Cardinal Pell Gets the O’Malley Evil Eye

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Sending out psychic drones

Sending out psychic drones?

Things are looking grim and ominous for Cardinal Pell, high-level curial reformer yet famous defender of the Faith at that heresy-laden Synod on the Family.  He appears to be getting the evil eye from Cardinal O’Malley, the man in charge of those caustic pro-gay professional victims who are spreading their hate from within the offices of the Church itself.

Jean-Louis De La Vaissiere writes:

External experts brought in by Pope Francis to help tackle the tiny city state’s ills are answering the papal call for openness — and infuriating some Holy See stalwarts in the process.

Over the past few months members of the pope’s commission for child protection — handpicked by Francis to help root out sex abuse in the Catholic Church — have publicly attacked a cardinal and a bishop.

The cardinal in question is the Vatican’s finance chief George Pell, who was accused by commissioner Peter Saunders of being an “almost sociopathic” man who covered up abuse and tried to buy the silence of at least one victim.

Australian Pell, who was described by Saunders as “a massive, massive thorn in the side of Pope Francis’s papacy”, threatened legal action and was defended by the Vatican, who stressed Saunders was only expressing his personal views.

Despite the anger among red hats in the gilded corridors of Saint Peter’s, Saunders — a British child abuse victim — stood his ground and has not apologised.

The anti-paedophilia body has strong ties to survivor groups who are highly critical of the Vatican, and its members readily draw attention to the Church’s flaws, even if it embarrasses the very man who appointed them.

These newly empowered survivor groups are plain enemies of the Church and priests.

Now the office run by Cardinal O’Malley, the most senior man at the Vatican appointed to handle such matters, has issued a statement calling on Cardinal Pell to respond directly and promptly.

It was Curial Gang of Nine’s O’Malley who signaled the doom of targeted K.C. Bishop Finn several months before his ultimate resignation.

“The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, as mandated by the Holy Father, Pope Francis, has no jurisdiction to comment on individual cases or inquiries,” the statement issued yesterday evening reads. “Regarding Australia’s Royal Commission of Inquiry into Institutional Child Sex Abuse, all appropriate questions are being dealt with by the Truth, Justice and Healing Council in Australia, which is coordinating the local Church’s response to the Royal Commission’s findings,” the statement says. “The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors remains dedicated to its mission as outlined in the recently approved provisional Statutes, which is to help the Church worldwide protect minors and make certain that the interests of abuse survivors and victims’ are paramount. To this ends the Commission considers it essential that those in positions of authority in the Church respond promptly, transparently and with the clear intent of enabling justice to be achieved.”

Just like FrancisChurch has done with Bishop Finn, with the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, and with other good bishops in South America, Italy, now Belgium; they are muscled aside in the name of murky or overblown scandals.

Meanwhile there’s almost nothing the liberal friends of Francis can do to lose their exalted positions in the Church today.

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Pope Francis Is Confused About St. Francis

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Loved for his holiness, not his hipster agenda

Loved for his holiness not his hipster agenda

At Crisis Samuel Gregg counters the accumulated image of a saccharine St. Francis who gave his life to the poor.  People are hijacking St. Francis, using his name for their own less-than-Christlike agendas.

Such ideas about Saint Francis don’t fit well with some portrayals of the medieval hermit and friar that have emerged in recent decades. Many of these have been developed, as illustrated by the doyen of Italian historians of Francis and the Franciscan movement, Grado G. Merlo, to exploit Francis for numerous contemporary religious and political agendas, ranging from pacifism to radical environmentalism. Franco Zefferelli’s well-known 1972 film Brother Sun, Sister Moon presented the saint, for example, as a type of winsome eccentric who was all about shattering conventionality. In his 1982 book Francis of Assisi: A Model of Human Liberation, the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff portrayed Francis as one who, conceptually speaking, would help us move away from a world dominated by “the bourgeois class that has directed our history for the past five hundred years.”

Leo Boff is one of the many rehabilitated Marxist pseudo-Catholic thinkers in the Pope FrancisEra.

So what are some aspects of Saint Francis’s life detailed in Thompson’s book that will surprise many? One is that although he sought radical detachment from the world, Francis believed that he and his followers should engage in manual labor in order to procure necessities like food. Begging was always a secondary alternative (29). Another is that Francis thought that the Church’s sacramental life required careful preparation, use of the finest sacred vessels (32), and proper vestments (62). This is consistent with Francis’s conviction that one’s most direct contact with God was in the Mass, “not in nature or even in service to the poor” (61). While Francis is rightly called a peacemaker and one who loved the poor, Thompson stresses the saint’s “absolute lack of any program of legal or social reforms” (37). The word “poverty” itself appears rarely in Francis’s own writing (246). It seems Francis also thought that it was absolute rather than relative poverty which “always had a claim on compassion” (40).

When it came to Catholic dogma and doctrine, Francis was no proto-dissenter. He was, as Thompson puts it, “fiercely orthodox” (41), even insisting in later life that friars guilty of liturgical abuses or dogmatic deviations should be remanded to higher church authorities (135-136). Hence it shouldn’t surprise us that Francis’s famous conversation in Egypt in 1219 with Sultan al-Kamil and his advisors wasn’t an exercise in interfaith pleasantries. While Francis certainly did not mock Islam, the saint politely told his Muslim interlocutors that he was there to explicate the truth of the Christian faith and save the sultan’s soul (66-70). Nothing more, nothing less.

Francis is of course especially remembered by Christians and others for his love of nature, so much so that another saint, John Paul II, proclaimed him the patron saint of “those who promote ecology” in his 1979 Bula Inter sanctos. Francis’s deep affinity with nature and animals was underscored by those who knew him. The killing of animals or seeing them suffer upset him deeply (56). In this regard and many others, Francis didn’t see the natural world and animals as things to be feared or treated solely as resources for use (57).

Unlike many other medieval religious reformers, however, Francis rejected abstinence from meat and wasn’t a vegetarian. Nor was there a trace of pantheism in Francis’s conception of nature (56). Francis’s references and allusions to nature in his writings, preaching, and instruction were overwhelmingly drawn from the scriptures rather than the environment itself (55). More generally, Francis saw the beauty in nature and the animal world as something that should lead to worship and praise of God (58)—not things to be invested with god-like qualities. G.K. Chesterton’s 1923 popular biography of Francis makes a similar point: though he loved nature, Francis never worshipped nature itself. Francis’s relationship to nature, Thompson observes, shouldn’t be romanticized. The saint even viewed vermin and mice, for example, as “agents of the devil” (225).

Francis is a saint because he was faithful.  He lived the Gospel so closely that Our Lord granted him countless miracles including imprinting him with His own stigmata.  He was poor as a discipline, as a sacrifice, and example.

Francis’s goal was souls.  His was the work of God.  His mission was to rebuild the Church, not tear it down or make it into something profane.

He was no liberation theologist, trying to take over the world by demonizing the wealthy, overturning the social order, and flouting the natural laws in the name of the poor.  He threw all that materialism aside when he was quite young and picked up the cross of Christ.

 

 

Archbishop Cordileone Makes Priests

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Bishop

Bishop

San Francisco’s Archbishop Cordileone is not resilient because he’s clever.  He’s a good pastor because he’s loving.  In other words he’s a bishop of the Church.

One Mad Mom reports on his recent talk to new seminarians about priesthood.

On temptations to shirk:

Of course, there is a valuable lesson of life here, especially for your future ministry as priests, God willing. Sometimes doing the right thing will be emotionally difficult. The temptation will be not to take decisive action in order not to create conflict and to keep relationships harmonious. Yes, often things can be worked out in less disruptive ways, and that is the course of action to take whenever possible. But other times you just have to bite the bullet, man up, and do the right thing regardless of how you feel about it.

On being ideological or lazy…

The ideologue simply imposes his own ideas on everyone else, regardless of how it will be received and without trying to understand the people who have been entrusted to his pastoral care.  The lazy priest, on the other hand, simply lets people do and believe what they want; he avoids conflict at all cost, and builds everything around his personal life, his ministry included.

On the hard work of being pastoral…

This is being pastoral: encountering the other, establishing a relationship with them, being lovingly present to them. A priest cannot possibly hope to help his people grow in holiness if he is not present to them. His loving, pastoral presence to them at those most critical moments of life – the loss of a loved one, the birth of a child, marriage, times of crisis – all of this prepares the ground for him to, when necessary, challenge them for their own ongoing conversion. So make no mistake: truly doing the “pastoral thing” will always be harder, it will always place demands on you, sometimes inconvenient and uncomfortable demands; it will require you to work hard.

On the liturgy and the sacraments….

Now, some people might say that this is all fine and dandy, but it’s irrelevant because it’s not what’s happening in our parishes. Well, if you see a discrepancy between what is in the pages of the Church’s documents and what is going on in our parishes’ liturgies, it’s not because the documents are wrong!

This is where the three approaches can be so easily illustrated. The ideologue will simply start mandating changes without talking to people, seeking to understand them, and, most importantly, teaching them. He’s in charge, so he does what he wants, and even if what he wants is what the Church says we should be doing, he alienates people. The lazy priest simply lets things drift off on their own, and get further and further away from what the Church teaches about how we are to worship. This, too, will inevitably begin to affect how and what his people believe, and so weaken their faith. But the pastoral priest will educate his people about what the Church teaches, what the Council really had in mind for authentic liturgical reform; he will begin to introduce changes gradually, probably targeting one principal Sunday Mass to build it up as the one with special solemnity. He also will not take anything away from his people; he will keep the contemporary music at the other Masses, and teach the musicians how to do it well. In this way, he will facilitate liturgical renewal organically. And it can be done. I’ve seen it done. I know pastors who inherited a parish in shambles (in one of them, the kids’ swing set was in the pastor’s back yard!), and, by approaching it precisely this way, they have completely transformed their parishes: the Masses are full, there are long lines for confessions, the full spectrum of ministries abound – even including the teaching of Natural Family Planning – and people are on fire for their faith.

This won’t happen with the ideologue or the slouch. When the ideologue discovers that the high school kid is having a great time banging away at the drums at Mass, he’ll tell him to take a hike. Never mind that this was his one connection to the Church, and maybe even hope for keeping out of trouble. Of course, the slouch will just let it continue, maybe even encourage it, and pretend as if it’s enjoyable. The true pastor will befriend the young man, guide him as to how he can use his instrument in a way that supports the singing rather than drown it out, and begin to sensitize the musicians to their proper role. When the young man graduates and leaves for college, there is an opportunity to make a subtle change of direction.

Finally from OMM to the Archbishop:

We cannot thank you enough, Archbishop Cordileone!   We know you’ve taken the harder road so many before you have failed to do.  Despite the media spin and the efforts of the “100 Prominent Catholics,” your love for the people in your care shines through!  You are the true shepherd that we need for our local area as well as for the whole country. May your efforts be blessed!