'Tradervatives' at AKA Catholic...and is Bergoglio pope, or what? (Updated)

 Amici,

Over at AKA Catholic,a good article to read is Are non-infallible doctrines trustworthy? It's a follow-on to this article about the knots many Traditional and Conservative Catholics tie themselves into in trying to 'square the circle' that Jorge Bergoglio is actually pope, yet obviously a wanton heretic who needs converted to the True Faith or excommunicated (i.e. his own blatant self-excommunication needs to be recognized).

I alluded to this cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-you-face conundrum (or one could call it the "We must destroy the village in order to save it" syndrome) in recent comments about Dr. Peter Kwasniewski's efforts to defend the Vetus Ordo, the Traditionalist Latin Mass. Efforts such as Prof K's are aiming toward redefining the nature, office, and powers of the pope, rather than asserting Bergoglio simply is NOT pope, for no actual pope would do what Jorge Mario B. does on an hourly basis. OnePeterFive and other such "mainstream Trad" sites are good exemplars of Prof K's thinking. They work overtime at it, and while they generally have excellent arguments for keeping the TLM, "Bergoglio as pope" is ultimately "a dog that won't hunt".

As I've written before: a pope has carte blanc powers, indeed, but they are to only be used for defending and promoting the Deposit of Faith. No pope can change or add to the Faith. Montini deeply wounded the Church in attacking the TLM Vetus Ordo, but he wasn't teaching heresy per se (though one could argue that point, I suppose). Bergoglio is trying to absolutely, truly, and most sincerely cancel and repudiate and kill the TLM AS WELL AS teaching heresy daily. (Indeed, Bergoglio's evil henchman, Andrea Grillo, says the TLM is already abrogated completely!)

Having the greatest respect for Prof K, and many of the others, I cannot go down their road, and the papacy cannot be weakened with extreme dangers to the Church. Trying to limit the papacy's powers in order to prevent Bergoglio's treachery leads to "rabbit hole" articles like this one. Such debates cause factions and perpetual adversaries.

We can clearly solve all this by insisting papal power only be used as intended. And that means, shove Bergoglio into an oubliette. I agree with Louie at AKA Catholic and Ann Barnardt at her site that it is much, much saner, simpler, and far more truthful, far more self-evident, to admit we have not got a legitimate pope in "Bergi". Now, that would get me called a Sedecavantist or a Benedicavantist label (like Ann B argues Ratzinger is still legit pope, so she gets unfairly mocked as a "Benedicavantist").

Prof K and that crowd seem to think it absolutely verboten to go Barnhardt's or AKA Catholic's way. It causes too many problems, they maintain. Well, their position causes even MORE problems! Insurmountable ones. Catholicism is not an intellectual suicide pact. And anyway, we've had eras in Church history when we have had two concurrent popes, even three! (Great Western Schism, 1378 - 1417) And periods existed when a pope could not be elected for various reasons. Pius VI died on August 29, 1799 and his successor, Pius VII, was elected on March 14, 1800. That's six months.) And Pius had been out of power for a couple of years before that! (Our old friend "Nappy" Napoleon occupied Rome in 1796 and poor Pius ended up in exile in France for 18 months before his death.)

Some die-hard sedevacantists say Pope John XXIII, Angelo Roncalli, was not a valid pope, and none of the others after him. But it was only Montini, Paul 6, who was a catastrophic disaster – and he holds no candle to Bergoglio, who is in full Church-gutting-and-scalping mode, striding Godzilla-like across the ecclesiastical landscape, smashing all before him and snorting radioactive fire.

It seems patently obvious that the logic is clear. AKA Catholic (Louie) writes in the first article linked above, in part about whether we should get rid of what the Church has always taught:

Not so. Let’s revisit the examples given. In each case one has a choice to make, to either apply what the Church has always taught to explain the present situation, or to redefine (that is, to twist or reject) what the Church has always taught to fit the present situation.

• The organization presently in Rome claiming to be the Holy Catholic Church authoritatively teaches false doctrines. 

TRADITIONAL EXPLANATION: Based on what the Church has always taught about herself, the organization presently in Rome, since its doctrines endanger the faithful, cannot be the one true Church.

TRADSERVATIVE NOVELTY: The organization presently in Rome is the one true Church, despite what the Church has always taught about herself. Yes, it teaches false doctrines, but not infallibly, and so we are called to resist.

• Jorge Bergoglio fails to manifest the true faith; he actively opposes it.  

TRADITIONAL EXPLANATION: Based on what the Church has always taught about membership in the Church, Jorge Bergoglio is not a Catholic of any rank. 

TRADSERVATIVE NOVELTY: Jorge Bergoglio is a member of the Holy Catholic Church, despite what the Church has always taught about visible membership in her. What’s more, given that most everyone considers him pope, we have no right say otherwise.

• “Francis” attacks the true faith but claims to be the Holy Roman Pontiff. 

TRADITIONAL EXPLANATION: Based on what the Church has always taught about the pope being our rule of faith, the Divine protection afforded to the pope by Our Lord, and the witness of the past nearly 2,000 years, Francis is obviously an anti-pope.  

TRADSERVATIVE NOVELTY: Francis is the Holy Roman Pontiff and Vicar of Christ, despite what the Church has always taught about the papacy, the Divine protection afforded to it by Our Lord, and the witness of the past nearly 2,000 years. Even though he is the pope, we cannot treat him as our rule of faith, rather, we must defend ourselves against his false doctrines!

AnP again.

Read the whole article. Read both AKA Catholic articles. They are excellent, and I think AKA Catholic and Ann Barnhardt carry the day, easily.

For what it is worth. Who cares what I think? But personally, I think it worth a lot to know the truth of things and not let oneself get tied hopelessly into a Gordian knot. Speaking of which, another old-time general friend of mine famously took care of that knotty issue in a simple yet dramatic way.

He cut it. 

An Préachán

'The "Vatican Rite" or "Pauline Rite" is the Novus Ordo, but NOT the Roman Rite...'

Amici,

For all of us repudiating and discarding – to the extent we can avoid it, something Bergoglio is making difficult at the moment – the hapless, never sufficiently disparaged Novus Ordo Mass, there's an essay from Dr. Peter Kwasniewski at OnePeterFive, here online that I encourage everyone to read.

Dr. K is a great defender of the Vetus Ordo, the Ancient Rite, the TLM, and I always read him with profit. Usually, my only quarrel with him revolves around whether Bergoglio (for whose pitiful soul we must all pray while he's still among the living, before it is too late for him to repent – though it is a pretty big mountain to repent: i.e. a lifetime of trashing out the Church and supporting the sexually deviant in myriad ways) is actually pope.

But leaving that issue aside, this article at OnePeterFive focuses on the infamous Sant’Anselmo professor of liturgy Andrea Grillo. Grillo has been outed as the creator of Traditiones Custodes and the subsequent liturgical garbage Bergoglio has tightened around our necks, like successive slave collars. Indeed, except for one or two individuals, Grillo is perhaps the biggest influence on Bergoglio.

The article is lengthy, but should you have interest in how the official Catholic Church (à la the "Officials" for you who know IRA history) is now so determinedly anti-TLM, well, Grillo is yer man. He's just evil. And stupid. These two estimable qualities vie in his cockroachian soul. But don't take my word for it. Read the article.

I will say that the comhrá os íseal, the scuttlebutt, that the TLM will be formally cancelled sometime next year, must come from Grillo's fevered imagination. "Grillo proposes, God disposes" ought to be a saying. Actually, Grillo is insisting it is banned already! (Read the article.) By this time next year, however, there'll be mass starvation around the world, national power outages in the "developed world", esp Europe, and social unrest on a horrendous scale. Covid vaccine mortality alone will bankrupt public and private insurance on a planetary scale. So somehow I think it will be easier than ever to dismiss Bergoglio's rantings (as indeed, Prof Kwasniewski would have us do, though not as I would, as the words of an anti-pope whom we must pray for lest he be damned).

Here is an extract from the article, a fascinating and a very revealing exchange of email Grillo had with a student; here's the student:

More and more voices, of different sensibilities, testify that the 1969 operation was truly radical, in the face of a limited conciliar mandate: from the right, as in Card. Stickler’s lengthy memoirs; and from the left, as in Fr. Gelineau’s lapidary comment: “This must be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists. It has been destroyed.”

And it is precisely on account of Gelineau’s admission that I personally feel like making a concession: it is indeed true that the theorem of the two forms of the Roman Rite is fragile (to be generous) and sophistic (to be more ruthless). For the Council had called for a reform of the Roman Rite. The Consilium produced instead a “Vatican Rite” or a “Pauline Rite,” with some vestigial resemblance to the historic Roman Rite, and some superficial resemblance to some of the Council Fathers’ indications, although most were ignored de plano. Hence with a little intellectual honesty—but that is still a long way off—it will sooner or later be necessary to acknowledge that the Vatican Rite or Pauline Rite is not the Roman Rite, as indeed a forthcoming book argues.

AnP again:

• An excellent way of saying it. The Vatican II Council called for one thing and got another, something with "some vestigial resemblance to the historic Roman Rite, and some superficial resemblance to some of the Council Fathers’ indications." Touché. It's ridiculous, but there it is. We should have demanded they toss it back then, reject it on the spot, yet the "Vatican I Church" (from 1870 to 1962) had drilled Catholics to pray, pay, and obey. No longer. That sort of submission no longer exists much of anywhere in the Church.
  
• FWIW, I never bought into Ratzinger's spiel that two forms of the western Roman Rite existed, the "Ordinary" form and the "Extraordinary" form. Many others did not, either; anyone, in fact – me thinks – will come away with that realization who bothers to even remotely interact with the TLM Vetus Ordo. Hence the idea of a "Vatican Rite" or "Pauline Rite" seems so fitting. The N.O. is an alien thing altogether. A Changeling. As I say, it's a Methodist service with one of the N.O.'s Eucharistic prayers squeezed in.
  
• If you take time to read Grillo's responses to this student above, and another exchange Prof K provided, you realize Grillo is a parrot to Modernist notions purely ideological in nature. A high apparatchik in a dying cult. Such ideas cannot be sustained except by brute force (via KGB, Stasi, or FBI), which is precisely why Bergoglio acts the way he does.
• The near-term future is not conducive to the Novus Ordo: world-wide social stresses and economic upheavals will destroy, at long last, the "Vatican II Church", for as we saw with the ridiculous Covid lockdowns, that Church has no stuffing, no guts; it bent over showed its  butt to the dominant Grillo gorilla-brute culture of power, the fascist "boot on the human face forever" (Orwell) when what the world needed was the actual Catholic Faith, represented during the lockdowns best by the SSPX, which kept chapels open and priestly services ongoing, as much as possible. If you want to see that actual Catholic Faith in action, watch this video of an SSPX priest making the rounds in Alaska. 
  
  

So, we'll see. Time will tell. But remember: Motus in finem velocior. Time speeds up before the end. Or as Aristotle said: Time is the measure of motion. And things are running ever faster toward Global Dystopia.

    An Préachán

Psalm 146 of the Douay-Rheims: verse 9:

Who giveth to beasts their food: and to the young ravens that call upon Him.

Epiphany / Theophania and "Traditionis Custodes is a monumental and embarrassing admission of defeat..."

 Amici,

A blessed Feast of the Epiphany (what the Greeks call Theophania, "God Manifest") to you all. In these insane, lying, apostate times, we truly need this feast of the manifestation of God amongst us, do we not?

Last night, the Eve of the Epiphany, was the "Twelfth Night" of the "Christmastide", the Twelve Day of Christmas, as in the Carol (an old Catholic carol, I understand, with each day's gift representing a Catholic teaching amongst the officially Protestant Englishmen). From this coming Sunday on out, each Sunday will be a "First, Second, Third" – to the "Sixth Sunday after Epiphany." Then Lent beings (i.e. after the three Sundays beginning with the Septuagesima "seventieth" Sunday, which neatly count down (approximately) to the beginning 40 days of Lent). The mid-winter Season of Epiphany includes Candlemas on February 2, when candles are blessed for the year. It is also the Feast of the Purification of Mary. February 11th is the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. February 1st is the Feast of St. Brigid of Killdare, one of the three patron saints of Ireland. (Ireland is so sinful these days it needs 'em all three!) And of course, St. Valentine's Feast on February 14th (when I was a kid, it was always "St." Valentine's Day, but no longer). A beautiful and elegant season all to itself is Epiphany, giving color and light (pun intended) to the dreariest time of the year. Of course the Novus Ordo trashed it all out and turned it into "Ordinary Time", (as if any time after the birth of the Incarnate God could be "ordinary").

Which brings me to that quote: "Traditionis Custodes is a monumental and embarrassing admission of defeat...". A great line, isn't it? The estimable Dr. Peter Kwasniewski wrote it in this article at OnePeterFive, :  wherein Kwasniewski also quotes from a "rousing" article by one Gregory DiPippo, to wit:

    The surest sign that a revolution has failed, and chosen to take the easy path, is its fear of the past, its fear of the memory of what life was really like before the revolution. And this is why, in the midst of a tidal wave of crises within the Church, a hammer has been dropped where it has been dropped: not on the German Synodal Way, or the various Catholic institutions that have to all intents and purposes walked away from the Faith. The problem so grave that it must be met with the same furious scribbled-on-the-back-of-a-napkin haste that we remember from Fr Bouyer’s memoirs is not the long-standing persistence of grave liturgical abuses, the de facto absence of catechetical formation in once-Catholic nations, or widespread moral, doctrinal and financial corruption. The hammer has been dropped, rather, on the father and mother who were born at least 20 years after the last time a cleric used the word “aggiornamento” unironically, and on their children who are too young to remember the papacy of Benedict XVI.

    There can be no clearer sign that the post-Conciliar revolution is totally uninteresting to the rising generations, and knowing this, [it] grows deathly afraid, and resorts to doing by force what it cannot do by persuasion…. A dying revolution is not a dead revolution; it can still strike out and cause pain, and will likely do so. But in the very act of doing so, it confesses that it has failed and is dying. Do not be afraid. The revolution is over.

(I was going to highlight some lines but ended up highlighting all of it, so... :)

So let us rejoice now, from today on through the Season of the Epiphany. As the tide finally begins to turn on the infamous Covid lie, so the Vatican II Church senses a shift has begun against its intervention in the two millennial life of the Church. (Dare I say it? They've had an Epiphany. Ahem.) Of course, it's always "darkest before the dawn" so we need pray heartily, indeed.

Grásta Dé to all who accept it.

An Préachán

Heaven, Hell, Limbo, General Thoughts

A great essay by Dr. Peter Kwasniewski has been posted at OnePeterFive.  However, just a note: Dr. Kwasniewski didn't mention Limbo. For a review of that, see this old Catholic Encyclopedia article for a discussion of Limbus patrum and Limbus infantium. Regarding the latter, after reviewing it, I was once again struck by the severity of the disagreement between the most eminent theologians in the Church's history.

Being followers of the Lord Christ isn't easy, on many levels, as all here know and have often attested. Even Dr. Kwasniewski has discussed how difficult his life has been -- has been made to have been -- for following the Traditional Faith. And in general, for a Christian, the question of Hell and who goes there is one of the difficulties. We can read Holy Writ that makes it plain those without Our Blessed Lord are Hell-bound, and He Himself plainly says the road to Hell is wide and easy. (Matt 7:13, for example.) But he also tells the Pharisees "not to judge" -- meaning not to judge specific individuals' final destination. (He clearly teaches us to judge immoral behavior and shun those who insist on practicing it: see Matt 18 about the brother who sins.) And what of all those of the human race who never heard of Him at all?

Also, if we stress Hell too much, we turn off people. Now, mind me, I don't mean the modern Vatican II Church's pablum about that; I mean in the old-time preachin' down in the hills, or among the Calvinist Orangemen: the endless focus on Hell produced serious neurosis. I've heard a number of first-hand accounts of individuals who either went mad or certainly got as far away from "religion" as they could because of it. Ironically, a successful revival, like The Great Awakening, too often left what wags called a "Burnt out" or "Burnt over" district. As in most things, I suppose, there's a Golden Mean in preaching Hell. Clearly, though, we've gone far, far, way too far into the "Don't worry, there, there" school of religion as therapy. The Christian Faith is Faith first, the Transformation in Christ, the infusion of Grace; and if there's anything "therapeutic" about that, it comes of Our Lord's boundless Grace.

But perhaps the real problem is that while it is clearly necessary to preach Hell, we can't judge individuals as to whether they go there or not. (So many of us SO want to say that of people we know, but it is as much the sin of presumption as saying a recently deceased went to Heaven!)

Oh, certain cases are plain: Hitler, for example. If Adolph went to the Pearly Gates and St. Pete threw them wide open and said, "Adolph! Come on in!" Hitler would look in and see countless Jews -- Ancient Jews, Jews at the time of Our Lord on Earth, and Jews in plenty thereafter because we non-Jews become descendants of Abraham and members of the Covenant via Baptism and especially the Most Holy Eucharist. Hitler wouldn't enter Heaven because it is full of Jews! Or take a pornographer (various names come to mind): they'd look in through the Pearly Gates and see the most beautiful, attractive people imaginable, beyond their imagination, indeed! But they'd see NO lust! "To Hell with this!" they would say and go look deep past the Gates of Hell. There they'd see infinite ugliness, but lust the likes of which they never dreamed of. Guess where they'd go. In a real way, one can say, each individual chooses Heaven or Hell for themselves, with Our Lord God on Judgment Day reflecting them back to themselves in perfect clarity, such that each of us will know upon that instant whether we really wanted to do God's will in our lives, or thwart it. (In that moment, we'll be like the angels were on their Day of Judgment, knowing what they knew in absolutely perfect clarity.)

[Note that Matt 25, starting at verse 31, would suggest everyone is surprised by their sentence of Bliss or Damnation, the opposite of this idea I mention, or seemingly so. One must remember that the dead are outside of time, in what Boethius called "the Boundless Now", so all moments are eternally "present". No one will celebrate their millionth year in Heaven or lament their millionth year in Hell: time there doesn't exist as we experience it on Earth.]
Finally, there's the question of justice. Justice is giving something its due. Rejection of God is due Hell, as a matter of justice. Without Hell -- which as Dr. K shows the Vat2 Church really isn't "into" ("We're just so NOT into Hell, peeps!" say the hip Vat2 prelates), there's no justice for those who reject Our Lord, and they deserve justice just as much as anyone else; in other words, without Hell, there'd be no justice for those who obeyed Him, either, those who entered into the Covenants He established for our salvation, and who, despite temptations, and by God's bountiful Grace that enabled us to stay in the Covenants, stayed fast. The "there's no Hell/no one in Hell" crowd have simply no answer to this argument.

Ultimately, there's one thing I certainly believe about this matter, one sure and certain thing. All the Damned and all the Saved and all the (I suspect, just an opinion, quite a host) in Limbo, will all aver with the strictest conviction what ol' Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural, when he quoted the Psalmist, in the second half of verse 9 of Psalm 19, "...The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Amen to that!

An Préachán