“That understanding of its sacred dogmas must be perpetually retained, which Holy Mother Church once declared; and there must never be a recession from that meaning under the specious name of a deeper understanding” (Blessed Pope Pius IX, 1st Vatican Council, S.3, C.2 on Revelation, 1870 ex cathedra)

 

 

Stinging Truth from a Pulpit — but not a Priest

“We are not worthy of persecution. We are Christians not worth killing.”
Matthew Walsh

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The State vs. Frankie
 

Capo di tutti capi

 

 “Pope Francis’ sexual abuse prevention summit planned for winter’s end [next year!] in Rome
with the world’s bishops will apparently not address protections for the demographic found in recent months to be at significant risk from sexual predators in the Church: seminarians.”
 Lifesite news

 

In other words, while the house is on fire and crumbling around us, Francis will schedule yet another ... “conference” — next February ... five months away ... to “look into” the issue — rather than address the disaster NOW!
 

FOR CHRIST'S SAKE — literally  —  DO SOMETHING — NOW!!!

 

This is nothing less than madness, insanity, irresponsibility, deafness, blindness! I reiterate, it is MADNESS! And if it is not madness, worse still it is complicity.

In the meanwhile, shall we pretend that it is not happening (as we have pretended for over 50 years) until — to our everlasting shame — the arm of the State in the form of Grand Juries and subpoenas forces the Church’s hand to comply with Justice (a Cardinal Virtue, remember?) and turn over to competent authorities what documents they have not yet shredded — but in the ensuing 5 months will have plenty of time to.

If the Church obstinately refuses to punish her own children for crimes, then the State will address what are no less than felons unsparingly — as it should. No one should get a pass, no matter the color of his biretta or the trim of his robe — from priest to pope! Put them right in the slammer — for God’s sake if only to protect the young and innocent. What a parody of the Church: the State must occupy the moral high ground and attempt to justly incarcerate those whom the Church has no manifest intention of defrocking or denouncing as reprobate — and expelling them from the Body of Christ! There are sins that incur automatic excommunication no matter what ecclesiastical office is occupied! That is the interior court of Justice that cannot be escaped and in which there is no plea-bargaining. One may cleverly elude the State, but remains on intimate terms with his guilt — which will exact its tribute. Now or later. With apodictic certainty.

Consider the following:

Pennsylvania: over a thousand children and youths were raped by over 300 homosexual priests. Three hundred! Three hundred! The number is staggering!

MASSACHUSETTS: If the Archdiocese ever comes clean, the numbers in Pennsylvania will pall before the overwhelming predation of children, minors, youths, and young men that has occurred here. Over the years in my own parish (typical Novus Ordo) I knew, over the years, that certain priests were homosexual (the sashaying, lisping, the feminine hand gestures, the many movements we associate with women) and was once even propositioned in the Confessional in a Church the next town over.

One priest at my parish left the priesthood (presumably) to “marry” another priest. I would never have suspected him. Never. And that is scary. No feminine gestures. No clues — which means that you cannot tell — until the hand is on your thigh. At Saint John’s Seminary in Brighton in the late 70’s I attended some “Days of Recollection” for young men considering the priesthood. At once I could sense, see, the femininity of the young men — and more troubling still, the priests themselves who led the “Days of Recollection.” After attending several times I found myself set apart and alone …. marginalized — presumably because it must have been apparent that I was not one of the girls. The atmosphere was permeated by homosexuality … without the merest hint of the “odor of sanctity”.
 

FUMIGATE IT!

Saint John’s Seminary was in desperate need of fumigation. It reeked of homosexuality. I considered contacting the Chancery about this openly scandalous state of affairs but had learned that any letter to any bishop was answered politely but dismissively by one of his assistants (who himself may have been homosexual and not particularly sympathetic to any request for addressing the issue.)

Talking with other young men later — who were married and with children — their experience was the same. They chose the vocation to the priesthood but were not allowed to go beyond the pink doors — because they were straight, or worse still, straight and adherent to Church teaching. After much soul-searching they found their vocation elsewhere — just as I did. There were, I found, lots of vocations to the priesthood — but their fidelity and masculinity were an impediment that did not sit well with those who made the decisions. No scent of Lavender? Then the Pink Door slams in your face.
 

Religious Orders? Fumigate them, too

As I searched and searched for a Religious Order (surely Religious Orders were not infected …) as an External Postulant for the Capuchin Franciscans (who, at the time, had a monastery in Milton) my Vocation Director, a certain Father Matthias, asked me if I believed all that the Church taught. Unhesitatingly I truthfully answered “yes”. WRONG ANSWER! “No”, he replied at once. “We must question.” The Catholic Church? As a philosophy student in graduate school I knew the intricacies of inquiry and the spurious  “imperative” that a scholar — especially in philosophy — accept that nothing is certain (the “doctrine” of nearly every university in America). “That is not good”, Father Matthias continued — as I processed in my mind everything from Saints Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Saint Anselm and a dozen others as we walked. I briefly wondered if I had wandered into a Jesuit retreat house. They, too, lost God after Vatican II. But Father Matthias wore a habit — that more than likely cloaked his disbelief. Jesuits do not and are generally contemptuously unapologetic about it. I thought of a Barren Fig Tree.

But Father Matthias was the one whose skewed and illogical “spirituality” I had to get around if I hoped to make it to the Order’s main monastery in Garrison, NY (now The Garrison Institute for Transformational and Contemplative Ecology — a non-sectarian pseudo-sanitarium dedicated to “The Science of Contemplative Practice and neuroplasticity” where people actually pay to be indoctrinated with “climate change and environmental advocacy, neuro-, behavioral and evolutionary economics, psychology, social networking, policy-making, and investing and social media to work together on ways to shift behavior on a large enough scale to realize substantial emissions reductions.” It’s true.

I never made it to Garrison because God had other plans for me that included a wife and four children — I never looked back.

But now, over my shoulder, and with inexpressible anguish in my heart — I see Rome burning. And Nero fiddling.

 

Geoffrey K. Mondello
for the Boston Catholic Journal
September 16, 2018

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Philadelphia as Boston:
 

A Shameful and Deadly Remix

 

Do good priests share your outrage?

 

And THIS is the man Francis hand-picked to address the problem Church-wide?

(Those who ignore warnings probably have a vested interest in ignoring them — and collaborate when the berm is breached. Will it work this time?)
 

“We remain shamed by these egregious failures to protect children and those who are vulnerable and affirm our commitment that these failures will never be repeated.” (Cardinal O’Malley of Boston — 16 August 2018)
“O’Malley, chairman of Pope Francis’ Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, faces accusations of ignoring a priest’s letter trying to warn him three years ago about now-disgraced ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick”
Boston Herald 28 August 2018

 

“Failures”?  …“Failures”? ...  I really bristled at this.
 

What hypocrisy!

What hogwash!

Who can believe that? Who in Boston? In Brighton? On Planet Earth? 

He came here, to Boston, in 2003 — 15 years ago — to “correct” the criminal behavior, the homosexual deviancy that infested the priesthood and raped our children — and especially festered at Saint John’s Seminary where, if you could not pass the Color Pink, you would never see Holy Orders. Why? Because it was the seedbed of the homosexual culture that infiltrated, dominated, shamed, and broke the Church in Boston — and then the rest of the world.

Where do you first look when attempting to uncover widespread crime? How about a Criminal Organization? If it is theft, a gang of thieves! If it is political corruption, the State House and the Legislature!

If it is perversion in the priesthood — how about the seminary?

“Elementary, my dear Watson.”
 

NEVER AGAIN?

He came. He saw. He “conquered” — and left Saint John’s Seminary as filthy as it was when he arrived as the Vatican’s “White Knight” in 2003. And now he wishes to “affirm our commitment that these failures will never be repeated” even as he himself now stands in the shadow of complicity.

Did he not say something of that nature 15 years ago?

He is, reportedly, putting together yet ANOTHER ... “PANEL” ... to investigate what was already “investigated” long before.  According to NECN,

“Cardinal Sean O’Malley from the Archdiocese of Boston says he’s not able to verify or disprove these allegations, but wants the investigation to start as soon as possible … Cardinal O’Malley said in a statement, “The allegations made this week are a source of serious concern to me as Archbishop of Boston.”

He must be scratching his head: “Haven’t I heard something like this before?” As we see, O’Malley is STILL only tentatively scandalized by homosexual predators in the Episcopacy and the priesthood! He is yet — some 15 years after the loathsome scandal broke in Boston — simply “unable to verify or disprove these allegations”, you understand.  No, you are not in some parallel dimension. Fifteen years after this nauseating and pandemic putrescence in the Church burst like a vesicle  ... a boil ... from a diseased Body — O'Malley is not yet ready (as Francis famously was not in the priest-bishop-homosexual pedophilia scandal in Chile) to give credence to the such ... “allegations” ... however many, and however grave the scandal to the Faithful. Perhaps he misunderstood Christ:

“But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in Me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea.” (Saint Matthew 18.6)

Let us offer our clueless Cardinal in absentia … a few clues obvious to most Catholics, but apparently opaque to most cardinals:

Doesn’t a cardinal or bishop have to be a priest first? And do not priests first have to be seminarians? And do not seminarians attend places like Saint John’s Seminary? “Elementary, my dear Watson”.

How about “starting that the beginning”, O’Malley? You know, like the people responsible for admitting candidates to the seminary? And the teachers who instruct them? The bishops who consecrate them? Surely none of them were among the homosexual predators ... too?

You MUST have been there before. It is on Lake Street in Brighton. Of course we know that you share the habits of Francis — who is enamored of you — by living in a simple residence, and maybe you cook your own meals, too? But how about the weightier matters? The Faith? The Flock? Remember them? “The Little Ones” … you remember them, too?

Ask yourself: when was the last time you saw O’Malley? At a photo-op with Francis? You have listened to his “sermons” — mostly monetary appeals — ON RECORDINGS in your parish — in place of a homily embodied in a physical presence?

Did you ever write him about an abuse in your parish? If you did, you never heard from him. You heard from his “secretary” who told you that Father so-and-so was held in O’Malley’s “highest esteem”. In other words, GFY! This is a Catholic Journal so I will not spell it out for you.
 

“INSINCERITY” iS tOO kIND, tOO gENEROUS a wORD

O’Malley is the poster boy of all the insincerity we now find in the Church. He talks the talk. He kind of looks the part. But face it, by now it is apparent that he is most likely one of the Old-Boys from the 60’s culture that devastated the Church and has no real intention of correcting a vicious crime. Wasn't he famously brought in 20 years ago to clean this mess up? But it hadn't been “cleaned up”. It festered like a boil until the suppuration (the foul and putrescent pus) finally burst in a scandalously ugly mess that no amount of editorial “sanitizing” could keep the reek away from any sentient being. And you come again to rectify it — a second time?  We suggest that it is time to “Lawyer-up”, O'Malley!

The horror that emerged from Pennsylvania will teach “the hierarchy” nothing: 300 priest-homosexual-predators identified (so far) and over 1000 children — not to count the pre-and-post-pubescent, the seminarians, the young adults preyed upon by priest, bishop, and cardinal alike. “Surely the “hierarchy would have acted had it known ...” but the problem was the hierarchy and the systematic cover-up of crimes too horrible, too shameful to stain the pages of any Catholic journal.

Francis — himself now suspect of cover-up should have acted — but could not without indicting himself ... and very likely many of his “closest advisors” like the homosexual apologist and pro LBGT Father James Martin, S.J who Francis invited to speak in Ireland at (of all things) the World meeting of Families about “Showing Welcome and Respect in our Parishes for ‘LGBT’ People and their Families” while at the same time denouncing “Homophobic pastors”. But that would mean gathering the criminals and clapping them in irons! Who, then … would “man” the emptying churches which, since Vatican II, have been largely emptied of meaning anyway. If this concatenation of absurdities does not point to the End of the World, as some frightfully sober men suggest, it is, at the very least, the End of Sanity in the World — at least the world inhabited by rational Catholics ... whose Warden at the moment is the principal Inmate.

Salus animarum? The Salvation of souls? That is last on the list of O’Malley, just as it is last on the list of Francis. The Beatle’s song “Imagine” invokes two things indispensable to both men from that hallucinogenic era of the 60s: imagine a world of “the brotherhood of man” and “no religion too?” This is the “Post-Conciliar” Church. This is Vatican II. This is Francis — and, apparently, O’Malley.

God? Heaven? Hell? Salvation? All such silliness was stamped out by Vatican II — and both men are eminent products of that “Council” that became the ecclesiastical equivalent of Dresden. Once again O’Malley comes, not as a shepherd, but to collect the ashes of faith, mix them with the tears of the sodomized, and somehow to mold a monument to this crushing horror with the promise, yet again, that “these failures will never be repeated.”

“Failures”?  You call them mere “failures”?  How dare you?!

The rest of us— your “Eminence”—  call them our “Children”.

Vae vobis!

 

Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
September 3, 2018

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Francis as “the Prince”

 

 

and the Logical Conclusion of Vatican II

 

 

Francis is the logical conclusion of the Second Vatican Council understood as the Assisted Suicide of the Church.  He is the logical consequent of nearly every flawed statement, every questionable postulate, and every sophistical premise either substantive or implicit, within Vatican II as so many antecedents to a catastrophically spurious argument.  As he himself stated as early as 2013 — but not before a rude  slap in the face to all his predecessors (one still alive: Pope “Emeritus” Benedict):   
 

“In the interview, Francis denounced the “Vatican-centric” nature of the Holy See administration and acknowledged that popes past had been infatuated with the pomp of the
Vatican and its “courtesans.” and then:

“He said the Second Vatican Council, the 1962-65 meetings that brought the church into the modern world, had promised such an opening to people of other faiths and non-believers,
but that the church hadn’t made progress since then.” ¹
 

He then went further, to make the paradoxical claim that:

“I have the humility and ambition to do so,” he said.” ¹

In other words, “I, Francis the celebrated, acclaimed, and famously humble and unpretentious — propose to fully actualize all the nonsense embodied in the equally celebrated (albeit spurious) ‘Spirit of Vatican II’ because I alone among all my predecessors have the real humility — and ambition — that they lacked — and the iron will to do so! Bet on it.”

 

 Let us ponder that for a moment, for it is fraught with significance.

Does a humble man boast of his humility? Of course not, for he sees the contradiction inherent in such a question.

More troubling still is the question: is ambition consonant with humility in a pope?

At the apex of power (at which Francis now sits) ambition can dangerously verge on Machiavellian. As Niccolo observed  in his famous work, The Prince, “Ambition is so powerful a passion in the heart, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.” ¹ 
 

How Far?

Machiavelli was a vehement atheist. Francis is an unbridled progressivist (radical liberal).  In both cases, however otherwise divergent, the pressing question appears identical: “How far can I go? What can I get away with? To what extent can I push the limits of this power vested in me? To the point where power prevails over truth?”

These are serious questions, especially as they pertain to the Vicar of Jesus Christ on Earth.

Has the Church, as Francis insists, really been stagnant for 50 years — until the epiphany of Francis who alone can achieve what Vatican II proposed — because he alone has the humility to accomplish this, coupled with an unbending determination? Is there something disconcerting about this statement? Even contradictory?

What is more, we need only look at the anemic state of the Church following Vatican II:  the dearth of clergy, religious, seminarians — the aging and emptying pews … to see that no such “stagnation” in the Church occurred. To the contrary, prior to Vatican II it was a Church full of vitality in every conceivable metric — and growing exponentially!

To understand how Francis arrives at this spurious conclusion we must first understand that Francis is the quintessential product of a unique generation.  He is among the last of that now dwindling generation (thank God) who themselves were products of the psychotropic culture of the 1960’s — which, in our rear-view mirror — is a now barely visible, and from which we cannot speed away fast enough. It has long begun to fade to fatuity. Most of us have, by now, come to our senses and recognize this.

 
A Deadly Age

It was a deadly age, a noxious age whose poison still leeches into Western society. At a given stratum it will be percolated through reason, eventually strained of its poison, and become the historical nonsense it was — even if it contaminated so much and so many lives before it was bleached out of our consciousness and finally became innocuous , together with the psychedelic caricature of a reality it had never known. Timothy Leary, et alia, “Turned on, tuned in, dropped out” and in alignment with his not-so-famous literary micropiece “Design for Dying — Dying? Throw a House Party! ” — dropped dead.

The Age of Aquarius and the Psilocybin mushroom are dead and what is left of that sad crop are dying leaves on a withering tree, fretted by songs still strummed by the arthritic hands of the elderly on guitars three times the age of the audience. They are pathetic figures clinging to a youth that betrayed them to an old age that wasn’t supposed to happen in the euphoric Flower Days.

In truth it was a miserable age that opiated America; an age that filled the valleys and made the mountains low — for the coming of the Flower Child who littered it with filth. It was Woodstock after the rain and the music stopped: a wasteland of plastic trash, condoms and roach clips.
 

The Segue into Vatican II

Same time, same culture, same euphoria, same mantra against inhibition, same contempt for authority, same disdain for absolutes. It was the time to experiment with society, with minds, and — most sadly — with souls. While students occupied the chancellor’s office at the university, “liberated” Catholic theologians, together with Avant-guard bishops and their ecumenically requisite Protestant advisors occupied the Vatican.

“The Establishment” was shut out — in academic, ecclesiastic and civil society. “Old school” was out. “New school” was in: a new and radical school of theology and spirituality; new interpretation, “exegesis”, “hermeneutics”, and now “discernment”.  “Dogma” became “anathema” and “anathema” was finally scrubbed from the Catholic lexicon altogether: both became something  pejorative: nothing was incontrovertibly true (itself a reflexive contradiction).

Latin as an Ecclesiastical Marker or Identifier was out. Banality was in. Priests spoke the vernacular and finally realized that they had nothing to say. Homily became comedy. Comedy became skit. The Guitar is King! — no longer Christ Jesus. And the only Choir we know is not of Angels: they ceased their accompaniment with us when “Liturgists” discarded Gregorian Chant in favor of the insipid ditties of Marty Haugen who is Lutheran or the “Saint Louis Jesuits (not all of whom remain Jesuits, or priests, or even Christians.”¹)

 

No going back: DNR and the Church as a Hospice

New vestments, new language(s), new Mass, new spirituality that emphasized man through a unilateral (Catholics gave up virtually everything. Protestants relinquished nothing) effort at a newly-reformulated notion of “ecumenism” instead of salvation. Nun’s and Sister’s Habits were shortened, then abbreviated, then thrown out. The new “cool” was the collarless priest, the unidentifiable Sister. The various “Conferences of Catholic Bishops” (which have no binding authority) became social, then political. The Church effectively became the “field hospital” envisioned by Francis — but it was also the only patient — mortally wounded, and strapped to it was the purple rescript DNR (“Do Not Resuscitate or Revive”) upon the inauguration of Francis as pope with a ready hand on the plug. Vatican II, it turns out, was really an act of Assisted Suicide as Francis has more than amply demonstrated and the Church has become less a “field hospital” than a hospice. “Better that the one true Church die than acknowledge our mistakes and return to the business of saving souls as we had done for the 2000 years preceding Vatican II.” But even the model of a hospice is inadequate, for after the last Catholic dies, the hospice itself altogether ceases to be. This is nihilism — not Catholicism — and it has been for some time.
 

The Birth of Theo-Politics

Theo-politics was born. Peace, Poverty, Immigration, Inclusiveness, Equality, Linguistic Neuterization in the Liturgy, Feminism, and “Ministries” without meaning or number became the New Evangel. “The salvation of souls”?  Not a chance. That outdated mandate belonged to the 2000 years prior to the Second Vatican Council — and is something of an embarrassment to contemporary Catholic priests, theologians, scholars, and … yes … laymen. Ask yourself: when was the last time you so much as even heard that phrase at Church? Modernism — that “synthesis of all heresies” — replaced every vestige of the theological concept of Tradition that is inseparable from the identity of the Church especially as it is articulated through infallible Church Teaching and Dogma.

The Kingdom of God became the Polity of Man. Language was purged of “salvation”, “soul”,  “Hell”, “Penance”, “repentance”, “Mary”, woman, virgin, man, he, she, her, hers, his, gender, evil, the devil, conversion,  sin, suffering, chastity, mortification — anything that stifled the desires of men and the ambitions of women. Heaven now has Open Borders — and they are coterminous with earth.
 

A Replica or a Counterfeit?

We built a simulacrum, a meretricious and largely plastic replica of the Kingdom of Heaven and placed in on earth — complete with electric votive candles.  And yet, for all its semblance we secretly fear it is counterfeit.  It is little wonder that we fear dying and leaving our Kingdom … for, perhaps, another and fabled Kingdom of which we heard long ago where Someone else ruled and in which the totality of man did not abide, given his sin, selfishness, cruelty, malice and indifference to God — a place of ceaseless Light and no fire divided from a chasm of ceaseless fire with no Light.

 But we know that Vatican II — or at least it’s true “spirit” abolished all that 50 years ago. “Everyone and everything goes to “Heaven” — despite the explicit teaching of Christ to the contrary (Saint Matthew 7.13-14).

 Does this appalling vision offend you? Have I injured your “sensibilities”?

Reality is like that — much like the “Reality TV Shows” that you probably watch. Not every episode has a good ending. Many do not even have a good beginning — much like Vatican II — and even more apropos of the spectacle that is Francis as its culmination.

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¹ Associated Press http://www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2013/10/pope_francis_urges_reform_want.html

² https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otr.cfm?id=3844

³ Niccolo Machiavelli — The Prince

 

Geoffrey K. Mondello
for the Boston Catholic Journal
April 19, 2018

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