Category Archives: Good Shepherds
The Eunuch President
Well, honorary at least...
And so it came to pass that so-called same sex marriage was pushed very hard in a certain State of the US. This State is very solidly in the hands of the Democrats, and might have been considered a reasonably safe bet. This State is also the adoptive one of the current President, who has been lovingly nurtured and protected by the local – very corrupted, as even we in Europe know – political and party machine in order to become the poster boy of a brave new world without God or shame, and recently the first honorary “Gay President” in the Land.
This new satanic measure had already made it through the Senate, which – on St Valentine's day, no less – approved the measure amidst the excited screeches of the local perverts. One would have been justified in thinking the measure would have good cards in the lower chamber.
Alas for the perverts, it wasn't to be, at least for now. The measure failed – please read this twice – to even gather enough support for a vote to be called in the first place. This, notwithstanding the intervention of the above-mentioned Gay President, who travelled to Illinois to say please, please go to hell with me.
Now let us reflect on this: the intervention of the Gay President was not even enough to allow for a vote, let alone a victory. Decidedly, Presidents are not what they used to be.
Between the lines, you get even more interesting information: when many Democrat legislators ask for more time to talk to their constituents, it means they are terrified of voting in favour of the measure and be massacred as a result; this, notwithstanding the party pressure, which must have been absolutely massive if even the President intervened. It must also be noted the black religious community has erected a solid wall against the measure, and good luck to the “Black President” on that. Thirdly, the measure had been already amended with the usual fake “protections” only extended to explicitly religious institutions, but this was evidently not nearly enough to avoid its demise.
It is very sad to see the once so celebrated heathen messiah having so little influence on his own people, in his own home turf. Sad for Democrats, I mean. We obviously do not know how this will go on, and one can be sure the minions of Satan will continue their effort against basic decency and Christian morality; but one cannot avoid noticing that, whatever the decision of the Supreme Court, the opposition to heathenism is getting more determined and organised as religious communities continue their work on the ground and oppose the stupid “human rights” mantra of the perverts.
Perversion has no rights. Those who want to see perversion as the founding principle of their community only need to be a little patient, and they will find their wish fulfilled beyond their expectation.
In hell.
Mundabor
Indefectibility At Work
And so it came to pass that yours truly was at a Mass where a young priest, never seen before, was officiating.
The priest explained during the homily that he was from Nigeria, and a member of a missionary order. No electricity where he lived. No Internet of course. Water is what they get from rain. Fifty different cults in the region. You wouldn't believe these things still exist.
As he spoke about the “challenges” (as he called them) of his missionary work, there was no trace of any intention to let the present feel “guilty” for the wealth of their circumstances.
He looked around him, to the beautifully decorated church, and clearly liked it; but with no trace of either envy, or any feeling the church represented an “injustice” or “inequality” of any kind. Not one word was spoken of “Franciscan simplicity”, neither the suggestion was made the local economy should be damaged so that his own work might flourish.
His appeal for donations was simple, noble, beautiful. You saw a man who knew his fund raising is in the hands of Providence, and does not need any questionable, unsavoury or outright stupid argument to make his point.
The contrast with the flipping Jesuit some years ago, who ranted for ten whole minutes about armaments, guilt-tripping the presents without pause, couldn't have been more striking.
I looked at this simple, brave man of Christ, whose solid faith was evident in the modest, simple way he explained what he did and why he was there, and I saw the Indefectibility of the Church literally standing in the sanctuary.
As Christianity in Europe runs the risk of becoming a sentimental accessory between divorces, the Church of Christ continues to grow, amidst difficult circumstances and at time outright persecution, through the work of priests of simple courage and authentic vocation. You saw the man, and you could not have any doubt about it.
God bless our good priests, the veins and blood of the Church. They will continue to spread Christ's work whilst we in the West allow abortionist, communist, marijuana-approving priests to get circus requiem masses with perverts in attendance, and receiving communion.
Mundabor
Bagnasco Scandal: SSPX Italia Speaks
The press release of the SSPX Italia after the scandalous events at the funerals of don Gallo.
Italian original first, my translation (as literal as possible, no emphases) follows.
——————————————————————————————
In seguito ai funerali di don Gallo presieduti dal card. Bagnasco la Fraternità San Pio X denuncia il grave scandalo causato dall’intervento di Wladimiro Guadagno (detto Luxuria) e dal fatto che il cardinale gli abbia amministrato la Comunione, come se il suo pubblico comportamento e la sua attività da parlamentare non fossero contrari alla morale e scandalosi.
Così si è agito anche nei confronti di altri rappresentanti di movimenti contrari agli insegnamenti della Chiesa. Secondo la dottrina cattolica e la logica del Vangelo gli autori di peccati notori, prima di accostarsi al sacramento dell’Eucaristia, devono pentirsene e riparare pubblicamente.
Riguardo alle posizioni difese da don Gallo, non denunciate dalle autorità ecclesiastiche, ed in un certo qual modo avallate dalla presenza del presidente della conferenza episcopale italiana al suo funerale, si ricorda che:
1- La legge di Dio condanna la pratica omosessuale e la Chiesa insegna che essa costituisce un peccato contro natura che grida vendetta al cospetto di Dio.[1]
2- Don Gallo ha aiutato delle donne ad abortire.[2] Ora l’aborto è un crimine poiché si uccide un essere umano innocente ed è punito con la scomunica non soltanto per coloro che lo praticano ma anche per tutti quelli che lo favoriscono in maniera efficace.[3]
3- L’utilizzo delle droghe cosiddette leggere, incoraggiato da don Gallo, non soltanto costituisce spesso il primo passo verso altre sostanze stupefacenti, ma è contrario al V comandamento che ci ordina di custodire il nostro corpo come un dono di Dio.
4- Il comunismo, esplicitamente sostenuto da don Gallo[4], è stato condannato dal Magistero ecclesiastico come “intrinsecamente perverso”.[5]
Tali comportamenti manifestano in maniera sempre più evidente la grave crisi che sta attraversando la Chiesa ed il tradimento da parte di membri importanti della gerarchia dei principi più elementari della morale cattolica.
Don Pierpaolo Petrucci
Superiore del Distretto d’Italia della Fraternità Sacerdotale San Pio X
[1] Catechismo di San Pio X
[3] Nuovo codice di diritto canonico can. 1398
[4] «Comunque è vero, sono comunista. Non dimentico mai la Bibbia e il Vangelo. E non dimentico mai quello che ha scritto Marx». Da Angelicamente Anarchico, Oscar Mondadori, Milano, 2005.
[5] Pio XI, Divini Redeptoris
———————————————————————————
Following the funerals of don Gallo, officiated by card Bagnasco the Fraternity of Saint Pius X denounces the grave scandal caused by the intervention of Wladimiro Guadagno (known as Luxuria) and from the fact that the Cardinal allowed him to receive the Communion, as if his public behaviour and his activity as a Member of Parliament were not contrary to the morals and scandalous.
The same happened concerning other representatives of movements contrary to the teachings of the Church. According to catholic doctrine and the logic of the Gospel, the authors of notorious sins must, before they approach the sacrament of the Eucharist, repent of them and make acts of reparation publicly.
Concerning the positions defended by don Gallo, not denounced by the ecclesiastical authorities, and in a way endorsed by the presence of the President of the Italian Episcopal Conference at his funeral, it must be kept in mind that:
1. God’s law condemns the homosexual practice and the Church teaches that it constitutes a sin against nature, that cries for vengeance in the presence of God [1].
2. Don Gallo helped some women to abort [2]. Now, abortion is a criminal act because an innocent human being is killed, and it is punished with excommunication not only for those who practice it but also for all those who facilitate it in an efficacious manner [3].
3. The utilisation of so-called light drugs, encouraged by don Gallo, not only often constitutes the first step towards other hallucinogen substances, but it is contrary to the V commandment that orders us to custody our body as a gift of God.
4. Communism, explicitly supported by don Gallo [4], has been condemned by the ecclesiastical Magisterium as “intrinsically perverted” [5].
The events show in an increasingly more evident way the grave crisis the Church is now going through, and the betrayal of the most elementary principles of Catholic morals by important members of the hierarchy.
Don Pierpaolo Petrucci
Superior of the Italian District of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X
[1] Catechism of Saint Pius X
[3] New canon law code, can. 1398
[4]. “Anyhow it is true, I am communist. I never forget the Bible and the Gospel. And I never forget what Marx wrote”. From Angelicamente Anarchico, Oscar Mondadori, Milan0, 2005.
[5]. Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris.
San Francisco And The TLM
Lionhearts do not grow on trees...
I have it from Rorate Caeli that the Archdiocese of San Francisco now has a TLM “at the request of Bishop Cordileone”.
I was a bit confused at the start as I thought the reason why Summorum Pontificum exists is to allow a priest to celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass without any need for any initiative from the bishop.
I can, therefore, only read the announcement as meaning that, as there was in the entire diocese partout no priest able and/or willing to celebrate the TLM, the good Archbishop had to become active himself and take care that one TLM is celebrated on every day of obligation within the Diocese.
The archdiocese of San Francisco is certainly big and its priests, no doubt, numerous. That the bishop has to “request” the celebration of one TLM says a thing or two about the state of affairs in the diocese. Bishop Cordileone has just started and will hopefully manage to inject some orthodoxy in the diocese, but heavens, he has been left with a lot of work to do.
This goes to show that the appointment of sound bishops is absolutely vital in the proper care of soul. Get it wrong, and a couple of decades will suffice to demolish the healthiest diocese. Get it right, and the advantages will also be seen in a handful of years.
Who appoints the bishops, you already know. The average quality has probably improved in the last years, but it can't be said it gave reason to be impressed. Cordileone's predecessor was also appointed by the same one who appointed Cordileone; and was, without doubt, a failure.
I fear much for the appointments under the current tenure. I am afraid we will see even less Cordileones than his was the case under Pope Benedict.
You can think for yourself the long-term effects on the TLM.
God bless bishop Cordileone, and let us hope lion hearts like him (this is, funnily enough, his name's meaning in Italian) become more and more frequent in the future. But really, it takes a lot of optimism.
Mundabor
The American Nightmare?
Cardinal J Francis Stafford
I do not know how good Cardinal Stafford was when he was in active service, but from what I read around one can easily think he was (and is) one of the good guys. The US Cardinal, now 80 years old, has given an interview saying he weeps for his country after the devastations brought by the big societal changes of the Sixties and Seventies, devastations that have left him “deeply disillusioned” and “alienated” from his own country.
The man is actually old enough to personally remember the Fifties and give us all a reminder out of his own life of how big the difference is between a Christian and a secularised Country. He also makes a couple of rather intelligent considerations as to the cult of “freedom” as a founding value in the United States, a concept which can degenerate in the idea that killing unborn babies is in the end a matter of “freedom”. One hears what the Cardinal says, though I would also observe for almost 200 years of the United States’ history this was not the case, so the problem might well lie elsewhere.
It must, though, be saddening and refreshing at the same time for an US Citizen to read of a Cardinal simply looking in dismay at the state his own Country has reduced itself to. It if can be of any help, I can’t say countries like Italy are so much different, though in a way they still are: the militant atheism is still rather absent and most people still have a varnish of Catholicism, but the mentality isn’t so much different and abortion is legal over there, too. The concept that freedom is freedom to do what is good and not freedom to do what one pleases is, for example, rather poorly spread, because the local priest is more likely to talk about social issues.
Kudos for the Cardinal on this occasion, though. We need more like him, and we need them assertive enough as to make it to wider circles than the readers of the “Catholic News Service”.
Mundabor
“Kreuz Net” Alive And Kicking!
Only the background colour has changed: the new “Kreuz Net”.
Around one month ago, the German site of “Kreuz.net” went offline. The German prosecutors were investigating against them, and it was widely believed the site had been shut down to protect the contributors from the official Gaystapo of the German Republic.
At this point, it is necessary to make my English-speaking readers acquainted with a rather scary trait of the German legal system and, I add unhesitatingly, of the German soul: the criminal offence of Volksverhetzung, “incitement of popular hatred”.
In Germany, if you are perceived to spread hatred against a category of people (or a single person, if this is seen as spreading hatred against a category of people), you can be prosecuted and sent to jail. Whilst this measure was traditionally understood as a defence against Nazi propaganda and was rigidly meant to be limited to those expression seeking to provoke actual physical violence against segments of the population (say: Jews), the dark side of the German psyche – characterised by an unquestioned acceptance of authority, whereas the ” majority” takes the role of the old “Fuehrerprinzip” and those who sharply disagree with it are seen as subversive, provided of course they aren’t Muslims – has recently extended the concept, at least tentatively, to… vocal and very outspoken Catholics.
A site like Kreuz.net, whose outspokenness puts even yours truly easily in the shade, did not escape the attention of the prosecutors, who are obviously incited by the new darlings of the nation, the militant sodomites.
The site was already “under observation”, which means the Gaystapo was waiting for a suitable opportunity to crucify them. The head sodomite in the country (an involuntarily funny but influential “Green” member of parliament, called Volker Beck; he is such a parody of a whining queen Sacha Baron Cohen might have taken him as a source of inspiration) launched the charge some months ago and, in pure German style, many others followed.
The casus belli was the death of another militant homo, the TV entertainer and homosexualist Dirk Bach. Bach died suddenly in his home at the age of 51, and Kreuz.net merited – in the eyes of the Gaystapo – prosecution for the following reasons: they said they believed he was now in Hell (you can’t say that in Germany, apparently, because this is “incitation to popular hatred” against a “segment of the population”) and they made a case for Bach’s death having been caused by a drug used by sodomites to lessen the pain of their posterior, caused by sodomite acts. This particular drug would – if memory serves – cause blood pressure to rise, a collateral effect particularly dangerous in the case of Bach, who suffered of high blood pressure already. The original post is not to be read anymore, of course, but it wasn’t worse than this; and this was probably less bad than the concrete realities of Dirk Bach’s life.
As the German laws about Volksverhetzung also protect the dead, the united perverts of the country launched themselves against the site like one… queen, and a publishing house for sodomites even set a bounty of, again if memory serves, 15,000 Euros on the author(s) of the blog post. The criminal investigation started pretty much in the same days, as the anger of the queens is the modern equivalent of the old crime of lèse-majesté.
Now, the people behind the site are very (as in: very) smart, and they ran the site on the strictest basis of anonymity. The widely held opinion conservative priests (SSPX and others) are involved in the operation, already evident in the particular style of the contributions (a sequence of short, detached sentences clearly meant to make the nationality and writing style of the writer unrecognisable) was confirmed when one of the contributors turned out to be a brave priest of a German diocese, who escaped prosecution as not the author of the Dirk Bach post and was in the end, and for all we know, only mildly rebuked by his Ordinary.
Do not think, though, the Church in Germany goes well out of this story. Not only did the notorious Cardinal Lehmann (a disgraceful appointment of John Paul The Not-So-Great) publicly asked for the site – who is very sharply critical of people like him – to be silenced; but after the site was shut down he even publicly thanked the sodomite publishing house and their perverted friends for the services rendered to…. well, him, really.
I followed the events closely, but had no real desire to post about them whilst “Kreuz Net” was shut down as this would smell of defeat. As it was to be hoped the site would appear again at some point under a different name as already happened in the past, I thought it wiser to wait for the site to return in a halfway permanent way before giving you the lowdown on the situation (including the unspeakable behaviour of the unspeakable Cardinal Lehmann).
It is, now, with great satisfaction that I announce to all of my seven readers that the site www.kreuz-net.info is on the net and has been permanently online for the last couple of days.
There can be no doubt the new site is the spiritual successor of the old one: the terms and style used are rather the same, the name is clearly a reference, even the header is identical but with now a green instead of a red background. As in the past, the site is joy to read: gritty and militant, but accurate and sound. You don’t need to be a genius to assume the contributors are largely the same and are people pretty fit in Catholicism and inclined to shun a cyber fight. My kind of priests, I must say.
Surprisingly, there is now an “Impressum” (company information) link with the address of an (even more surprisingly) Austrian company, a decided departure from the old system of companies located in exotic locations or in the USA for obvious reasons of protection from Nazi prosecutors. It is thinkable (but I do not have the details, nor have I found news on Google) the Austrian prosecutors have concluded their investigation (the German prosecutors had asked for collaboration, as at least one key contributor was thought to live in Austria; think of the waste of taxpayer’s money…) and have found the exercise perfectly legitimate; or perhaps the Austrian address is a kind of “fuse”, with the site being closed down again and reopened elsewhere at the first sign of new Sodonazi involvement.
To us living in countries where freedom of expression is still taken rather seriously the German/Austrian events of the last weeks are, obviously, extremely disturbing. But make no mistake, as long as the site and their authors continue to operate directly from German-speaking countries the risk of prosecution (that is: persecution) will always be very real, and if you ask me an acceptable degree of security from the Gaystapo will only be reached when the contributors operate from (and live in) the United States, or from another country without the German worship for homosexuals and the contempt of at least their prosecutors (how the judges would have decided in the end is a completely different matter) for elementary freedoms.
What is important now is that a very honest, orthodox voice for Catholicism could for the moment not be silenced by the combined attack of unrepentant perverts and German prelates, aided and abetted by complicit and subservient state prosecutors. Cardinal Lehmann has shown once again what a disgraceful person he is, and if the post-Vatican II church had a modicum of integrity he would not be allowed to be a Cardinal for long. On the other hand, if the post-Vatican II Church had a modicum of integrity one like Lehmann wouldn’t be allowed to be a Cardinal (or a bishop; or a priest, come to that) in the first place, so there you are…
Kreuz.net is dead. Long live Kreuz-net.info! Their existence as a free voice should be dear not only to us conservative Catholics, but to everyone – be he an atheist, or an agnostic, or even an unrepentant sodomite – who thinks freedom of expression, and be it strong and if must be offensive expression, is a value most worthy of protection. I kindly ask you to actively click several pages on the site in order to help them to go up in the Google ranking and thus be easily recognisable from the (vast) readership of the old site.
Kreuz.net was the biggest Catholic site in Europe, which fact alone tells you something of the illiberal madness of its persecutors, be they perverts, state functionaries or clergymen.
The Germans, whose blindly gregarious attitude has already in the past caused untold suffering to others and to themselves, should be particularly attentive to every issue of freedom.
Unfortunately for them, they do not seem to have learnt the lesson.
Mundabor
Athanasius And… Marcellus
Athanasius…
Most of you may already know that the Church has already gone through very troublesome periods. Many of you will be aware that the Arians were probably the biggest challenge the Church had to confront, at least before the challenge of V I I.
What,though, many of you might not know is that even Athanasius, the great champion of Trinitarian orthodoxy, was excommunicated by Pope Liberius, and that the same Pope Liberius actually demanded that his diocese (or perhaps the entire Church, not sure on that but it isn’t so relevant) does not use the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in public worship. In a word, whilst not proclaiming a heretic dogma or denying the Trinity as traditionally intended, Pope Liberius did try – and certainly intended – to silence orthodox Catholic understanding at least in some regions. He did it, we are told, to avoid “fractures” within the Church and to not upset those “good Catholics” who had a, erm, modern understanding of the Trinity and should not feel, erm, antagonised.
Mind, those progressive Catholics thought they had their heart in the right place and were, no doubt, the nicest and most tolerant chaps around. I do not doubt they thought they would, by getting rid of an embarrassing concept like a God-Man who is fully God and fully Man, make Christianity more, erm, relevant. They must have seen our Athanasius as an extremely inflexible, obviously “uncharitable” bloke, bent on slavish adherence to “the past” with no consideration at all for the “new times” and the necessity of being “pastoral”. No doubt, after the papal excommunication (let us say this again: papal excommunication) most devout Christians thought the good man had now nothing else to do than to bow to the superior rank and wisdom of the Pope and retract his strange fixation with the Trinity properly intended.
Ubi Petrus, and all that…
If you think Athanasius bowed faced with group pressure, think again. If Pope Liberius did, he didn’t. If you think he was afraid of the excommunication, or fearful for his own soul, I will have to disappoint you again. This saintly man simply knew he was on the side of the Truth the Church had taught from the start, and if an angel had come down asking him to believe different things than those transmitted to us by God through the constant teaching of the Church he would have simply refused.
Fast forward to the XX century. The Church at large adopts strange ideas which, whilst not (mostly) openly heretics, are certainly at variance with what the Church has always taught. The Creed is not abolished, but the sacredness of the Liturgy as such is under a great attack. A very strange (but very convenient) theology concerning religious liberty and the role of the Church is being introduced; mainstays of Catholic theology are “revisited” according to modern sensitivities, with Capital Punishment now largely perceived as intrinsically bad, and war as always wrong. The primacy of the Pope itself is under attack, now practically – if not formally – substituted by a thinking according to which the Pope is there to give some good counsel and wise admonition every now and then, but leaving the real business of governing the Church to his bishops as a body. Concepts like the Kingship of Christ are not officially abolished but willingly forgotten; the same happens with countless traditional devotions like the Rosary, the Litanies or the Vespers; even the Sacraments suffer unprecedented attack, with Confession now seen as an embarrassment by many priests and even the sancta sanctorum of Catholic dogma, Transubstantiation, being factually ignored by a growing number of priests and faithful who, like their Arian ancestors, simply feel too modern and enlightened to believe in such “old” things.
.. and Marcellus
A bishop reacts, like Athanasius, to all this. Like Athanasius, he does not care what the clear majority thinks, preferring to side with the minority which includes Christ instead. Like Athanasius, he is not impressed at having the Papacy against him, and like Athanasius he gladly suffers excommunication at the hands of a Pope to allow true Catholic teaching to continue.
We all know who this brave Archbishop was. Please remember him with affection in your prayers, and ask him to help you in your daily tasks and toils if you think – which would not be surprising at all – that he is in Heaven and can intercede for us wretched sinners fighting not only against the lures of the world, but against a clergy apparently joyously intent in a ceaseless work of self-destruction, and of possible destruction of legal Catholic practice in many Western countries.
To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant, Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman famously said. To be even shallow in Church history is, if you ask me, to cease to be deceived by clericalism or, worse still, papolatry.
The Truth is the Truth is the Truth. We do not adapt the Truth to the thinking of the Clergy, but we measure the work of the Clergy according to its adherence to Truth. Pope Liberius’ mortal spoils have finished decomposing a long time ago, whilst the immortal Truth defended by Athanasius could never die. This our hero never forgot. Several times during the course of his very turbulent life he had to endure exile, humiliation, and physical danger. Never he wavered, knowing he had Truth on his side.
I suggest you remember Athanasius every time you are told the one or other bishop (or Society) must recant or repent or adopt a strange theology because… the Pope says so, perhaps under pain of excommunication.
Athanasius didn’t retract, because he defended the Truth and the Truth is defended against angels, let alone Popes. It is not clear to me why the thinking of the XX Century’s Archbishop or of his followers should be any different than the one of the great saints of the past.
Mundabor
Novus Ordo Watch
Amen!
Every now and then, yours truly attends a V II Mass in a randomly chosen Home County parish, to see what is happening on the ground, away from the oases of sound Catholicism like the Brompton Oratory. Some weeks ago, I had some pleasant surprises.
The priest – a young man, and not a pussycat like the ones I saw around me in Italy in younger years – suddenly invites the faithful to pray the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel. This was the first surprise. The second was that when he started to recite it out loud, not only yours truly but two others (a man and a woman) recited it out loud, with that “better late than never” tone and a clear sense of relief that the obviously young priest was steering things in a different direction than his predecessor, certainly not a great fan of St. Michael as shown by the deafening silence from most of the pews. I took this as a sign the number of Catholics who do not rely on the local priest for their instruction might be bigger than we think… but perhaps they had it from their parents and I am wrong here…
The third and biggest surprise came at the end of the Mass, when Father came again on the prayer, explained how powerful it is, invited everyone to memorise it and said from now on it will be recited at the end of every Mass. It truly made my day.
I do not know whether a slowly awakening Bishop is behind this and we will therefore listen to more voices like this one, but I consider it far more probable that this was the initiative of an already awakened priest who wants to try to steer things in the right direction before it’s too late. The homily was good too, though to your average Mundabor it lacked some bite; but then again, to your average Mundabor most homilies do. In time, I am sure, we’ll get there; one step at a time.
Better times ahead?
Mundabor
Bishop Ricken, Intrinsic Evil, And “One Party”
Well done! Bishop Ricken of Green Bay.
Bishop Ricken of Green Bay, Wisconsin, has written a letter to his sheep. This is a short excerpt. Emphases mine.
“A well-formed Christian conscience does not permit one to vote for a political program that contradicts fundamental contents of faith and morals,” Ricken said in the letter. “Some candidates and one party have even chosen some of these as their party’s or their personal political platform. To vote for someone in favor of these positions means that you could be morally ‘complicit’ with these choices which are intrinsically evil. This could put your own soul in jeopardy.”
The full text is here. You’ll find though stuff, like this:
I would like to review some of the principles to keep in mind as you approach the voting booth to complete
your ballot. The first is the set of non-negotiables. These are areas that are “intrinsically evil” and cannot be
supported by anyone who is a believer in God or the common good or the dignity of the human person.
They are:
1. abortion
2. euthanasia
3. embryonic stem cell research
4. human cloning
5. homosexual “marriage”
These are intrinsically evil. “
Notice a couple of things:
1) The Bishop is not interested in party politics. He does not say “The Republicans say this”, or “the “Democrats say that”. It’s not about the label, but the content.
Does a candidate promote intrinsic evil? Then voting for him endangers your soul. It is fully irrelevant if the party is called “St. Francis peace’n love party”, or “The Democratic party”, or whatever.
2) It is not only about the Presidential race. Almost as equally important is what happens with the huge amount of political positions that are up for grabs: all of the members of the House and one-third of the Senators, with 7 toss-ups which, if they make a Republican majority improbable, at least will make it very difficult to have, say, another lesbian elected to the Supreme Court. Then there is the House, where the Republican majority should be consolidated, hopefully with an increased number of pro-life candidates.
3) Green Bay is in Wisconsin. If you think this State and its 10 electoral votes are safely in Democratic hands, think again; Obama’s advantage is melting fast, and now Joe Biden has to waste precious time in a State the Democrats have won in every election since 1984. Add to this that Ryan is from Wisconsin, and you have the picture.
4) I have no knowledge of Bishop Ricken guffawing with any so-called “pro-choice” candidate, giving them precious photo-opportunities to show how very much in tune with Catholicism they are. If I am wrong, please let me know.
Bishop Ricken will now obviously be accused to make party politics and be trying to influence the outcome of the elections; but you see, the man does not even mention one single party, and the outcome of an election is clearly important if you are a Christian. These are matters of life and death, for the voters’ soul as well as for countless unborn children. A Bishop who ignores these matters is a bishop who betrays the Church.
I doubt many readers of this blog are planning to vote for a so-called pro-choice candidate; but they might have relatives, or friends, or colleagues to whom the concept of “endangering one’s soul through support for intrinsic evil” might be, if the right circumstances arise, be brought nearer.
Kudos to the Bishop. More like him.
Mundabor
SSPX: Feast Your Eyes (Plus Some Sad Reflections).
On the newly launched website of the new building for the St. Thomas Aquinas’ Seminary, you can see the future of Catholicism in the Western world.
Whilst the Vatican II church waffles itself into irrelevance and almost extinction, the sane parts of the Church not only resist, but grow and prosper. See the video below
to see what is happening.
It is difficult, very difficult not to see that traditional Catholicism is prospering and growing, whilst the (numerically still vaster) NuChurch is dying fast, sinking into irrelevance in the process.
The site and video explain to you nothing less than the future of Catholicism: solid, determined, serious. No laughing clowns in sight, no “daring” architectures, no waffle whatever.
Rorate Caeli not only has the video, but in a truly dramatic contrast has another blog post about the slow but perceptible decline of the Church in France. Besides the sobering statistical figures, the blog post has a rather telling photo of a huge (and, if you ask me, horrible, Le Corbusier or no Le Corbusier; see photo below) Dominican seminary now housing a dozen of seminarians.
For the dozen seminarians, the sense of decay must be palpable every hour of the day.
Vatican II in Images.
This is how the drunkenness of Vatican II is dying: leaving a lot of (mostly ugly) concrete in empty buildings, after deserting the Western world now under a massive attack from the forces of evil; forces of evil which the church continues to cajole and try to be friends with.
The two photos shown give a very clear idea of what the future of these two opposed vision of the Church will be, and which one of the two (the traditional, of the V II one) will survive.
The bill for the madness of the past is being presented very fast, and with the almost complete extinction of those organisations which have embraced the “spirit of Vatican II”-Zeitgeist (Jesuits and Franciscans come to mind; an awful lot of scrounging nuns; and who knows how many other minor orders) more and more bills will become due in the next decade or two.
Another who just couldn’t get it: Comrade Erich Honecker.
In the meantime, serious Catholicism will continue to grow, until in one generation or two it will control the field again because of the literal, physical death of the opposing camp. A much reduced Catholicism it might be, but probably a much more effective one; than the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of priests and religious we have now aren’t doing much for Catholicism other than muddle the waters, encourage sodomy or support same-sex couples, desecrate the mass, abet heresy, being openly simoniacal and hobnob with the enemy.
In their blindness, they remind me of Erich Honecker, the deluded DDR Comrade celebrating the 40th anniversary of the DDR whilst the building was squeaking in a way impossible not to notice.
Honecker’s regime did not live to see the 50th anniversary.
Whatever the challenges of the future, we can be very confident the V II madness will not live to see the 100th.
Mundabor
Pius XII: Yad Vashem Admits It Was Wrong. In Instalments.
It’s time to wake up for those in charge of the Yad Vashem
It is very embarrassing to say “we got it so wrong we should all resign and apply for a job at McDonald’s”. Particularly when the people in question lead the Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum visited by people from all over the world.
Therefore – and in order to avoid having to resign – the responsible for the museum have decided to back pedal a bit at a time, in order to look less ideologised, blind and stupid when the time comes to say “erm, aah, well, actually….”.
For the moment they limit themselves to show the arguments of the thinking minds together with those of the liberals; but frankly, everyone knows the game is up.
McDonald’s awaits. Perfectly honourable profession. Much better than working at the denigration of such an excellent man, one of the key people in the XX century, and one who saved the backside of so many Jews they could fill the entire Gaza strip with them.
Time to wake up, boys and girls.
Shalom.
Mundabor
Father Reto Nay On St. Peter and St. Paul
Though one day late, if you follow the link you’ll see Father Reto Nay’s interesting take on St. Peter and St. Paul.
It is beautiful to know that in the middle of heretic Mitteleuropa some strong priest acts to defend and spread proper Catholicism.
Mundabor
Blessed Pius IX On “Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus”
Blessed Pius IX’s theology made pasta.
Pope Pius IX had, among his many gifts, the one of expressing himself in a simple, crystal clear terms. His language and way of presenting the Church’s case are beautiful and instructive reading to this day.
Emphases mine:
“Not without sorrow we have learned that another error, no less destructive, has taken possession of some parts of the Catholic world, and has taken up its abode in the souls of many Catholics who think that one should have good hope of the eternal salvation of all those who have never lived in the true Church of Christ. Therefore, they are wont to ask very often what will be the lot and condition of those who have not submitted in any way to the Catholic faith, and, by bringing forward most vain reasons, they make a response favorable to their false opinion. Far be it from Us, Venerable Brethren, to presume on the limits of the divine mercy which is infinite; far from Us, to wish to scrutinize the hidden counsel and “judgements of God” which are “a great abyss” (Ps. 35.7) and cannot be penetrated by human thought. But, as is Our Apostolic Duty, we wish your episcopal solicitude and vigilance to be aroused, so that you will strive as much as you can to drive form the mind of men that impious and equally fatal opinion, namely, that the way of eternal salvation can be found in any religion whatsoever. May you demonstrate with skill and learning in which you excel, to the people entrusted to your care that the dogmas of the Catholic faith are in no wise opposed to divine mercy and justice.
“For, it must be held by faith that outside the Apostolic Roman Church, no one can be saved; that this is the only ark of salvation; that he who shall not have entered therein will perish in the flood; but, on the other hand, it is necessary to hold for certain that they who labor in ignorance of the true religion, if this ignorance is invincible, will not be held guilty of this in the eyes of God. Now, in truth, who would arrogate so much to himself as to mark the limits of such an ignorance, because of the nature and variety of peoples, regions, innate dispositions, and of so many other things? For, in truth, when released from these corporeal chains ‘we shall see God as He is’ (1 John 3.2), we shall understand perfectly by how close and beautiful a bond divine mercy and justice are united; but as long as we are on earth, weighed down by this mortal mass which blunts the soul, let us hold most firmly that, in accordance with Catholic teaching, there is “one God, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4.5); it is unlawful to proceed further in inquiry.
“But, just as the way of charity demands, let us pour forth continual prayers that all nations everywhere may be converted to Christ; and let us be devoted to the common salvation of men in proportion to our strength, ‘for the hand of the Lord is not shortened’ (Isa. 9.1) and the gifts of heavenly grace will not be wanting to those who sincerely wish and ask to be refreshed by this light.”
This is one beautiful example of what I am tempted to call “Italian Catholicism” (there is no Italian Catholicism, of course), as the simple, common sense, practical way of seeing at things that to a Protestant (and if I am frank, to many North Europeans) appears not reconcilable or the fruit of hypocrisy.
The line between “in” and “out” of the Church is obviously not such that can be decided by men; but please observe how wisely this great Pope circumscribes the matter, and in just a short number of sentences pours on us many centuries of Catholic truth.
This is like bucatini cacio e pepe. So simple, and so right.
Mundabor
Archbishop Chaput on Humanae Vitae
Archbishop Chaput, every bit as good in 1998 as in 2012.
The Catholic News Agency has an interesting letter written from Archbishop Chaput (then of Denver) concerning Humanae Vitae. The letter was written in 1998 on occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the encyclical letter, but has lost nothing of its beauty. It is very long, but it is easy to read, well argued, and extremely clear in its content at all times. Blessedly, it is also devoid of those continuous references to V II documents so dear to modern Vaticanese.
Archbishop Chaput repeats (and explains very clearly) the arguments brought by Paul VI against contraception, but he adds a new observation: the rather cold theological character of the encyclical letter did not help its diffusion or acceptance among the Catholic masses. It is true Chaput is able to write with admirable clarity, but I allow myself to see the reason for the failure of Humanae Vitae to stem the tide of contraception in the following elements:
a) weakness from the top. To write is one thing, to bite an altogether different one. Paul VI probably thought it was brave enough to issue the encyclical in the first place. I cannot imagine the idea of aggressively following up on the letter and demanding that it be upheld by his bishop and priests ever entered his mind.
b) On the contrary, Humanae Vitae gave rise to a widespread dissent within the Church.
Therefore, the letter was not vocally defended from the Vatican, and either ignored or outright opposed by the majority of the clergy. With these premises, it would have failed to be a success even if it had been written in the most beautiful and lyrical language.
When we talk about Humanae Vitae, we should not forget the encyclical was and is largely ignored because the Church as a whole failed – with the culpable inaction of Paul VI, who could see very well what was happening but lacked the courage to oppose the trend – to stand for it in the first place.
If the Church now begins to aggressively – and I mean saying it loud and clear, rather than always hiding behind the dratted pastoral sensitivity – defend the message of Humanae Vitae, in a couple of decades much will be done, as the Sixty-Eighters go to meet their maker (or not, as the case may be) and a new generation can be raised with the right values.
Mundabor
SSPX (Williamson) On Homosexuality
Questionable political ideas; but when he talks about Catholicism, hats off…
I have said many times by all his human shortcomings Bishop Williamson easily puts into shade (and into shame) every English bishop, bar none, for clarity of message and purpose, let alone orthodoxy and sincere love for the Church and the flock.
In the last days, there have been in the Catholic blogosphere some disturbing discussions about homosexuality.
Well, thinks I, let us see whether at the SSPX someone has some clear exposition on the matter, avoiding yours truly to spend an entire night with the adrenaline over the roof and the persistent suspicion of living in a world so blinded by stupidity not even the worst abominations can be seen anymore.
I have, therefore, looked and have found a letter of said Bishop Williamson which, like many other articles I have read of him (when he talks about Catholicism, that is), is simply exemplary.
The comment section will be closed, because life’s too short.
The letter is here reproduced in its entirety, with emphases and the odd comment mine. The original is here.
——————————————————————————–
Regarding: “Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children”
October 8, 1997
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
The Catholic bishops of the U.S.A., more precisely their Committee on Marriage and Family, have just come out with a “Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children”, which is a lamentable piece of work. Since this Pastoral Message is liable to make people, already confused, even more confused, let us re-state some Catholic principles, because the question bears directly on Faith and Morals, and on people getting to heaven or falling into hell.
Homosexuality means the misuse between man and man or between woman and woman of those functions and parts of the human body which God designed for use exclusively between a man and a woman within a lawful marriage, for the primary purpose of the reproduction of the human race. The Law of God governing use of the reproductive functions can be broken in a variety of ways even between man and woman, but these sins, e.g. fornication or adultery, are at least natural to the extent that they observe the basic duality of man and woman. On the contrary sins of homosexuality violate even this basic natural structure of the reproductive function, rendering it necessarily and utterly sterile, void of its intrinsic purpose. That is why homosexuality is sometimes called “the sin against nature”.
In fact the sin is so unnatural that Mother Church ranks it alongside murder, defrauding the worker of his just wage, and oppression of the widow or orphan, as one of the four sins “crying to Heaven for vengeance”. However, God did not wait for the founding of the Catholic Church to instill in men the horror of this sin, but he implanted in the human nature of all of us, unless or until we corrupt it, an instinct of violent repugnance for this particular sin, comparable to our instinctive repugnance for other misuses of our human frame, such as coprophagy.
That is why St. Paul in the famous passage on homosexuality in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, verses 24 to 27, lambastes the Gentiles for practising this sin even though they had no revealed religion, and he does so in terms chosen to re-awaken that natural repugnance, e.g. verse 27: “And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error”.
Therefore to speak of homosexuality as an “alternate life-style” is as perverse as equating the violation of nature with its observance. It is as foully corrupt as to make no difference between recognizing God the author of nature, and defying Him.
Therefore what is “innate”, or in-born, in human nature concerning homosexuality is a violent repugnance. Therefore to speak of homosexuality, or even just an inclination to it, as being “innate” in certain human beings, of course to excuse them, is to accuse God at least of contradiction, if not also of planting in men the cause of sin, which is implicit if not explicit blasphemy.
The very most that can be innate in a man of, for instance, homosexuality, is the raw material for his temperament which may be sensitive in one man, rough in another, but whether that sensitivity or roughness is molded into the compassion of a saint or the vice of a homosexual depends on a series of good or evil choices made by each individual. Homosexuality is a vice, or sinful habit, created by nothing other than a series of sinful acts, for each of which the individual was responsible. Homosexuality is a moral problem, which is why, fascinatingly, St. Paul in the same passage derives it from idolatry! (No space to quote, look it up!)
“Oh, but Our Lord had chawity, (unlike thumwun we know who wath tho nathty to Pwintheth Di!). Our Lord loved thinnerth, and faggotth, and tho thould we!!” So runs the objection! [this is fantastic!!]
Yes indeed Our Lord loved sinners, but not in their sirs, rather despite their sin, which he hated. When Our Lord protected the unrighteous Mary Magdalene against the righteous Pharisees in a way which can bring tears to our eyes each time we read Luke, Chapter 7, he was protecting not her sin but her repentance. God will, as He has told us in the Gospel, go to almost any lengths to help the sinner who is trying to get out of his sin, but He abominates the sinner who wallows in it, and upon these modern cities that flaunt their perversity in annual homosexual parades, He is preparing such fire and brimstone as may make what fell upon Sodom and Gomorrah look like a fall of dew, because at least those cities never knew the Gospel (cf. Mt. XI, 20-24).
Woe then to the sinner who instead of casting away his sin, hugs it to his bosom, as do a mass of today’s homosexuals, and as the Bishops’ Pastoral virtually encourages them to do. God’s patience is long, but if the sinner insists upon welding his sin to his soul, then one day God’s patience runs out, and He hates sinners with sin, crying out to both, “Depart from me, ye accursed, into everlasting fire”(Mt.XXV,41). Therefore real charity, which wishes everlasting salvation to homosexuals, will, with all due prudence, not put a cushion under their sin, but paint it to them in its true colours to help them to get out of it.
But what does our American Bishops’ Committee on Marriage and Family do? They dangerously down-grade the sin and dangerously up-grade the sinner, putting in effect a cushion beneath the sin.
As for the sin, they do still – to their credit – say that homosexual activity is intrinsically wrong. However, in at least two ways they diminish the wrongness. Firstly, they suggest homosexuality can be innate when they quote a Newchurch document from Rome to the effect that some homosexuals are “definitely such because of some kind of innate instinct”, and when they say that “Generally, homosexual orientation is experienced as a given, not as something freely chosen”, because “a common opinion of experts is that there are multiple factors – genetic, hormonal, psychological – that may give rise to homosexuality”. Of course whatever is innate is not sinful.
Secondly, they make a true but in this respect dangerous distinction between the habit (“orientation”) of homosexuality and the act (“activity”), saying there is nothing wrong with the orientation as long as it does not turn into activity. True, only the act and not the habit is a sin, but since when did habits (especially in this domain) not incline to acts? There may be even much virtue in resisting a bad habit, but am I helped to resist it by being told the habit is not bad? If the orientation is not so bad, why should the activity be so bad?
As for up-grading the sinner, watch how close the Committee come to saying that God loves the sinner with his sin (which is blasphemy). I quote: “… God loves every person as a unique individual. Sexual indentity helps to define the unique persons we are. One component of our sexual indentity is sexual orientation ….Human beings see the appearance, but the Lord looks into the heart (I Sam XVI,7).” How is this quotation to be interpreted other than as saying that God loves the homosexual in and with his orientation to homosexuality?
And if God loves the sinner with his sins how must men love him! From start to finish the Pastoral Message drips with honeyed words to prescribe how we must behave towards homosexuals. Let me reconstruct the general idea: (my own words in the quotation marks)
“With supportive love we must accept the homosexual persons challenged by the hurtful humour and offensive discrimination directed against their kind. We must reach out with honesty and commitment to help in the overcoming of their painful tensions. We must not be exclusive or judgmental but by significant communication as caring persons we must enable them to take a fresh and healing look at their dignity as human persons so they can learn to cope with their feelings. Sensitive to their authentic needs, and unconditionally supportive of their tender self-awareness, we must reach out and embrace them in intimate community” – oops! – it’s dangerous to get in the honeyed groove!
And this stuff goes on for eight pages uninterruptedly! What other purpose or effect can such words have than to dismantle the individual’s and society’s instinctive defence mechanism against a sin stinking to high Heaven that wrecks them both? And all this in the name of the Catholic Church??
Such a false love blurring sin and sinner has nothing to do with Catholicism! As St. Paul traced homosexuality back to idolatry, i. e. the breaking of the First Commandment, so the true remedy of the sin is for those practising it to return to the true worship and love of the true God. But what chance do they have of being led back to it by churchmen who virtually promote such corruption as in this Pastoral Message? Almost none.
“Pray”, said Padre Pio, who died in 1968, “there is nothing else left”. But prayer, said the Cure of Ars, “is the powerlessness of the All-powerful, the all-powerfulness of the powerless”.
November will be the month to enlist the prayerful aid of the Holy Souls in Purgatory. A card is enclosed for you to return if you wish by November 1st to the Seminary, where it will go on the altar once a month for a sung Requiem Mass for all souls inscribed. But please send any stipends for Masses separately from the cards.
And please be supportive and compassionate towards the sensitive feelings of the Seminary’s cash-box, presently hurt by a painful sense of rejection and emptiness, always in need of fulfillment! So do let yourselves be challenged to nurture it and fill it full with a healing flow of greenbacks, and it will not stop thanking you for your co-operation.
Dear readers, forgive me, the Bishops’ Committee’s language is getting to me! On the contrary, may the Lord God sustain every one of us in the real religion!
Most sincerely yours in the month of the Holy Rosary,
Padre Pio And The Mass
an instructing video.
Please always remember: some saints (mostly women, with the exception of St. Francis) had the stigmata.
Some saints had the “odour of sanctity” (emitted a scent recognised by others, though generally not by themselves).
Some could read other people’s mind.
Some could foresee future events.
Some could miraculously bilocate.
Some could be the vehicle for God’s miracle.
Only one could ever do, and be, all these things.
Mundabor
Quo Primum
Pope St. Pius V.
On occasion of the Feast of St. Pius V, you may want to feast your eyes on Quo Primum, the Apostolic Constitution with which the great, great, great Pope Saint Pius V promulgated his Missal in 1570 and established its ambit of application.
We specifically command each and every patriarch, administrator, and all other persons or whatever ecclesiastical dignity they may be, be they even cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, or possessed of any other rank or pre-eminence, and We order them in virtue of holy obedience to chant or to read the Mass according to the rite and manner and norm herewith laid down by Us and, hereafter, to discontinue and completely discard all other rubrics and rites of other missals, however ancient, which they have customarily followed; and they must not in celebrating Mass presume to introduce any ceremonies or recite any prayers other than those contained in this Missal.
Pope Saint Pius V apparently didn’t do “encouragement” much. He doesn’t suggest, he commands. The language is brutally frank: the priest “must not presume”, other rubrics and rites are to be “completely discarded”.
We grant and concede in perpetuity that, for the chanting or reading of the Mass in any church whatsoever, this Missal is hereafter to be followed absolutely, without any scruple of conscience or fear of incurring any penalty, judgment, or censure, and may freely and lawfully be used. Nor are superiors, administrators, canons, chaplains, and other secular priests, or religious, of whatever title designated, obliged to celebrate the Mass otherwise than as enjoined by Us. We likewise declare and ordain that no one whosoever is forced or coerced to alter this Missal, and that this present document cannot be revoked or modified, but remain always valid and retain its full force notwithstanding the previous constitutions and decrees of the Holy See, as well as any general or special constitutions or edicts of provincial or synodal councils, and notwithstanding the practice and custom of the aforesaid churches, established by long and immemorial prescription – except, however, if more than two hundred years’ standing.
Note here how the Pope protects not only the Liturgy from bad priests, but the priests from bad bishops: No one can be forced or coerced to alter the missal. Also note the extremely strong words: this present document cannot be revoked or modified. Don’t ask me what I think this great Pope would think of the liturgical reforms of the Sixties…
We decree that, after We publish this constitution and the edition of the Missal, the priests of the Roman Curia are, after thirty days, obliged to chant or read the Mass according to it; all others south of the Alps, after three months; and those beyond the Alps either within six months or whenever the Missal is available for sale. Wherefore, in order that the Missal be preserved incorrupt throughout the whole world and kept free of flaws and errors, the penalty for nonobservance for printers, whether mediately or immediately subject to Our dominion, and that of the Holy Roman Church, will be the forfeiting of their books and a fine of one hundred gold ducats, payable ipso facto to the Apostolic Treasury
Splendid again: a very short time for the implementation of the new Missal, after it has become available. Similarly, the immediate threat of hefty fines for the transgressors.
Spot the differences with Summorum Pontificum…
Mundabor
Three Cheers For Bishop Jenky
Where the President has put himself.
Can’t remember last time I read such beautiful words from a Bishop.
The first part, about Christ’s resurrection, is beautiful enough. But this part, I had read and heard already.
What I was not prepared for, is the barrage of the most orthodox, and most uncompromising Catholic cannons against the evil forces of our time, led by “Mr. Change” himself.
If I think that only some months ago many US bishops were timorous of speaking about matters which might have construed as “political” (that is: pretty much everything besides the need of being nice to the neighbour’s dog), the shift in attitude is nothing less than astonishing. May it be that Bishop Jenky was rather blunt in times past, this is still a sign of things to come.
Bishop Jenky is saying very plainly that the Church is now at war with the Obama administration and the enemies of Christ, and every good Catholic must be part of this war.
Truly, Obama is in trouble. Six months of this will tear him to pieces if he doesn’t backpedal, sharpish.
If you don’t believe me, try this (hat tip to Father Z):
For 2,000 years the enemies of Christ have certainly tried their best. But think about it. The Church survived and even flourished during centuries of terrible persecution, during the days of the Roman Empire.
The Church survived barbarian invasions. The Church survived wave after wave of Jihads. The Church survived the age of revolution. The Church survived Nazism and Communism.
And in the power of the resurrection, the Church will survive the hatred of Hollywood, the malice of the media, and the mendacious wickedness of the abortion industry.
The Church will survive the entrenched corruption and sheer incompetence of our Illinois state government, and even the calculated disdain of the President of the United States, his appointed bureaucrats in HHS, and of the current majority of the federal Senate.
May God have mercy on the souls of those politicians who pretend to be Catholic in church, but in their public lives, rather like Judas Iscariot, betray Jesus Christ by how they vote and how they willingly cooperate with intrinsic evil.
As Christians we must love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, but as Christians we must also stand up for what we believe and always be ready to fight for the Faith. The days in which we live now require heroic Catholicism, not casual Catholicism. We can no longer be Catholics by accident, but instead be Catholics by conviction.
In our own families, in our parishes, where we live and where we work – like that very first apostolic generation – we must be bold witnesses to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. We must be a fearless army of Catholic men, ready to give everything we have for the Lord, who gave everything for our salvation.
Remember that in past history other governments have tried to force Christians to huddle and hide only within the confines of their churches like the first disciples locked up in the Upper Room.
In the late 19th century, Bismark waged his “Kulturkampf,” a Culture War, against the Roman Catholic Church, closing down every Catholic school and hospital, convent and monastery in Imperial Germany.
Clemenceau, nicknamed “the priest eater,” tried the same thing in France in the first decade of the 20th Century.
Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care.
In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path.
Now things have come to such a pass in America that this is a battle that we could lose, but before the awesome judgement seat of Almighty God this is not a war where any believing Catholic may remain neutral.
This fall, every practicing Catholic must vote, and must vote their Catholic consciences, or by the following fall our Catholic schools, our Catholic hospitals, our Catholic Newman Centers, all our public ministries — only excepting our church buildings – could easily be shut down. Because no Catholic institution, under any circumstance, can ever cooperate with the intrinsic evil of killing innocent human life in the womb.
What shall I say more. Bishop Jenky said it all, so beautifully.
Mundabor
SSPX on “Religious Freedom”
That's what you end up with.....
An interesting fruit of the battle about HHS mandate is the fact it forces the Church in the US to progressively clean herself from the influences of a not-so-glorious past; but in doing so, she runs the risk of her message not being properly understood, or being altogether wrong.
The issue here is religious liberty. There is no doubt in the US:
a) there has historically been a great measure of religious liberty, and
b) this religious liberty is now endangered by the HHS mandate and the Obama troops.
It seems wrong to me to deny that, from the factual point of view, religious liberty has served the Church in the US well. A country originally colonised by hard-line Protestants now has some 70 million Catholics, and I doubt this would have been the case if religious liberty had not been – though nothing is perfect on this earth – a distinctive trait of American society.
Up to here, I think we all agree, even the SSPX: what American faithful now have (=religious liberty) is worth fighting for, because what will happen otherwise is a country where Christianity – and most directly, Catholicism – is discriminated against or even, in extreme cases, forced to go underground.
In addition, the issue of religious freedom is what allows – and rightly so – to obtain the mobilisation of Protestants, Jews & Co against the HHS mandate, undoubtedly an attack on religious freedom. If the Church in the US would say “religious freedom is endangered, but we don;t care because we are against religious freedom in the first place” this would not be terribly useful, or intelligent.
Where the problems begins is – as the SSPX rightly observed – when the US Church interprets religious freedom as something intrinsically right, or intrinsically Catholic. This is very V II, and very wrong. Read these words:
From well before Cardinal Gibbons, Catholics in America have been advocates for religious liberty, and the landmark teaching of the Second Vatican Council on religious liberty was influenced by the American experience. It is among the proudest boasts of the Church on these shores. We have been staunch defenders of religious liberty in the past. We have a solemn duty to discharge that duty today.
As the Gipper would say, “there you go again”. Again the usual V II soup, and again the defence of an error as the result of the “American experience”.
Far more to the points are the words of the SSPX:
Certainly we must fight for the liberty of the Catholic Church – that is, the ability for her to fulfill her divine mission to save souls, promote the faith (particularly in society) and enact the corporal acts of mercy. However, this is a much different thing than defending religious liberty, a false notion that originated with the Protestants and condemned as an error under the generic title of “Liberalism”.
Note the SSPX doesn’t say the Church in the US must not fight against the HHS mandate, or for her ability to work as freely as she can. But when religious liberty is smuggled for a Catholic value, we are clearly in heresy territory. It can’t be said that error is entitled to the same degree of freedom as Truth, and that a country in which error and truth are allowed the same rights is doing things the Catholic way. Jesus did not die on the cross so that people may be Muslims, of Hindus, or whatever. He did not say “I am one of the ways”.
Therefore, religious liberty is emphatically not a Catholic value, even if it was
“the vision of our founding [?] and our Constitution, which guarantees citizens of all religious faiths the right to contribute to our common life together”
and this is the first time I see Catholic bishops approving non-Catholic religious principles from a largely Protestant body, and taking their Protestant ideas as an example of good Catholic thinking. This must have been V II, no doubt.
If I were an American citizen, my take on the matter would be that whilst I can be a good Catholic and a good American, I will never allow my patriotism to come before my God, and therefore in matter of religious freedom I will acknowledge religious freedom as a component of American political life, whilst wishing and professing the Catholic view on the matter, namely: that error can never have the same rights as Truth.
I do not think this is too much to ask of a Catholic in the US, because it is not too much to ask of a Catholic everywhere else. On the contrary, when the US bishops make of religious liberty a religious value, they are mixing Catholicism with US politics, and giving right to those who say V II, wrongly interpreted – as on this occasion – only produces confusion and heresy. I understand they are fighting a good fight against secular oppression, but they are sending signals that whilst politically acceptable are very wrong if taken as religious principles.
The President’s good servant, but God’s first.
Mundabor
Why Father Guarnizo Is Right
R.I.P.
To a simple mind like mine, Father Guarnizo is right because he has done what every good priest, in every age of the Church, would have done in his place.
Alas, it would seem that just because Canon 915 was written in order to achieve exactly the aim the Church wanted to achieve without Canon 915 for almost two thousand years, it is now allowed or even mandatory to examine whether really, really, really all conditions called for by Canon 915 to refuse communion were present.
I truly wonder. It is as if in front of a canonical text people would say “let us stop thinking for a moment, and let us examine the dispositions of the Canon as if they existed in a purely theoretical vacuum”. The fact is, they don’t. They exist in the real world, and they exist to express a need that was there before Canon 915 was written, and because of which it was written in the first place. When in presence of a lesbian who openly declares her homosexual relationship to a priest before a ceremony consisting of, among others, a couple of dozen of her relatives there are still doubts whether said priest should protect the Host from desecration, I truly wonder what has become of us.
Still, in case you are not satisfied with what the basic common sense and the Christian logic of the last two thousand years should have suggested you, and want to spend some time reading a very detailed, extremely well argued and, most importantly, adherent to common sense and common Catholic feeling explanation of canon 915, you have to do nothing more than to click the following links:
Father Anonymous’ canonical defence of father Guarnizo,
and
The reply of “Fr Anonymous” to the objection to his intervention
Both text are absolutely impressive not only in the rigorous logic and spotless foundation of every steps he takes, but in the exemplary clarity of the language used. Whoever he is, this Fr Anonymous is a cannon.
The arguments used as clarification in the second post are, in my eyes, clear enough already from the reading of the first post, so that you may skip the second post without detriment to the clarity of Fr Anonymous’ argument. For example, in my eyes the idea a woman would live in a lesbian relationship with another woman at the point of bringing her “lover” to her mother’s funeral, but without her lesbian concubinage being known among her siblings and relatives – at the latest at the funerals, and applying basic common sense a long time before – is completely preposterous. Beside the fact we do not exactly have to do with a shy wallflower here, when things have come to such a point of brazenness if you would pretend with me the relatives didn’t know and – even in this absurd case – wouldn’t know at the funeral at the latest I would seriously ask you what’s wrong with you. From the beginning, it seems to me that basic common sense was the first victim of this controversy.
Still, the two posts give a clear, detailed explanation of why Father Guarnizo acted in conformity of Canon 915 (which is as to say: why Canon 915 does nothing else than translate in a canonical norm elementary Christian rules of behaviour concerning the Most Blessed Sacrament). You will find the reading extremely interesting not only because so well written, but because so intrinsically sound.
Fr Anonymous raises a second question, the conformity to Canon law of the measures taken against Fr Guarnizo. I have not dealt about it here, but the argument in favour of Father Guarnizo is not less cogent than in the matter of his denying communion to the lesbian female.
Once again, this squabble reminded me of one of Father Corapi’s most lovable quotes (also to be found in my “quotable Catholic”):
My grandmother, who had only an eighth grade education, knew more than many theologians because she knew the truth.
Mundabor
