Syrian Christians Understand: Modernism is Worse Than ISIS

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Worse Than Terrorism

Masters of Terror?

Everywhere today in Our Church, even in Hellish Syria, we forget that human beings are so much more than physical.

From the SSPX:

The bodily persecution of Middle Eastern Catholics is terrible indeed. And yet, Christ teaches us that those who persecute the soul are even worse:

And there is no need to fear those who kill the body, but have no means of killing the soul; fear him more, who has the power to ruin body and soul in hell.” (Matt. 10:28—see also Luke 12:4-5)

The letter of a Syrian to a French friend, bears out this truth by showing how the internal enemy of Modernism is an even greater danger to the souls of persecuted Catholics in the Middle East.

Dear friend,

During your latest visit, you asked us to put our thoughts in writing. For many years, you have devoted yourself to showing our French friends how the most ancient Christianity of the East is dangerously threatened in the flesh and in its very existence. But will you dare to tell them today the terrible truth and to speak of the danger for our souls? For it is not so much the Christians that are being assassinated in Syria; it is their faith.

Contrary to popular opinion, we believe that the Sunnite Muslims who behead our brothers and devour their hearts are in fact less deadly for our Christianity than a Church that has ceased to transmit the Faith to us. And yet, that is the dramatic truth: the proportion of practicing Catholics is somewhere between 20 and 30%.

Our clergy is disappearing. I am not talking about the priests who have abandoned their flock to seek shelter in America or Europe; I am talking about the number of vocations, which are becoming seriously rare. Can we excuse those who remain among us, even as we deplore the fact that they have not received any serious formation on the doctrinal, spiritual and even moral levels? And to prove it, take the fact that—on the pretext that the faithful would have more trust in a married clergy than in a celibate clergy, (it is all too easy, alas, to guess why)—it only took a few months to start ordaining married men priests. Shall I confide to you that this practice satisfies neither their wives nor their communities, who both complain of their lack of availability, since in most cases, the priest has to practice a profession in order to support his family?

Since the ’70’s, the secular clergy in the Middle East has scarcely received a better formation. Not to mention the “monks”, who are monastic only in name, living in luxurious monasteries where there are often more servants than religious, and where the religious are free in their acts and under no control. It is only too easy to imagine the wanderings of a liberty left to the control of each individual, and the habitual scandals for the weak in our narrow East, where everyone takes pleasure in spying on and judging the priests in order to comfort their own consciences.

But let me come back to Syria. What would be the point of distinguishing between a hierarchy completely preoccupied with money, whose priests worry only about feeding the poor, without ever giving them the bread of the Word, and those who care about neither and often scarcely even set a good example?

The obvious reality today is this: that the Christians have no more trust in their priests than their priests have in their hierarchy. And the concrete consequence is dramatic: in the face of the indescribable sufferings they have been enduring since the beginning of the conflicts, more and more Christians in Syria have come to declare: “God does not exist!“

What does the FrancisChurch bring us by attacking the faithful, heretically lauding all Protestant sects as if they’re in union with the Church, and chasing the world?

‘Traditionalist’ Catholics lament modernism and refer to Pope St. Pius X but I don’t think framing our disease as a heretical cocktail of everything modern advances anything.  Our problem is simple worldliness.  Where Our Lord rejected Satan’s offers in the desert, we accept them. Rather than the follow disciplines of ancient rules and prayers, the sacraments, and the sacrificial ascetic lives of poor servants, we take the easy road and reap its spiritual blindness.

Today everyone is celebrating Cardinal Sarah’s revelation that Pope Francis told him to continue the liturgical work of Benedict XVI.  That sounds very encouraging and so unlike the rest of things Pope Francis has said about the Mass, but according to Cd. Sarah, Francis also told him to continue the liturgical ‘reform’ of the Second Vatican Council.

Such a hybrid bi-directional vision was in fact put forth by Benedict, but in practice where does it lead?  What can one make of the liturgical reforms of Vatican II?  How can they be developed or integrated?  It seems the Pope Francis has, via third party, once again said something politically reassuring yet ineffectual and, like victims of Stockholm Syndrome, we praise Him for briefly relenting.

We cry and bark about terrorism today, but the crimes against our own souls have been so much worse.  The crushing installation of Hell on earth is happening to us right here and now.  We have already been shrunken and disfigured into something much less than human; no longer men, women, fathers, or mothers.  How long will we continue to be distracted by worldly causes that pretend to be Christian and political games where we can only lose?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pope Francis To Orders: If They’re Not ‘Forward-Looking,’ Screen ‘Em Out As Nut-Cases

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No need for balance or structure

No need for balance or structure

At the Radical Catholic there’s no reason to start glossing over the Pope’s naked contempt for the Faithful.  It’s not like it’s going to stop.

The great Vatican II is the Church in entirety!  Those Catholics who retain beliefs from the prior Church must be branded insane – and this in the Year of Mercy.

Doubling down on Cardinal João Braz de Aviz’ warning to religious vocations directors from around the world about the consequences of distancing oneself from the “great lines” of the Second Vatican Council, the following day Pope Francis gave the same group a short list of warning signs that a young person might not be suited for religious life.*

Given the state of the Church, one might be tempted to expect such a list to include, say, active homosexuality, pedophilia, theological and/or pastoral dissent, careerism, inordinate fondness of polyester pantsuits, etc. But I suspect that even considering such things as being potentially harmful to religious vocations is to have already distanced oneself from Vatican II – perhaps irreparably so. No, the real threat to religious vocations is to be found elsewhere: deep in the Freudian Unconscious. Pope Francis explains:

All the people who know the human personality – may they be psychologists, spiritual fathers, spiritual mothers – tell us that young people who unconsciously feel they have something unbalanced or some problem of mental imbalance or deviation unconsciously seek strong structures that protect them, to protect themselves.

Faithful Catholics, people who are conservative, grounded, Christian; they are unbalanced.  Ask anyone who knows the ‘human personality’ like a psychologist.  Nothing trendy about psychology, no.  It trumps all.

While insinuating mental imbalance in one who seeks structure is somewhat new – I mention only in passing his description of Christian ideology as a “serious illness” – decrying the threefold evil of ‘structures, rules and habits’ is an established trope of Pope Francis’ personal magisterium. As he wrote in Evangelii Gaudium (§49):

More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: “Give them something to eat.”

Again, is there any doubt as to who is meant here? And could the modus operandi of setting up false dichotomies be any clearer?

Why is it that every aspect of the 1970s church, which produced, among other things, the endless sex abuse lawsuits and scandals, has to be replicated today?  How many faithful vocations were subjected to these psychological screening attacks back then?

Personally I find little encouraging in the fact there are about a hundred more ordinations in the U.S. this year.  It’s still a miniscule number for a country with over 300 million people.  I know Pope Francis says he’s all about quality, but I can’t help but thinking they’ve probably become more lax in at least one key area.  After all, they’d probably have thousands of vocations if they really wanted them, not hundreds.

At his core, the place where there should be Faith and wisdom, doesn’t something seem deeply twisted in the mind of Pope Francis?  It’s almost a crushing hatred for those who obstruct his goals, a determination to succeed at their expense.  It’s the kind of force which drove the Protestant Reformation: a deranged (ideological?) mind at the helm with all the powerful establishment lined up behind him.

I hate to say it, but I don’t know what else to call it.

 

 

As An Entire Country Closes Its Churches, One Cardinal Mentions Why?

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Presiding over the death of his Church?

Presiding over the end of his Church?

In the Netherlands a cardinal prepares his Catholics for the inevitable:

During Lent, Catholics in the Netherlands are getting accustomed to the vision of a future without churches. In this year’s Message for Lent, the President of the Episcopate of the Netherlands Willem Cardinal Eijk, announced that he will take on one of the most painful problems of the local Catholic community, i.e. the necessity to close the vast majority of churches in the country, in the near future. As a result of mistakes made by the local Church after the Council and the actual abandonment of evangelization, there has been a dramatic reduction in the number of faithful in in recent decades.

In all fairness Cardinal Eijk may not mean exactly what he seems to be saying here, but one couldn’t think of a more exact description of the problem, not just in the local Church, but the entire Church itself.

Card. Eijk stressed, that he never takes an initiative in this regard alone. For the “deconsecration” of a sanctuary, it is the parish council that writes a simple request stating that only a few faithful attend a church and therefore the parish does not have the necessary funds for its maintnance. The Utrecht ordinary stressed that the decision to deconsecrate is always taken with a heavy heart.

Card. Eijk therefore understands the bitterness of the faithful who find that their village or district will no longer have a church. He however cautions that this should not cultivate these sorts of negative feelings, because they can lead to permanent bitterness. It is important, however, to be open to God and to other Catholics, and with them deepen their faith through prayer, the Word of God and catechesis. Although church buildings might disappear, our faith and the will to be the Church does not disappear from our villages and districts – Cardinal Eijk writes in his message for Lent.

No the Faith won’t disappear.  They just won’t need very many Churches to hold it.

One would imagine that someone must have had this result in mind back in the 1960’s.  Was everyone misguided hierarch behind it just in the grip of some fantasy?