Rome Obsessed?
[ 7 minute read ]
Confusion is no longer a side-effect of proud men discarding the practical wisdom of the Doctors of the Church. Confusion among Catholics is all too frequently a mandated outcome, the result of a syncretistic methodology nearing the status of a dogma, which thereby permits evil to slip in unnoticed, the evil wanted by the misguided few who fear not the Lord Almighty but who fear the wrath of a lesser god who promises acceptance and fame, the opiates of the uncritical and morally bankrupt person. Should it come as a surprise, then, that arguments pushing for an ill-considered embrace of disordered inclinations are being promoted by those who are comfortable with their own disordered predilections and bolstered by their confederates whose understanding of Catholic teaching and the natural law is about as informed as that of a CNN churnalistic opinion piece?
Those eager to spread confusion are using a strategy common among power hungry individuals and groups that seek to control others by promoting soul, mind, and body damaging objectives that rob people of agency and that force compliance. First, knowingly or at least willingly (if they are minions duped into cooperating with cruel forces), the goal is to foment chaos so that once instability - a mess! - is created, they can then introduce a "solution," an agenda that would not find favour except in a moment of confusion that destabilizes relationships, induces fear in people, and compels them to plead for rescue.
Powermongers routinely create forums to lend legitimacy to irrational or tenuously rational projects and foster a broad and shallow consensus in order to move for acceptance of even more bizarre policies. All despots "succeed" by courting and numbing others into an embrace. Thus is born a willingness to whole-heartedly please the tyrant who smugly watches while his or her flunkeys happily run headlong off a cliff. Some lemmings wake up and turn back, only to be shamed by their former idol(s) for abandoning the cause.
People who have been members of a cult recognize all too well the manipulative and diabolical actions of those promoting woke ideology and who routinely bully others into compliance, or attempt to do so, in order to maintain control. After leaving a cult, survivors must often deal with undeserved feelings of guilt, fear, loss and disorientation, and bullying by active members whose tactics are so very similar to those of politicians, social activists, academics and others who belong to the secularist cult of woke activism.
Desperate for a return to order, people will sign on to or vote for anything or anyone who, like an angel of light, promises a restoration of order. (The current Liberal Party governing Canada has been highly effective in creating a mess and countless scapegoats to sacrifice to attain and retain power and control.)
And wild beasts shall meet with hyenas, the satyr shall cry to his fellow; yea, there shall the night hag (Lilith) alight, and find for herself a resting place. - Isaiah 34:14
Like the malevolent entity who fully possesses the individual who has made several seemingly insignificant yet definitive "yeses" inviting diabolical influence, the demons that mesmerize and control a society or an institution drunk on ideology are not eager to give up their comfortable home. Evil spirits are very comfortable among the self righteous.
In an attempt to serve the sinner his cake and help him eat it too, many careless observers of the latest announcement from the DDF will likely manipulate the responses to the dubia raised by Bishop José Negri to instigate a broad engagement of people in sinful circumstances only to result in a withering of resilience and the destruction of the human spirit. Concupiscence unchecked by sustained repentance has a way of twisting good intentions into an idolatry that leads to destruction and damnation.
Pope Francis' generational lens, a stuck-in-the-1970s mentality that habitually views the past as a hindrance that blinds his cohort to the need for prudence, is likely an unconscious bias behind many of his Jesuitical antinomian and casuistical statements.
Is the current pontiff bungling this episode in the life of the Catholic Church?
More and more often, thoughtful intellectuals and pious everyday folk - if X and other forums are any indication - are communicating frustration, bewilderment and righteous indignation when Pope Francis lashes out at tradition-minded Catholics for expressing their love of the 'old ways', which are really the tried-and-true ways. While Pope Francis tries to engineer a social revolution by various means, the faithful and their tradition-minded bishops and priests are trying their gentlest and best to communicate that the way forward in mission is not yet another Jesuit "liberationist" social justice project, but rather an intensification of penitence, of striving for personal holiness and living a prayer-filled life, of worshipping God reverently so that from that relationship true communions may be forged with those in most need of God's mercy.
While the Holy Spirit continues to raise up faithful Catholics who love and defend the divine legacy of the Church, what some rightly refer to as the Latin Patrimony, Papa Francis smights with off-handed demeaning criticism. Those who are perceived as a threat to an ill-defined papal agenda are pummelled by their spiritual father with condescending comments that at times reek of soul-searing malice and a bewildering lack of concern for theological continuity.
And what of our eastern Catholic brethren who hold fast to their profoundly beautiful patrimony? Are they not included in the Church, a Church ruled by the same Francis? By denying the value of the spiritual and theological legacy of the Church handed on faithfully by the successors of the Apostles, the living history of the action of the Holy Spirit, Pope Francis strays very close to expressing contempt for the apostolic character of the Church. By so doing, is he also announcing that he cares little for the timeless and contemplative faith of the East that is also apostolic in origin?
Forty-one years ago today, I stood before the altar and spoke aloud the same words spoken by every Christian who was baptized outside the Catholic Church and is later received into full communion with the Church: “I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God.”
And that is the heart of Christianity as a revealed religion: our complete confidence and life-changing conviction that the Savior has revealed to his Church a sacred deposit of faith which she is commanded to transmit without addition or subtraction until Christ returns in glory. And that deposit of faith is the supernatural gift of divine revelation that we call the gospel, which is contained in the God-breathed Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments and in the Apostolic Tradition that faithfully hands on all that Christ taught the Twelve and commanded them and their successors to teach others until his return in glory at the End of Days. - Fr. Jay Newman @ First Things, LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD - 2023: SPECIAL EDITION 4, edited by Xavier Rynne II
Why should our eastern Catholic brethren take us seriously as long as we rather uncritically and haphazardly jumble together mercy, secular ideology and mission, that enables near approvals of sinful behaviours abhorrent to Almighty God?
In our times, many Catholics, like other Christians, want to change the Gospel. Faithful Catholics have been shocked by an increasing number of bishops and Cardinals who have called for altering sexual morality, approved the blessing of homosexual couples, or suggested that euthanasia be permitted.
Such changes are said to be “realistic,” “inclusive,” and “compassionate.” In fact, they’re cruel illusions that lead people in harmful directions and fail to offer the healing and redeeming Word of God. They have no power to bestow divine life or merciful aid because they’re the misguided, foolish words of men. - Fr. Timothy V. Vaverek @ The Catholic Thing 12/NOV/2023
Many prelates' surrender to the Church's opponents in the culture war is sapping the mission strength of the Church. One would have to be a liturgical ostrich with its head stuck in the sand of the new piety to have missed the onset of said conflagration, and yet many large chickens sit comfortably on their cathedras with their mitres pulled down over their eyes, and have practically become caricatures of hierarchs who are called to be watchful overseers.
After the theologically coherent papacies of the brilliant Benedict XVI and Saint John Paul II, what were the cardinal-electors thinking when they placed Jorge Bergoglio on the throne of Peter? Were they conscious of the need for continuity? of orthodoxy? of authentic spirituality and charity? Or, were they preoccupied with finding an administrator whose religious order too often in recent decades has been allied with political agendas that smack of the tyranny of socialism and its theologically flawed partner, i.e., liberation theology?
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you. - St Matthew 5: 10-12
Despite the theological meanderings and political distractions in which some influential Catholics are engaged, the Lord is furthering His Kingdom through the unassailable witness of brethren whose daily well being is threatened by secularists and whose lives are being ended by murderous Islamists.
Pope Francis might be trying to induce synodality into the homerooms of Catholics, but the red and white martyrdom of truly faithful Catholics puts to the lie any agenda that does not rise to the Lord's own standard for authentic discipleship. In view of the very real consequences of being a Catholic prepared to live the apostolic Faith deeply, and the glory of God that worshipping the Lord in holiness acknowledges, cheap synodality hardly merits a wink let alone a three-year long picnic.
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