Reasons To Doubt Thomas: Part One

Saint Anthony of Padua, 'Hammer of Heretics': pray for us.

No, not Saint Thomas the Apostle (Gospel according to St. John 20:24-29). Saint Thomas' doubt served/serves a divine purpose (v. 29). In due course (Part Two), we will chat about another Thomas, a man who desperately needs our prayers.

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To the mind that submits to grace, divine revelation (and its companion: mystery) is an ever expanding opportunity to encounter the True, the Good and the Beautiful, the living God, an opportunity to explore God's self disclosure that God gifts to people in graced glimpses. Those glimpses are most reliably discovered when, by grace, God's people approach in humility the Holy Eucharist, i.e., Divine Worship, the Mass. Take note, too, that many graces flow from Eucharistic Adoration and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Where Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is celebrated, vocations to the religious life and the priesthood flourish.

The Mass was instituted by Christ Himself, and that same night in the Upper Room, Jesus gave power to the Apostles to make possible His Presence by establishing the sacerdotal priesthood to celebrate Mass. That Holy Thursday night, i.e., Maundy Thursday, two sacraments were instituted by Jesus: the sacrament of His very Presence, the Holy Eucharist; and Holy Orders.

https://ordinariate.net/parishfinder

Witnesses to Authenticity

In conversations with others who have left diocesan precincts (Novus Ordo Masses) for welcoming Ordinariate communities, there is, in addition to a shared love of God and His Church, a common thread of aversion to a particular situation. Each story confirms a serious reason to justify a departure from a diocesan community. People - who are thirsty for faith, hope and love that only God can give and sustain - are unsettled by diocesan clergy who are barely capable of leading others to encounter Jesus Christ in the Mass. Because of a serious lack of formation in liturgical spirituality, the average Novus Ordo congregant is unable to bridge the connection between the Sacred Liturgy and daily life. The Mass hardly informs their daily lives.

Compounding Confusion

Instead of confining themselves to the role of messenger entrusted with delivering and serving the message of the Holy Gospel, those same diocesan clergy habitually make themselves the message, a message that is incapable of rising to the level of the Holy Gospel that necessarily includes self-forgetfulness in service of the very Gospel upon which priests should be focused. That confusion of roles that possesses the minds of clergy is most clearly seen at the homily when clergy become enamored with the sound of their own voices, animated by being... animated. That is, affected - artificial, pretentious, theatrical, melodramatic, etc. By drawing too much attention to their own stories, i.e., using themselves as a first and last reference or topic of their homilies, they draw the congregation's attention away from the Person Who should be animating the Mass: Jesus Christ. By contrast, it is the experience of those same 'witnesses to authenticity' that homilies by Ordinariate priests are, by comparison: God-oriented; routinely well organized; refreshingly scriptural and theologically orthodox; authentically pastoral and therefore entirely suited to the spiritual well being and development of the People of God, the flock of the Lord.

Well crafted homilies are a hallmark of the Anglican Patrimony gifted to the Church in the Personal Ordinariates. Thanks be to God for these former Anglican ministers who, now Catholic priests, bring with them to the Church a rich spiritual formation and a firm commitment to handing on the Catholic Faith whole and undefiled.

In addition to priestly narcissism, another cancer eating its way into the flesh of the typical Novus Ordo Mass that contributes to the migration of the faithful to more tradition-minded shores is, as already hinted at, loose play with the Faith. Too often, priests who were once theologically well-formed have slipped upon an adolescent need for validation which clouds their minds and enables them to fall into a vile pit of heresy.

Pray for the souls of wayward priests!

Sin of Heretics

Heretics know a good thing when they hear it or see it. Perhaps they once desired to promote truth, but they only succeed now, having given themselves over to pride, in promoting 'their truth', which is to say something less than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Their serious error consists in taking only the parts which enable them to twist the truth of that 'good thing' to fit their twisted agenda. They avoid the challenging bits about the Catholic Faith because they cannot admit that their tiny human brains have a narrow grasp that the Trinity, for example, transcends their limited capacity to explain One God in Three Persons. That is, they cannot admit that they should trust divine revelation and faithfully hand on (tradere; traditio) the teaching of Jesus Christ received from the Apostles and their orthodox successors, the bishops in communion with the See of Rome, the guarantor of orthodoxy. Instead, having little or no respect for Tradition, heretics play lightly or loosely with doctrine; they substitute cheap substitutes for the real thing.

Heretics have lost the balance, the nexus between faith and reason. So, they cannot possibly be comfortable with mystery. They see mystery as something opaque, as it surely is to the mind fixated on itself, closed to the illuminating power of God's grace.

Opacity

Heretics often rely on creating a fog of half-truths, a flood of information, in which they attempt to conceal a fiction that without that flood or fog to bury that attempt to bamboozle the trusting crowd would be immediately exposed for the lie it is.

Online Etymological Dictionary

heresy (n.)

"doctrine or opinion at variance with established standards", c. 1200, from Old French heresie, eresie "heresy," and by extension "sodomy, immorality" (12c.), from Latin hæresis, "school of thought, philosophical sect." The Latin word is from Greek hairesis "a taking or choosing for oneself, a choice, a means of taking; a deliberate plan, purpose; philosophical sect, school," from haireisthai "take, seize," middle voice of hairein "to choose," a word of unknown origin(.)

Heretics plagiarize with little or no sense of obligation to transmit and preserve the fullness of the Faith. Snippet-theology and its cousin proof-texting, commonly employed by "biblical christians" to defend their look-alike religion, enable the appropriation of data in order to skew perception.

Prooftexting is the practice of using isolated, out-of-context quotations from a document to establish a proposition in eisegesis (introducing one's own presuppositions, agendas, or biases). Such quotes may not accurately reflect the original intent of the author, and a document quoted in such a manner, when read as a whole, may not support the proposition for which it was cited. The term has currency primarily in theological and exegetical circles.- Wikipedia

Both the heretic and the plagiarist steal that which does not belong to them in order to attach authority and credibility to their own reputations. They attempt to accrue power to themselves by wrongly appropriating the power of truth and associating it with their lies. They are cheats who fuel gossip and confuse seekers of truth who, perhaps not having the special training nor the time to allocate precious family hours to fully unlock biblical language, rely on others to communicate facts without error so they can then apply faithfully that authoritative teaching to current times.

Too often, the faithful are subject to the attention-hungry and profit driven drive-by media quidnunc who whores himself out to the highest bidder who, being the mogul who seeks to own the public square by making media clones in the image of his destructive ideology, enables his willing accomplice to trade in half truths to sway public opinion and to unleash chaos which then makes possible the blunting of minds and hearts and the theft of innocence.

Theft

And so, once again we confront the case of Fr. Thomas Rosica, serial plagiarist and enabler of heretics (click on link: scroll down to 'Baum').

The Eighth Circle: Fraud

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/02/fr-rosica-fraud

Rosica is a communications expert, a professional intellectual, an authority. More than most ministers of the Word, he traffics in words.

Given the extent of his theft, there was reason to expect that the plagiarizing had begun more than a decade ago, and might even be found in his scholarship. Sure enough, in the first essay I checked—published 25 years ago and related to one of his academic theses—Rosica had clearly and extensively plagiarized.

Others found more, pressure increased in the press and social media, and two days later—yesterday—he “apologized” again (only digging his hole deeper by claiming, incredibly, that his plagiarism was “never deliberate”). But his academic board memberships were already falling away; the story isn’t over, but one suspects that soon other organizations—perhaps including the Vatican Press Office, institutions that awarded him degrees, and even his media company—will be eager to cut ties.

Malbolge 

Wikipedia

The Bolgia (ditches) of the Eighth Circle of Hell: Bolgia 7, 8, 9 & 10.

Bolgia Seven:

This bolgia houses the souls of thieves. The bolgia is also filled with serpents, dragons and other vengeful reptiles that torture the thieves endlessly. The bites of some of the snakes cause the thieves to spontaneously combust, only to regenerate their bodies for further torment in a few moments. They are pursued by the monstrous fiery Cacus. Other thieves are denied human forms and appear as reptiles themselves, and can only assume their true shape if they steal a human shape from another sinner; this involves a very painful transformation for both souls involved.

Bolgia Eight: In this trench, the souls of Deceivers who gave false or corrupted advice to others for personal benefit are punished. They are constantly ablaze, appearing as nothing so much as living, speaking tongues of flame.

Bolgia Nine: Sinners who, in life, promoted scandals, schism, and discord are punished here; particularly those who caused schism within the church or within politics. They are forced to walk around the circumference of the circle bearing horrible, disfiguring wounds inflicted on them by a great demon with a sword. The nature of the wound mirrors the sins of the particular soul; while some only have gashes, or fingers and toes cut off, others are decapitated, cut in half (as schismatics), or are completely disemboweled. Among those who are tormented here is Bertran de Born, who carries around his severed head like a lantern.

Bolgia Ten: Falsifiers, those who attempted to alter things through lies or alchemy, or those who tried to pass off false things as real things, such as counterfeiters of coins, are punished here. This bolgia has four subdivisions where specific classes of falsifiers (alchemists, impostors, counterfeiters, and liars) endure different degrees of punishment based on horrible, consumptive diseases such as rashes, dropsy, leprosy and consumption.

Next post: Reasons To Doubt Thomas: Part Two