"There will be Civil War in the Catholic Church"

Indeed. A "Civil War" has been silently waged, what we call a "War of Position" as opposed to a "War of Maneuver" since the rejection of Humanae Vitae in 1968. (Similar to the Communist "Long March" through the Western institutions, of which, of course, this is a part; see the story of Bella Dodd.) In a sense, the Gays and Bergoglio have done us a favor, in effect, as it were, by finally coming out of their dugouts and trenches into the open field. We can all see now what they're up to, and it "stinks to high Heaven", to "coin a phrase".

We don't know the details of how this will turn out, and so much depends on how Bergoglio resists the growing pressure, and how long he holds on to the papacy, and whether the homosexual "Lavender Mafia" can be expunged. If that doesn't happen, it is clear that a Schism (which de facto exists now) must occur. The "official" Church, sort of like the "Official IRA", will wither on the vine, and end up joining the Anglican Communion or the mainstream German Lutherans. How long it will take to get the Vatican itself back, we'll have to see. But surely, God is letting this occur so we can clean the Augean Stables, though admittedly without Heracles. (With God on our side, we don't actually need ol' Herc, of course. :) But one thing is certain sure, once the majority of the laity understand that the "Lavender Mafia" in effect call all the shots, they won't tolerate it. The Church is made up of families, and few fathers and mothers want to be in a Church of the Gays, run by the Gays, and all for the Gays. (If I may conjure up that old atheist, Abe Lincoln.:)

Excellent essay below, one full of history that I didn't know.

(Paul A. Rahe holds The Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College, where he is professor of history. )

An excerpt:

This past weekend, the chickens finally came home to roost. We had already learned of the predatory conduct of Theodore McCarrick, Wuerl’s predecessor as cardinal-archbishop of Washington. The evidence showed that he had buggered altar boys and seminarians while auxiliary bishop in New York, bishop of Metuchen in New Jersey, and Archbishop of Newark. Formal complaints had been lodged against him as the 1990s and continued to be lodged in later years, but they were ignored, and he was nonetheless promoted.

On Saturday night, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who was the papal nuncio in Washington from 2011 to 2016, released an 11-page testament, revealing that Pope Benedict had learned of McCarrick’s conduct, had acted against the man in 2009 or 2010 by silencing him, prohibiting him from travel, and forbidding him to say mass in public; that in 2013 he had himself personally warned Pope Francis against McCarrick, spelling out in detail the man’s misdeeds; that Francis had reversed the restrictions imposed on McCarrick by Benedict, taken him as his chief American advisor, and ignored the advice of the Papal Nuncio and accepted that of McCarrick in choosing archbishops and bishops for the United States. This includes Blaise Cupich, the cardinal-archbishop of Chicago, and Joseph Tobin, the cardinal-archbishop of Newark.

Viganò also did something on Saturday night that, as far as I know, no high-ranking prelate has done in more than six hundred years. He called on the pope to resign.

In the meantime, Monsignor Jean-Francois Lantheaume, former first counsellor at the apostolic nunciature in Washington D.C. has emerged to confirm that Viganò‘s predecessor had been instructed to confine McCarrick by Pope Benedict, that he had witnessed the confrontation with McCarrick, and that everything else that Viganò had said was true. To this, we must add that Viganò named names in the Vatican, specifying which high officials had obstructed the investigation into McCarrick’s conduct.

As all of this suggests, we are now at a turning point. The Lavender Mafia controls the papacy and the Vatican overall, and Pope Francis is packing the College of Cardinals, who will elect the next pope, with sympathizers. Pope Francis and his minions have now been exposed, named, and shamed; and there will be a civil war within the Roman Catholic Church.

Either Francis leaves and his supporters and clients are purged, or the church is conceded to those who for decades have sheltered and promoted the pederasts and those who regard their abuse of minors as an indifferent matter. It is time that those bishops, archbishops, and cardinals who are innocent of such conduct stand up and force a house-cleaning. In the meantime, the laity should speak up loud and clear.

How bad are things in the U.S. Church? Check this out:

Cardinal Wuerl on the run? Using the Vatican to escape justice?

And this from Archbishop Charles Chaput:

An excerpt:

 Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia told a conference that had met to discuss the “young people” of the Church that in light of the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church he had written to Pope Francis asking him to cancel the upcoming Youth Synod set to take place in Rome.

“The bishops would have absolutely no credibility” in the upcoming Youth Synod, Chaput told the Cardinal’s Forum, an annual gathering to provide academic formation of seminarians and continuing education for lay people, yesterday. The synod's planned dates are set for October 3-28, 2018.

And then there's this by Rod Dreher, which overviews and links to this: 

Francis and the Journalists, by John Waters

(Clearly, the entire Irish episcopate should resign; what few good men are left haven't "stood up and been counted", so they should go, too.)

An excerpt:

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/08/francis-and-the-journalists

Three questions to begin:

1. Why did the World Meeting of Families, which took place in Ireland last week, all but exclude from its panels and speakers people who had been active in recent Irish referenda relating to family and children?

 2. Why did virtually every panel of commentators covering the World Meeting of Families and papal visit on Ireland’s national radio and television station comprise at least 50 percent LGBT activists?

 3. Why did the Irish media play down the explosive intervention of the former Vatican diplomat Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò until Pope Francis was preparing to leave Ireland on Sunday afternoon?

The answer to the first question has two parts. One is that the Irish Church hierarchy, having more or less avoided involvement in three referenda—on (so-called) children’s rights (2012), same-sex marriage (2015), and abortion (2018)—seek to ensure that those who tried to do the job they abandoned become non-persons within the Irish Catholic world. More and more, the Irish bishops appear to wish to curry favor with those who despise the Church, and to dismiss and disparage those who defend Christ’s proposals for humanity.

I was one of just three people who fought prominently in all three referenda on the side that the Catholic Church might have been expected to lead. Though I had gained a reputation as an arch-apologist for the Catholic Church, I was not invited to speak at the World Meeting of Families or even to attend it, and so I watched and listened from a distance.

To the second question: Media panels are stuffed with LGBT activists in order to protect the dominant narrative concerning clerical sex abuse in the Church. That narrative insists that sex abuse was perpetrated by pedophiles; that the main cause was clerical celibacy; and that the coverups were conducted by Church leaders to protect the Church from bad publicity. 

We have known since the John Jay Report published by the US bishops in 2004 that the overwhelming majority of abuse in the Church was carried out against teenage boys. The levels of pedophilia in the Church are shown by this report to be below those of the general population—whereas the levels of homosexual abuse were many multiples of the general situation. 

In Ireland, anyone who tries to state this case is immediately attacked by both journalists and LGBT activists. For this reason, the truth has never been fully reported, nor has its significance been absorbed even by the Church at the official level. Most Irish people have no sense of the true meaning of the child abuse scandals, and both the media and much of the Church’s priests and leadership seem anxious to retain the narrative that implies the victims were all “little ones.” 

See also: Thousands of Catholic Women Sign a Letter Pleasing with the Pope.

This is a "pathetic" piece in the sense that these people "don't get it" about Bergoglio, but at least they'll "get it" soon when he brings on a full-scale "civil war". In essence, it is a sort of last gasp of the Vat2 laity, the leftovers from JP2's days, the "conservatives" who are bewildered by the people running the Church off a cliff. 

An Préachán

Our Lord did mention homosexuality in the Gospels. See Matthew 11:7-8

About our Lord, one of the things homosexuals like to say is that Jesus never condemned them, mainly because he never mentioned them at all. Homosexuality had, for the Jews, a strong stink of pagan temple worship, as did prostitution. Jews saw enough prostitutes (and tax collectors) to mention them. No Jew would want to be remotely thought of as homosexual, though.

However, I came across this reference from http://padreperegrino.org/  (Read the whole thing. It is extremely important and has a lot of info on how the Gays took over the Church; very depressing, but one has to read it. Know the terrain: the Master Sun Tzu talks about the importance of that in Chapter 10 of his immortal Art of War.)

About Our Lord, an excerpt from the Peregrino link:

In a little-known passage from the Gospels, Jesus contrasts his saintly second-cousin John the Baptist to the filthy Herod who would one day kill the Baptist.  St. Matthew writes: “As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds concerning John: ‘What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses. What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.'”—Mt 11:7-8 ESV.
That word translated above “soft” in Greek is μαλακοῖς, and Jesus is saying that John the Baptist would never be caught in soft garments like rich kings. But the adjective μαλακοῖς (pronounced malakois) which is indeed accurately translated as “soft,” also has a very telling etymology. μαλακοῖς comes from the noun μαλακός (pronounced malakos) and my Greek-English dictionary defines it as this: “μαλακός—soft, soft to the touch, metaph. in a bad sense, effeminate, of a catamite, of a boy kept for homosexual relations with a man, of a male who submits his body to unnatural lewdness, of a male prostitute.”
If you doubt that this interpretation is simply a stretch to include homosexuality in my blog post, look at which word the Apostle Paul uses to show how practicing homosexuals will not make it to heaven: 1 Cor 6:9: “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality (μαλακοὶ), nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”—1 Cor 6:9-10. Notice that μαλακοὶ is the plural for effeminate men.

An Préachán again:

Now, being the sometime, long-ago Greek scholar that I was (once), I remembered this word "μαλακοῖς" myself. So I looked it up in my Eros, The Myth of Ancient Greek Homosexuality, by Bruce S. Thornton (1997 Westview Press). On pages 107-108: referring to catamites, Thornton writes: '..."soft" (malakên) ... the adjective one typically used to describe moral "softness" and sexual degeneracy -- and cognate even today to the pejorative modern Greek word for passive homosexual (malaka, a deadly insult). Thus Aristotle defines sexual incontinence as a "kind of softness," and Plato condemns democracy's materialistic self-indulgence as evidenced in the younger generation, "too soft to rule over pleasures and pains.'

Doesn't that latter sound exactly like our modern-day college-educated "hot house flowers"? In other words, what goes around comes around. Nothing ever changes -- much. Evil and sexual perversions go together and always produce the same sort of result, whether the world is Ancient, Modern, or Future.

Read all of Fr. Peregrino's blog, though, too. Brutal, but spot on. I can't recommend it highly enough and am thankful to one of my friends here who sent it to me. Go raibh maith agatsa, a chara!

An Préachán

Is a U.S. Civil War Coming? "The signs of the times..."

For some time, various commentators (and I mean, both Left and Right, high up the pundit food chain to down low) have been suggesting a new U.S. Civil War might develop, or is developing as we look at it. That may sound extreme, but oft times the Cri de coeur one can find in blog comments "says it all" as to why such a thing might happen.

People are at their wits' end, and of course that's why Trump was elected. They took a desperate gamble. "The powers that be" loath him and they're trying to unseat him, pig-headedly ignoring all the social unrest warning signs against doing so – the middle America that elected Trump is far more armed than Hillary's supporters. Therefore, depending on how the November elections go, we can expect things to reach a boiling point, either from the Left or the Right.

(Because of the daily demands of life, most people don't have time to think about all this: but serious social disruption may be coming and knowing "the signs of the times" is necessary for simple survival.)

Regarding this possibility of civil war, I found both of these Comments I've included further below at The Conservative Treehouse. (The "young girl" referenced was one Mollie Tibbetts. Highlights are mine, of course, but every line of both Comments need highlighted.)

N.B. "Angel families" (also mentioned below) are those with loved ones killed by illegal immigrants. Debates rage about just how many people are killed by illegals, and obviously more are killed by U.S. citizens. But the point is, all illegals commit the basic crime of entering the country illegally; they should not be in the U.S. in the first place, so when some of them commit murder, rape, drug dealing, and so on, legal citizens naturally are outraged. "We have enough crime of our own; we don't need to import it." 

In Europe, with many of the various governments importing Muslims (mostly younger Muslim men), the resulting crime overwhelms their "multi-kulti" thinking, as now intense crime occurs where before it was very rare; for example, Sweden now being "the rape capital of the world". Of course, whether that is true is quite complicated, as reported here. For example, in Sweden, a husband can be accused of raping his wife, which can increase the rape statistics, whereas in Egypt, which has the lowest reported number of rapes, that's apparently because of Islamic law's attitude toward women (women can be out-and-out murdered by their Egyptian husbands if the husbands accuse them of adultery, and so on). And that's just women. Boys are raped all the time in Islamic lands, as reported here:

https://nypost.com/2015/09/25/yes-our-troops-were-ordered-to-ignore-afghan-pedophiles/  and also: https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/10/the-muslim-world-is-more-tolerant-of-homosexuality-than-you-think/

Such is the world we live in. Ignorance of it is no excuse.

  

Jan says:

August 23, 2018 at 2:59 am

Before I get emotionally wrapped up in the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings after Labor Day, are the damned Republicans going to vote to confirm Kavanaugh or are they going to withhold their vote based on Schumer’s command that Pres. Trump is an unnamed co-conspirator in a crime & so voting on anything now stops until Pres. Trump is impeached before or after the mid-terms? I saw Kevin McCarthy stand up for the president tonight, and that’s about all I’ve seen of our “Republican leadership”. Sessions/Rosenstein approved a plea agreement where the defendant plead guilty to 2 non-crimes, naming a “candidate” who told him to do the non-crimes. And the Dimms think it’s okay if a man here illegally or legally beats a young girl to death; so long as we allow all illegals to enter our country and we must let sex traffickers take unaccompanied children who are not their children with them AND then we must find the parents of these unaccompanied kids because it’s our fault.

I am heart broken for the Tibbetts family and all American angel families. And I am heart broken that our unAmericans hate their country, our President & us Americans so much they would rather see us dead and America a s**t-hole country. Underneath all this is cold anger, but what happened to Mollie Tibbetts should never have happened; yet it does, every single day. And we have to make it stop. And we have to stop the unAmericans before they kill us.

tjm says:

August 23, 2018 at 1:33 am

“We are faced, not with a situation that can be overcome by rational or moral arguments, but with an unleashing of emotional forces and ideas engendered by the spirit of the times… The dictator State has one great advantage over bourgeois reason: along with the individual it swallows up his religious forces. The State has taken the place of God; that is why, seen from this angle, the socialist dictatorships are religions and State slavery is a form of worship. But the religious function cannot be dislocated and falsified in this way without giving rise to secret doubts, which are immediately repressed so as to avoid conflict with the prevailing trends towards mass-mindedness. The result, as always in such cases, is overcompensation in the form of FANATICISM, which in its turn is used as a weapon for stamping out the least flicker of opposition. Free opinion is stifled and moral decision ruthlessly suppressed, on the plea that the end justifies the means, even the vilest.”
–C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (1957)

Response to a friend who mention William Donohue and his defense of the Church against the allegations in Pennsylvania.

Response to a friend who mention William Donohue of the Catholic League and his defense of the Church against the allegations in Pennsylvania.

Thanks for responding to my email and for sending ol' Donohue's rebuttal to the Pennsylvania sex abuse charges. The guy is a one-man Third Army, Donohue is (why doesn't he use the O'?), when it comes to defending the Church. And definitely, balance is necessary. Yet things have gone too far. As one author, Matthew Schmitz, writes (link below)

Yes, McCarrick’s reported offences occurred years ago. But they were known in 2000, when a delegation travelled to Rome to warn John Paul II of McCarrick’s crimes. They were known in 2002, when the American bishops put him forward as their spokesman on sex abuse. They were known when he retired to the grounds of a seminary, where he was attended by a string of young men. Whatever one’s view of the underlying moral matter, we must do away with the compromise that established this culture of lies.

All that indicates a profound institutional problem. Even the Vat2 super-pope JP2, wouldn't (or couldn't) do anything about McCarrick – and nothing speaks more poorly of the Polish pope – well, that and kissing the Koran – an act of out-and-out blasphemy.

And sure, Donohue is always on the defensive, but he's had to be really jumping to the barricades in recent years because the Church seems in danger of becoming an open sewer. I actually wrote Donohue a few weeks ago about an article he wrote defending the indefensible McCarrick. Never heard back from him. McCarrick is the camel's straw, perhaps, rather than the PA report. McCarrick is indefensible. He's out-and-out obscene. He's become the Church's poster boy for corruption. And that's because the Church kept him, promoted him, and he gloried in his Vat2 Churchiness, in spades, basking in the radiance of the Vat2 Church and promotion by none other than JP2.

And it was all a lie. One of the problems with homosexuality in the Church is – it hides. Like demons do when the exorcist comes calling. Exorcisms can take months because one has to find out just where the devils are hiding in the person. It can be a long process. But if you read that article on St. Peter Damian, he goes into detail about the effects of homosexuality on the priesthood, and wow, it is uncanny –just like reading the modern news reports on it! I encourage all to read it.

The other aspect to this that is revealing is that the bishops have had a long time now to get their act together and they just don't. Didn't then. Don't now. And probably won't in the future. That is an institutional problem, and if "the institutional system" keeps promoting mountebanks, Yes-men, and duplicitous non-religious money managers, then the system has to be changed.

Look how they treated Frank Keating. Keating saw what was going on, talked openly about it, and got run out of the oversight group. That's reprehensible. I saw an article the other day where Bishop Robert Barron, the "face of Vat2", who asked the laity, "Well, what should we do?" Good question. They should all resign, the lot of 'em, as they seem clueless. Remember how Dougherty said they were chosen?

For a number of reasons, the Catholic priesthood has selected for sexual deviancy. Bishops have been selected for their ability to manage legal and social risk, rather than their ability to govern and lead a religious organization. As one smart canon lawyer put it, men don’t rise through the ranks of the Catholic Church, they are pulled upward by those above them. High-ranking churchmen select for men who make peace with this sexualized culture in the priesthood. They prize collegiality rather than exacting holiness, or even competence. Cardinal Wuerl was selected by the pope to sit on the powerful Congregation of Bishops, which helps recommend to the pope new candidates for the office of bishop. It’s time we ask why he was deemed suitable for this task.

That's the Vat2 Church in spades: A "congregation" of bishops recommending bishops! Bureaucracy! Old-Boy network. "The fix is in." FWIW, I would insist that the pope should only chose Archbishops – write this into Canon Law – because there are too many bishops in the world for the Vatican to try to "vet". (There's about 5,100 bishops in the Catholic Church, both Latin and orthodox rites – the latter known as eparchs; I couldn't readily find how many archbishops exist) and the bishops below them, their "suffragan" bishops, should subject to the archbishops' oversight, rather than trekking off to Rome for the occasional group photo opportunity.

Archbishops are closer to the scene and more easily held responsible for foul ups by local Catholics than distant Rome (as Rome itself can more easily hold the archbishops responsible); and the local bishops under the archbishops should be elected by the Cathedral canons of each diocese (most Cathedrals probably don't even have these any more), who in turn would be priests chosen in part by archbishops and a diocesan senate of priests and laity. (Currently, archbishops now have no such authority, and many "archbishops" merely hold the position as an empty, honorary title.) This would be much more like it was done in Medieval times. It's also a version of the Catholic principle of Subsidiarity. "Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Political decisions should be taken at a local level if possible, rather than by a central authority." Indeed. Otherwise, all we get is a distant, unaccountable bureaucracy which means no one is responsible for anything – which is exactly what we're seeing.)

As you rightly point out, my friend, there are exceptions and perhaps a strong majority of priests are "orthodox" both theologically and sexually. Friends recently sent me the letter to his parish of such a priest in Columbus, and I link to it here:

An excellent essay and one can readily see that this priest's parish is, indeed, very Catholic. He raises very important points about public penance, too, and corporate prayer, fasting, and devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. And that's important: Devotion to Mary is a hallmark of all the Orthodoxies, West (Roman Church) East (the various Orthodoxies, the bigger ones not being in Communion with Rome), and the true Eastern Churches, called the Oriental Churches (such as the Copts: Mary has been appearing in Egypt for some time now.) But the Western Church's powers-that-be are neither very orthodox nor have the devotion to Our Lady (Pope Francis calls such Catholics "bead counters", and the Vatican II Council specifically squashed a plan to write a special Conciliar document on the B.V.M because, ostensibly, they didn't want to "offend" Protestants).

Indeed, consider Jorge Bergoglio: he's an out-and-out Lutheran (to the extent he's anything; certain his doctrine of grace is very Lutheran). All in all, and trying to consider the exceptions we all know about (good, solid, if long-suffering priests) I think both Michael Brendan Dougherty and Michael Walsh are pretty much on target with their accusations about the system.

Anyone growing up in the Church always has tales to tell. I remember a number of priests in the last decade or two before I left the area (I used to go to Mass at odd times, at parishes here and there around Columbus, when I worked at McGraw-Hill) and quite of few of them were obviously gay -- and I say this as someone without much of a "Gaydar" radar. I've been surprised a few times over the years by finding out this or that person was queer, and I had never had a clue. But some are caricatures of course of the old-fashioned caricature of male homosexuals. These priests I refer to now certainly were.

Then there was my Uncle John, who in his retirement had tried to enter a branch of the Franciscans he had sort of been in and out of over the years. This must have been in the 1980s. After some months, he left, and wouldn't talk about why he did (it was extraordinary for him to get in to begin with, of course, at his age) and he died soon after. My mother was amazed and concerned – at his anguished silence as much as anything else – and when the sex abuse scandal finally broke, she said, "Ah, that had to be it, now. That's why he left, and died so soon after." Yep. Things had changed from when he was last in the order back in the 1960s, apparently. 

That had to be a severe shock to him, a man who would have crawled over broken glass, if ordered to, or into a volcano, if a bishop asked him. He was the classic Vatican I Catholic, betrayed by the Vat2 Church. Vatican I Catholics had been trained to pray. pay, and obey, and the Vatican II Reformers crassly counted on that to implement their disastrous changes. I remember Uncle John giving me a lecture in the middle of a Mass once because I wouldn't shake hands at that absurd gesture – something held in the middle of the Eucharistic part of the Mass, no less. (Word is that B16 was going to move it to the front of the Mass, but he was tossed out before he could effect that.)

And then there was 'Sister Roberta'. One of my aunts was a Dominican nun, and in her retirement, she lived at St Mary's of the Springs, which the Vat2 nun reformers devastated. Trashed out. Tore down the beautiful old buildings and put up that gawd awful "tower" that a few years ago they tore down! (Total waste of money.) Such wanton, stupid iconoclasm strongly indicated those people had no sense of the sacred, and how the human mind associated the old, hallowed, ancient buildings connected them with their ancestors and the Faith as it was in the past. Everything had to be New! Improved! The latest! Like dish soap or selling cars.

Anyway, the old St. Mary of the Springs was buried and forgotten. Yet I actually had a "recovered memory" at the first Trad Mass I went to at Holy Family when Fr Lutz was there. (He's an example of a fire-brand believer who would be a natural for a great Reforming Bishop, and who has no chance in Hell of becoming one, as Dougherty explained bishops are chosen with quite different criteria than strong belief.) Anyway, as I came out of the church after Mass, I suddenly remembered being at St. Mary's of the Spring as a kid, a little kid, with my mother as she visited her sister, and I remembered – like it was yesterday – the old Convent building, and the visiting room, and the wide lawns and nuns floating about in their full habits. Like a vision, it was nothing else I've experienced "waking dream"-wise, or even sleeping dream-wise. The old Mass brought it back to me. One "old Catholic" thing triggered buried memories of other "old Catholic" things.

I had totally forgotten it. I mean, I was out to St. Mary's quite often from the later 1970s on, taking my mother to visit my aunt. But I had totally forgotten what it was once like. It had been Númenor in its glory, long lost in the depths of my memory sea. Atlantis, forgotten. It had been so Catholic. Now it is just a rest home. And an empty one at that.

Anyway. in my aunt's later years, a certain 'Sr Roberta' used to bring her down to the farm, and from what I know now, Roberta was all dyke. I could go into details, but working years in textbook publishing gave me some insight into recognizing them. And I remember she used to put my mother down sarcastically when my mother brought up the Vat2 changes. Eventually, Sr Roberta returned no more with my aunt. My aunt said she and a couple of other nuns moved across the road into a house – to establish some sort of aesthetic community. Maybe. Or maybe they wanted a place where they could do what they wanted to do without supervision. Then one day my aunt explained the house had been broken into and Roberta's girls were robbed blind. (As you know, that's not such a good neighborhood anymore.) I've no clue to whatever became of Sr Roberta after that. Maybe she got a job in text-book publishing?

In any event, as you know, I never went to Catholic school, and I luxuriated as the lone (or one of the very few) Catholics in a Protestant (later Pagan) school, but I still attend Mass today (albeit the Trad Latin one) whereas most of my city cousins don't attend Mass of any sort. I've 30 or so cousins, and most of them are no longer Catholic (maybe vaguely "Cultural Catholics" possibly, sorta), and then again, from what I hear, their kids even less than that.

As I grew up in that "AmChurch", I can say I never experienced the mysteries, the beauties, the profundity of Catholic worship. It was Protestantism with a few statues. I can appreciate that because of my strong, encompassing Protestant background – I know Protestantism inside and out, as it were. And were it not for simple Irish-American pride, and the fact I stumbled across G. K. Chesterton (and later Jack Lewis) in high school, and had I not been an avid reader of Tolkien (one of the very few, if not the only one, at Bloom-Carroll H.S.) I would be no more Catholic today than my cousins seem to be. I would have probably drifted into Orthodoxy, or a Catholic-connected Eastern group, like the Melkites; (in Hungary here there's a whole Hungarian Catholic Eastern Rite Church, existing in its own canon law right. Amazing.) That, or stand some standing stone up to Lugh Lámhfhada and retell the Deeds of Fionn.

So, as for Mr Donohue. What's got the people's goat is McCarrick "hiding in plain sight" for decades. And now the Establishment Church has lawyered him up, and does what it always does in these cases -- deny. obfuscate, misdirect, lie like a rug, and so on. And that pretty much says it all.

For what it is worth, here's a long article from PJ Media by a person who is from that region in Pennsylvania.

J. Christian Adams is the author, and it is a good article, pretty balanced. It should be read in conjunction with my rantings.

Here's the Schmitz article:  An excellent article. So good I'll excerpt from it: (highlights my own):

No one cares for the endless Catholic culture wars, but we should be wary of attempts to shut down frank discussion of how we got here. Bishop Barron’s list of taboo topics suggests that he – like most bishops – is keen to preserve the settlement of 1968.
In that year, Pope Paul VI famously reaffirmed Catholic teaching on birth control in Humanae Vitae, but then declined to discipline the many bishops and priests who rejected that teaching. The result was an uneasy truce: the teaching was formally upheld, but obedience to it was not demanded.
The same dynamic played out in 2005, when the Vatican decided that men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” should be barred from the priesthood.
Countless bishops ignore this guidance; some even tolerate discreet romances. They only require that the priests not openly challenge Church teaching.
Both traditional and liberal Catholics are unhappy with this settlement. Under it, holiness and truth are sacrificed for a superficial peace. This arrangement is fair neither to the people who want to live by Church teaching, nor to those who would rather do without it.
Maintaining this truce makes sense if one is convinced that the post-Vatican II settlement is worth preserving. The McCarrick affair suggests that it is not.

...

But for people in the pews, things don’t look so great. In 1955, nearly 75 per cent of American Catholics went weekly to Mass. Today, only 39 percent do. Outside of a few Latin Mass and “reform of the reform” enclaves, Mass-going Catholics suffer wrecked sanctuaries, botched liturgies and moral confusion. The springtime is hard to find.
In recent months, I have attended a Mass at which Christ was assigned gender-neutral pronouns, and one at which the homilist proposed that he may have had biological brothers and sisters. (So much for Mary’s perpetual virginity.) At another, I was invited to join a ministry that openly rejects Christian teaching on sex.
Such is the new era of evangelisation, the wondrous paradigm of pastoral accompaniment preserved by the fragile truce of 1968. Speaking as a member of what is called the JPII generation, I no longer think it is worth preserving. Upholding Catholic teaching on paper but not in reality has led to widespread corruption and contempt for authority. Preserving the peace has required a culture of lies. This is the culture that allowed men like McCarrick to flourish. One way or another, we must sweep it away.

An Préachán again, definitely a good article and a brilliant idea about "The Compromise of '68". Very insightful.

But definitely read St. Peter Damian.

An Préachán

What the Pennsylvania indictments say about the Church, and two withering articles

Withering article here by Michael Walsh. Maybe not as good as this one by Michael Brendan Dougherty, but Walsh's piece has a lot of great points about abandoning the Latin, the Trad Latin Mass, and so on. Both articles are great; both these guys are Irish-Americans and they know how to eviscerate.

There's always been rats in the Church, of course. Remember Judas Iscariot? The Emperor Justinian, a man who never raised his voice, and who could order the death of thousands, had a bishop of his burned alive because that bishop was a homosexual. Or check out the life and times of St Peter Damian: (just one of many articles pointing out the similarities) and so on down to "Franny Spellman", cardinal archbishop of New York.

But always before, we had the Traditional Mass, and the dignity of it -- the supreme dignity of the Rite of St. Gregory the Great in its missa cantata / missa solemnis forms -- and both Sacred Tradition/Holy Writ and the Theology of divine insight that got us past bad priests, bishops, and popes. Also, at the nadir of papacy, in the 900s, we had a very strong Monastic movement. There was always a balance, in other words, one way or another. This is true even with the Reformation, which produced the Counter-Reformation Church (from 1540 to 1648). But aside from a few new Athanasiuses (I'm thinking of old Archbishop Lefebvre and our current Athanasius, Athanasius Schneider, we have very, very few bishops willing to "take the heat" and "stand up and be counted". (And when they do, like the Dubia Four, they're ignored and not supported by the others.)

These revelations from Pennsylvania will be the breaking point, however; they're just too awful, too outrageous, too widespread: they're the straw that breaks the camel's back. Look to some high prelate, a Cardinal for example, to resign his position in the Vatican (or wherever) and announce he's joining the SSPX.

That'll be the "shot heard 'round the world". 

Otherwise, it looks like the secular law enforcement is going to have to simply start treating the Catholic Church as a Criminal Organization. Does that sound outrageous? Look at the facts, the cover-ups, the truth. What else can law enforcement do? And what can we, the laity, do?

In the meantime, we've got nothing in the mainstream Church at least (I refer to the hierarchy mainly. and many lower-level clergy) except a cacophonous misdirection, uncertainty, and dissimulation. Thanks to none other than John Paul II, the mainstream Church marginalized the SSPX, but it and the Trad groups still in Communion with Rome ARE the Catholic Church, at least as far as I'm concerned. And for many. Pope Francis is the poster boy for the "disinformation" campaign that is today so strongly in control of the mainstream Church as he works like a devil to undo, redo, and eviscerate Traditional Church teaching, and all done through his by now obvious and characteristic M.O. of slight of hand, innuendo, and insinuation. (And that is "Modernism" as it was from its Lutheran beginnings in Germany: it used "scholarship" as a cover to take any meaning out of the Bible, and then Church history; we have a situation that has Modernism's fingerprints all over it.)

Sure, in part, all this mess is because the "Gay Mafia" is so entrenched in the Church, and its members' ceaseless quest to keep from being exposed. They're like demons in possession of someone, hiding "in plain sight" from the exorcist and trying not to be cast out. But as Fr. Ripperger says, anytime you misuse a thing, you open it up to diabolical interest, infestation, or possession. "Being Gay is not OK", in a spiritual sense (not to mention in every other sense), in other words. Neither is adultery, fornication, or a host of other sins. So far, the Gay Mafia has succeeded but now, these revelations from Pennsylvania are so out-and-out obscene, and coming after all the official bishops-based efforts to "clean up" the Church, that they can no longer maintain the illusion that "all is well" or is something "getting better" or that the bishops are in control. That last one is laughable. The bishops are in control of nothing now, not even "spin".

But in larger part, all this mess is because of the total Modernist confusion Vatican II introduced. What does the Vat2 Church really believe? Can any of you tell me? No? Think you can? Try to. That's Modernism. It's a type of "deconstruction" of both the institution and the teachings of the Church. I can't tell you, after six decades of being in the American Catholic Church, what it believes, or even what it is, exactly. The Body of Christ? As Saint Paul said, can Christ be united to adulterers and murders through us? (1 Corinthians 6:15 & following) "God Forbid!" Paul 6's Humanae Vitae for example, which merely reiterated traditional teaching, 2,000 years of Revelation, was rejected by probably a majority of theologians. Did those theologians know what they believed? I think not.

It's time to stop this. The bishops obviously can't. If they swore an oath to the Devil himself to destroy the Church, what more could they have done? They stripped it of it beauty, its mystery, its timelessness, its holiness, its morality, and even its mission (JP2 kissed the Koran, for example; how confusing is that? Just one example.) One thing we can do: don't give the "AmChurch" any money, not unless it is a religious order or house or individual priest/monk/nun you know and can personally vouch for. But remember that the "AmChurch" gets tens (if not more) of millions from the Federal government to help take care of "refugees", and that's why they're so over-the-top demanding about illegals being let in. As long as they get that, they're laughing at us, the laity.

An Préachán

Professor Edward Feser writes about Bergoglio's Capital Punishment move. A must read (Feser, not Bergi.)

Edward Feser is my favorite living philosopher, and an expert on Aquinas. Here at First Things, he writes about Bergoglio's dogma-breaking move with the Church's ancient teaching on Capital Punishment. He's the co-author of a book titled: 

By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment.

that came out last year or so.

An excerpt from the First Things article (highlights are mine, of course):

Pope Francis, by contrast, wants the Catechism to teach that capital punishment ought never to be used (rather than “very rarely” used), and he justifies this change not on prudential grounds, but “so as to better reflect the development of the doctrine on this point.” The implication is that Pope Francis thinks that considerations of doctrine or principle rule out the use of capital punishment in an absolute way. Moreover, to say, as the pope does, that the death penalty conflicts with “the inviolability and dignity of the person” insinuates that the practice is intrinsically contrary to natural law. And to say, as the pope does, that “the light of the Gospel” rules out capital punishment insinuates that it is intrinsically contrary to Christian morality.

To say either of these things is precisely to contradict past teaching. Nor does the letter from the CDF explain how the new teaching can be made consistent with the teaching of scripture, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and previous popes. Merely asserting that the new language “develops” rather than “contradicts” past teaching does not make it so. The CDF is not Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, and a pope is not Humpty Dumpty, able by fiat to make words mean whatever he wants them to. Slapping the label “development” onto a contradiction doesn’t transform it into a non-contradiction.

An irony is that John Paul’s Catechism was issued to clarify matters of doctrine, and finally put a halt to post–Vatican II speculation that Catholic teaching was open to endless revision. Yet now we have had two revisions to the Catechism’s own teaching on capital punishment—one in 1997, under John Paul himself, and another under Francis.

Nor is the problem confined to capital punishment. This latest development is part of a by-now familiar pattern. Pope Francis has made statements that appear to contradict traditional Catholic teaching on contraception, on marriage and divorce, grace, conscience, and Holy Communion, and other matters. He has also persistently refused to clarify his problematic statements, even when clarification has been formally and respectfully requested by eminent theologians and members of the hierarchy. The effect is to embolden those who want to reverse other traditional teachings of the Church, and to demoralize those who want to uphold those teachings.

If capital punishment is wrong in principle, then the Church has for two millennia consistently taught grave moral error and badly misinterpreted scripture. And if the Church has been so wrong for so long about something so serious, then there is no teaching that might not be reversed, with the reversal justified by the stipulation that it be called a “development” rather than a contradiction. A reversal on capital punishment is the thin end of a wedge that, if pushed through, could sunder Catholic doctrine from its past—and thus give the lie to the claim that the Church has preserved the Deposit of Faith whole and undefiled.

Not only does this reversal undermine the credibility of every previous pope, it undermines the credibility of Pope Francis himself. For if Pope St. Innocent I, Pope Innocent III, Pope St. Pius V, Pope St. Pius X, Pope Pius XII, Pope St. John Paul II, and many other popes could all get things so badly wrong, why should we believe that Pope Francis has somehow finally gotten things right?

An Préachán again: There's no question in my mind that some future pope will declare Jorge Bergoglio an "anti-pope". 

Pope declares himself heretic by denying a dogma held from beginning of Church: Capital Punishment

No pope can change Church dogma. 

"Dogma" is the Greek for doctrine, and refers to a must-be-held teaching. You cannot change 'em. No pope (or anyone else) has the right or power or authority to do so.

Not only do popes not have that power, but if one were to change a dogma, esp one held from the beginning, then ALL the dogmas can go, domino-style. There's nothing to stop that. (Same principle as with if you let two men "marry" each other, than you can't stop one man and two women "marrying" each other, or any other combo; all that restrains it is public opinion, vox populi, which of course changes with the wind. And as General Sherman said, "Vox populi, vox humbug.")

However, Pope Francis, a.k.a. Jorge, Bergoglio, El Caudillo, Bergi, and other nomenae, has just declared the Church opposes Capital punishment in all circumstances. And he's ordered the Catechism to be so changed.

Boom!

How big is this­? Steve Skojec of OnePeterFive calls it a nuclear theological bomb.

So it is. It was the necessary preliminary for ordaining women priests and many other upcoming changes that are planned. Get rid of a dogma a lot of people don't like. Easy to do, easily accepted. Then spring the trap.

It's how the Vatican II Church operates.

From the National Catholic Register:

Pope changes Church teaching on death penalty. Says it is never justified.

An excerpt:

In an explanatory letter to bishops, dated August 1, Archbishop Ladaria drew on the past teaching of Pope St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI on the death penalty to state the change is an “authentic development of doctrine that is not in contradiction with the prior teachings of the Magisterium.”

An Préachán:

Oh, c'mon! That is completely untrue. 60 years now of the Vatican II Church saying X, and that X isn't a change from Y, but of course everyone knows X is now "in" and Y "out" and of course  Z is now permitted, as well, though it goes against "official teaching", all with a "wink-wink, nod-nod, the fix is in, dontcha know" smirk – 60 years of this deceit and misdirection and "false-flag" operations is enough.

It's classic "disinformation". Psychological warfare. Plain and simple.

Protestants know this (some, at least); see:

Paul does not deny the right of the state to execute people. Instead of denouncing capital punishment, Paul assumes its validity and appeals to Caesar as was the right of Roman citizens when a  crime worthy of death and then levied.
Conclusion

It seemed clear that New Testament does not denounce the idea of capital punishment but instead assumes the right of the state to use it.

Indeed. And for the Catholic, 2,000 years of Sacred Tradition reaffirm that.

 See also:

Rod Dreher at The American Conservative An excerpt:

I don’t see how he can do this. To be clear, I am in most cases opposed to the death penalty, but I agree (agreed) with the previous teaching of the Catholic Church, which was (until Francis’s statement) that it is permissible when there are no bloodless ways to protect society. Catholic supporters of the death penalty have pointed out in the past that there’s no way that the Church can totally forbid it, and remain faithful to its past authoritative teachings.

In 2001, Avery Cardinal Dulles, an eminent theologian wrote an essay about the Church and the death penalty. 

He shows how the Church, from the patristic period until the 20th century, maintained consistently that capital punishment was permissible under certain conditions. The (at the time) official position of the Catholic Church was that the death penalty should only be used in extreme situations.

An Préachán again:

I think this needs reiterated: St. Paul, that teacher so elemental to the Faith, wrote in both Romans 13:1-4, and Acts 25:10-11, that capital punishment was allowed. And therefore each generation of the Church has held this as well, and it is an indelible part of Sacred Tradition. You can't change that, or of you try, you declare yourself a heretic. You've removed yourself from both Tradition and Revelation. You are, in effect, claiming a new revelation. (And you open the door to changing anything you don't like  – which is what the Vatican II Church has been doing for 60 years.)

But Begoglio has done that to himself, now. And his officials approve it. Is this the "Sarajevo bullet" that begins full-fledged Church crisis? De jure, not just de facto. It should.

See again my favorite modern philosopher, Edward Feser, here:

for details. That was little less than a year ago. Feser authored, a little over a year ago, the book, By Man Shall His Blood be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment (15 Mar 2017) It is a detailed defense of the traditional Catholic teaching.

JP2 said dangerously close to those waters but didn't dive wholly in. Bergi has.

So, what's it mean? If you are a Catholic, you're no longer under any obligation to the guy? It's over? We are not "sheeple", or we shouldn't be; "Dogma Denial" is a Rubicon no pope can cross. The 

Deposit of Faith has been compromised.

You, as an individual, might find capital punishment distasteful, or barbaric, or that it is sometimes (historically, certainly) abused. But so what? It is meted out to individuals 1,000s of times a day around the world by murderers, robbers, Islamic zealots, Communists, and official police forces either intentional or "by accident" as here:

Vietnam veteran shot intruder trying to murder his (the veteran’s grandson) and the police shot and killed the veteran.

http://dailycaller.com/2018/08/01/vietnam-vet-naked-intruder-shot/

“They shot first and asked questions later.”

See also: http://dailycaller.com/2018/08/01/bodycam-footage-lapd-hostage-shooting-released/ Hostage shot to death along with hostage taker.

You are not going to "wish it away" and the Church has tried to restrict it to what it ought to be for, but now the Vatican Twoers – who so officiously think they've taken the high road, have merely – as so often – emasculated themselves. To put it bluntly, this is "virtue signaling", something this pope is congenitally addicted to. That's all. There's far more Narcissism to it than necessity.

Now, will the Cardinals and bishops who claim to be orthodox respond to this with anathema, "bell, book and candle," as Bergoglio deserves, or what? They seem hopeless about dealing with the Church Sex Abuse Scandal. Totally. See:

I've been predicting the Church would go into Schism de jure as it has clearly been in Schism de facto (since 1968 and the push back against Humanae Vitae).

Now what?

An Préachán