who have flooded the hierarchy with unworthy and stupid men.” That is to say, Voris identifies two key sources of the crisis in the Church, so far as the United States is concerned, but as always fails to follow the line to its inevitable conclusion. Fenton was not sede vacantist in the slightest, and the quoted words were private comments pulled from his personal diary after his death, but nevertheless he was openly critical of the papalotry of his time and would be even more so today. This is where Church Militant continually fails.
It’s a very rough line to draw. If I had their reach and audience, I, too, would be very careful in how far I went in describing the crisis in the Church and its source, but it rings a little hollow to absolutely excoriate the hierarchy in the United States and say not a word about those in Rome who have selected, empowered, and backed up that hierarchy in all its error and destruction not only in the United States but around the world.
And, of course, today we see the apotheosis – or at least it’s apotheosis thus far, his successor may be far worse, God forbid – of this trend in the dictator pope Francis.
Nevertheless, these reminders of the corruption at the heart of the Novus Ordo establishment are healthy and helpful. I would love to know how Voris’ video is received by any souls long used to the Novus Ordo church, who believe it to be the normative mode of Catholicism – indeed, for millions, it is the only form they have ever known. But I am skeptical that many converts will be made by this video. Perhaps there will be some, and God bless them if they see the light and Michael Voris for all his hard work. But I have found that very few souls happily ensconced in low-demand, happy-clappy, kindergarten-class Novus Ordo land very open to serious critiques of what they know. Some of the very hardest to reach are the older souls who remember the pre-Vatican II Church, and dutifully followed their mother down this wide path to destruction so many years ago. Souls who were devout enough to remain faithful even as the Church turned against her very core, her very nature, have a very, very hard time admitting, in the twilight of their life, that any reseverations they had decades ago were well placed, and that the experiment in aggiornamento has been a complete and total failure. Of course, some of these folks went along quite wilingly, in the spirit of that tragic decade, thinking they really were good and great enough to “sing a new church into being,” to summon a “new pentecost,” one even greater than the first.
Nevertheless, watching this caused me to reflect on that occasional good news that comes out of the Novus Ordo environment, of priests offering Mass in Latin or more Confession, or good assignments made. I like to think these are positive developments, but if they keep people from making the leap to the TLM and a real traditional Catholic community where the Faith is preached and, to the degree it can be in this sewer of a culture, lived, then they may actually be counterproductive. It’s possible my own experience, where all these things – more Confession (which I sorely needed and need), more authentic forms of the Liturgy, increasingly solid catechesis from priests as we moved from the “large suburban parish” to the very conservative oddball Novus Ordo parish on the outskirts of the Diocese – pushed me and mine inexorably towards a traditional Latin Mass community. But that may not be everyone’s experience. At the same time, I do not feel comfortable criticizing those who are trying, by their own lights, to improve the situation in their parish, and seeing occasional positive moves in that direction.
Another thing Church Militant misses, today – they didn’t used to, at one time they were very much going in the direction of publicly excoriating the ambiguous, deliberately murky, and even blatantly erroneous aspects of Vatican II – is just that. They don’t get to the root errors that caused Vatican II to happen. Not at the level of, like Archbishop Lefebvre, accusing the Council. I’ve been trying to screw up the courage to do a long podcast review of two books, John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition by David Wemhoff, with a strong whiff of E. Michael Jones about it, and Desire and Deception by Charles Coulombe. I’ll have to do it as a podcast, otherwise it’d be a 5000 word post I’d never get out. Both books dwell on possibly the key aspect of the Faith, the practical rejection of which led inevitably to the crisis in the Church today – Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus – but one I think is a rather poor and even often misleading effort, and the other is much more spot on. It’s a subject I’d really like to do proper justice to, so I pray I can finally get around to making a recording and posting it.
Coulombe Critiques the Novus Ordo and a Few Pics from Fatima Conference May 3, 2018
Posted by Tantumblogo in Admin, awesomeness, Basics, catachesis, different religion, Father Rodriguez, General Catholic, Liturgy, Restoration, Revolution, Spiritual Warfare, the struggle for the Church, Tradition, Virtue.comments closed
A great excerpt from the weekly Tumblar House series of video Q&As with Charles Coulombe wherein Mr. Coulombe discusses the Novus Ordo and the problems with it. He gives a fair and accurate assessment, though not as harsh and thoroughly critical as perhaps I might be. He does note, quite rightly, that some “presentations” of the Novus Ordo are much better than others. Indeed, the Novus Ordo in Latin, Ad Orientem, offered with great reverence with the Asperges and a solid priest giving good catechesis in the sermon with all the bells and smells, is what the Novus Ordo perhaps should have been, though I would argue that no change to the Mass was necessary and that humans are always on perilous ground in playing around with divine creations, which I would say the Mass largely is. My family and I derived great fruit from just such a Mass for several years in the mid-2000s, and that experience paved the way for our eventual “transition” to the TLM. Having said that, I strongly believe the TLM is the once and future Mass for the entire Church, but getting back there will likely take a very long time.
But what is generally offered in most parishes is a far, far cry from that relatively benign Novus Ordo experience. In fact, what is offered in most parishes is a positive danger to the faith of many souls, especially those badly formed in the Faith (or formed well but in some false simulacrum of Catholicism).
What I really like in the analysis below, however, one thing Mr. Coulombe says: the Council did not address the problem truly affecting the Church, that the Mass did not need a radical makeover but that the penetration of Leftism into the minds and heart so most priests did, but this was ignored, as was the original driving force behind the Council, at least in the minds of the large majority of bishops polled before it took place – formally condemning communism as a philosophy and condemning those who embraced it.
I also very much appreciate the fact that many of the liturgical innovations that came as a result of the Council, though very few were called for in Sacraosanctum Concilium, already stood condemned before the Council took place! These were condemned by Pius XII in his encyclicals Humanii Generis and Mediator Dei (which reminds me, I really need to re-read those). Anyway, it’s a really good video and I hope you find watching it edifying:
Are those five Eucharistic miracles, or miracles associated with the Eucharist, he mentions above approved or clearly demonstrated? I’m only familiar with one or two.
The pics below came from the March conference of Our Lady’s Army of Advocates at the DFW airport. It was a wonderful experience, not only for the talks, but for meeting so many good friends and readers of this blog. The wonderful Rodriguez family of El Paso was there, and I got to take some pictures with members of their family, along with others. The pics are a bit on the blurry side, but you takes what you gets. Thank you to the kind Beatrice Rodriguez for sending these to me, and sorry it took so long to get them posted!
David Rodriguez, myself, Beatrice Rodriguez, and Father Michael Rodriguez
Michael Matt, Beatrice Rodriguez, me
Heretic Pope – Francis Declares “There Is No Hell” March 30, 2018
Posted by Tantumblogo in asshatery, catachesis, cultural marxism, different religion, disaster, error, Francis, General Catholic, horror, rank stupidity, Revolution, scandals, secularism, self-serving, Spiritual Warfare, unadulterated evil.comments closed
The Vatican has tried to sidestep this blatant declaration of heresy, but they have been very careful not to deny that he was accurately quoted. So Francis outed himself as a blatant heretic for at least the 10th or 11th time:
In another informal interview with Italian atheist journalist (and founder of liberal newspaper Repubblica) Eugenio Scalfari, published today, Pope Francis reveals that “hell does not exist”.
His exact words below (full interview behind paywall here, most important excerpt below):
Title of the interview: “It is an honor for me to be called revolutionary.” [That is also a kind of heresy, at least given the condemnations of leftist revolutions from past pontiffs]4
Excerpt on hell:
[Scalfari:] Your Holiness, in our previous meeting you told me that our species will disappear in a certain moment and that God, still out of his creative force, will create new species. You have never spoken to me about the souls who died in sin and will go to hell to suffer it for eternity. You have however spoken to me of good souls, admitted to the contemplation of God. But what about bad souls? Where are they punished?
[Francis:] “They are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”
Yeah, you wish.
The timing is no accident. Almost every year at Easter this creature occupying the Chair of Peter has taken perverse delight – diabolical delight – in showing his utter disdain for popular piety and the few tattered remains of Catholic tradition that exist outside the traditionalist-dominated remnant. He loves to mock and usurp it. His only use for the Faith he so obviously hates is as a vehicle to his own self-aggrandizement.
Of course, he also loves to be the star of his own self-directed drama, the movie of his mind where he is always the swashbuckling young Peronist waging constantly successful insurgency against the hidebound reactionaries of the Church and world of his imagination. He cannot see that he and his ilk are now the hidebound reactionaries wreaking destruction and causing suffering at every turn (as they have throughout their sorry lives), as his generation corrupted from the false and illusory ideals of the 60s into just another ruling class blinded by its own self-interest.
I’d be really harsh, but this being Holy Week and all, I’ll lay off. To me, really, this guy is a joke, elected by infinitely corrupted and corrupting old pederasts who themselves are more sorry and pathetic than anything else. They’d be laughable if they hadn’t done so damn much damage to so damned many souls. But my judgment is nothing. I’m just a man, and probably a fool. But God is eternal, and hell is real.
Francis will find that out to his absolute horror at some point in the not too distant future.
This Nation Is Headed for a Most Unhappy Breakup February 23, 2018
Posted by Tantumblogo in abdication of duty, cultural marxism, different religion, firearms, General Catholic, horror, Revolution, scandals, secularism, self-serving, sickness, Society, unbelievable BS.comments closed
I’m not a big fan of David French or National Review – or T. Codrington Van Vorhies IV of the National Topsider, as Iowahawk calls them – but he does raise an important point in a recent post on how the Left is driving increasing political, social, and moral polarization in this country, to the extent now that we have two very large segments of this country who can no longer agree on even such basic things as what constitutes a male or female human, and whether bakers should be forced by government gun to bake a cake for a non-wedding of two people of the same sex.
What is developing is a situation where each side is so alienated from the other – a process driven by the Left’s relentless demands for always more revolutionary change – that it finds being governed by representatives of the other side intolerable. Furthermore, the internet has encouraged and enabled the formation of ideological bubbles where most of us screen our sources of information to those which not only tend to comfortably reinforce our views, but even have a tendency to make them more extreme in confirming them.
However, as French notes, it is the Left that always, always leads in both of the phenomenons above. The right was concerned and a bit panicked about the election of Obama, but we didn’t have public breakdowns and still-ongoing (more than a year after the event) screaming hissy fits about the election of someone other than our preferred candidate. And it is the Left that is much more typically broadly ignorant of policy, and especially the viewpoints of the Right, than it is the other way around. The Left has virtually always forced the issues that divide us, and always always always presses for ever more radical developments, especially moral/cultural ones, but the right is also becoming radicalized as a process of both natural reaction to the constant antagonism of the Left, and as part of a process of coming to recognize its core principles more and more through media dedicated to that purpose. The end result of this process appears to be such polarization that a Civil War type breakdown seems increasingly likely.
I don’t see much hope of the polarization decreasing in the future. In fact, I look forward to it continually increasing. I also think the two sides will grow less and less able to live together. However many believing Christians (and orthodox Jews) there are, there are tens of millions of people who continue to live with a fundamentally Christian moral framework. Coexistence with the always more radical left is becoming increasingly difficult, and for more and more, impossible. This cannot lead anywhere good. I expect the national breakup with be short, sharp, ugly, and bloody.
Anyway here is French’s spiel:
In most states, the Overton window moved to the right, and it’s still moving right.
We can do this issue by issue, but an issue-based focus obscures a larger and far more significant reality. We’re no longer fighting about “the” Overton window. Our differences have grown so profound that “the” window has broken. We’ve got two windows now. One for red. One for blue.
Since 1994 the Pew Research Center has been studying political polarization in the United States, and you can watch the two windows form right in front of your eyes. Here are two images that show the difference between the political positions of the “median Republican” and “median Democrat” in the “general public” in 1994 and in 2017:
And this brings us back to the three stories that started this piece. There is a difference, I believe, between progressives and conservatives. Given their control of the academy, legacy media, and Hollywood — along with their intense geographical concentration in large, urban enclaves — progressives are not only racing further to the left, they’re also deceiving themselves about their cultural strength.
They think they’re “winning” when they’ve really moved mainly themselves. The other window either remains unmoved or moves right in response. Arguments on the far-left side of the blue Overton window (like campus temper tantrums) are greeted with complete incredulity and open mockery on the right.
In fact, even progressive conventional wisdom (such as the notion that a man can become a woman) is at best on the far-left edge of the Republican Overton window. At best. Similarly, I’d challenge a Republican to walk into a Brooklyn coffee shop and find a single person who didn’t think you were a violent bigot for believing that Caitlyn Jenner is still a man and that the Second Amendment alone grants you the right to carry a weapon.
We may have exhausted all the “why Trump won” arguments, so I won’t go there. But I will say that the notion that one Overton community will govern the other is increasingly infuriating and even terrifying to the losers of national political contests.
None of this is exactly new. It’s been apparent to many for decades. But the process of dissolution of common interest and increasing animosity only continues to accelerate. The Founders set up a system that could take surprising amounts of strain, but every system has its limit. When we cross that limit is anyone’s guess, but I am thinking we’re getting closer than anytime in the past 150 years, with the possible exception of the late 60s.
Francis to Canonize Paul VI, and Thus, Try to Canonize Vatican II February 22, 2018
Posted by Tantumblogo in asshatery, Basics, different religion, error, Francis, General Catholic, pr stunts, scandals, secularism, self-serving, Society, the struggle for the Church.comments closed
Michael Matt is severely critical of this move below, and asks the question on many Catholics minds – certainly, given the former rigor of the pre-1983 canonization process, when the role of devil’s advocate was taken away, canonizations were always viewed as an infallible act of the Church’s Magisterium. But that very dogmatic definition depended greatly on the former process of canonization, and the office of devil’s advocate was an instrumental part of that process. Since John Paul II had that office abolished, the process has been massively changed, and so does the same doctrinal authority still hold? It’s not an unreasonable question, and it is addressed by Charles Coulombe in the 2nd video below:
These are two well formed, learned men, and they arrive at somewhat different conclusions, I think – Matt seems much more doubtful of the post-1983 canonization process and especially the canonization of Paul VI (what happened to the damning documentation the Cure of Nantes had when we died?), whereas Coulombe seems skeptical and leaves room open for doubting the infallibility of the new process, but seems to lean towards it still being infallible.
Once again, the faithful, in this time of unprecedented doctrinal chaos in the highest echelons of the Church, where high authorities literally contradict one another on matters of grave import, the faithful are left to largely fend for themselves and make their way as best they can in this new revolutionary post-conciliar situation we’re in. Because of that, I’m fairly agnostic on where one winds up on either side of these kinds of difficult to resolve issues.
That’s speaking generally, but as for me, as Rorate notes, it is very difficult for a faithful soul who loves the Church, or tries to love the Church while being uncertain just what that massively important word means anymore, to see the destruction wrought by Paul VI and think “now there’s a man worthy of canonization.” I’m fairly reticent to get enthusiastic about John Paul II’s canonization, as well, not least of which because I think it more than a bit unseemly for the man who radically changed the process of canonization to directly benefit from that process, but much more so because he appointed thousands of modernist bishops and basically had the ability to reverse many of the worst aspects of at least the “spirit of Vatican II,” but chose not to, and in many fundamental ways helped cement that spirit much more firmly into place.
But Paul VI is infinitely more concerning than John Paul II – not only was he the pope that gave the whip hand to the modernists at Vatican II, not only did he impose the new Mass in the most draconian and uncharitable manner possible, and not only did he attempt to abrogate the TLM without justification or, as Benedict XVI proclaimed, even an ability to do so, but the very persistent allegations regarding an amoral personal life and his being blackmailed by modernist/sodomite actors in the Church have been disturbingly numerous, persistent, and detailed for my taste. These latter may be false, but if there is even a chance that they be true, how much (more) damage will be done should evidence emerge that the recently canonized “Saint Paul VI” in fact carried on a number of sodomitical acts over his life?
Then there is this final factor – what if the critics are right, and the process changed by John Paul II is no longer infallible? What if these men are not saints? By being declared so, that terminates all prayers on their behalf. This is all so politicized and wrapped up in what one thinks of the Council, for or against, and the canonizations are coming with such urgency, so much faster than they used to in the past (and involve so much hype and hoopla) that it is very hard to analyze the matter dispassionately. I really think the best course would be to put an informal ad hoc ban on canonization of popes for at least a century after their death – which is something the Church used to practice just as a matter of course, on almost all Saints, the thinking being that to really determine whether one was a Saint or not, a lot of time had to pass, as did most everyone who was alive during the Saint’s time, and analyze the matter dispassionately and with fairness and rigor. That is not at all what is occurring here, and represents, again, another major change to the process that could affect its infallibility.
It’s all a bit too much for me to figure out. Francis can do what he wants, but so can I. I won’t be directing many requests for intercession towards Paul VI. I’ll stick to the more established and less controversial Saints.
Dr. Christopher Dawson on the Fundamental Anti-Christian Religious Nature of the Left February 22, 2018
Posted by Tantumblogo in Basics, catachesis, Christendom, cultural marxism, different religion, error, General Catholic, history, horror, persecution, Revolution, scandals, secularism, self-serving, Society, unadulterated evil.comments closed
Dr. Christopher Dawson was one of the greatest Catholic historians and sociologists of the modern era, a man capable of amassing voluminous knowledge and collating it down to a sensible, digestible whole that relatively educated masses could imbibe. He wrote a number of books, mostly now held by Ignatius (which makes me wonder the degree to which they have been edited for content uncomfortable to the post-conciliar zeitgeist) but there are other titles available from other sources, and you can still find pre-conciliar copies of his works every now and then.
One of the most interesting of his works was The Gods of Revolution, which argued that the French Revolution – the progenitor of the modern Left and all subsequent revolutionary movements – was primarily motivated by the desire to promulgate a new religion and moral order for society, both of which were antithetical to the hated religion and moral order of Catholicism and the Ancien Regime. Now this realization may be old hat to many readers, and Dawson was hardly the first to make this claim, but in an age where history and science are dealt with, especially in the academic sense, from an overwhelmingly materialist and rationalist perspective, Dawson’s analysis is both refreshing and helpful. I think there some gems in the excerpts below that may help you in your exchanges with the forces of revolution/post-modernism you may encounter.
Or, it was at least interesting to me, and interesting enough to post, so I shall make you suffer through it, if you read to the end. The excerpts below come from pages 65-66 and 84-85 of this short book (the excerpt starts rather abruptly, discussing the Jacobin Clubs, the focal point of French revolutionary ferment, as being also the religious center of that movement):
The clubs were in fact the churches of the new religion. “How was the Christian religion established?” asks a Jacobin writer. “By the preaching of the apostles of the Gospel. How can we firmly establish the [new French] Constitution? By the mission of the apostles of liberty and equality. Each [Jacobin club] should take charge of the neighboring country districts. It is enough to send an enlightened and zealous patriot with instructions which he will adapt to the locality; he should also provide himself with a copy of the Declaration of the Rights [of Man] , the Constitution, the Almanack du Pere Gerard [a scurrilous source of anti-Church calumnies], and a good tract against fanaticism, and a good model of a pike. [I’m sure you can imagine what that is for. But it might be helpful to ponder who the cult of liberty was spread in our own nation, and who the apostles were of that new religion, whether its founders intended it to be one or not, it has taken on many overtones of religion nonetheless.]
In many respects the clubs had inherited and absorbed the traditions of eighteenth century Freemasonry………[The clubs] possessed the same ideal of optimistic deism and claimed in the same way as the Freemasons to represent the fulfillment of the Christian ideals of fraternity, charity, and morality……….But the religion of the Jacobins was a far more definite and dogmatic theory than that of the Masons had ever been. From the first it possessed its creed in the Declaration of Rights and its scriptures on the Social Contract and it gradually developed a regular cultus and ritual centering round the Altar of the Fatherland, the Tree of Liberty, the Book of the Constitution, and addressed to deified abstractions like Reason, Liberty, Nature, and the Fatherland [Which were precisely the objects antichrist directed the false religion of satanic-dominated humankind in Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World]…….[[this new revolutionary religion] was a religion of human salvation, the salvation of the world by the power of man set free by Reason. The Cross has been replaced by the Tree of Liberty, the Grace of God by the Reason of Man, and Redemption by Revolution. [And here I think Dawson gives as good a description of the totality of the opposition of the new religion of sexular pagan leftism to Christianity as I’ve read. Benson does an excellent job of prognosticating how this new secular religion will move as it seeks to replace Christianity, and forecasts a sad and infinitely trying future for the Church and faithful souls. What Benson did not predict was that virtually the entire institutional Church might join the false cult of man.]
This creed was by no means peculiar to the Jacobins; it as common to all the liberal idealists from the Illuminati to Blake, and from Shelley to Victor Hugo. But with the Jacobin Society it acquired the external organization of a sect, with a strict discipline, a rigid standard of orthodoxy, and a fanatical intolerance to other creeds. From the first the Jacobins had thrown themselves into the persecution of the Church with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and the resultant conflict with the nonjuring Catholics was largely responsible for the sectarian bitterness and persecuting spirit of the Jacobin Society. [today, that spirit has been taken up by the more leftward segments of the democrat party in this country and numerous other parties in the West in the various parliamentary democracies, with the same persecuting spirit and the same fanatical adherence to leftist orthodoxy. In fact, Leftism has continued a steady process of metastasizing, growing ever more extreme in belief and in the amoral society they wish to achieve.]
…………[Thus] the Revolution was no longer satisfied with the liberal Catholicism of the Constitutional Church [the false, heretical, Gallican state “church” set up with the help of apostate bishops and priests who feared men more than God, just as Francis seeks to support in China today], it had come to regard Christianity itself as a counter-revolutionary force which must be destroyed in order to make way for the new religion of humanity. As early as 26 September 1792 Fouche’ had announced at Nevers that he thought it was his mission “to substitute teh wroship of the Republic and natural morality for the superstitious cults to which the people still unfortunately adhere,” and in the following month at Lyons he staged an elaborate anti-Christian demonstration in which a donkey wearing a cope and mitre dragged a missal and the Gospels through the streets. During the autumn all the churches in Paris were closed, Notre Dame became the Temple of Reason, and the Constitutional “bishop” of Paris, Gobel, with his leading clergy, made a public renunciation of their ministry at the bar of the Convention………..
——–End Quote——
There is much more that is great in the book, but Dawson writes compactly and densely, making it difficult to pull out excerpts that make much sense on their own. I’ve read three books by Dawson now and have enjoyed them a great deal, but I am looking forward to something a bit more polemical in Coulombe. But that will be some months off, I have some other history to go through first, including a study of the man who set the entire rationalist/materialist/leftist train in motion, Luther.
Latest Atrocities Regarding Francis of Rome – Corrupt Donation, Seeking to Sack Raymond Arroyo February 21, 2018
Posted by Tantumblogo in asshatery, cultural marxism, different religion, disaster, Endless Corruption, error, Francis, horror, paganism, scandals, secularism, self-serving, sexual depravity, sickness, Society, the struggle for the Church, unadulterated evil.comments closed
A couple of recent items regarding the man inexplicably elected pope in 2013, Jorge Bergoglio. One involves a massive and unusual donation from a US source to a corrupt Italian hospital apparently made at the pope’s direct request, and the other is the working out of a personal vendetta by one of the closest of Francis’ advisers (Anthony Spadaro, SJ) against an unlikely target – Raymond Arroyo of EWTN News, who has, it must be said, been quite willing to air negative opinions regarding Francis and his pontificate over the past several years, and especially the disastrous papal document Amoris Laetitia, apparently ghost-written by Spadaro himself. Spadaro has been waging a PR campaign to have Arroyo fired, and now wants EWTN anathematized, an action which would surely scandalize and anger millions of the few remaining faithful American Catholics (not to mention being incredibly hypocritical, seeing how much heresy and error is tolerated and even promoted by this pontificate).
First on the donation, from LifeSiteNews and with additional commentary by Bishop Gracida:
Leaked documents obtained by LifeSiteNews connect the Pope himself to a new Vatican financial scandal and raise serious questions about his global reputation as the “pope for the poor.”
LifeSiteNews has obtained internal documents of the U.S.-based Papal Foundation, a charity with a stellar history of assisting the world’s poor, showing that last summer the Pope personally requested, and obtained in part, a $25 million grant to a corruption-plagued, Church-owned dermatological hospital in Rome accused of money laundering. Records from the financial police indicate the hospital has liabilities over one billion USD – an amount larger than the national debt of some 20 nations.
The grant has lay members of the Papal Foundation up in arms, and some tendering resignations. Responding to questions from LifeSiteNews, Papal Foundation staff sent a statement saying that it is not their practice to comment on individual requests………
………However, the majority of the board is composed of U.S. bishops, including every U.S. Cardinal living in America. The foundation customarily gives grants of $200,000 or less to organizations in the developing world (see a grant list for 2017 here) via the Holy See.
According to the internal documents, the Pope made the request for the massive grant, which is 100 times larger than its normal grants, through Papal Foundation board chairman Cardinal Donald Wuerl in the summer of 2017.
Despite opposition from the lay “stewards,” the bishops on the board voted in December to send an $8 million payment to the Holy See. In January, the documents reveal, lay members raised alarm about what they consider a gross misuse of their funds, but despite their protests another $5 million was sent with Cardinal Wuerl brooking no dissent. [Clouds of intrigue and immorality have swirled around Cardinal Wuerl for decades]……..
…………The lay members of the board have good reason to be concerned about the supposed recipient of their generosity. Pope Francis asked for the funds to be directed to the Istituto Dermopatico dell’Immacolata (IDI), a dermatological hospital in Rome that has been plagued with corruption and financial scandal for years.
On May 15, 2013, ANSA, the leading news wire in Italy, reported “police confiscated over six million euros worth of property and bank accounts as part of investigations into alleged corruption at the Italian hospital group Istituto Dermopatico dell’Immacolata (IDI).”
The news of Vatican financial corruption connected to the IDI hit international headlines in 2015 with a June 20 Reuters article showing the Italian magistrates suspected Vatican Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi diverted 30 million euros destined for a Church-owned children’s hospital to the Church-owned IDI.
Another ANSA piece from 2016 reported, “Finance police discovered IDI was 845 million euros in the red and 450 million euros in tax evasion while 82 million euros had been diverted and six million euros in public funds embezzled.”
In May 2017, La Repubblica – the only newspaper Pope Francis says he reads – reported on court rulings revolving around the IDI detailing twenty-four indictments, leading to a dozen convictions, some of which carried over three years in prison. The court recognized the evidence from the financial police including “about 845 million euros in balance sheet liabilities and over 82 million in diverted funds, plus the undue use of another 6 million public funds.”………
So it seems a typically corrupt Italian enterprise. Why would the pope demand a $25 million donation from an unusual source, one that typically gives donations orders of magnitude smaller and typically only in third world countries mired in extreme poverty? It seems the cardinals on the board – which does not include Raymond Burke, since he does not reside in the US – pushed this donation through over the objections of the lay people who both fund and partially direct it (with final determinations being made by the cardinals, when they see fit to exercise their authority).
Bishop Gracida adds more, reminding us of other financial scandals:
First, what happened to the $140,000,000 left to the Knights of Malta which led Francis to fire Cardinal Burke as the Cardinal Protector of the Knights and to fire the Supreme Knight and to replace him with one of the Friends of Francis.
Second, was Francis involved in the ‘loan’ of $400,000 to Cardinal Sodano for the ‘remodeling’ of his apartment. A loan made by the Bambino Children’s Hospital in Rome. Was the money passed through the Hospital in a money laundering operation? The Italian Government thinks it was and has launched an investigation, the results of which will probably never be made public.
Cardinal Sodano is Borgia-esque in his personal corruption and immorality. Benedict XVI spent years trying to drive him from the Vatican and finally succeeded, only to have Sodano – probably – play a role in his downfall through the manipulation of Vatican accounts and the Italian government. Rorate Caeli has hinted for years there is much to be found in investigating the St. Gallen group, the Vatican bank “scandal,” and Benedict’s abdication and Francis’ subsequent election, but has remained mum on the details. Apparently there is some connection between Sodano, money laundering, the St. Gallen group, and Francis. Thus, the Leftist Catholic, the self-mortifying friend of the little man, always concerned about the poor and always living a penniless ascetic existence. Not.
Onto Spadaro’s patent vendetta, as I said above, he seeks to have Arroyo fired, for criticizing himself, Francis, and Amoris Laetitia – if they do not, he calls for them to be interdicted and shut down:
Papal confidante Father Antonio Spadaro retweeted a call for EWTN to be severely censured “until they get rid of Raymond Arroyo.”
The call for an “interdict” to be imposed on the Catholic media empire started by Mother Angelica came from Anthony Annett, Assistant to the Director at the International Monetary Fund’s Communications Department. [This is a rather odd matter for a major figure at the IMF to comment on, is it not? Notice the connection to the worldwide financial network, however, along with the revelations above]
An interdict is essentially one step short of excommunication. It bans a person or people from accessing most Church Sacraments.
Annett called for an interdict to be imposed on EWTN because of a February 15 World Over segment.
“Make no mistake,” tweeted Annett, the show’s discussion of a recent Spadaro speech and ultra-liberal Cardinal Blase Cupich “represent ‘total war’ on the papacy of Pope Francis.”……..
………..Spadaro, a Jesuit who is often called the pope’s “mouthpiece,” frequently criticizes critics of Amoris Laetitia’s ambiguity or the Francis pontificate. He is the editor-in-chief of La Civiltà Cattolica. [Well, he would lash out at critics of Amoris Laetitia, since he wrote it.]
Here is the world over segment, which discussed Francis’ plan to support Leftism worldwide and give a massive rebuke and infinite wound to the faithful souls of China’s underground Church, who have labored under the most severe persecution for decades, by sacking all the faithfully consecrated bishops and priests and substituting them with those approved by the communist government in Beijing (segment starts at 6:47):
The Vatican’s “diplomacy” regarding the Church in China is something I hope to write about soon. It is an unspeakable betrayal and something that is unjustifiable and frankly even rises to the level of sin, I would argue. I have long been a supporter and advocate for the Cardinal Kung Foundation, which helps the true Church in China survive by financial and other means. They have been covering this seductive dance between the Chicoms and Francis’ pontificate for years, and have rightly prognosticated that Francis seeks to sell out the Church in China.
This betrayal involves no concrete reward to the Church or souls, but only an ideological victory for Francis and his allies in removing a thorn from the side of fellow Leftists around the world, in this case, China. Unbelievable, but hardly surprising.
Spadaro is essentially Francis’ mouthpiece, so when he exalts Francis as being “light years ahead” of basically every non-communist-appeasing person on the planet, we know what the Pope of Humility thinks of himself. He’s so far above us peons that we don’t even register on his radar.
And this is the Vatican that has Cardinal Secretaries hosting cocaine-fueled sodomite orgies directly adjacent to St. Peters. This is their vision for the Church. It is always sin that drives heresy, and generally sins of the flesh, though those of love of money also often figure in. These things are all tied together.
Get Me a Tinfoil Hat, I’m All-In on Conspiracy Theories Now February 8, 2018
Posted by Tantumblogo in blogfoolery, different religion, disaster, error, foolishness, General Catholic, history, horror, persecution, Revolution, scandals, secularism, self-serving, sickness, Society, the struggle for the Church.comments closed
Not really, not entirely, but some discussion on the previous post about how the powers that be in this nation are now completely off the rails, and just when it was that this nation lost it’s way, prompted me to extrapolate a bit on the broader subject of conspiracies. The nation, of course, was in many ways off the rails from the founding, if you are even halfway convinced by Christopher Ferrara’s most important work, Liberty: The God that Failed, but I left a comment wherein I talked about how recent study has caused me to conclude that my previous belief – that conspiracy theories are almost always false – was itself a result of a deliberate effort by the CIA to discredit those who opposed their varying agendas. That is to say, it was the CIA itself that coined the phrase “conspiracy theory” in the 60s to squash those asking uncomfortable questions about the JFK assassination, the Vietnam War, morally questionable (or downright damnable) US activities in many countries, etc., etc……..and in fact came up with all the arguments against conspiracy theories I have tended to believe – that conspiracies are extremely hard to conduct, that they are impossible to keep secret, that to do X so many people would have to be involved that word would certainly get out, that “the real world doesn’t work that way,” among other things. [Sorry for those of you who get posts by e-mail, I wrote this in a huge hurry and really botched the grammar in this first paragraph. The first few sentences didn’t make much sense. Mea maxima culpa]
I had swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. To my comment:
One thing I learned recently, which was fascinating and has caused me to re-examine my own previously held notions, is that it was the CIA itself that coined the phrase “conspiracy theory” in response to continued doubts over the JFK assassination and other scandals of the 60s. I wouldn’t say I believe in black helicopters, the Illuminati, chemtrails, or anything quite like that just yet, but it is patently obvious at this point to anyone with an ounce of sense that there is a massive, ongoing conspiracy against conservatism, Trump, liberty, Christianity, and the conception of this nation as founded, or what was long presented as the conception of this nation, that has become so clumsy and obvious of late that it can no longer be ignored, but which in fact goes back decades if not much longer. And yes the US was wrongly founded from the beginning, in being not based on Catholicism (and in many respects hostile to the Faith as it was certainly practiced then, and had been since the early Church), and in being the product of a small dedicated group that sought the overthrow of the existing economic/political/cultural power structure and its replacement with another structure – with themselves in the positions of power. In other words, a conspiracy, and a successful one.
If you read the sad, US-influenced political and cultural history of Mexico since 1800, you will find almost exactly the same thing. A small cabal subverting the will of the vast majority of souls and imposing a hostile and alien construct upon the masses, for their own personal benefit.
And then there is the example of the Church, where again a relatively small cabal, infinitely aided by sympathetic, timid, and/or feckless leadership, has seized control and imposed a radically different construct on the (initially?) largely unwilling masses, and even convinced them of how good and wonderful all these changes have been. Just recently I had an exchange with some septuagenarians, very early boomers who were at just that “right” age at Vatican II, who are just utterly convinced of how wrong and awful the pre-conciliar Church was, and how wonderful all the changes have been. When I presented contradictory evidence, the implosion of vocations, tens of millions of souls lost to the Church in this country alone, etc., etc., they said those were POSITIVE developments, that it made absolutely no difference what “church” one belonged to and those people were probably better off outside the Church, given all the evils like the boy-rape epidemic and collapse of catechesis that have resulted (and that religious life was a crock, that it was a medieval concept for stuffing unmarried daughters and Jesus freaks into veritable asylums). There is absolutely no arguing with these people, no quoting of Scripture, no relation of the wisdom of the Fathers, no statistical data that can possibly move them from their position that Vatican II was an unalloyed good and what existed before an unalloyed evil. These people are wholesale devotees of the new religion foisted on the Church in the 60s. They only remain Catholic themselves for sentimental reasons, or, more demoniacally, to continue the work of destruction (and some of them have been long involved in just that).
These are just a handful of examples. I still do not believe that history in toto is more or less a collection of conspiracies successful and failed, but that doesn’t mean that extremely influential events have not been developed and decided by a (relatively) small group working to a particular purpose.
So get me a tinfoil hat and call me a conspiracy theorist, but honest reading of history reveals that a great many extremely influential events have been the result of a small cadre of dedicated activists, generally working in secret (see France, 1789). IOW, a conspiracy.
And I would say that all the cultural/moral travesties we have witnessed over the past 50-odd years are the result of a deliberate conspiracy aimed at destroying Western civilization and, in particular, the Church, in order to bring about a sexularist socialist “utopia.” I mean, transgender bathrooms, really? or arguing that guys (it’s always guys) who say no to men dressed up as women are hateful bigots? For real? Like that just happened organically, naturally? Riiiiiiight.
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