Fr. Jacques Hamel Might Not Be In Heaven

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When I was young, I received terrible catechesis from my Catholic grade school.  I mocked most of the process and grew up to lose the faith just like the rest of us, but I did learn one thing:  the reason that we went to the Sacrament of Penance was so that we could be free of any mortal sins on our souls.

They would take us to Confession once a month.  If we missed Mass on Sunday we needed to confess it, and we couldn’t go to Communion again until we had.  Later we learned to disregard this instruction, but I did hear it.  So today I must ask every single priest I know and almost every single Catholic I’ve met, “Is this still true?”

The reason why I have to ask is that everyone seems to think that Heaven is for almost everyone now.  You don’t need to worry about Confession or Communion.  You don’t have to be Catholic, or even Protestant.  You just have to be nice, generally.  God has a plan and he’s merciful, and Hell would be ridiculously unfair.

So, if that’s the case, then what was all that about mortal sin? If Protestants and ‘nones’ don’t go to the sacraments, yet they are Heaven-bound, then why am I wasting my time being Catholic?  If Mother Teresa and my parish priests all think you can enter Heaven being faithful to your denomination or philosophy, why can’t I just be an Evangelical?  The Methodist minister who lives next door to me is very pro-abortion.  If he’s going to Heaven, why do I have to go to Mass on Sundays?  Our Sunday Mass is really an ugly nightmare.  Can I switch?

No, um, that would be inappropriate, but for them it’s OK?  Is the Catholic Church some kind of kiddie-pen?

Nobody ever has an answer to these questions.  They just live with the inconsistency of it, but they don’t live with easily.  It’s a fallacy and it’s collapsing the Church like the World Trade Center.  Unity with Christ and his Church absolutely must mean what it always has: living a sacramental life, in a state of grace, without heresy.  Heaven is an orderly place.  It tolerates no hidden heretical time bombs to unravel its realities down the road.

So what then is a martyr?  To Francis, a martyr is any ‘christian’ killed by a Muslim, perhaps anyone at all killed by a Muslim.  But a martyr must be someone who is in Heaven.  So if you are a baptized person and lead a terrible life, then get caught in a Church massacre, you’re now in Heaven?  If you’re a Copt and ISIS combs through your village, rounds you up with twenty other men, puts you in an orange suit and shoots you, then are you in Heaven?  If they gave you a chance to deny Christ and you refused, then I’d say that was quite different.  But if you are a priest saying Mass in France and they ambush you, does that make you a martyr?

Many, many of the priests we see and read about are not faithful Catholics.  They teach heresy from the altar.  Divorce, gay sex, contraception, suicide, are condoned.  If a priest like that is murdered on a train, does he go to Heaven?  Not unless he is in a state of grace.  Father Hamel may have been a very liberal priest.  Did his killers ask him to deny Christ and he refused?  Was he openly breaking the anti-Christian laws of the state as in ancient times?  Was he like Stephen, stoned for proclaiming Christ in spite of the danger?  Did he stand like St. Francis, before the Saracen and tell him he’s going to Hell when he knew it was a death sentence?

No.  Father Hamel had little reason to think he was risking his life doing what he’d done every day for decades.  He probably was not given the option to deny the Faith.  He was just killed, not because he stood up for Christ in the face of death, but because he wasn’t Muslim.  He could have been accustomed to making sacrilegious Communions and giving deadly counsel for a lifetime.  We don’t know.  If he had been given the choice between the Faith in Christ and his life, that would have been horrible too, but that’s what martyrs do.

If ISIS is able to nuke the entire United States, who will go to Heaven?  Will it be:

  • everybody
  • those who are generally nice
  • those who are baptized
  • baptized Catholics
  • faithful Catholics
  • people at Mass
  • priests who are saying Mass

Answer: Some of them, but it would be a mistake to say they went to Heaven like martyrs.

If being murdered by Muslim terrorists during Mass got you automatically into Heaven, they might have made it a sacrament by now.  Keep an eye out for the next Motu Proprio.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s Catholic to Defend the Church From Francis

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Robert Royal has posted a powerful response to Francis’s abusing of the papal office by trying to change Church doctrine on Holy Communion.  You can see it here.

Dr. Royal finds the whole thing ‘bizarre.’

His is the kind of reaction that is as welcome as it is helpless.  In the battle for the Faith during FrancisEra there are two sides to the mainline faithful Catholic front, both reactive.  When FrancisChurch burns down their houses and steals away their children, the Weigel side says, “Thanks,” and the Royal side says, “Hey, stop that you!”

Royal closes his piece with a sort of flick of the tail:

I say this in sorrow, but I’m afraid that the rest of this papacy is now going to be rent by bands of dissenters, charges of papal heresy, threats of – and perhaps outright –schism. Lord, have mercy.

While it is lamentable that there is this fracturing going on, and it’s certainly an occasion to pray, it’s really perfectly natural since the faith is a living thing.  The rest is just so much rot.  If a blackness descends upon Rome, the children of light will pull back, go underground.

Still the twisting and dancing on our side is spectacular, so to Dr. Royal I reply:

  • If the Pope himself is a dissenter, then he is the one doing damage.  If you resist a Pope like Francis, that makes you a Catholic not a pantsuit nun.  Those guys love FrancisChurch.
  • To charge Francis with heresy is a good idea.  You should try it.  I’m sure he’ll make a good faith effort to prove you wrong, yes?  (I would imagine that if someone like you didn’t think Francis was a heretic, he would wonder that he wasn’t trying hard enough.)
  • A schism is what happens when a group of bishops and priests reject the legitimate authority of a Catholic pope based upon their own heresy, not the other way around.

In short, Francis IS the schism.  His personal FrancisChurch, where anyone can receive Communion, and even his own phony namesake is now a ‘violent fundamentalist’, is not Catholic.

Condemning the heresy and rejecting the rulings of a man like Francis is called defending the Faith.  He must either be replaced with a Catholic or resisted.  You don’t throw the word schism at people like some teacher’s pet running around telling all the boys to stay in their seats.  Instead you properly identify them as Church Militant, and I’m not talking The Vortex.

 

 

 

 

We Take This Brief Moment to Pause for a Pope

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I was surprised to see Mr. Armaticus, who seemed fairly enthusiastic about SSPX Bishop Fellay’s report on the personal FrancisPrelature he’d been offered, praise Ann Barnhardt’s recommendation today.  Ann thinks the SSPX should declare a belief that Francis is an anti-pope, thereby forestalling further negotiations with the heresiarch trickster who perches in Rome whilst Benedict hides, hugs, and insipid mafia-like statements are issued in his name.

The SSPX should cease all negotiations with Bergoglio, publicly state that it is a moral certainty that Bergoglio is not the pope, and publicly declare allegiance to the one and only living Vicar of Christ, Pope Benedict XVI Ratzinger.

Ratzinger will never do anything – for good or ill – to the SSPX, because he refuses to exercise his responsibility as Pope.  Further, this will make clear that the SSPX will recognize NO actions taken against it by Bergoglio, AND that the SSPX remains exactly as it is, inside The Church, faithful to the Holy See.  And then the SSPX will truly become before this is all over, I strongly suspect, a lifeboat.

I must say that I don’t think this will happen. I think it’s likely what we are witnessing with Bishop Fellay at the moment is a man being bent.  He is taken in by some organized charm offensive.  It reminds me of the time a cop ran into my wife and I at an intersection.  The sun was in his eyes and the red light was his.  The Chief, the State Trooper, the Mayor’s office, everyone was there.  I had to stand on the corner for three hours while multiple investigations progressed.  A parade of police were designated to chat me up the entire time.  I made so many cop friends that day.  The stories we shared!

More persuasive than this FrancisCarrot, there must also be a stick out there somewhere for Fellay.  After all, look what a miserable mess they’ve made out of Pope Benedict.  Nobody seems to remember a thing about him from his long career defending the Catholic Faith.  Now this zombie creation is like, “Defend the Faith?  I’m retired from that, man.  It’s all good.  Popes are popes.  I love this new freshness.  Chill.”

I hate it when these moldy poofs keep saying ‘freshness’.  It’s sad, and dubious, to hear it now from VirtualBenedict.  What is so fresh about Francis? Is the Gospel stale without him?

I would love it if all these SSPX lights were right and the air-tight prelature idea was hopeful and, as they say, a result of the collapse of the Church and their ongoing allegiance to the Faith in the face of rejection all these hard years, but don’t worry:  Lucy’s going to pull the football.  There’s tremendous pressure bearing down on what’s left of the Church and of course, the SSPX is about the only thing that’s left of the Church.

This isn’t a trap.  It’s really just a clean up effort, a ‘delousing’ so to speak.

So Ann’s premise, that ‘agreement’ with the Francis, and ‘unity’ with his fresh new MercyChurch is not an actual option, is true.  Then what choice do they have?  Should they march off and die in a false hope, knowing they were faithful to ‘unity’, and wrecking the only leverage left on the planet for Christians in the process?  Should they just resist and wait for the stick?

No.  They can simply say, “We are not convinced that Benedict’s abdication and it’s subsequent elevation of a new pope is canonical for several reasons.  These doubts are compounded by the manifest heresy of the man who replaced him, Francis.  Since Benedict, who yet lives, may still remain Pope, and Francis is clearly not a true member of  Christ’s Church in faith, we shall persist in union with the Church as we have been, until such time as there are no longer two dubious popes on the scene.

Between a potential mis-abdication and a liberal Lutheran at best, we choose to pause for a pope.