Monthly Archives: March 2015

At the Remnant Hilary White ask the important question, “What do we do now?”

More people are asking, what are we going to do when Pope Francis or the national bishops’ conference or the local bishop, orders all the priests to formally and publicly declare that they are willing to desecrate the Holy Eucharist? We can dismiss the objection that “this is already being done all over world, so what difference will it make?” Of course it is, and everyone knows that it was by the Church’s leadership making a habit of turning a blind eye to this horrifying abuse that we now find ourselves in this dreadful situation.

But the proposal at hand is qualitatively different. If Kasper and his followers (and his leaders) have their way, the abuse will become a universal norm. A decree, will be issued from the highest authorities that will require all priests everywhere to agree to betray Christ in this manner in a systematic, programmatic way, to formally assent to it as a precondition of their continuing to act as priests. Priests, all priests everywhere, will be required to at least be willing to desecrate the Holy Eucharist, to commit the grave sin of sacrilege.

At what point do we stop and say, “That’s enough.  My obedience to the heretical hierarchy is not required here.  It’s resistance that the Lord wants from me.”

I suppose a lot of people out there have refused to really think unflinchingly, to reason logically, where the Vatican II revolution was going to go, and are now shocked that it has gone where we Traditionalists had always said it would go: to disaster. Global catastrophe. But we seem to be very close to that ultimate conclusion.

“Schism” used to be a word one heard only either in history books or on the websites of the wackier sedevacantists. But now, and in an astonishingly short time, we are seeing some very prominent people using the “S-word” right out loud. So I don’t feel too bad voicing the same fear now that we appear to have moved into Phase II of a clearly deliberately planned and expertly executed revolution.

Why is it that if you see a hand or a plan in some major development, you’re paranoid; a conspiracy theorist?  Is it so irrational that the world’s movements have leaders, that the strong herd the weak, or that singular and unnatural things like gay marriage or euthanasia don’t just pop-up worldwide all at the same time for no reason?

Everything has to have been a normal evolution I suppose, a forward motion?  I don’t agree.  When the leadership of the Catholic Church for the first time in history, begins to share more goals with the powers of the world than they do with their own saints and teachings, working hand in hand either consciously or foolishly; you must assume that they are being leveraged, compromised somehow from the outside.

White sees this latest swing as a fatal blow.  Where will the Church be when this comes to pass?

Once they have overturned the actual words of Christ Himself as recorded plainly in the Gospel, all bets are off, and absolutely anything becomes a target. All the teachings of the Church will automatically, logically and inescapably, be rendered merely deterministic “rules” to be discarded at will. As many others are saying, the entire edifice of the Catholic religion is at stake, starting with the twin pillars of the Eucharist and the priesthood.

In the end, the Church Militant, united in grace, is the only real Church.  The more closely the visible Church approximates that, the more pure and living it will be.  Outside the Faith due to sin or heresy there is no true Church, so we don’t need to consider it so.  If most of the hierarchy is doctrinally heretical or manifested in practice, they’re not Catholic.

We must find a way to let the true Church Militant fight and grow, and let the morbid Church die.

 

Much is being made of the Pope’s unorthodox, untimely, and frivolous use of the Jubilee Year to continue to ‘re-educate’ the world on ‘true mercy.’ Thankfully there have also been some warnings against a radical misunderstanding of God’s mercy which, if those running things have their way, can lead to widespread presumption and sacrilege.

Fr. Longenecker at Aleteia discusses the Year of Mercy and what it may mean.  Be prepared not to be over-simplistic.

The tradition of a Jubilee year dates back to the Old Testament. Every fifty years a jubilee was celebrated to mark the universal forgiveness of sins and pardon for all. Debts were forgiven and slaves were set free. The Catholic tradition of Jubilee years begins in the year 1300 when Pope Bonfiace VIII established a celebration in which sins would be fully forgiven for those who prayerfully and faithfully visited Rome to pray in the basilicas associated with the apostles.

At first pilgrims had only to visit the Basilica of St. Peter, but later the basilicas of St. Paul Outside the Walls, St. John Lateran and St. Mary Major were added. The Jubilee year was first intended to be only once a century, but because of popularity it began to take place every fifty years, then every thirty three years, then extraordinary jubilees were added for special events. Thus in Pope John Paul II’s pontificate there was the usual thirty three year jubilee in 1983 and an extraordinary “great jubilee” for the celebration of the millennium in 2000.

Then, in the “Time of Mercy”, 15 years later, we had another.

In order to fully appreciate the Jubilee of Mercy we have to fully understand what Pope Francis means by “mercy.” The most common understanding of mercy is being excused for a crime. A criminal stands before a judge and knowing his guilt and realizing that he deserves punishment, he pleads for mercy and a lighter sentence. While this understanding of mercy is not wrong, it is also not complete. Mercy is more than simply letting someone off the hook and not punishing them as severely as they deserve.

So mercy is even more than forgiving those who owe us debts.

In fact mercy and justice must be seen as two sides to the same coin. Justice is fulfilled, not denied when true mercy is exercised. This is because the justice which the law demands is always rightly balanced by the mercy which the human heart demands. Justice is completed by mercy and mercy is fulfilled by justice. In the Christian understanding, our redemption is completed when mercy and justice are both fulfilled by Christ’s death on the cross. There punishment for sin is finished and mercy and redemption are won through Christ’s victory.

Can this possibly make sense?  Mercy isn’t “completed by justice”.  If the heart demands something, does that mean we owe it?  Wouldn’t that be justice then to pay it?  And Jesus did not “finish punishment for sin.”  He just gave us a opportunity to receive His mercy through our repentance and His saving grace.  Punishment isn’t finished.  It’s still available.

Why must these important terms be so conflated and commingled?  I think perhaps it’s so next we can be convinced that mercy is justice and vice versa, so that in the end what we have is something wrong.

I know one group of people who would definitely agree with Fr. Longenecker though: our Bishops.  The American Bishops, who hide behind Prayers of the Faithful, and routinely support Leftist policy in the name of justice; also think mercy is justice.  In fact the entire faux social justice campaign is founded on an idea of justice that is really more akin to mercy, especially if by mercy you mean giving people things they have no right to and acting like you’re relieving them of a debt.

The common idea of Catholic social justice may be something like mercy, but it’s nothing like just.

 

 

Fr. Z links to a video from the Pope’s recent homily. In it Pope Francis laments couples who want to return to the Church and go to Mass but , due to their ‘mistakes’, must ‘stay right there’ and not go anywhere.  The Pope blames the rule-makers, the ‘doctors of the law’ who destroy.

It seems to me the Pope is, characteristically, speaking both figuratively and directly at the same time.  (He seems to do this so that everyone understands him except for those who don’t want to.)  If I interpret him correctly, this is the first time he’s made it so clear that he thinks people in open mortal sin should go to Holy Communion, quite a frightening thing for a Pope to indicate.  Fr. Z seems to agree:

Hmmm… it seems to me that there is something missing.  Of course these are only off-the-cuff remarks that have no magisterial weight whatsoever and no preacher can be expected in a short time to hit every possible point.   But it seems to me that he has set up a straw man: who the heck are these “doctors of the law” whom he has been disparaging with some frequency?  I think he means those who argue that people who are divorced and civilly remarried should not be admitted to Holy Communion because they are objectively living in a state that is inconsistent with our understanding of the Eucharist.

It’s time to stop pretending the situation isn’t stark.  Cardinal Burke seems to have gotten the message a while ago.  Catholics must be prepared to resist.