“Who is GOD?”
The Loss of Christ to Ecumenism
and the Growing Pantheon
of the Post-Catholic-Conciliar-church
C
hrist
will one day return
— yes, imagine, even in this cesspool of human and diabolical
misery that we proudly, even defiantly, call the “post-Modern
World” where the only ethic is the abolition of every ethic
— that is to say, the calculated repudiation of truth as
the vertex of all moral authority.
Of course,
we can stand as Pilate did and ask with feigned ignorance,
“What is truth?”
1
even as
Pilate stood before Truth itself (Christ) — and then go
on to crucify it. In fact, ... we have!
But why?
Why this renunciation of Christ as absolutely singular and
indispensable to salvation, such that St. Paul unequivocally
declares:
“Neither is there salvation
in any other. For there is no other Name
under Heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved.”
2
We must note that St. Paul does not say “can be saved” — but “must
be saved.”
The answer is quite pedestrian; in fact, it is strikingly simple:
the centrality and indispensability of Christ is an impediment
to something deemed greater than Truth itself which, since
Vatican II, has been the ecumenical project, perhaps best
understood as religious neutrality.
In Ecumenism, all religions (however absurd, illogical, and in
manifest contradiction to every other religion) are not
just “correct” — but are, in a way that defies reason and
logic (to say nothing of Divine Revelation), equally true
expressions of the “One, True, Religion” — which becomes
understandable when we realize that Ecumenism is the unreserved
affirmation of all religions. No one religion is correct
or true; all are true, all are correct. Such a statement,
of course, is logically absurd. It is a statement in violation
of the Law of the Excluded Middle in Logic: p_¬p To wit:
one and the same thing cannot both be and not-be at one
and the same time in a univocal sense without resulting
in irreconcilable contradiction. It is a necessary and inviolable
function of human understanding.
We hasten to add that this is not Catholicism, but a different
religion altogether — which had been mistakenly conflated
with Catholicism for 60 years — but which has emerged as
a phenomenon of itself and in its own right, having no distinct
creed and in need of no doxological credentials — the very
phenomenon which we have come to know as Ecumenism. Consider
the following which Francis proclaimed to the Plenary
Session of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian
Unity on May 5, 2022:
“I would like to emphasize that: today, for
a Christian, it is not possible or practicable
to go alone with one’s own denomination.
Either we go together, all the fraternal denominations,
or we do not go ahead at all. … Alone, never.
We cannot do it. … Today, either we all walk
together or we do not walk”
This is Francis. This is also madness. It is heresy, and possibly
apostasy. It is unquestionably contrary to the Catholic
Faith as it has been known, understood, and practiced for
the two millennia preceding that calamitous Council we call
Vatican II, and the disastrous “oracle” of Francis within
the Church.
The preceding citation is an affront, not only to Traditional
Catholics, but to the universal human capacity to reason
and understand in coherent and consistent terms. In Ecumenism
we confront the illogical, the emotive, the intractable
unwillingness to engage in anything construed as possibly
inimical to its own peculiar agendum. Any attempt to invoke
the canons of reason are understood as a threat to the Ecumenical
Project.
For this reason, we insist that Francis is not simply the culmination,
but the personification of the failed logic of that malignant
enterprise — a pantheistic project, really — benignly dubbed
“Ecumenism.” Since Vatican II, reason, logic, and revelation
have been effectively abolished. Ecumenism — not Christ
— is the ne plus ultra, the summit of every religious aspiration
and impulse.
Who is the True God?
We see this clearly in the three “Inter-Faith-Assemblies”
initiated by three successive popes in Assisi: John Paul
II on Oct. 26, 1986, “To be together to pray.” Then
on January 2002 his next pan-religious prayer meeting in
the same venue. This was to be followed by Benedict XVI’s
“Meeting for peace” on October 27, 2011, and then
Francis’s “Day of prayer for peace” in Assisi, Italy,
Sept. 20, 2016).
On these occasions, the absence of certainty concerning The One,
True, God was the sine qua non of the merest possibility
of Ecumenism.
Praying to Islam’s Allah, Shinto’s Kami, Hindu’s Trimurti, the
Zoroastrian Ahura Mazdā, the African animist’s snake god
Dan, or the Buddhist’s Dali Lama (who possesses no fewer
than 108 “avatars”), was — in a quite uncertain way — praying
to the same god in a kind of iridescent cope.
Each iteration of “god” was respectively acclaimed the
certain god, even while it was impossible to reconcile all
the alternating perceptions and contradictions inherent
in those claims.
The Catholics were the only faction in the pantheon of contradictory
gods who, through their pontifex Maximus Francis,
conceded that they, at least, were uncertain; in fact, quite
uncertain about the identity of the true “god,” and held
the least tenable position of all: that the contradictions
were only, and ultimately, illusory in the ecumenical schema.
Those brazen enough to insinuate the faculty of reason into
the ecumenical paradox and who raised the objection that
the contradictions were real— both baffled and infuriated
the “progressive” Catholic ecumenist who could, of course,
resolve these otherwise insuperable issues in the snap of
a chat. It is a strange, recursive world completely apart
from the world of men. And its epicenter is the Vatican.
It is a world that expropriates madness from the narrow halls
of the insane asylum, not only as emblematic of, but necessary
to, the absurdity encountered at every level of “higher
authority” and “higher learning” within the Church — and
most especially the Vatican and Francis-as-pope.
This mantra — “the certainty of uncertainty (except the irrational
notion of the uncertainty of certainty …)” —
appears to verge on something intelligible … until one examines
it more closely:
“Of this
alone are we certain: the certainty of uncertain
(except the certainty of uncertainty …)”
The religious epicenter of
this mental illness, as we have said, is the post-Catholic
Vatican — and its primary sponsor — and vector — Francis,
who infects with faux Jesuitical casuistry, everyone in
proximity to him. As such, Francis is indeed the pathogen
of this devastating disease that manifests itself in “certain
uncertainty.”
Ambiguity, we must understand, is the first symptom: state
nothing with unimpeachable certainty, and never in unambiguous
terms that possess the insolence of exactitude, that is
to say, apodictic (or absolute) certainty is the first organ
infected. It then advances through meaningless neologisms
which sound meaningful to the dull-witted — until they are
rationally examined by uninfected minds and reveal themselves
as so much drivel, or unembellished nonsense. But let us
allow Francis, a heretic, a Modernist, and the apex of evil
in the Vatican, to prove our point:
·
“A first principle for progress in building a people: time
is greater than space.”
·
“Space hardens processes”
·
“Spaces and power are preferred to time and processes”
3
Unless you are the keeper
of, or an inhabitant within, an insane asylum, such “Analects
from Chairman Francis” would be impossible to parse in rational
terms, let alone attain to something meaningful, or, for
that matter, coherent.
Once this ambitious policy of ambiguity and uncertainty infests
the offices and bookshelves of every seminary rector, pseudo-scholar,
and all the “carefully groomed” future priests in virtually
every Catholic seminary — it entirely suppresses and then
ruthlessly supersedes (but can never abolish) the 2000-year-patrimony
and the indefeasible competency of the quite certain Magisterium
of 2000 years. Together with the equally certain Sacred
Deposit of Faith, and Holy Tradition, which it contemptuously
disdains, it strives to replace all three with both spurious
and meretricious parodies — none of which possess “certainty.”
“Pink Palaces”
There is a desperate, decisive,
and crucial need to return to sanity — and with sanity,
certainty — through a complete reversion of all things to
what is and ever was genuinely and unapologetically Catholic.
This entails everything that has been blighted or obliterated
since Vatican II, most especially a specifically numinous
and universal language crafted for divine worship — Latin
— which is unchanging and unchangeable and hence in no need
of meaningless improvisations, no geographic or cultural
inflections; it is a language that — for two
millennia — was not confined to time and place; it transcended
all geographical borders, all cultures and every age, attaining
to universality in a way that no other language ever accomplished.
The return to sanity must embrace all that has been corrupted:
everything religious, liturgical, intellectual, devotional,
musical, every rubric, every response, enunciated without
ambiguity — everything must be restored to the 2000-year-old
form preceding the sacrilege of Vatican II. Apart from this
total return, we remain a Church without reason in both
its meanings: irrational and without purpose.
This cannot be achieved by schism from — but reversion to
the One, True, Holy, Catholic Church of our forebears for
two millennia — and apart from which (as the Church had
constantly and tenaciously held until Vatican II) there
is no salvation. She is the Body of Christ of which He is
the head, and “there is no other Name [or god, or goddess,
or pagan idol] by which we are saved” (Acts 4.12) except
Christ Jesus.
Our hot-bed-homosexual seminaries, rectors, liberal and
disaffected “teachers”; our “carefully groomed” pederast,
pedophile, and predatory priests must first be immediately
and unceremoniously thrown out, and the buildings they partied
in and “co-occupied” must be thoroughly fumigated from the
sexual filth that has found fertile ground there, much as
a bacterium in a petri dish. They must be reassessed and
reformed in stringently Catholic terms that tolerate no
aberration. The spectacle of feminist ideologues (both female
and male) instructing Catholic MEN on how to become priests
must be put to an end and never allowed to experimentally
emerge again. That is madness! Imagine laymen instructing
women Religious postulants on how to become contemplative,
cloistered nuns! In what venue would that occur? In a papally
enclosed monastery? A Convent? Impossible! “Steel sharpens
steel,” as it is said, and manly men should be examples
in the classrooms and elsewhere to forge men for a manly
task. The priesthood is nothing less.
“Certain” ... “feelings”?
The notion of certainty is both epistemological and invariable.
The notion of feelings is both emotional and variable. The
two are entirely separate. “Certainties” pertain to universally
accepted definitions that cannot be contravened without
contradiction. Anything less would be mere opinion. “Emotion”
and “feelings, on the other hand, can consistently be contradictory.
They are not confined by reason or any other objective constraint.
My emotional “feelings” are
different from your “feelings” but my cognitive understanding,
say, of a triangle must correspond to, and be in agreement
with, your understanding of a triangle: there is absolutely
no latitude, or alternative definition: “The sum of the
three interior angles comprising a triangle will always
— without exception — equal 180 degrees.” That absolute
certainty may not please you, but you cannot possibly make
it otherwise. You can state that it has 120 degrees, but
simply stating it will not make it so.
What we have Lost
Everything — everything we
held dear and precious to us, everything distinguishable
as uniquely Catholic — everything held sacred to us as Catholics
has been has been torn from us by those who deem themselves
“intellectually superior,” “aligned with the social issues
of our times,” “more “enlightened,” “progressive,” “liberal,”
and fashionably “dissident.” Understand that these are both
subjective and subversive credentials.
Virtually every aspect of genuine, historical, Catholicism has
been thrown under the feet of Modernists: the
avant-garde (that is to say, the increasingly Protestant)
cardinals, bishops, theologians, and “liturgists” — together
with the “ever-experimental” priests incardinated by apex
homosexual predators with an impenetrable network of homosexual
advocates both inside and outside the Church. We absolutely
must remember Christ’s admonition: “Do
not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls
before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and
turn and tear you in pieces.” (Mat.7.6)
Every traditional
Catholic understands the force behind this admonition. It
is not simply marginalization, exclusion, and ridicule —
but open hostility. Calvinists, Lutherans, animists, atheists,
or pagans are much more likely to encounter a warm and welcoming
reception from “progressives” in the Church than a traditional
Catholic. Why? Because a traditional Catholics are in possession
of a certainty foreign to their “progressive” counterparts
— and central to that certainty is Jesus Christ Who is largely
ignored in “ecumenical gatherings” as an impediment to Francis’s
program of “Accompaniment” with all men, and all gods, and
under all conditions.
Christ sometimes spoke analogically, but for the greater
part of His (that is to say, God’s) discourses or simple
utterances, He spoke with forceful clarity, unmitigated
austerity, and absolute unambiguity. There was no misunderstanding
Christ — or St. Peter, St. Paul, St. John, or any of the
Apostles. No effort was made to accommodate the “sensitivities”
of men, or the antagonism of the world. As St. Peter succinctly
stated, regardless of consequence, “We ought to obey God,
rather than men.” (Acts 5.29)
Judge for yourself: if the absence of certainty is not ineluctably
the absence of Christ — and of what He taught, what He commanded,
and what He mandated for all who presume to follow in His
footsteps — we have no warrant, no reason whatever, to appeal
to what is uncertain — and being uncertain, inconsequential.
The corruption, estrangement, and ultimately the rescission of
central aspects of Catholicism by Vatican II to accommodate
non-Catholic “denominations” (Lutheranism in particular,
Protestantism at large, and increasingly other “practices”
it factitiously subsumes under the concept of “religion”)
must be recognized, confronted, and not simply “resisted”
— but actively challenged in the tribunal of reason and
demonstrated to be wanting. Contradictions cannot be politely
put aside to simply accommodate consensus. The very notion
of contradiction denotes conflict and disagreement.
We must remember that the Church has consistently taught
and maintained that the relationship between Faith and Reason
is both mutual and reciprocal — not contradictory. It is
both doxastic and evidentiary, and so understood, the one
involves the other.
It is on these grounds that the documents and propositions — however
much subversively presented as “practical” in nature — that
issued from Vatican should be decided. If they do not accord
with reason (especially the Law of non-Contradiction), then
neither are they consistent with Faith, specifically the
Catholic Faith. We must soberly ask, “Do they accord with
the Mens Ecclesiae” (the Mind of the Church”) distilled
and meticulously articulated through the two-thousand years
preceding “the Council” which has sought to mitigate the
stringency of those teachings (for example, Nostra Aetate,
otherwise known as the “Declaration on the Relation
of the Church with Non-Christian Religions”, and
Gaudium et Spes, the “Pastoral” Constitution on the
Church in the Modern World— which seeks the engagement
of the Church in “the world,” through a pastoral “activism”
much along the lines of the social and political activism
that became prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. No longer
obsessed with issues eternal (such as the salvation of souls),
she was called away from them by Gaudium et Spes
to what it deemed more immediate and practical issues, issues
concerning the social and political dimensions of man to
the end of improving the secular world — now firmly in her
embrace.
Here we would do well to pause here and to remember that these
documents, among many more, are pastoral in nature, — not
dogmatic — and unlike dogmas which are divinely revealed,
infallible, and binding on all believers, whatever the nature
of their authority, they are still open to being reformed,
that is to say, revised and changed. They are not dogma
which, by definition, is irreformable or unable to be changed.
Since nothing infallible accrues to these teachings (nor
is held to), then they are, indeed, subject to the criteria
of reason and competent to stand before the Tribunal of
Reason. We must then ask, do these pastoral documents accord
with the canons of reason such that no contradiction is
implied between these documents and the constant teaching
of the Church prior to Vatican II? If no contradiction obtains,
then the Council had done well. If not — and contradictions
exist — they must be reconciled, or failing that, the teachings
abandoned.
But where could such a forum be convened? Rome, of course. And
convoked by whom? A pope, of course — which means that such
a convocation will likely not occur within the lifetime
of any present cardinal created by Francis or either of
his two predecessors. They have been too thoroughly indoctrinated
with Ecumenism to make such a leap into reason and logic.
For this reason, it is vital for us, in the meanwhile, to find
a Traditional Catholic Church where the Holy Sacrifice of
the Mass is celebrated in Latin and according to the long-established
rubrics prior to 1962 and the outrage that the post-Catholic-Conciliar-church
imposed upon us and our children. Wherever the Latin Mass
is celebrated, it is an outpost of sanity in a wilderness
of ecclesiastical and liturgical madness.
In a very practical aside,
when
we “support” your local Novus Ordo church or when we donate
to every diocesan plea for money, we must recognize that
we are paying, at least in part (perhaps in large part),
for the exorbitant fees of lawyers hired by the diocese
to settle lawsuits against homosexual-predator-priests.
Entire dioceses around the country have been bankrupted
as a result. What is more, much of that (your) money is
sent to the Vatican in billions of dollars used for countless
capital ventures having absolutely nothing to do with alleviating
the condition of “the poor” or “evangelizing non-Catholics
in poor nations; rather, it is used to sponsor films like
“Rocket Man,” a bio of the openly homosexual Elton John,
to the tune of $4.5 million USD, in what the Daily Beast
describes as,
“Elton
John’s rather steamy biopic Rocketman, which portrays
the entertainer’s drug problems and is the first studio
movie to portray gay sex between men in an authentic
way.”
Or, it may go to totally secular real-estate deals such
as the €350 million investment in a luxury London
real estate venture. Because of a blatant lack of transparency
or accountability, your donation may simply be used in money-laundering
for gangsters.
On the other hand, it may have gone to building the $2.2
million Tudor mansion by LBGT-friendly Atlanta Archbishop
Wilton Gregory (now the cardinal of Washington, D.C.), or
Newark New Jersey's Archbishop John Myers whose archdiocese
spent $500,000 “to expand his retirement home, adding an
indoor therapy pool, fireplaces and an office library.
It is not only American Catholics
who are getting fleeced: German bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van
Elst spent $43 million on a new residence and related renovations,
including a 5-foot-deep fish tank, filled with Koi carpfish,
at a cost of $300,000.
Is this really where you want
your very hard-earned money to go? Of course not!
— but it routinely does.
Refuse to legitimize this travesty. As we encouraged
you earlier, find a Traditional Catholic Church not associated
with the religious and financial scam that the Vatican has
become since that tragic Council in 1962 — the year when
the children sold their Mother into shame.
A Lingering Question
Should we, then, dismiss
Novus Ordo Catholics? No! The great majority of them
do not know — for they were never taught — the most basic
concepts and tenets of genuine Catholicism, let alone proper
comportment and apparel at Mass (which, for all appearances,
is not a free-for-all for every religious impulse and expression).
The blame lays squarely on the narrow shoulders of their
“bishops” who never exercised oversight or authority over
their priests — and their priests who never assured the
proper catechesis of their flocks.
Let us be frank, for the past 60 years Catechesis essentially
became crayons and insipid but expensive glossy books with
not so much as a crease in their bindings. Most Catholic
Masses remain effectively Protestant in tenor, presentation,
architecture, statuary, stained-glass, Marty Haugen (not
a Catholic) music and “I’m okay, you’re okay” homilies geared
to the brainless.
This is not to impugn the piety of the aging congregation
who — in the absence of proper and authentic Catechesis
— never took the time to examine the unimpeachable credentials
of their own religion, or even its differentiation from
every other religion.
Despite the ignorance (understood in its actual definition
as “a lack of knowledge, an absence of information”) of
doctrine and dogma that we almost universally encounter
in the post-Vatican II church, it is vital to us, as traditional
Catholics, to understand — and answer — two essential points
of confusion:
Does this mean that the Eucharist confected by a Novus Ordo
priest at a Novus Ordo Mass is not Sacramentally valid?
No. It is still the Holy Eucharist, providing that the priest
“does what the Church does.” This is a very real and canonically
explicit imperative:
“The Council
of Trent does not mention the purpose of
the sacrament
or say that the minister ought to intend
to do what the Church intends
but what the Church does. Moreover, what
the Church does refers to
the action, not the purpose. There is required
the intention with regard
to the action, not in so far as it is a
natural action, but in so far as it is
a sacred action or ceremony, which Christ
instituted or Christians’
practice. If one intends to perform the
ceremony which the Church
performs, that is enough.”
(St. Robert
Bellarmine,
de Sacramentis in
genere, chapter 27)
Traditional Catholics who
(justly) defy Vatican II should be paradigms of humility
and holiness, remembering the admonishments of the Apostles:
·
“If any man says, I love
God, and hates his brother; he is a liar. For he who loves
not his brother, whom he sees, how can he love God, whom
he sees not? And this commandment we have from God, that
he who loves God, love also his brother.” (1 John4.20-21)
“We are reviled, and we bless; we are persecuted, and
we suffer it. We are blasphemed, and we entreat;
we are made as the refuse of this world,
the offscouring of all even until now.” (1 Cor. 4.12-13)
But we must not and will not
call evil good, nor good evil; nor will we compromise with
deceit, crucifying Truth anew.
________________________
1
John18.38
2 Acts 4.12
3 See Quotations from Chairman Francis in this book.
Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
Boston Catholic Journal
www.boston-catholic-journal.com
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