Answer to Mike about "Wacky goings-on within the Church"

Hi Mike,

You write:

As I read about all this wacky goings-on within the Church, I cannot help but recall the words from Matthew 16 where Jesus says to Peter, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."  Seems to be quite a promise.  Gotta believe that Jesus knew what he was talking about. 

MIKE

I've been thinking how to answer this one, Michael. Three options come to mind.

I suppose Option 1 is to get on the Vat2 Church Bandwagon, i.e., become a Progressive Modernist oneself. They're in power now, and so many in the hierarchy, whatever their personals beliefs, are now "out and proud" pro-Gay Progressives. They're weather vanes, they blow which way the wind blows.

Option 1 stinks, of course. Anyone who really believes the religion, accepts it as Divine Revelation, can't join The Church of What's Happening Now. That's an act of non-belief in itself.

Option 2 is to cry up, "To your tents, O Israel!" as Jeroboam did in King Rehoboam's day. It has lots of drama, but it didn't work out so well for the Northern Kingdom, soon conquered by sin, unbelief, and scattered to the four winds by the Assyrians. That's the Protestant option -- and there are now 20,000 Protestant denominations. They scattered. A cacophony. There's also cacophony on the Orthodox side of things (big "O" crowd, not those in Communion with Rome); they are hopelessly divided along linguistic and national lines, and that's the looming fate of the mainstream Western Church that doesn't return to the Latin Mass. (This "nationalization" is something that can't be reversed, really, except by a "conversion" to the TLM!)

So, what's behind Door Number 3?

Recently, to the extent I pay attention to religious sites, I look a good bit at OnePeterFive and a handful of others. Not much chance recently to blog anything. But it is clear from what I read that "Conservative" Catholics, those Middle-of-the-Roaders (aka Magisterium Catholics) who tend toward orthodoxy -- probably the actual majority of Catholics in the world -- are pretty much at the end of their rope. Hence my comments about Robert Royal and Fr. Murray. Another season or two of The Bergoglio Show and they'll become Hindu Kanwariyas, making their pilgrimage to the Ganges, singing to Shiva.

As a "Trad" Catholic, I don't really care too much about the Progressive (Left-Wing) Catholics; they're not Catholic any more, except in their own minds, sort of like Mormons consider themselves "Christian". One can, after all, only walk so far out on the plank before one falls into the sea. Deny you've fallen into water, deny you're drowning: fine; but one's denials don't change reality.

Of course I feel very sorry for the Magisteriums. Their bishops are either aiders and abetters in the Gay / Modernist / Secularist takeover of the Church, or they are somnolent zombies. (The left-tending Magisteriums are very similar to the Progressives, and seem unable to "read the signs of the times." Or perhaps they've given up reading; theirs is a "feel good" faith!)

Zombie bishops: take the U.S. bishop's recent vote on June 12th to (what, exactly? Endorse? Accept? Ratify? -- classic Vat2 "creative ambiguity!) Bergoglio's condemnation of the Death Penalty, for example: they voted 194 to 8 to favor Bergi's heresy, with three abstaining. The Catechism will be "reformulated".

Now, take note that the bishops use a secret ballot, so we cannot know their names! We don't know who the eight orthodox ones are, though perhaps we can guess. But aside the heresy the 194 are embracing, consider that we have, in effect, a "faceless bureaucracy" voting to do X, Y, and Z, and no actual individual is responsible. A bishop is God-on-earth to his diocese, God's vicar, His stand-in, God's direct representative, accountable on Earth (as it is currently sent up) only to the pope, who as top bishop (he's not consecrated pope, but elected; it is a juridical-executive position as God's vicar general on Earth, as it were) and court of final appeal. In that capacity, a pope can remove or discipline a bishop. Over the past century or so, the Vatican has come to be the sole appointer of bishops, too. The episcopal bench used to be locally elected (by Cathedral chapters) and only affirmed by Rome when the news eventually got to Rome. Occasionally a pope would appoint a bishop directly, but that was usually an archbishop. By the time the first trans-Atlantic cables were laid (mid-19th century), the pope at that time began to assume "up close and personal" control of bishops (he of Vatican I fame, Pio Nono).

Speaking of archbishops, the archbishops currently have some small role to play today in lower bishops' Church discipline, too, but the archbishops should be the ones directly answerable to the pope, and responsible for managing their suffragan bishops -- there are over 5000 bishops in the world, and that's far too many for the Vatican to directly manage. It used to be that the pope of the time would send a pallium to a local bishop (or include the man with the pallium!) to manage a nation's bishops, to be the pope's man-on-the-scene, the archbishop. The buck always stopped at the archbishop -- though on very rare occasions it might be passed to Rome. But as it is now, there's just no actual responsibility for overseeing the overseers (the definition of episkopoi) except these faceless national bishop conferences and ultimately the faceless Vatican bureau responsible for bishops. All these insulate the pope from direct responsibility.

So, while these national bishops' conferences are not the actual Church rulers in each country in terms of God-ordained responsibility, yet, for all intents and purposes, they actually govern the national Churches of each nation! AND they're essentially anonymous! Say you are one of the eight against the 194 (sort of like the Seven Against Thebes) -- you oppose the heretical pope (for heretic Bergoglio is, as he himself evinces about every time he opens his mouth, as with this Amazon synod ) -- but now you're stuck with going against your conscience because of some anonymous vote!

Needless to say, were I a bishop, I would resign from the bishop conference and explain why, and in effect dare the bureaucrats (in the national bishop conference or Rome) to remove me! All that garbage is yet another rotten fruit of the Animus of Vatican II. But it is running the Church -- into the grave.

Of course, none of them have that kind of chutzpah, if I may use that word.

So were does that leave us? What's behind Door Number Three. The Gates of Hell will not prevail, as Matthew says, but then Scripture is written on many levels, like a Shakespeare play. And it raises the question: What is the Church? The old answer is the faithful laity of the bishops who are in Communion with the pope in Rome. But what happens when the pope is a heretic? It is a Scylla and Charybdis situation: you can't be Catholic and not be in Communion with the pope and yet you can't be in Communion with a heretic.

What to do with a heretic pope? Can anything be done? The question has been asked in the past and various saints and theologians have put forward various answers, but the bottom-line is we have to wait it out, to let God Himself take care of it. We just need to be prayerful and suffering. Suffering is at the core of the Faith, so suffer, offer it up. No actual mechanism exists to judge a sitting pope, after all. Some writers I like say Bergoglio is a "severe mercy" God has afflicted us with, in order to trash out and drive a stake through the unquiet corpse that is the Vatican II Church. That's probably true. Even Satan himself, the top (lowest?) guy, does God's will, much against Satan's will and much to his eternal chagrin. And it is a trope of Greek tragedy that the king who acts to prevent a prophecy from coming true, well, in that very act he brings about the circumstances that eventuate the prophecy!

The Door Three option isn't purely passive, either. We can certainly stop funding the dying Vatican II Church, taking care only of our local orthodox priests and monastic communities. (This is what mostly happens today -- the mainstream Church lives off of U.S. government money given out for "refugees".) That's hard to do in any event because Pope Plutarco Elías Calles will unleash his gay Federalis against them at any time. True, we've yet to rise up in a La Cristiada revolución against Pope Callous Calles Bergoglio, but it's coming, in God's good time. (What we really need is a General Enrique Gorostieta, of course.) "Viva Christo Rey!" we should all be saying, as the Cristeros shouted when they shot up the Federalis down in Old Mexico. Of course, the mainstream Church betrayed them, then. But now it has betrayed itself. 

The Bottom Line

All we can do is try to live like Catholics ought to live -- as any good Christian ought to live, whatever their perception of what "Church" is: i.e., if you live by the Gospels, you should know that The Figure therein -- Yehoshu'a, Joshua of Nazareth, is interested in primarily two things: how we treat one another, A, and B, whether we recognize Him. "Be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect", said Joshua of Nazareth (Matthew 5:18). In the Historical Church (Catholicism and the Orthodoxies) that means baptism and then Holy Communion, by which we "take on Christ", "put on Christ" become "new creations in Christ" (St. Paul used various ways to say this). Protestantism rejects the Holy Eucharist being God Himself and thus deletes the possibility of this Transformation/Divinization in Christ, what the Greeks call Theosis. For Protestants, as Luther taught, we can't be perfect and are manure piles covered with God's grace, entering Heaven shining outside but reeking of filth within. But that is clearly NOT what the New Testament teaches, and the New Testament is not the 27 books of the Bible Christians use, but the Holy Eucharist itself, the Seventh Covenant, the one God made with Himself, Father and Son, through Himself, the Holy Spirit.

The Most Holy Lord God of Hosts would not pour Himself into walking manure piles.

This "be perfect as your Heavenly Father is" is also NOT what Jorge Bergoglio teaches -- to the extent he's revealed his mind on this, it is Lutheran, and how can that be surprising since Modernism developed in Lutheran 19th century Germany? Modernism is essentially Lutheran: we're incapable of fulfilling Matthew 5:18, so "sin boldly, Philip," as Luther wrote Melanchthon. Isn't that exactly what Pope Francis teachers? Anyone who teaches otherwise, he says, is a Pharisee.

Whatever. It's a crazy world. Always was. Hold on, Mike. The krill of the Modernists have been swallowed by the humpbacked whale and we orthodox minority are like Marlin and Dori, the fish in Finding Nemo, about to be blown out through the whale's blow spout as the krill remain behind to be digested.

Well, something intestinal like that! :D

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

Why don't Cardinal Burke and the surviving Dubia Cardinals Issue a Formal Correct of Pope Francis?

There's been a LOT of speculation on when the Dubia Cardinals will issue a formal correction to Jorge Bergoglio. Lifesitenews has this:

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/cardinal-burke-heres-what-the-formal-correction-of-pope-francis-will-look-l

And Onepeterfive also has an article on it, but many of the bloggers there have had enough of "talk". They doubt the "Dubia Brothers" will do anything at all, now.

As I wrote there, I'm sure the good cardinals are praying fervently, fasting, even wearing hair shirts (and I'm not mocking; they might well be). But I would suspect that most of all they're not acting because they know if they do what they have to do, as blogger Michael Dowd suggests, formally issue a formal correction and all that entails, then I suspect they're thinking they'll damage the next pope. They're thinking "political damage" and "damage control"; that taking "El Bergo" down will — sort of like what happened to Republicans after Bill Clinton's impeachment — damage the Magisterium Catholic position (the Great Catholic Middle), and in effect, produce a papal George W. Bush, a guy continually mocked and derided throughout his tenure, hounded from every side. They're reasoning that the next pope would have a pall cast over him, ESPECIALLY if he's a "conservative" Magisterium-type JPII "come again".




(A Traditionalist pope, a Gregory VII, a new Hildebrand, wouldn't put up with such criticism: he'd excommunicate anyone who attacked him, disenfranchising over half of the world's bishops, university professors, and so on. But no Magisterium pope would DARE act thusly.)

Cardinal Sarah, for one, is clearly angling to be elected the next pope, and I wouldn't be surprised if he took the name "John Paul III". (If he took the name Benedict XVII he'd meet Caesar's fate as he walked toward the loggia. Same if he took the name "Pius XIII".

I've been rereading this Onepeterfive's excellent articles and came across the "Revolution in Tiara and Cope" series from last year (and 2015) and it really is ASTOUNDING the lengths the "Deep Modernist State" back at Vat 2 went to in order to create the "Vatican II Church". Just incredible. They worked like Trojans (or devils) at endless length to pull every lever, punch every button, jerk every string, to bring about the Revolution in the Church that they did. They have NO INTENTION of letting go. They won't "go quietly into that good night." You don't go to those lengths, that level of effort, unless you're ALL IN.

And Cardls Burke and Sarah know that too, my friends. They're the French Army in 1940 and they don't even have a Maginot Line. They got God on their side, the Holy Spirit, I believe that because I'm a Trad Catholic, but they're balancing that out with the potential carnage, especially for the next pope, and they're therefore very, very hesitant.

That's the level of problem they're facing.




Pray for 'em.


I myself suspect that the next conclave will elect another Progressive. The only Magisterium they'd elect would have to be the definition of milquetoast. Paul VI come again. If they do elect a new Paul 6, we're in for another decade or so of misery. If they elect a Prog, I shouldn't be surprised if a few Cardinals "walked out" and elected their own candidate, rather than see an "El Bergo Dos" keep turning the One, Holy, Apostolic Church into the Anglican Communion.

An Préachán