by Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke Bishop emeritus Athanasius Schneider Cardinal Janis Pujats Archbishop emeritus Tomash Peta

Can YOU distinguish between the Church and the Municipal Social Services?

 

• “The present-day “Catholic” Church has become — most especially under Francis — a tiresome reiteration of social correctitude and utterly insipid platitudes from sources other than Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition. Let us be unequivocally forthright: the Catholic Church, since Vatican II, has become a de facto Secular and Social Agency, rather than a Sacred Body instituted by Christ to faithfully transmit the authentic Catholic Faith and ... oh yes, to save souls.
   

• Francis’s “God of Surprises” and “Church of Discernment and Accompaniment in Sin” is the venue pre-eminent where people “dialogue” (a noun — not a verb) — while the rest of us “speak” to one another or “discuss” issues. To “dialogue”, you must understand, is to pretend that one is learned in a subject of which one knows little or nothing, but nevertheless wishes to be accounted among the intelligentsia — who, presumably, use such absurd terms (e.g. “would you like to dialogue about what you did today?”) while the rest of unenlightened mankind witlessly settles with “talking with each other”. The notion of “dialoguing” is oddly dear to pretentious liberal circles, the social sciences, feminism and the homosexual lobby — which are invariably concerned with “social structures”, ecclesiastical “constructs”, gender fluidity and a looming environmental catastrophe etched in oddly indiscernible “carbon footprints”. How can the quaint notion of the salvation of souls possibly compete with this present patriarchal oppression and impending disaster?
   

• Under Francis the Church is principally concerned with “dialoguing” with other religious traditions it esteems “wiser” than Catholicism,  and it seeks to acquire — even to incorporate — their aboriginal wisdom, especially as it flows from the Amazon basin — wisdom of which the Church stands in urgent need since the wisdom of Christ is apparently deficient and stands in dire need of rehabilitation through more primitive sources.
   

• The real evangel of Francis’s “Church of Surprise” is to promote a social and material agenda unmistakably deriving from the leftist, elitist, liberal, academic, “intellectual” and wealthy strata of a purely secular society from which God is banished as an impediment to the fulfillment of every inflection of perversion and sin.
   

• The “post-Conciliar Church” is merely the façade of a spurious ecclesiastical organ acting within a much broader social and political context. It has become a temporal functionary — contrived through Vatican II — to reiterate prevailing secular social agenda — but in the subtle terms of a sacralized redaction of what is ultimately a profane Social Manifesto.
   

• Lenin wrote “The State and Revolution” in an attempt to legitimize what was essentially a Socialist coup. Perhaps Francis will — in virtue of his uniquely acquired “personal magisterium” — write a similar document aptly entitled“The Church and Revolution” and to a similar end, devastating the Church much as Lenin had devastated Russia. Lenin argued the following: “While the State exists there can be no freedom; when there is freedom there will be no State.” Francis need only substitute a noun: “While the Church exists there can be no freedom; when there is freedom there will be no Church.” While Marx spoke of the “withering away of the state” as the triumph of Communism, Francis understands it as the “withering away of the Church”  — and the triumph of Modernism! Total indifference and total indifferentiation.
  
  Comrade Francis strives precisely to this end.

¿No es así ... camarada?

Ask the suffering Church Militant in China whom he betrayed — 同志， 這不是這樣嗎
 

---

 

• Vatican II was an absolute calamity that culminated in ecclesiastical suicide and the final triumph of the Second Protestant Revolt (which was never a “Reformation”) in 1962 that finally abolished Catholicism, pronouncing its ancient dogma and doctrines — especially those that accord with, or derive from, the Sacred Deposit of Faith and Sacred Tradition — utterly extraneous — the mere vestiges of a presumed medieval superstition which was once and for all expunged by the “Rational Enlightenment”. That this was achieved through the complicity of the “Council Fathers” themselves — most of whom ceased being “Catholic” long before the “Council” — is the most superficial intimation of what was to follow.
  
  The Church is no longer contrary to the world. It is not even distinct from it, but exists as a pseudo-moral facet of what might be described as a purely synthetic Quadraplex consisting of a social facet, a political facet, an economic facet — together with this spurious moral facet — which simply endorses — by reflecting — the secular agenda of other three, contributing of itself nothing distinct and uniquely substantive — which is to say that it has become merely a redundant and ultimately tiresome iteration of Humanism.
  
  This is not the Holy Catholic Church — which remains unblemished by the corruption of the post-Vatican II “Conciliar Church”, the mere simulacrum of what that fraudulent council, in its conceit, believed it has abolished — but which remains, much to its dismay, vibrant and growing — most especially — and most telling — among the young. (1 Saint John 2.13)

 

Key to images above:

 

The Argument against Ecumenism:
 

“dost thou betray the Son of man with a kiss?”

Why did Christ Die on the Cross?

 

This question — and any conceivable answer to it — is the most compelling argument against any speculative proposition that could logically lend itself to the project of what we have come to understand as “ecumenism” (a word first
coined in 1948) — the novel and ultimately implausible notion that was the principal motivation behind the convocation of the Second Vatican Council. It is an unavoidable question that is absolutely unanswerable in terms consistent with the entirely specious — or better yet, factitious — “ecumenical” project:
 

Why do we — indeed, how could we — maintain the indispensability of the Holy Catholic Church — in other words, on what grounds do we maintain that it is necessary — rather than merely redundant and ultimately superfluous — if any and every other religion is the sufficient means to the salvation of souls and the attainment of Heaven?

Francis — the pre-eminent product and culmination of Vatican II — recently and finally made this clear — indeed even signed a document with one of Islam’s Grand Imams declaring that:

“The pluralism and the diversity of religions, color, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings,” … “This divine wisdom is the source from which the right to freedom of belief and the freedom to be different derives. Therefore, the fact that people are forced to adhere to a certain religion or culture must be rejected, as too the imposition of a cultural way of life that others do not accept.”

Two years earlier he had emphasized this radical insistence on ecumenism through a different tack, the absolutely clear terms of which by now we are all familiar:

“It is not licit that you convince them of your faith; proselytism is the strongest poison against the ecumenical path.” ¹

 

To Reiterate the Point:

Why, then, was it necessary for Christ to die on the Cross — if “any religion” suffices to bring man to God, offers salvation, and ultimately leads men to Heaven?

The answer to this question had apparently been peripheral to the “Council Fathers” and the answer to it still eludes the sophistic casuistry of Catholic and Protestant theologians alike, as it had in their collaborative construction of the Council and the documents that emerged from it.

At first the heresy of ecumenism was confined to nominally “Christian denominations” — but as the many ineluctable contradictions unfolded, it increasingly and necessarily moved beyond Christianity to encompass all religions — and no religion at all.

Let us be as forthright as possible: why — for what possible reason — was it necessary for Jesus Christ to suffer and die on the Cross … if — if — there was another way, another religion, in fact any religion that suffices (including that of the Canaanite god Moloch who required child sacrifice, and the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli — who also required human sacrifice), to say nothing of the Trimurti of the Hindus, Allah of the Muslims, Mormonism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Gnosticism, etc. or, in fact, no religion at all as Francis’s argument implies?
 

“The god of Surprises?”

Absurdity may, in fact, be a prerogative of Francis’s fabricated “god of surprises” — but it is not the same God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; not the God revealed in His Incarnate Son, and certainly not the God worshipped in the Catholic Church.

If it was not necessary for Christ to die on the Cross to redeem man from his sins and so open Heaven to men — then His immolation on Calvary was purely gratuitous. He suffered and died needlessly. God the Father capriciously and wantonly crucified His Only-Begotten Son. The Crucifixion was pointless, and the agony of His Mother of no consequence. This is the necessary conclusion to the spurious attempt to both initiate and implement all that is inherently irreconcilable in the disastrous project of “ecumenism”. Any other religion would have been sufficient without Christ and the Cross.

As a postscript I suggest that you not attempt to use the “ut unum sint” (“that they may be one” ) citation from Holy Scripture. There are too many citations to the contrary. Christ was clearly speaking of His Apostles:

“And now I am not in the world, and these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep them in Thy name whom Thou has given me; that they may be one, as We also are. While I was with them, I kept them in Thy name. Those whom Thou gavest me have I kept; and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition, that the scripture may be fulfilled.” (Saint John 17.11-12)

If you argue that the revelation of God is a gradually evolving and on-going process, a continual “up-dating” of His most holy will so that He, Who created the world, can keep pace with the times and man’s “evolving consciousness”— then Jesus is not the final Word of God after all:

“God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world.” (Hebrews 1.1-2)

The revelation of God was completed in His Son, and ended upon the death of the last Apostle, Saint John.

This is long-established Catholic Doctrine.

But now, we are to believe, God is going to speak through Francis and abolish this doctrine by revealing that Christianity (Catholicism) is not the only way to the Father despite what Christ Himself said:

 

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by Me.” (Saint John 14.6)

 

Francis’s proclamation — without precedent in Catholic history — is nothing less than a betrayal of Christ, the Teachings of Christ’s Church, the Sacred Deposit of Faith and is a grievous wound in our Holy Mother the Church whom he has also betrayed. It

 is heresy.

And if this is not heresy (specifically the heresy of Indifferentism) then nothing qualifies for the definition.

 

The Second Reason

The second reason is not a crime against God and holy religion  —  it is much more mundane, but no less powerful: It is an affront to Logic  —  specifically the Law of Non-Contradiction. Simply stated it is the Law that cannot consistently prescind from Reason (and Logic) which maintains that contradictory beliefs and doctrines cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time  —  and that to maintain the legitimacy of such a contradiction against the unimpeachable canons of reason and logic results in absurdity  —  it is to dispute the proposition that nonsense makes sense.

This is particularly true as it relates to Catholic dogma:

• To maintain that the Holy Eucharist IS the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ  —  and that it is ALSO simply a “memorial” or “communal meal” or “symbolic” and that it has no such substantial species as maintained by Catholic Church  —  is irreconcilably contradictory. Both cannot be true of the same species, in the same sense, at the same time. In short, The Eucharist cannot both be and not be the real Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. It is or it is not. What is more, if it is not, then nothing of necessity can be predicated of it relative to the salvation of the immortal soul: the Eucharist and, therefore the Holy Mass, is inconsequential to salvation. Why offer Mass? Why attend Mass? If it is not necessary to the final disposition of the soul, then any rite, ritual, or symbol (or none at all) suffices to attaining eternal happiness in Heaven: witchcraft, sorcery, and necromancy are equally efficacious, to say nothing of other “religions” which hold themselves to be indispensible to salvation: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism  —  and, perversely enough, Satanism and Atheism.
   

• Mary, the Mother of God (Jesus Christ) is either Immaculate (free of Original Sin and Actual Sin) and a Virgin before she bore Christ in her womb, while He was in her womb, and remained a perpetual virgin her entire life on earth. This is Catholic dogma, the belief in which is incumbent upon every Catholic. Nearly every Protestant sect  —  not to mention nearly every other religion in the world  —  deny this. Either Mary was and is Immaculate and Virgin  —  or she is not. But she cannot be held to be both.

In fact, most Catholic dogma  — whether it is concerning the divinity of Christ, Baptism, Penance, etc.  —  is denied (implicitly or explicitly) by most of “the 47,000 [Protestant] denominations which the Center for Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, which is evangelical Protestant, estimates that there are.” ²   Once again, this does not include “non-Christian” religions that are too many to enumerate here. To maintain that “Ecumenism” can reconcile all the conflicting deities, religious beliefs, observances, and practices of every religious denomination  —  “Christian and non-Christian”  —  is absurd. Simply put God is not Vishnu. The so-called “Ecumenical endeavor” of the post-Conciliar Church is, in the end, a repudiation of the Catholic Church  —  and the Logic with which She was consistent for the 2000 years preceding Vatican II. Rejecting the notions of “the salvation of the soul” and “conversion to Christ and His Church” to the end of attaining to Heaven has been systematically supplanted by something no less insipid than the “Brotherhood of Man” (oh, yes  — “and no religion, too”  —  Imagine, by the Beatles).

What a sorry trade!

________________________

¹  https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/pope-to-teen-girl-proselytism-is-the-strongest-poison-against-the-ecumenica

²  http://www.ncregister.com/blog/sbeale/just-how-many-protestant-denominations-are-ther

 

Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
June 1, 2019

   Printable PDF Version

Comments? Write us:  editor@boston-catholic-journal.com

“Faith of our fathers living still ... ?”

 

No more stunning, no more frightening, and perhaps no more ominously portentous words are spoken in all the Gospels, in fact, in the entire New Testament — perhaps even in the entirety of Sacred Scripture itself — words that become increasingly fraught with significance with every passing generation. Indeed, we must wonder if they are, in fact, spoken of this generation ... or of one soon — very soon, to come.

 

“When the Son of Man comes will He find Faith on earth?”

As with so many of Christ’s teachings, the troubling question Christ puts to us in asking if He will so much as find Faith upon His return is too often and too deftly explained away — especially by the overwhelming number of liberal theologians and bishops who have proliferated and multiplied since 1962 — which is to say, by “the learned and the wise”. It would appear that either Christ does not know what He is saying, or we do not know what He is saying — although we all agree that He said something that sounds suspiciously clear.

These are twelve words, however, to which we must pay careful attention, perhaps more now than at any other time in Church history.

However reluctant we are to take Christ at His word — which becomes increasingly inconvenient to us —  we must recognize that Jesus never spoke idly: His words, His teachings — and yes, His Commandments — were always uttered to one explicit end: the salvation of souls — attaining to Heaven and everlasting happiness and to avoiding Hell and eternal misery. The Jewish religious authorities — “the learned” of His own time — had scornfully dismissed Christ’s warning that not so much as stone would remain standing in the great Temple ¹ ... the very Temple within which, 70 years later, these words were fulfilled when Rome laid waste in days what took 46 years to build.

We tend to view such alarming statements made by Jesus — and there are many — with the same scorn and disdain today.
 

Indeed ... what has become of the “Faith of our Fathers?”

A mere fifty years ago we ourselves would have instinctively replied “Of course He will find faith! There simply must be some deeper, some obscure and less evident meaning to this that we do not presently understand — and what He appears to be saying, He is not really saying at all. Surely the “learned” of our own day can deftly explain the answer to this troubling question. In the end, they will conclude, Jesus is really asking something entirely different from what He appears to be asking and that it has nothing to do with our very real defection from the Faith.”

It is likely that many Jews of Jesus’ time — both the learned and the unlearned — had replied in much the same way. In fact, they did. ²

In other words, to us, our faith, the Faith of the Catholic Church for two millennia, could no sooner disappear than ... well, the stones of the great Temple 2000 years ago!

If, however, we take a careful inventory of our present and undeniably dismal and increasingly scandalous situation in the Church — especially as it has unfolded in the last five decades — Jesus does not quite appear as ... “perplexing” ... as so many apparently make Him to be.
 

CANDIDLY Ask yourself the following:
 

• Has the Faith — the Catholic Faith — indeed, has Christianity itself,  flourished in the last 50 years, or has it withered?
   

• Are vocations to the Priesthood and Religious life growing or dwindling?
   

• Are Catholics (are Christians in general) having more children or are they having fewer children?
   

• Are Missionary efforts, to the end of (dare we say it?) “conversion” as mandated by Christ ²  encouraged as intrinsic to Catholicism — or are they discouraged as impolite, obtrusive, culturally imperialistic and inherently inimical to the “Ecumenical spirit of Vatican II” — especially as interpreted by Pope Francis for whom “proselytism is solemn nonsense”, to use his own words?
   

• Is it really the case that “conversion” to Christ and His Church is actively discouraged — that especially under Pope Francis it is no longer understood as a holy and inherently necessary endeavor — rather than being disdained, even dismissed, as “socially and culturally incorrect” — indeed, has it really come to this: that promoting our Catholic Faith as Christ has commanded us to, been all but forbidden by Francis and his “progressive” coterie of feckless and disaffected cardinals and bishops?
   

• Is our understanding of the Catholic Church, as an absolutely unique institution indispensable to the ordinary means of salvation, emphasized as urgently today (if it is emphasized at all) as it was a hundred years ago? Fifty years ago? Indeed, is the concept itself of the singularity and indispensability of the Holy  Catholic Church authentically deemed a dogma and a viable concept any longer?

For all our insolence and equivocation, we know the answers, and we are uncomfortable with them, for they fly in the face of Christ and all that He taught — to say nothing of Sacred Scripture, Holy Tradition, and the Sacred Deposit of the Faith entrusted to the Catholic Church by God Himself.

Indeed, Christ’s question takes on a greater sense of urgency, for the sheep are scattered and confused as never before. The papacy of Francis has been disastrous for the Church. Why? Because he has taken Vatican II to its logical conclusion: the irrelevance of the Church.
 

Ubi est Pastor? Where is the Shepherd?

Where is the Shepherd? Who is earnestly addressing this spiritual malaise and religious decay, the indolence and dereliction of the vast majority of American and European bishops who appear far more eager for secular plaudits than the now quaint and discredited notion of “the salvation of souls.” Pope Francis has effectively declared this mandate defunct in favor of the rehabilitation — and sometimes transformation — of bodies, societies, economies, and the environment. That the passing material environment of man is infinitely less important than the eternal abode of his soul often appears to elude Francis. Indeed, it appears to elude most Catholics whose mantra increasingly coincides with the world’s:  Social activism! ... not interior conversion away from this world and to Christ.

Shame! Shame on us! By our silence, our fear of being disparaged by “other Catholics” for the sake of Christ, we condone this travesty — are complicit in it ... even promote it!  What will motivate us to recognize, and to redress, this frightful and ultimately deadly state of affairs?

There are, after all, other contenders in this world for the souls of men ... seen and unseen! As our own wick smolders, others blaze! The burning Crescent of Islam, poised like a scimitar, and every bit as deadly, glows and grows in the east, and with it, not an ethnic, but a Religious Cleansing to which the world remains indifferent — an expunging of every vestige of Christianity in partibus infidelium. Even the European Union will no longer tolerate the inclusion of its indissoluble Christian heritage within its Constitution. Not only does it thoroughly repudiate its own Christian cultural heritage — it prohibits it — even banishes it!

Surely, then, in our effort to remedy this impending state of dissolution, we will first turn to our bishops, since they are, preeminently, the “Teachers and Guardians of the Faith”. But more often than not — much more often than not — in the well-appointed office at the end of the corridor we do not find a shepherd of souls but a deeply sequestered, occasionally avuncular, and predictably remote ... “administrator”.

Relegating his prime responsibility as Teacher and Promoter of the Faith ... to others, in the form of Lay committees and subcommittees largely “chaired” by liberal Catholics more concerned with social issues than the salvation of souls, are we confident that the patrimony of our faith will somehow percolate through this strata of already contaminated soil and reach our children authentically and intact? Is our fear mitigated ... or further exacerbated ... by our bishops’ resolute lack of diligence in being attentive to what Catholic colleges and theologians in their own dioceses are really teaching — and who are teaching the teachers ... who, in turn, are teaching our children? 

Do you think that your bishop actually — that is to say, cognitively — is aware of, or even concerned with — what the teachers themselves are actually teaching?

Not in this diocese. Not in Boston. In fact, Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley routinely fetes, praises, and holds up as exemplary the clueless “Catechists” who churn out our children to the Sacrament of Confirmation — with no clue whatever of that in which they are being confirmed. By comparison, even the dismal failure of our public schools in Boston must be deemed a stunning success.

For most of us — especially in the Archdiocese of Boston, but no less elsewhere — the answer is, as they say, a “no-brainer”: it is a universally resounding no. Most of us find, to our growing dismay and deepening cynicism, that our Bishops appear to have “more important”, more ... “pressing” things to do ... than to communicate the Faith to the faithful ... especially the children.

Really, we beg the question: if no one teaches the teachers — who, then, teaches the children? If they are not brought the faith by those to whom it has been entrusted — the  bishops, the episcopacy — who will bring it to them?

Will they — how can they — acquire the Faith ... if no one brings it to them? Saint Paul is very clear about this:

Ask yourself candidly: do you know more ... or less ... of your Catholic faith than your children? Very likely more — although, in all honesty, it is probably little. You politely assent to the now quaint Catholic notion that “parents are the primary teachers  of their children”, but knowing little of your own Faith, you simply shell out $50.00 per child and pan off this grave responsibility to others of whom you know nothing, and who themselves largely know nothing of the faith they presume to teach. You go through the motions as careless of what your children are taught in their 10 years of “Religious Education” as your Bishop is of what the teachers teach. 10 years later, and $500 poorer per child, you scratch your head and wonder why Johnny still does not know God, and why Judy never goes to Mass — and yet we have agreed that you know more than your children ...

What, then, we must ask — with growing apprehension — will your children teach their children ...?

What will they — who know even less than you — teach those who know nothing?

 

Total Ignorance

The momentum, as we see, is inexorable — until it culminates in total ignorance: every generation knows less of their faith than the generation preceding it. It is, in the end, the devolution from doctrine to legend, from legend to fiction, and from fiction to myth.

That is not just a poor, but a stultifying and ultimately deadly patrimony.

This default — at every level — in transmitting the authentic Catholic faith intact ... leaves Jesus question suddenly very real.

The problem is more than mathematical, as we have seen; it is exponential. 70%  of Catholics do not possess this most fundamental, this most essential understanding of the core article of genuine Catholic doctrine: that “Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His Blood, you have no life in you.” Heavy stuff!

It is not just a matter of the greatest concern, but nothing less than a matter of the gravest dereliction that most Catholics do not realize — do not know — that the very Mass itself is an abbreviation of “The Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass”, and that it is really a Sacrifice, the actual re-enactment of Calvary before their very eyes!

This failure of understanding ... culminates in a failure in Faith. It possesses, in significant ways, the remorseless characteristics of mathematical certainties.  Not understanding, grasping — having never been taught — the most elementary features of the faith, how can they be understood to possess what they have not acquired, and how can they transmit, pass on, what they do not possess? It is inescapable.  

Prognostication, of course, is for fools.

But the words of Christ are certainties that will come to pass.

“Weep not for Me, but for your children”, ⁵ Christ told the sorrowing women on the road to Calvary.

In very deed.

Jesus’ question, then — “When the Son of Man comes will He find faith on earth?”, is not a “rhetorical question” at all; it is a question fraught with enormous significance ... the frightful answer to which appears to be unfolding before our very eyes — but that is if you take Christ at His word — and given Jesus’ track record on things yet to come, we would do well and wisely to give pause for more than thought.

Are you worried now ...?  Not nearly enough.