For St. Josephe's Feast Day -- Are Catholics in Communion with Pope Francis?

Amici,

I see a lot of talk about "being in Communion" with Bergi. I'm not having that. 

We're in Communion with the office of the papacy, the Petrine Office. After all, Our Lord created the Petrine office directly, whereas the Apostles more clearly created the office of bishop in general (and diaconate) and delineated the seven sacraments (such as ordination). When they died, the Apostolic offices were ended, and bishops were subsequently the leaders of the Church. All of them passing on, each generation to each, the Most Holy Eucharist, the Divine Blood Oath, sworn on the Body and Blood of God, they they saw Our Lord after He had risen from the Dead. and they created the regular priest level of the job via ordaining "elders" (presbyter/presbuteros) in specific faculties out of the seven sacraments, leaving the rite of ordination to themselves solely. 

Yet bishops and bishoprics come and go. Laodicea no longer has a bishop (unless some Vatican bureaucrat has been given the empty title.) For example, Tsar Peter the Great ("the First Peter" the Russians call him) nixed the office of the Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church; Pete just said nyet to it, and the Russian Dox were governed (till the Communist Rev) by a "Holy Synod", as is the Greek Dox Church today. Proud Constantinople is reduced to a small ghetto in Istanbul, the Patriarch himself, a Turkish citizen, is tolerated on sufferance by the Muslims; they could extinguish that office in a moment. 

But Rome is unique in being the "Thou art Peter" bishopric. So, obviously, the office itself takes precedence over who is in it. Being actually in it is what gives the office holder his power. (Notice one is elected to it, not ordained to it.) So therefore we're in Communion with the Petrine office, not necessarily the man holding it at a given time, especially if he clearly is working against its purpose and duties, which Bergi is. Bergi is supposed to be the slave of Scripture and Tradition, but he's too busy rewriting it for such slavery. He's supposed to be the servant of the law, not its master.

So, the particular man in the office is temporary, but the office abides.

Look at "the Great Western Schism" (1378-1417) when we had at first two, then THREE popes! There were canonized saints supporting the various contenders. Clearly it was the office, regardless of who claimed it, that they were in Communion with. And in our case, when the man holding the office is a heretic, he still maintains his priestly and episcopal faculties, even if he denies them. Bergi would have to publicly and formally announce he's abdicated (something Ratzinger seems hesitant to do fully, as he still wears white, etc.). Therefore, I think it fair to say we're in Communion with God through the Petrine Office, and not necessarily the man – especially should he go wacky.

FWIW. At least it gets us out of the no-win situation of having to say were in full Communion with a guy who is not Catholic, or perhaps even a Christian as traditionally understood. And we pray St. Joseph, Protector of the Church and Terror of Demons, intercede with Our Lord to save the Church. 

An Préachán

Was Vatican II Our Equivalent of the Black Death and the Rite of St. Gregory the Great?

Amici,

Happy St. Patrick's Day to all of you. For the occasion, a couple of religious thoughts.

The Great Pestilence ('Black Death' is a 19th century title for it)

Look at the last 70+ years in the following way...

The 1950s were as the decades between the death of Aquinas (1274) and the year 1346, when "the great pestilence" appeared in Europe. Vatican II and the grim "Spirit of Vatican II" were the Black Death sweeping through the Church, and we are shell-shocked survivors, walking among the unburied corpses, the untended fields, the abandoned churches, the desolate monastic houses (as then, so now: entire monasteries emptied: during the Black Death by physical plague, during this last 70 years, by spiritual plague). We wander about, stunned, trying to make sense of the utter tragedy of it all.

During the Great Plague of the 1340s, that's when the second half of the Hail Mary was added, remember. We need to pray both halves now as we wander about among the ruins, thankful for both surviving the pandemic and for God allowing us to keep the Faith.

The TLM

Modernist like to say the change from the TLM to the Novus Ordo was no big deal, that something like it happened when Greek was dropped from the Roman rite at some point after Constantine. And of course some argue the TLM should be called the rite of St. Gregory the Great, famous for issuing decrees and rules for it, but it predates St. Gregory the Great (d. 604).

Whatever the form of the very earliest liturgies, the major population centers soon generated early liturgies that "took hold" over entire regions. Antioch is a prime example, with "the Queen of the East" influencing liturgies toward the East and down into Syria proper, and Westward as far away as Milan and Gaul. The Egyptian liturgy of Alexandria soon influenced liturgies throughout Egypt and down into Ethiopia, etc. Later, the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom from Constantinople would inspire all the Slavic Orthodox liturgies. But Rome, at that early date still the actual imperial capital of the united empire and its major population center, would have developed its own liturgy, and the TLM has and austerity about it, an "Old Roman" reserve and seriousness not found in the other major liturgies, such as the Antiochan, which was in the Greek language, for certain, from the git-go. So Rome's liturgically must have went its own way for a while, its character colored by the old Roman spirit of duty and stoicism. After all, for a couple of hundred years after Peter and Paul, Roman Christians basked in martyrdom of the two great saints, and in the prestige of Rome's bishops (such as the first Clement), with all those early popes being martyred or exiled.

But that unique Roman character of the TLM must have been there from the first, and that in turns strongly suggests the Latin language was intimately involved. Language is essential to culture, and a bulwark against foreign influences. Heidegger said language was "the house of being". If the Roman liturgy had been entirely or even mostly in Greek for a couple of hundred years, as is usually alleged, why then the old Roman gravitas in the Roman liturgy? Rome's liturgy exhibits an inherent sobriety and austerity when compared to the lavishness of the others. And if you think about it, although Imperial Rome had a large Greek-speaking population, and although "Magna Graecia" was just to the south of it (Naples, etc.), the Eternal City also was home to hordes of people from Gaul (by Sts. Paul and Peter's time, as it had been conquered by Caesar not so long before) and Hispania, not to mention the Latin (or Berger-speaking) North African coast! Note how St. Augustine, born in 354 A.D., was both (probably) a Berber speaker from youth, and the greatest prose stylist Latin ever produced – yet he knew no Greek. And in that mix, as Christianity spread from Baptized Jews (like Peter and Paul) into the non-Jewish population, it attracted folks of all ranks, but probably mostly the lower classes, who either spoke Greek because they were Greek slaves and/or hailed from Southern Italy, or Latin, because they were from everywhere else. Latin was the lingua franca of the Western Empire, a land of many tongues.

So, in short, I have little patience with the idea that Greek was the language of the liturgy in Rome until Constantine. Of course after Constantine, the Eternal City steadily became less important, and soon began to lose its large population. The grain-bearing fleets setting sail from Egypt were redirected to Constantinople, remember, after Constantine the Great. And yet, fascinatingly, Rome's liturgy at that time began to spread everywhere in the Western Empire. Eventually it replaced the Antiochan-derived liturgies (the Gallic Rite, the Mozarabic Rite, and (sadly for me) the Celtic Rite.

So, know it predates St. Gregory the Great. By a lot. FWIW

An Préachán