"Their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father Who is in heaven."

 Amici, a chairde,

Today is October 2, the Feast of the Holy Guardian Angels.

Perhaps the most famous Biblical passage about Guardian Angels is St Matthew 18:10

"See that you despise not one of these little ones: for I say to you, that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father who is in heaven."

Guardian Angels are a not a formal doctrine of the Catholic Faith. That Angels exist is a dogma, but Guardian Angels is an ancient belief, formally defined or not. "That every individual soul has a guardian angel has never been defined by the Church, and is, consequently, not an article of faith; but it is the 'mind of the Church', as St. Jerome expressed it: 'how great the dignity of the soul, since each one has from his birth an angel commissioned to guard it.' (Comm. in Matt., xviii, lib. II)." This is from the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia at the New Advent site. For theological detail on Angels in general, and the Church teaching thereof, see this encyclopedia article. for the historical development of the Feast.

St Peter certainly had a Guardian Angel. See Acts 12:15: "You are out of your mind," they told her. But when she kept insisting it was so (i.e. that the imprisoned St. Peter was miraculously at the gate), they said, "It must be his angel." Clearly, by Our Lord's own words, children have Angels, and but this story from Acts, it is clear adults have Angels. Historically, theologians argued back and forth whether everyone has Guardian Angels.

Does everyone have a Guardian Angel? This from the Encyclopedia:

St. Thomas teaches us (Summa Theologica I:113:4) that only the lowest orders of angels are sent to men, and consequently that they alone are our guardians, though Scotus and Durandus would rather say that any of the members of the angelic host may be sent to execute the Divine commands. Not only the baptized, but every soul that cometh into the world receives a guardian spirit; St. Basil, however (Homily on Psalm 43), and possibly St. Chrysostom (Homily 3 on Colossians) would hold that only Christians were so privileged.

It is one of the greatest meditations on God that he created so many Angels in the first place, and that life on Earth is itself so "plush", so exuberant, so over-the-top abounding in life, that this probably reflects their spirit world (things visible and invisible). It's hardly a stretch to comprehend the Lord God just creating Spirit Life as abundantly as the biological life here below. The Bible of course has a number of quotes about the many hosts of Angels. Just one example, Hebrews 12:22 "But you are come to mount Sion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels...". "Thousands of thousands, thousands of hosts of Angels" is a typical style of putting it. And this from Revelation 5:11 "And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne, and the living creatures, and the ancients; and the number of them was thousands of thousands,...".

There's enough Angels, clearly, for God to appoint one to you.

In fact, Fr. Ripperger, the Exorcist, says that when created, each Angel was given a specific task. If the Angels refused, off to Hell he went. Satan, Lucifer, the Lightbringer, the Star of the Morning, one of the greatest of Angels, was given the task, Fr. Ripperger says, of being the Guardian Angel of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He refused. This, remember, from an exorcist who has forced many a demon to tell him information, information he extracts via inflicting severe pain on the devil. Go here for Fr. Ripperger's one hour long lecture on Guardia Angels. It is, of course, excellent and very well worth the time.

In any event, from this perspective, there's no doubt everyone has a Guardian Angel. And they chose to be your Guardian Angel, so, be right with them. Don't hurt them by sinful acts, and thank them for all they do. Today is their special Feast but you can (and should) thank them every day.

One great way to thank them is to recite this Traditional Catholic Litany for Guardian Angels. It takes a few minutes but it's a beautiful series of prayerful truths about the "Angel of Heaven, who dost love me tenderly."

From the Collect for today, from the TLM:

O God, who in Thine ineffable Providence hast deigned to send Thy holy Angels to keep watch over us: grant to us Thy suppliant people, that we may always be defended by their protection, and may rejoice in their fellowship for ever. Through our Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Three in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.

         AnP

Revelation, the Apocalypse as Understood by Catholics

 Amici,

With all that is happening, one can be excused for thinking we are living in the End Times. Many are showing a renewed, or first-time, interested into my favorite book in the entire Bible, The Apocalypse, The Book of Revelation. 

Traditionally, or I mean at least since the Protestant Revolution and more specifically since the first half of the nineteenth century, there have been four schools of thought about the prophecies (everything post chapter 4) in this book.

The Futurist school was originally held by the Church Fathers, and it asserts that everything after chapter 4 is to occur in the future, and the Apocalypse is literally an unveiling of that future. The the Historicist school, however, teaches the propheices have happened progressively, i.e., being fulfilled throughout church history, so while Revelation does predice the future, in a way it is essentially fulfilled throughout church history and not some future tribulation. (The later is a popular notion right now, for obvious reasons.)

Perhaps the simplest school, the Preterist, is a theory teaches that the events have passed already, with the prophencies fulfilled in the first century (i.e., the Destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, the dispersion of the Jews, and so on). N.B. Preterist being a fancy word in English for "past tense".

Finally, the fourth general notion is the Idealist school of thought: that the Apocalypse is about a symbolic fight between good and evil, a sort of allegory, and that the Bbook of Revelation should be taken as a purely symbolic explanation of our personal and collective battles raging on the plains of our souls.

It's the Futurist school that discusses and expect the “Great Tribulation” (of various lengths of time, some say for up to seven years) immediately prior to the Second Coming of Christ. This view in Protestant circles is the classically ‘Dispensational’ school, with sub-schools adhereing to "Pre-Trib" notions and others "Post-Trib". (Then, too, there are the Dispensationalists who are "premillennialists", i.e., they assert there will be a future, literal 1,000-year reign of Jesus Christ on Earth, from Revelation 20:6, involving the "new heavens and the new earth" as in Revelation 21. Catholics and the Orthodox are "amill", and one could go on but it is a "rabbit hole" pretty much!)

Not all futurists accept such views, of course, and it is obviously complicated. For example, some argue for "the Rapture" (developed by the Protestant John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) in the first half of the 1900s,  and the famous seals that are opened are then representative of all history. Also believed by many is that that upon Christ’s return the Davidic kingdom of Israel will be established for a period of 1,000 years – the Millennium – through which Our Lord will govern the world, after which follows the final judgement and the eternal state.

Well, amici, obviously, one could go on and on; many angles and schools of thought have cropped up over the centuries. Catholics have traditionally had various views at various times about the Apocalypse (as noted, for example, about the Church Fathers being Futurists, essentially). It depends on the circumstances. Basically, the underlyingi truth of it all is that the Book of Revelation describes (in some detail) the Heavenly Liturgy. 

"Liturgy" is a Greek word that originally meant a citystate-wide party celebrating some deity. The Panathenaea (Ancient Greek: Παναθήναια, "pan-Athenian festival"), was one such. So the early Christians used that word to refer to the religious worship they engaged in. The Liturgy was festive, a worship involving sacrifice (worship always involves sacrifice, and worship of Yahweh always involved blood sacrifice, except the one time in Genesis, when mysterious priest-king Melchizedek offered bread and wine in Genesis 14:18 – this is obviously what is called a "typology" of the Holy Eucharist), and it was free. (In the citystates, the rich had a lottery and whoever "won" it had to pay for the liturgy!) 

So the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse (the unveiling) is an unveiling to Christians on Earth of the Heavenly Liturgy. Now, the Liturgy on Earth is considered to be directly related to the Eternal Liturgy in Heaven, its mirror, as it were, with only a veil between them, and the Liturgy is "the control room of Heaven" as one author put it. And the past, present, and future are all decided upon via the events of the Heavenly Liturgy. That's because the Heavenly Liturgy is outside of time, outside of our "space-time continuum". And that is the ultimate solution to all the various schools of thought regarding the Apocalypse.

N.B.

And as a side note, this is why traditionally, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was "done up" in so grand a fashion (and still is in the Orthodox World): because it is a literal participation in the glorious, sumptous, miraculous and incredible Litury of Heaven. Turning the Mass into a Protestant service is antithetical to the entire Catholic idea of "Liturgy". 

So that's the background to see the "prophecies" of the Heaven Liturgy, they're not foreshadowing future events, but they are our past, present, and future as seen from Eternity.

An Préachán

The Importance of Understanding the Biblical Covenants

The Importance of Understanding the Biblical Covenants

Foreword

While much of Christianity is a Mysterium Fidei, such as the Most Holy Trinity, all the “mysteries” of it are believed because of the basic point historically attested to, i.e. that Christ rose from the dead. THAT in turn is not something one has to “accept” on “blind faith” but rather judge on the evidence. We have two sources for this evidence.

First, St. Paul in 1 Corinthians details in the 15 chapter the men who saw the Risen Christ, and said so. He names names: Peter, the Apostles, James “Brother of the Lord” and first bishop of Jerusalem, then 500 brethren, “most of who are still alive” when he wrote this epistle, about 55 A.D. (See here for details.) Then he writes that he himself, Paul (as Saul of Tarsus) met Jesus (on the road to Damascus). The 500 is interesting, as that was the size of the jury in Golden Age Athens when a man was on trial for his life (as with Socrates). So the classically educated Paul is asserting he has evidence that would pass muster in Periclean Athens! Also, he swears this is true, using a specific formula “I give you what I have been given”, which was a “I solemnly swear to tell the whole truth, nothing but the truth…” mechanism. He uses it again in the same Epistle in Chapter 11, in verse 25, where he ups it by writing, about the Real Presence in the Most Holy Eucharist, no less: “I give you what I was given by the Lord…”.

Second, the Holy Eucharist itself is a solemn oath¹: a blood oath on the Blood of God Himself, i.e. it is a sacrament, the most important of them, and generations of Catholic and Orthodox Christians have sworn, for 2,000 years now, on the Blood of God that Jesus was seen alive after His Crucifixion. Who can imagine a more solemn oath than that! Therefore, the number and nature of the witnesses, and the profoundly powerful oath, give us great confidence indeed that Jesus rose from the dead.

And one must realize that the Most Holy Eucharist is also the Seventh Covenant, the New Covenant, that God established with his people.

Essential Covenant Explanation

The whole of the Bible, and the whole of Christianity and Judaism (Islam rejects the following) is founded on God, the Creator God, the Absolute Being of the great philosophers (pagan, Jewish, Muslim, Christian), and not merely on His revelation to us, but His contractual agreements/treaties He has made with us. God makes Covenants, or treaties, contracts, with people! Islam absolutely rejects this. “Allah’s hand is not chained”(by contract or oath) says Surah 5:64 (it even damns the Jews for saying Allah makes covenants!)

So the whole of the Revelation, Old Testament and New, hangs on these Covenants, seven of them. The first is when God blesses His creation and rests on the Seventh Day, making it holy. If you read Genesis 1 and on into chapter 2, up to verse 4, where it says, “These are the generations of the Heavens and the Earth…”, that info all fits perfectly onto a cuneiform clay tablet, and the verse 4 of Chapter 2 is the signature line – God Himself has signed it, actually. In the first half of Genesis, there are a number of these “These are the generations” of Noah, and so on, whoever the previous chapter or two has been telling the story of. The authors of the tablet are careful to sign each one, so you know who told the story of the “generations” involved! This is called Toledoth (“Generation”), and thus the Toledoth/Generations theory.

After creation, God makes Covenants with Adam and Eve (Genesis 3), then Noah (Genesis 9), then Abraham (three separate but related ones, all considered to be counted as 1 Covenant: see Genesis 15, 17, and 22), then with Moses in Exodus 19. However, the Passover, enshrined in the Passover Seder, is the Old Testament/Covenant’s contract-affirming oath-swearing Covenant-renewal action – i.e. Jews are Jews when born of a Jewish woman, but become part of the Old Covenant proper when circumcised and then participate in the Passover – so the Passover is an essential part of this Mosaic Covenant, the central Covenant of the Old Testament series of six Covenants. This Mosaic Covenant is the Covenant that Christ replaces with the last Covenant, the Seventh, or more precisely fulfills in a final, astounding way via His Body and Blood. As He says, “I have come not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it.” – Matt 5:17, using Himself as the new Pascal Lamb in the Holy Eucharist. (Luke 22:20)

After Moses, which is the Fifth Covenant counting from the very first one, God makes a Sixth Covenant with David, one of His favorite people in all history. (1 Chronicles, 17) Notes that one needs to read the whole chapter; and 16 too; also in chapter 15 they sacrifice the animals for this Covenant, as there is simply NO worship of Yahweh without blood sacrifice: see Abel of Cain and Able; Noah’s and Abraham’s blood sacrifices, and of course the Pascal Lamb in Moses’ worship – Christ is the final blood-sacrifice of the Bible, the one fulfilling all the others, from Abel to Himself.

Finally, of course, we have Jesus of Nazareth’s sacrifice of Himself on the Cross, an integral element of the Holy Eucharist institution (begun the night before) is the means by which we are saved¹. (Read the whole of the 6^th Chapter of St. John’s Gospel: Jesus clearly is not speaking metaphorically, as Protestants claim.)

Therefore the whole of the Bible, Old and New Testaments, is hung on these Covenants. They are its intellectual and spiritual framework, the map connecting all the stories and the chart through the millennia of God’s interaction with us.

Neither the Bible itself or Christianity (nor Judaism for that matter), make sense until you understand this Covenantal Salvation History framework. And the important thing to notice, next to God making business contracts with us to begin with, is how God keeps expanding the reach of each covenant: He makes the Second Covenant with a couple, a pair of people; the next one with a family (Noah and his sons, etc.), then the next one with a tribe, Abraham (God changed Abram’s name to “Abraham” meaning Great Father), then with a nation, the People Israel under Moses’ command; and finally in the Old Testament, with King David, that the Kingship of the KINGDOM (the Israelite nation is now a Kingdom) of Israel shall never pass from David’s house – and finally the Seventh Covenant, with which the specific Covenants of the Old Testament are now expanded one final time, this time to ALL peoples EVERYWHERE, i.e. anyone who will accept Joshua, Yehoshu'a, for Who He claimed to be: God Himself. (John 8:48-59)

Notes:

1.

The Holy Eucharist as Blood Oath Sacrament is something most modern-day Catholics are ignorant of. As they are ignorant of how Salvation works. God’s Incarnation is central to our Salvation, and so much so we have to participate in that Incarnation to be saved. We do that through the New Covenant, which is the Blood Oath of the Holy Eucharist.

Basic Points

·    The Incarnation: Absolutely necessary and central to salvation

·    God becomes a human person, Jesus / Yeshu'a (Yehoshu'a: "Yahweh is salvation").

Why the Incarnation? Why did God have to become man? To make Infusion of Grace possible.

·  God’s Incarnation didn’t lower God so much as elevate human nature, in Christ, enabling…

·  "Theosis" (Divinization) which by grace – not by nature – is our incorporation into Christ, raising us up to participate in His Divinity (as St. Peter teaches in 2 Peter 1.4). Usually described in the Western Church as an Infusion of Grace, our natures are changed. Protestantism teaches Imputation of Grace: God assigns grace to us but doesn’t actually divinize or change our nature.

·  St. Athanasius: "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." (De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B) and [CCC 460]

·  St. Thomas Aquinas: "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods." (Opusc. 57, 1-4) [CCC 460]

·  This teaching is stated in many ways throughout the New Testament. Examples:

·  John 1:12 “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (Obviously, a new creation)

·  2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (Again, a new creation) 2 Peter 1:4 might well put it best; see also Romans, 6:4, 7:6, 12:2; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22-24; Colossians 3:8-12.

·  Two Old Testament examples: Isaiah 65:17; Ezekiel 36:25-26

·       Note: In general, Jesus seems to demand the impossible of “ordinary” humans. In Matthew 5, during the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives the Beatitudes, then says we are “salt of the earth” and “light of the world”, discusses how He has come not to do away with the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them. He discusses elevated behavior regarding anger, adultery, divorce, making oaths and not retaliating (“turn the other cheek”) and love our enemies. He ends with "You, therefore, must be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect." (5:48) That is something manifestly impossible for “normal” human beings to do.

The Sacraments: Fulfilment of the Covenants

Salvation “works” in us, as individuals through the sacraments, formal covenant oaths, by which we partake of the nature of God, in Christ (God’s grace is infused in us).

·       Baptism removes Original Sin, thus we’re free to…

·  Receive Christ in the Holy Eucharist…

And to keep this “New Creation” and grow in the Divine, we have Confession, a sacrament of vital importance because it restores us to our baptismal state.

Afterword:

What About the Jews, the Original Keepers of the Covenants:

1.    Once God makes a treaty, a contract, a covenant, He never breaks it. God is the same today, yesterday, and tomorrow. (Hebrews 13:8) Thus these Covenants are never abrogated or cancelled. Yet how to think about the Jews, who reject Christ as Messiah yet adhere to the first six Covenants?

2.    Historically, there were many Jews in Jesus time who fully accepted Him, as His Apostles did, and beyond them many others, such as those Jews converted at Pentecost. Then again, many Jews existed afterward who accepted Jesus as the Messiah, but not necessarily that He was co-equal to God; that Trinitarian idea took a while to develop and be formalized, something the Church did over some hundreds of years – though it must be understood that the very earliest Christians understood Jesus to be saying He was God (John 10:30), and this is the core idea necessary to the validity of His Sacrifice on the Cross and His institution of the Holy Eucharist, the New Covenant. Thus the Gospels are about two central ideas Jesus had: first, would people recognize Him for Who He was, and second, that people treated one another with agapé, caritas, the highest form of love. After many acts of caritas to Samaritans and Romans, and after many parables such as the Good Samaritan, He Himself gave them the ultimate and fundamental example of how to love.

3.    Concurrently to those Jews seeing Jesus as the Messiah, there were those who were Christians and who wanted the gentiles, the non-Jews, to become Jewish in order to be Christians. These were the Judaizers. They understood clearly that a split, a schism, between Christians and Jews was imminent, and wanted to avoid it; however, they were Saint Paul’s bête noire, and he lost his cool when he had to deal with them or their teaching as it affected his churches. This led to complications 1500 years later: Luther and Protestantism focuses on the idea of Sola Fide, that God saves through faith alone (faith understood as blind faith, an act of will, whether generated in oneself or given by God, as Calvin insisted). But the Pauline passages Protestants take as proof of this idea are all written by St. Paul when he was discussing Judaizers. In Judaism, one HAD to be circumcised to be part of the Covenant (then as now) and keep the kosher dietary laws, temple ritual, and so on. This St. Paul rejected vehemently, and it was in that context he wrote passages such as the famous Romans 3:28, the “verse that launched the Reformation”: i.e. “For you are saved by faith and not works of the law.” At the Council of Jerusalem, as recorded in Acts 15, the Judaizers’ ideas were formally rejected. From that time on, the Jewish element of Christianity began to die out as the two religions diverged from one another. Any Jewish Christian had to make the decision of decisions, the choice of choices: stay or go: be a believer in Christ and lose one’s Judaism, or keep the Jewish identity by cutting oneself off from the increasingly gentile Church.

4.    Yet in the Near Eastern Semitic lands, strong traces of this early Semitic Christianity survived, especially in the Syrian, Aramaic- (technically, Syriac) language bishoprics. It was, I suspect, some strain of this Semitic Christianity, certainly a fringe one that never accepted Jesus Christ as Son of God or the Holy Trinity, that eventually gave birth to Islam, the central tenet of which is to deny the Incarnation.

5.    Therefore, in the break with the Jews, the Church taught formally of one Covenant, the Mosaic one, that it was actually cancelled. Abrogated. Taken off-line. Scuttled. Of course, one can also see each Covenant as a fulfillment and enlargement of the ones preceding it, as Christ is the fulfillment of God’s promise to Eve that a descendant of hers would crush the dragon’s head, or that he’ll come in glory to end the world, not flood it again (as the Covenant with Noah was). Metaphorically, the Covenants are like a line of bricks in a wall: as each new one is made, the last of the old ones is no longer top of the wall, yet it is still essential in its historical place for supporting the wall’s later additions. For example, no one would think of “cancelling” Adam and Eve’s Covenant, or Noah’s, or the Davidic Covenant, that the kingship of Israel would pass for David’s House, for Joshua of Nazareth is a “Son of David”.

6.    So the Mosaic Covenant is “cancelled” in the sense of being subsumed and then flowering into the New Covenant, the sacrament of which is the Holy Eucharist. The Mosaic Covenant is a typology of the Holy Eucharist, and one of the six Covenantal foundations upon which the New Covenant stands.

7.    Today, Jews consist of many different groups and sects, of course, and they did so back in Jesus’ day; a large portion of Jews are “non-religious” as well. Yet none of them want to hear this idea of Catholicism’s, that their central religious rite is abrogated. But the Church is not being “kind” or “caring” by watering down the truth; and whether one insists on the old “cancelled” language or “subsumed and recreated in the Holy Eucharist,” participation in the Mosaic Covenant is simply no longer efficacious for salvation, except as a pointer to the New Covenant. (Jews would not consider “Messianic Jews” any longer Jewish; however, from a Catholic/Orthodox perspective, Messianic Jews are evangelical Protestants who reject for the Historical Church’s understanding of the Sacraments.)

8.    For Jews today, as of old, the Absolute Being God, the God of the great philosophers and the God of His revelation to them, is what He’s always been, their Tribal Deity. Non-Jew gentiles are not Jews and cannot have God in His fullness because they’re not part of the Abrahamic Covenant or the following two Covenants, though according to long-standing (early Medieval) Jewish teaching, they can be “Righteous Gentiles” if they keep the Noahidic (or Noachian or Noahide) Laws God gave to Noah (Genesis 9:4-6). By following these laws given to Noah, then, those descendants of Noah who are not part of the ensuing Abrahamic Covenant can attain Olam Haba (עולם הבא), the world to come for the reward of the righteous.

The Differences between Catholics and Protestants PART III Section 1

Catholics and Protestants Irreconcilable Differences

PART III How Salvation Works: The Irreconcilable Differences between Catholicism (and Orthodoxy) and Protestantism

In Commemoration of the 500th Anniversary of Protestantism

Section I

This third installment of Catholics and Protestants focuses on How Salvation Works. It involves Justification, how God “justifies” us, or “makes us right” with Him so that we can enter Heaven. Go here for a Part I of this series, the Introduction, for Part II, the Protestant issue with Church Authority (section 1; section 2 is here.)

• The essential question involved is: are our natures changed? Can we enter Heaven and be sinners? How’s it work?

Two Options
The Historical Church Option

• Catholicism and Orthodoxy (what I say for the Catholic position covers both) insists that one must be changed in one’s nature to enter Heaven. Sin cannot co-exist with God. So that’s why God became man and took on our Fallen Nature: He did so in order to transform it into a sinless perfect nature. N.B. Theosis the traditional term for this in Greek, and in Latin Divinization.
• For evidence of this in the New Testament, one simple option is to see the many New Testament refs to “a new creation in Christ”, such as 2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” 2 Peter 1:4 might well puts it best – but Protestants essentially only read St. Paul. So, see Romans, 6:4, 7:6, 12:2; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22-24; Colossians 3:8-12. (Also John 1:12 “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”

The Protestant Option

• Conversely, Luther answered no, Romans 3:28 shows that we’re all sinners and all of us “fall short of the glory of God. St. Paul then lists six Old Testament refs in Romans 3:10-18 to emphais this point. These are very important to look up in a minute, but they are: Psalms 14:3, 5:9, 140:3, 10:7, Isaiah 59:7-8 (the only non-Psalm) and 36:1. Therefore, Luther argued,  one is NOT changed in one’s nature. One can’t. The effects of Original Sin are irreversible. This is the “T” in the Dutch Calvinist “T.U.L.I.P”; i.e., “Total depravity.”
• Instead, Luther said, one enters Heaven like a manure pile covered with snow; i.e., God’s grace covering our wretched, sinful, fallen nature, which we are united to for eternity. Luther’s Latin tag for this was “Simul justus et peccator”, “simultaneously justified and a sinner”. (This slogan would have been incomprehensible to theologians before Luther, as it goes against the entire idea os Theosis, our necessary divinization, which was the reason God became man, to elevate human nature in himself to make Theosis possible.)
• Therefore, the Battle Cry of the Reformation was “Salvation by Faith Alone!” or “Sola Fide”.  Both meaning that only by having faith in God are we “saved” or “justified”. It’s a legal action God takes with us. God imputes or assigns righteousness to us because of His Son’s death on the Cross, rather causing a metaphysical change in our natures.
• The “verse that launched the Reformation” was Romans 3:28 “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.” (KJV, and for the “New Living Translation: “So we are made right with God through faith and not by obeying the law.” The Douay-Rheims Bible: “For we account a man to be justified by faith, without the works of the law.”

That’s it. One might say, “Hey, wait a minute! THAT’S it? Tens of thousands killed and maimed and the faith of millions wracked, if not destroyed, and Western culture and civilization torn to shreds (and if nothing else, an incalculable loss for art and our very idea of art) for this?

Yep.

A lot of blood has been spilt over it, and lot of loved ones forever estranged from each other over it. It’s one of the great tragedies of the human race that so much disaster should come from the misunderstandings of a few hot-shot, up-and-coming intellectuals about a few Biblical passages. For a misunderstanding it was, caused in part by something innocuous: the numbering of chapters and verses in the Bible and how that development resulted in a change in how the Bible was read. (Which I’ll explain in more detail in Section II.)

But the effect on the Christian Church seems to have been permanent.

Now, even today, this difference in how Catholics and Protestants see how Salvation works is elemental, foundational, and it takes up all the air in the room, all the inches in the column. If you’ve ever watched a debate between Catholics and Protestants, this is the true bone of contention, with endless quotes from St. Paul to bolster the Protestant position. (Martin Luther said of him that “St. Paul's voice is the voice of the divine majesty.” Yeah, and Christ’s wasn’t? No, because of Matthew 25:31-46.) However, it is not the most important difference between the two sides of Christianity, and once one understands where St. Paul is actually coming from, this most contentious of arguments evaporates into nothing.

It truly does.

That’s hard to believe, I know.

But let's see why this is so in Section 2.

An Préachán

Part II Catholic and Protestant Differences Section II

PART II Section II
A More Detailed Background

For those who might desire more detail than the PART II Section I Overview:

Johann Eck (a Dominican friar) debated Martin Luther (and others) during the famous (and wide-ranging) Leipzig Debate in June and July of 1519. Luther had started the Reformation in 1517 (if we set aside the story of Jan Hus in Bohemia 100 years before 1517) by nailing his 95 Theses on a church door on 31 October 1517, in Wittenberg, Saxony. (Initially, of course, he had no idea how far it all would go;  but he was certainly a “man on a mission”.)

Most Protestants today probably never heard of Luther, though his name has been in the news because of the 500-year anniversary. But then, most "Protestants" wouldn't call themselves that, just "Christians". So in a sense, going into detail about Martin Luther is flogging a dead horse, one that isn't even there. But for the curious, I'll relate a few facts about him. He's sort of the King Lear of the Protestant Reformation, so important in its beginning, colorful, powerful, full of bombast, yet cast aside by smarter men (Zwingli first, then Calvin) and finally left behind by the tides.

In any event, during the course of this Leipzig debate, Luther admitted he would have to accept the Bible over a Church Council.

• At that moment I would think a number of gasps would have been heard from every corner of the room.
• Obviously, if you lay a Bible on the desk in front of you, it won’t open of itself and begin teaching you in a voice of its own. 
• Even if you open it and prod it a bit, it will just lie there. 
• Someone has to actually READ it and draw their own conclusions, or read it with associated learning materials containing his own denomination’s take on what the Bible would speak about if it could.

So by his assertion, did not Luther clearly set himself against a parliament of learned clergymen? (And one hopes an assembly of wise ones, but at least as a group having a collective understanding and insight, as any congress would).

• You see the hubris? 
• It’s actually staggering. 
• Martin Luther knew better than a Council with members from all sorts of backgrounds and indeed, from different nations, collectively possessing an extremely wide-ranging experience “skill set” regarding the Christian Faith. 
• Yet such a senate of elders could not collectively be smarter than he himself, Martin Luther, a 36-year-old academic who had been trained in a small, in-bred academic circle in two provincial universities in Thuringia and what is now Saxony-Anhalt.

It has to be one of the most hubristic statements ever made.

And as the apple never falls very far from the tree, so Protestantism asserts any individual can read the Bible for himself and chart his own Salvation course. Or at least Luther talked that up, but soon found it didn’t work very well. We’ll discuss that more in Part III, the section on the Bible. Here I’ll just point out the curious fact that Protestant Bible Societies have pushed Bibles on all sorts of folks, even leaving them in motel rooms (as do the Gideons, a group I myself am thankful for). Yet most folks getting these Bibles are not very educated in such a field as Biblical Studies. So it’s an odd thing to do when you consider that learned Protestants themselves have recourse to Protestant Bible commentaries, of which many have been published. They don’t push the commentaries, though, on the people who would need them most. Interesting.

• Compare that attitude to Romans 10:15 “How then shall they call on him, in whom they have not believed? Or how shall they believe him, of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear, without a preacher?” Or that great scene in Acts 8, (Acts 8:31 ‘"How can I," he said, "unless someone guides me?" And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.”)

Significance

Luther’s astoundingly arrogant claim is where things get complicated. The Holy Bible is a wide selection of books, a portable library, and this library's volumes were written over thousands of years by a people living quite differently than people do today.

• So, naturally enough, some of its books are easier to read and understand than others, and among the New Testament authors, you also have the same reality. 
• St. Paul is hard-to-read, often leaving one clueless, and often seemingly contradicting himself (much to the delight of atheists in debate). 
• St. James is easy to read; couldn’t be easier. Yet I’ve read exegesis (Biblical commentary and explanation) done by Lutherans that stand James on his head. (And quite plausibly, too; I mean, they seem to make a good case for themselves, until you go back and read James himself again. The effect is startling.)

Now, Luther was a 34 in 1517 (his birthday was November 10), having studied theology and advancing through the academic ranks in about 7 years (he had earlier briefly studied to be a lawyer, and all his early higher education was at Erfurt, a city worth visiting today, both for its Lutheran heritage and the fact it is one of the best preserved medieval towns in Germany). He had begun to teach theology in 1508 (age 25) and made chair of the theology department of the newly established Wittenberg University in 1512 (age 29). These ages and dates of Luther are important here because they show how young he was and how much of a total academic he was. In other words, as an Augustinian friar never removed from the Cloister, Luther had no pastoral experience, living in a parish and dealing with everyday people. Nor, beside a short trip to Rome, did he travel much. So, as they didn’t have the Internet in those days, Luther’s world was a bit small. (Today his area of Germany makes up the states of Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt.)

Indeed, the medieval University of Erfurt (closed in 1816 by the Prussians and reopened in 1994 after German re-unification), was in Luther’s young days a center of Nominalism, a late medieval school of thought that stressed God as essentially unknowable, remote, and imperious. (Sort of like the Islamic conception of Allah, actually; the idea was to stress the Sovereignty of God, something Calvin would become famous for.)

• Luther embraced Nominalism (which rejected Aristotle – and thus Thomas Aquinas – and he, Luther, used to say that William of Occam, a major 14th century Nominalist, was his master teacher. 
• It’s more than fair to say Herr Doctor Martin’s education was very one-sided.

Biblical Background to the Church’s Authority

Ironically enough for “Bible-only Christians”, as noted in Section one of this Part II of the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, the Living Magisterium predates the actual New Testament. In Acts of the Apostles, chapter 15, St. Luke records the Council of Jerusalem. This council met around 50 A.D. and before the New Testament was written. (St. Matthew might well have written his earliest version of his Gospel by then, in either Aramaic or Hebrew, and St. Paul probably had begun writing, as well.)

• But before the Council of Jerusalem, while Jesus was still on Earth, He had clearly mandated a hierarchical system. He had chosen 12 Apostles, which not only mirrored the 12 tribes of Israel, but also the ancient Israelite kings, who often had 12 councilors (again representing the 12 tribes). 
• Christ also signaled out three men of the Apostles, Peter, James and his brother John. They were at the raising of Jairus’s daughter (Mark 5:37, etc.) and at Christ’s Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1–8, Mark 9:2–8, Luke 9:28–36) and the Second Epistle of Peter refer to the latter (2 Peter 1:16–18) as perhaps does the first chapter of the Gospel of John (John 1:14).
• Also, beyond the Twelve, there were a group of Seventy that St. Luke mentions; he might have been on of them (see Luke 10).

Now, the famous scene in Matthew, where in the region of Caesarea Philippi, Jesus gives Peter the Keys of the Kingdom in Matthew 16:17-19, every Jew present, and every Jew who heard of it later, would recognize Jesus as acting like an ancient Israelite king. Those kings had a special advisor who was given the keys of the palace and thus became a Grand Vizier or prime minister. Jesus actions could be taken – by the Jews who knew the old stories – that Peter was being given a very special place, indeed. A unique one.

• Read Isaiah 22, especially the verses 21-23, particularly verse 22, “And I will lay the key of the house of David upon his shoulder: and he shall open, and none shall shut: and he shall shut, and none shall open.”

Or simply read through St. Paul’s writings with an eye toward how often the Apostle himself asserts his own authority. It’s on every page, almost every sentence. Galatians 2:9 “And when they had known the grace that was given to me, James and Cephas (Peter) and John, who seemed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship: that we should go unto the Gentiles, and they unto the circumcision…”.

• He, Paul, has AUTHORITY, and so do the others, Peter, James, John – they’re recognized as leaders of the Church, indeed, overseers, or episkopos – and their recognition of Paul reinforces him authority. They are the Church’s overseers, or (singular) episkopos. 
• Our English word for episkopos is “bishop”.

Or see St. John in his Gospel, in Chapter 20:21-23, where he writes, ‘…Again Jesus said to them, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent Me, so also I am sending you.” When He had said this, He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you withhold forgiveness from anyone, it is withheld.”’

• All these passages point to the Biblically-based fact that the early Church had a hierarchy, and was understood by everyone in the Church to have a hierarchy, one that had Authority. This is even proven by St. Paul’s boasting how he stood up to Peter and James.

Throughout the early Church, then, the episkopos of each city would refer back to the chain of bishops before him, going back to an Apostle. When the Gnostics disputed Church teaching, the Catholics, or those of the “Universal” Church (Catholic means universal) would say, “Our bishop is so-and-so, who succeeded Bishop Such-and-such, who followed Bishop X who was a student of the Apostle John (or Peter, or whomever). Where is your bishop list back to the Founder? By what right do YOU teach what the Faith is?”

• And of course they couldn’t argue that.

In the same way, one could argue with Protestants: “Where do YOU get your Authority from? What’s the line of YOUR bishops?”

But there of course the whole Protestant Project falls apart. It has no such history. It's all individuals, each believing what he will (sort of like Progressive Catholics, actually!). Against this ecclesial corporate history it does have arguments, ranging from “You’re wrong! Peter and James and the rest with just buddies or relatives of Jesus! He set up no organized body!” to the older, long-standing, “Well, Jesus set up the Church but then came the Great Apostasy, when everyone fell away from the Faith, except for a minority who are nameless but to God.”

In the end, in our current state of civilizational crisis, all this might seem too trivial to matter. But knowledge is a good in itself, true knowledge. And we're having a civilzation crisis precisely because people don't know this information.

An Préachán

Catholicism and Protestantism's Irreconcilable Differences: Five Aspects to Discus

Catholicism and Protestantism: Five Aspects to Discus

The Irreconcilable differences between Protestantism and Catholicism: INTRODUCTION

Index

This is the Introduction to this series.

For Part II, section 1, the issue of Authority, click here.

For Part II, section 2, click here.

For Part III, How Salvation Works, click here.

For Part III, section 2, click here.

Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, the highly respected scholar who passed away in 2006, was a life-long Lutheran (his parents were Lutherans) till in his last decade he converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Known as a prolific author, Church historian, and liturgical expert, he had a knack for coming up with surprising images. One such was when he wrote to describe the Protestantism as a baby in the arms of its Catholic Church mother. Kind of arresting, that image. (Maybe just a bit too Stephen King, actually.) I grew up with Protestants and would never have thought of it. Certainly it reminds me of King Lear’s famous line, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.”

Differences

Different children of one mother, Protestant churches – whether those founded at the time of the Reformation or those ‘calved off” (like clouds) from those first Protestant churches, (generation upon generation of calving going on, by now, 500 years of it) – are all quite different from one another. Even so, however, all of them have certain basic “genetic traits” in common, as it were.

Therefore, five basic and completely irreconcilable differences between Catholicism and Protestantism exist, and these are found throughout the Protestant “metastasisophoria”. And while individual people of both can and do convert back and forth from one to the other (and even, sometimes, back again) the churches themselves cannot negotiate away (via modern ecumenicalism) these differences. They’re foundational. Baked into the cake. Mixed in the mortar.

The Differences are…

• First Point of Difference: Authority. What is the nature of Authority in Christian life? Who has it? The Church? Which church, or what individuals or groups within which church, and so on.
• Second Point of Difference: How Salvation Works. This difference arises from the first, as Martin Luther (and the other early Reformers) came up with novel ideas about how Salvation worked, and as the Church authorities rejected them, the Reformers in turn then broke with the Church in order to keep their own ideas “in play”.
• Third Point of Difference: How the Bible Is Read. Reading the Bible didn’t produce the crisis with Authority and the new ideas on Salvation, as one might think from 500 years of Protestant propaganda. Instead, the crisis in Authority resulted as a consequence of the new ideas; i.e., Luther read the Bible in such a way as to have it validate his own already-formed ideas about how Salvation works, rather than he himself somehow discovering how Salvation worked “locked away” or “hidden” in the Bible. (Protestants would strenuously disagree with this, as their whole program relies on it, but more more on that in the appropriate place.)
• Fourth Point of Difference: Church. What is it? What’s it for? Is it visible or invisible, an institution in history or a mystical body that history doesn’t record, but can only hint at.
• Fifth Point of Difference: The Rate of Change. Since its inception, Protestantism has been on an arc of change, dynamic, far-springing, ever-leaping change that steadily takes if farther and farther away from its Mother, Catholicism; and in all of its history, no Protestant Church ever evolved backward toward Catholicism, but always farther and farther away from it. By its very nature, then, it is irreconcilable with a Faith that is built upon a Rock, Unchanging, although ever manifesting itself anew in each age it finds itself in, but never changing doctrine, belief, or even (largely) its worship.

The Modern Mess Up
Now, that fifth point raises a word of caution, a warning, a caveat. And this is important, dear Reader.

• The Catholic heresy known as Modernism currently dominates the Holy Mother Church, and Pope Francis is its apogee. 
• But Modernism began among Catholic intellectuals in the later 19th century and it was energized and “idea-ized” by Protestantism, specifically the mid-19th century Protestant Tübingen School – and it consisted in large part of a relaxation of the Church’s perennially strict moral teachings – and the attempts to explain why these teachings could be changed.
• Protestantism can be said in general to have started out with the traditionally morally strict teachings, but from its beginning weakened them (Henry VIII being a classic example, or Luther’s infamous support for Phillip of Hesse, who wanted to marry one woman while still being married to another).

Also, and quite necessary for Modernism, the 19th century came saw the high tide of what’s called Higher Biblical Criticism, which was also a Protestant development (look up Historical Criticism or Adolf Harnack if you want) because Protestantism broke with the Church’s traditional interpretations of the Bible, rejecting the teaching authority of both the Living Magisterium and Sacred Tradition.

• But by doing so, the Protestants basically deflated the Bible as the sole rule of Faith for Protestants. 
• The Bible became a flat tire. 
• It could no longer carry the weight of Protestant belief. 
• Thus many “fundamentalist” churches were born; i.e., churches that rejected the more formal, more “educated” Protestantism because of its rejection of the Bible. Pentecostalism also developed at this time – the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th – and partly for the same reason. In either case, “Blind Faith” became the rule for these Churches.

Now, the Catholic Church formally rejected the attempts of Catholic Modernists to import all this unwanted Faith-killing misery into Mother Church, culminating in 1907 with several formal “smack-downs” of Modernism by Pope St. Pius X. But the movement, like various denizens of the order of Blattodea, survived “underground” to fight another day. In fact, they survived to take over the Church herself, beginning with the Second Vatican Council and culminating with Bergoglio.

So I’m writing here about Protestantism from a Catholic Traditionalist perspective. Jorge Bergoglio would send me in for a whipping, if not excommunication. But like Herod (“that fox”), Bergi’s days are numbered.

So in the next installment of this thread, I’ll discuss the Authority issue.

An Préachán

The Church's Constitutional System and the Modernist War Against It

(Partly from a blog post I wrote for OnePeterFive)

We live in a time of Ecclesiastical troubles: The Church's system isn't working, clearly, but what is it, that system, exactly?

The Catholic Church's "constitution" is a three-legged support system, as is the U.S. Constitution's, curiously, except the U.S. Constitution stipulates the three supports of government are specifically designed to counter-balance each other, to be a self-correcting mechanism, whereas the Church's three supports: Holy Writ, Sacred Tradition, and the living Magisterium, are supposed to be MUTUALLY SUPPORTIVE.

Curiously enough, it is plain from the New Testament that the living Magisterium is the oldest of the three: what else is the Council of Jerusalem in Acts except the living Magisterium of that day meeting to decide an important issue? Then came Holy Scripture, written mostly by VIP's in the initial Magisterium: two epistles by St. Peter, head of the Apostles and Christ's Prime Minister of the New Israel (and one gospel by his secretary and amanuensis, John Mark, later bishop of the 2nd largest city of the empire, Alexandria), one by St. James, bishop and presider at the Jerusalem Council, which was held in his city, and the lion's share of the NT books were of course written by St. Paul, another VIP at the Council.

     Rembrandt's Paul the Apostle

It always dumbfounds me – and I grew up among Protestants, mostly rural Methodists and Lutherans – that Protestants just don't get this; apparently Baptists believe as a matter of essential Baptist dogma (haha, BAPTISTS having DOGMA? But they DO!) that the various attendees at the Council were just buddies and followers (or relatives) of the departed Jesus, and had no hierarchy in any sort of actual institutional "Church". But whatever. I make this point because nothing the current pope and the Modernists do is so shocking to me (I mean, what would one EXPECT Modernists to do but such stuff, right?) as how Protestants can call themselves Bible Christians and NOT get this.

Sacred Tradition came last, and is the "Constitutional Case Law) of the Magisterium living the Biblical teachings out over 2,000 years. The difference is: whereas the U.S. Supreme Court is not bound by case law (which is contrary to the original English law system ) the Magisterium IS bound by Sacred Tradition (and the Bible as understood via the decisions of past Magisteriums, i.e., Sacred Tradition).

The whole thing operates as a mutual support system. The living Magisterium has tons of "case law" to guide it and the pope has essentially carte blanc authority to legislate and enforce to support the Bible and Tradition. But naturally, were he to depart from supporting the other two legs of authority, then HIS authority evaporates: oh, he's still "pope" until some validly appoint Council removes him, but who would listen to or trust him?

Now first, I need to talk a little bit in political terms. Catholics (and others) often say they don't want politics and religion mixed, but here I am just talking about the nature of the U.S. Constitution, its Three Branches of Government, and not "politics" per se.

What we're dealing with today in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church is that a specialized party (acting very much indeed like a political faction or party – and remember James Madison, author of the U.S. Constitution, LOATHED such!) has been working assiduously for over 100 years now to overturn the entire system. These are the Modernists, so called, also known today as Progressives. They organized originally to try to come up with a solution to a collapse of the Faith in Europe. The Intellectuals left Christianity (Prot or Catholic) in the 18th century, the working masses left if – or began to – in the 19th century for the new Christian heresy of Socialism. And then at the end of the 19th century, the middle classes began to show signs that they were leaving, too; i.e., the lose morals and "free thinking" and "Bohemian living" of the "Gay Nineties" was only put on hiatus by "The Great War" and reappeared in in the 1920s. Again on hiatus because of Fascism and Communism and World War II, it began again in the 1950s (Beatniks) and finally came into full flower in the infamous 1960s.

The Modernist solution to all this was to relax the moral teachings, their idea being that Christianity's moral strictures (Catholic or Protestant, but especially Catholic, which of course wouldn't allow divorce, etc.) was too strict for "Modern Man". They had various roots, often Protestant ones, such as the Tübingen School during the mid-19th century. Their ideas and personalities included:

• Easing off on traditional morals. "Relativism" is a key word to understand their thinking (and remember that Benedict 16 condemned the "Dictatorship of Relativism" before he was forced out of office). "Relativism will keep people in church!" they essentially said. 
• But naturally, to "ease off" on morals, one had to argue for relativism; i.e., everything is relative. To do that, they then had to do a lot of tinkering with the Church's authority structure and the roots of the Church in its origin; basically, all this was soon seen by the hierarchy as quite dangerous, as it could unravel the whole system. 
• If one were to "ease off" on the morals, (relatively, if I may say it that way), for example, then one would have to "reinterpret" Sacred Scripture, and to reinterpret Sacred Scripture, one would have to negate, undo, and generally rewrite Church Tradition! It all would just avalanche out of control, in other words.  
• Charles Darwin was an essential but indirect influence, naturally enough, because science seemed to be saying we were evolved from lower forms, and if so, then we could certainly "evolve" further and further: there could be no "baseline".
• Adolf von Harnack (1851 – 1930) a liberal German Lutheran, was an influence.
• His contemporary, Louis Duchesne (1843 – 1922), a Breton priest, polymath (linguist, archaeologist, historian, etc.) helped to influence the Modernists, and his Early History of the Christian Church was put on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1912. Duchesne was one influence on...
• Alfred Loisy (1857 - 1940) who is considered a founder of the Modernists, and who argued Scriptural elements might be only metaphorically true, not literally true (a Baptist friend is always telling me Catholics read Biblical metaphor literally, for example), and
• The Jesuit-influenced Bollandists, who were refounded about 1845: their research led to a lot of Vatican II ideas on the liturgy (though subsequent scholarship cast doubts on much of their work, Pope Francis still even today finds the time to praise them). 
• Another Jesuit, the Dubliner George Tyrrell (1861 – 1909), is an interesting and sad case of a Modernist, and who sort of encapsulates the whole movement, as it were.

So Modernism had a lot of intellectuals involved in it. But Leo XIII worked to counter it, and Pius X tried to blast is out of existence in 1907. In Lamentabili Sane Exitu of that year (the finely phrased "A Lamentable Departure Indeed"), His Holiness condemned 65 Modernist ideas, and in his famous encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis (or "Feeding the Lord's Flock"), he described Modernism as the "synthesis of all heresies". Then he promulgated Sacrorum antistitum, an anti-Modernist oath all clerics had to take, and which of course the "spirit of Vatican II" abolished in 1967 when the Holy Office of that time, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) rescinded it. (Priests ordained in the Trad Orders often take it voluntarily, however.)

The next pope, Benedict XV, had his hands full because of WWI, and it wore him out. Pius XI, an exemplary pope, tried to combat both Communism and Fascism. So it was the next pope after him, Pius XII, who, after WWII, tried to put the brakes on some budding Modernist-type theologians, such as Henri de Lubac, by putting some of his writings on the Index. It pretty much tells you all you need to know that John Paul II made de Lubac a cardinal!

After that, a series of weak popes simply didn't understand what they were dealing with; however, Pius XII started the earthquake by letting some "liturgical reformers", including the infamous devotee of Ba'al (Hannibal) Bugnini loose in the Vatican's "Deep State"; also, Pius didn't assiduously appoint orthodox, young, highly intelligent cardinals during the last decade of his life: thus, when the Conclave that met in October 1958 to vote on his successor, its cardinals had a very small pool to choose from.

With that, the ball began rolling down the bowling alley toward the long-standing pins of Catholic dogma. "Cry havoc! And let slip the Modernists of War!"

1. Starting with poor John 23, who was honestly too old and not vigorous enough to manage a Council, so the Modernists organized and simply took it from him (this is a well-known, exhaustively researched bit of history, btw)...
2. Then the "Weeping Pope Hamlet" Paul 6, who was trying to be a supporter of the Progs but ultimately horrified at where they wanted to go...
3. Then poor Albino Luciani, who might well have died of fright. 
4. Karol Wojtyla was an amazing Nazi-era survivor and hero against Communism, a wonderful world evangelizer but a prelate who steadfastly held to Vat 2 principles – which were innately bad (the foundational thesis of all Traditionalists is that whatever the merits of Vatican II's documents, their over-all effect and many of their specific teachings are, sadly, actually bad doctrines and need to be excised). Because of JPII's reliance on Vat2, then, and unavoidably – since they're teachings are defective, resulted in his downfall – they left him a very bad Church manager because he "didn't get it"; i.e., I mean that while occasionally he appointed a good bishop, he also steadfastly appointed Progressive Modernists to important sees (can anyone say Cardinal Archbishop Bergoglio? I once read where Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz told JPII to his face that he was appointing bad bishops!) The sex scandal, which grew on JPII's watch, and finally the infamous, depraved debacle of the Legionnaires of Christ, killed him. 
5. And finally we had the deeply intelligent and subtle theologian, Josef Ratzinger. In his early days, he was an ardent Vat2 reformer, but of the "milder" Cummunio faction (along with Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, and thus an enemy of the rival "Terminator reformer school" known as the Concilium coven...er, school (these two groups were named for competing theological journals that published the papers of the two factions) that consisted of that old fornicator Karl Rahner, and Edward Schillebeeckx, and the infamously hyper-boring Hans Küng. 

So, to sum up: I think Pope Benedict 16 knew VERY well what was going on, but the Modernists' long-term War of Position (i.e., working incrementally and unnoticed to put their own supporters in important places in the hierarchy) left him in a strategically bad place: when they went to an open War of Maneuver against him (and I firmly believe they did so with Obama's help), they brought him down.
I pray that understanding this past and present background can, along with the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, help us to deal as effectively as we can with this ecclesiastical mess we find ourselves in.

An Préachán