Masses Already Infected with Post-Synod Heresy?

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Just take it. It's for your own good, and mine.

Just take it. It’s for your own good, and mine.

Pat Archbold has a post at the Remnant that does what Pat always does, applies a reality-check and much-needed perspective to the spindom that is FrancisChurch.

I am reminded of the famous Maginot line today as I saw a flurry of stories these past days about how the “conservatives” are standing up at the synod, closing the door to this or that innovation in doctrine. Case in point, Cardinal Vingt-Trois (fittingly a French Cardinal) said that those expecting “spectacular change” of Church doctrine will be disappointed.

O goody.

We see breathless stories from those who would like nothing more than spectacular change, crowing how the “Conservatives Struck First”

In his 7,000-word opening address on Monday morning, intended to set the tone for the synod’s work, Erdő seemed determined to close a series of doors that many people believed the last synod had left open — beginning with the controversial proposal of German Cardinal Walter Kasper to allow divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to return to Communion.

That Communion ban, Erdő insisted, is not an “arbitrary prohibition” but “intrinsic” to the nature of marriage as a permanent union. Mercy, he said, doesn’t just offer the possibility of forgiveness, it also “demands conversion.”

So the conservatives have learned the lessons from the first synod, we are told, and they will not let THAT happen again. They will not allow an interim document like THAT again. They will make sure to argue against changing doctrine on this matter and some may even argue against changes in discipline.

The conservatives are ready this time; they will not allow Germany to invade from the east again!!

The Pope’s opening words at the Synod were a powerful defense of Catholic teaching on marriage, for nine paragraphs.  Then surprise, he closed with two paragraphs of FrancisGospel.  The pathetic bone he threw to his orphaned Catholic social conservatives last week by covertly meeting with Kim Davis, was immediately swamped in a barrage of gay propaganda and deceit from Rome.  Once in a while Francis does something Catholic.  It’s a game.

Cardinals say things.  Everyone reassures.  These people aren’t your friends.

***

Closer to home, I was just starting to appreciate my obnoxious liberal pastor after years of pain and disgust, until this Sunday.  During the desperate lap around the Church he always makes to being Mass, in mock of any type of procession, he stopped to harass my wife about her chapel veil and pretended he would tear it off.  I think his mic was turned off this time.  (He usually keeps it on for his candid mumbles and jokes.)

Our relatively old 1960 church has eleven televisions, two of them twenty feet across in front, and six tower speakers to hear Father’s tone-deaf shouts and growls. It’s the loudest parish in the world.  He calls it a ‘megachurch’ but it’s really just about 135 suffering people with a mega A/V system.

Father refuses to let us have missals but apparently the Gospel reading was on marriage.  Then in his homily he told us that, despite what Our Lord said about divorce, regrettably sometimes it is necessary, of course.

That was a new low.  Separation can be necessary under threat for example, but divorce?  Perhaps a ‘legal’ divorce to protect your rights, but there’s certainly no such thing as an actual divorce.  Besides, divorced people almost always think what they did was ‘necessary.’  “We just couldn’t live together.”  “We’d grown apart.” “It was best for the children, so they don’t grow up with an example of an unloving couple”  It goes on and on.  Father might just as well have said, “This way to Hell.  Let me help you.”

Next, among the frightening prayers of the faithful we prayed for ‘all those who have had to divorce!”  I felt like I’d slipped down the street to the Methodists.

If you celebrate and disseminate changes in Church doctrine, you reveal yourself an apostate with no faith at all.  The Church can’t be wrong then and right now, or right then and wrong now.  If you believe it’s only right now, then you’ve put your faith in ‘now’ and not the Church.  Faith in ‘now’ is not faith at all.  It’s just a nervous need to run with the pack, like pigs over a cliff.

Finally during Communion, the band at the side of the altar sang one of the most sickening love songs I’d ever heard.  I only remember one line though:

“The fragrance of your presence intoxicates me”

That may be in the Bible somewhere but I’m starting to feel like I’ve been captured by some homo-Church and pinned down with a knife to my ear.

***

At morning Mass today, the Prayer of the Faithful asked us to pray that the Synod would provide relief for those who can’t receive Holy Communion because of some ‘obstruction’ in their marriage.

Lector:   Please, God remove those obstructions from our marriages.

All:          Lord hear our prayer?

Is this Mars?

(We then prayed for the ship lost at sea in the recent hurricane.  Why do we have to pray for something on the TV news all the time?  Aren’t there ten people locally who just had their throats cut or were shot?  Why does it always have to be a TV tragedy?)

Tomorrow we’ll probably pray for all those who are obstructed from getting a divorce for some rigid reason.

I don’t know what fiends provide input to Prayers of the Faithful, but it must be injected somewhere at a national level.  Not only is the Synod false and pre-concluded, they already have all their propaganda lined up for the old people and remaining victims who are dim enough to appreciate an hour and fifteen minutes worth of repulsive ‘worship’ on Sundays.

 

 

 

 

 

FrancisAnnulments Are Just the Softening Up

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If that marriage is invalid, let's make this one valid. Call it a merciful 'renullment' or something.

If that marriage is invalid, let’s make this one valid. Call it a merciful ‘renullment’ or something.

The Eye-Witness blog has some rare truth about FrancisAnnulments, but it’s only common sense, really.

This is a dangerous business.

I am not alone in being concerned that the Pope’s new instant annulment process is just a part of the stage-management that has been going on by the movers and shakers of the upcoming Synod. It seems clear enough – especially by the timing – that this is a maneuver to both win some hearts and minds – uncritical hearts and minds, that is – while at the same time greasing the skids for the more radical moves that are intended for October.

Even Cardinal Burke, who is more than a little familiar with the annulment process and was active in that arena in its liberalized state, is uneasy about this, calling the easing of the annulment process “sentimentalism and false compassion.”  What His Eminence did not say is that it was already far too easy to get one, and even on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Sentimentalism.  That’s what’s Islamicizing Europe right now.  We are truly a debased, de-natured people.

Let us face some cold, hard facts.  The annulment process in recent decades has been an absolute farce.  In America especially.  It is so farcical that critics of the Church have rightly called it “Catholic divorce”.  A good example: a man and a woman (known to this writer) married seventeen years and the parents of seven children were granted an annulment.  No wife-beating was involved.  The husband was far from perfect but the wife had had enough of him.  So their marriage was declared to have “never existed in the first place”.

Whether the husband was a bounder or not, they were still sacramentally married.

Many of us in the active Catholic community have such stories.

That is one story among thousands.  The number of annulments granted in recent decades is by any standard ridiculous; in the past 2,000 years there were probably 82 annulments given by the Church.  Now they give out 82 per day.  It is as if the Marx Brothers were put in charge of marriage tribunals.

But the Eye-Witness sees something even more sinister at work than the destruction of society through this institutional malpractice.

The cheers from Catholics anxious to dump their spouses is deafening.  The cheers from supine clergymen supporting this new Francis edict are also deafening.  Fence-sitting Catholics, always willing to give the benefit of the doubt, are cautiously optimistic by this.  But all of these souls are falling into a booby-trap which will explode next month.  By their cheers of support they are providing a faux consesus for a Pope who it seems wants to show a false mercy towards divorced and remarried people and, far worse, homosexual cohabitation. If the Modernists can gain Catholic support for this new “merciful” annulment process the laid trap will be snapped in a few weeks.

The earmarks of Hollywood-style PR do seem to be all over this.  It reeks of contrivance.  Once again our emotions are being manipulated by clever men.  As far as the “merciful” aspect of this latest Francis move we remain sceptical.  Our common sense tells us that even more chaos is ahead, courtesy of the strange man who now occupies the Petrine Office.

‘Strange man.’ I see it.

If the entire faithful Catholic apparatus can look the other way at this latest atrocity, they’ll be demoralized enough to sign on to anything.

 

Washington Post Defends Underdog FrancisChurch From Unknown Catholic Attacks

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FrancisChurch defender vulnerable and at-risk from conservative attack

Vulnerable FrancisChurch defender at risk from ‘conservative’ attack

The Washington Post is seeing things.

VATICAN CITY — On a sunny morning earlier this year, a camera crew entered a well-appointed apartment just outside the 9th-century gates of Vatican City. Pristinely dressed in the black robes and scarlet sash of the princes of the Roman Catholic Church, Wisconsin-born Cardinal Raymond Burke sat in his elaborately upholstered armchair and appeared to issue a warning to Pope Francis.

A staunch conservative and Vatican bureaucrat, Burke had been demoted by the pope a few months earlier, but it did not take the fight out of him. Francis had been backing a more inclusive era, giving space to progressive voices on divorced Catholics as well as gays and lesbians. In front of the camera, Burke said he would “resist” liberal changes — and seemed to caution Francis about the limits of his authority. “One must be very attentive regarding the power of the pope,” Burke told the French news crew.

To call Cardinal Burke, or any other faithful Catholic ‘conservative’ is simply a slur.  We aren’t in love with old things. We just don’t run with the popular pack, afraid, or over the cliff with the herd of swine.  We stand on the eternal Rock of Truth.

Papal power, Burke warned, “is not absolute.” He added, “The pope does not have the power to change teaching [or] doctrine.”

Burke’s words belied a growing sense of alarm among strict conservatives, exposing what is fast emerging as a culture war over Francis’s papacy and the powerful hierarchy that governs the Roman Catholic Church.

This is last year’s revolt.  The post is replaying the 2014 Synod, trying to gin up a sense of repeated resistance before this year’s attack.  But where has Cardinal Burke been the past several months?  What has happened to that faithful front?  They’ll be watching for Edward Pentin this time, and Michael Voris has placed himself under restriction.

They’ve also knotted up all the rules so that working groups have absolutely no means of open communication either with the outside or with each other.  Did you think they were going to repent their thuggish tactics and become Christian gentlemen this year?  Synod 2015 is designed so that no Synod father will obstruct the ‘holy spirit’ and his frightening surprises.

This month, Francis makes his first trip to the United States at a time when his progressive allies are hailing him as a revolutionary, a man who only last week broadened the power of priests to forgive women who commit what Catholic teachings call the “mortal sin” of abortion during his newly declared “year of mercy” starting in December. On Sunday, he called for “every” Catholic parish in Europe to offer shelter to one refugee family from the thousands of asylum seekers risking all to escape war-torn Syria and other pockets of conflict and poverty.

Yet as he upends church convention, Francis also is grappling with a conservative backlash to the liberal momentum building inside the church. In more than a dozen interviews, including with seven senior church officials, insiders say the change has left the hierarchy more polarized over the direction of the church than at any point since the great papal reformers of the 1960s.

Read ‘destroyers.’

The conservative rebellion is taking on many guises — in public comments, yes, but also in the rising popularity of conservative Catholic Web sites promoting Francis dissenters; books and promotional materials backed by conservative clerics seeking to counter the liberal trend; and leaks to the news media, aimed at Vatican reformers.

Is a ‘FrancisDissenter’ an actual dissenter?

What websites do they reference here?  The mainline faithful Catholic press retains a very thin slice of its old glory.  They are for the most part FrancisApologists and cheerleaders.  They have even become pitiful sycophantic environmentalists.  It would be better just to link to a cover page that reads: “Nothing to see here, just some fearful chiselers trying to hold onto their jobs in the era of ObamaChurch.”

No.  The rising popularity is in what used to be called ‘traditionalist’ Catholic media.  In FrancisChurch the faithful flock has been hewn right down the middle.  One side has gone ‘Voris,’ and left intellectual honesty behind to chase money and visibility.  The rest have been tarred as freaks who love long red dresses.

But those freaks are just Catholics.  LifeSiteNews, 1Peter5, The Remnant, our site PewSitter, and a host of learned and passionate writers from the Catholic and secular worlds remain to fight.  The non-specific Post may be referring to these.

In his recent comments, Burke was also merely stating fact. Despite the vast powers of the pope, church doctrine serves as a kind of constitution. And for liberal reformers, the bruising theological pushback by conservatives is complicating efforts to translate the pope’s transformative style into tangible changes.

Good!

“At least we aren’t poisoning each other’s chalices anymore,” said the Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, a liberal British priest and Francis ally appointed to an influential Vatican post in May. Radcliffe said he welcomed open debate, even critical dissent within the church. But he professed himself as being “afraid” of “some of what we’re seeing”

A poisoned chalice is one taken unworthily, ‘Father.’  If you’re so afraid of these dangerous Catholics perhaps you should register a micro-aggression complaint and enforce some kind of ‘safe space.’  After all, there’s nothing organic about the church to which you belong.  It’s already dead and dying, but the true Faith only grows.  It must be forcibly smothered and suppressed by men like you and their secular masters so that the ‘awful horror’ can go on ‘standing in the place where it should not be.’