Blinding FrancisMercy Assault Undone in a Day

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Blinded by all the mercy

Briefly blinded to the Truth

It’s only September 2nd and the Obama network of dictators, the UN, their Vatican, its hierarchy, and the entire media machine are all hyping FrancisVisit ahead of the Paris Summit.  Right out of the box they hit us with a bewildering cocktail of assaults of course under the banner of ‘mercy.’  With his left he disarmed his faithful critics.  With his right Pope Francis made the entire faithless world think he just forgave abortions.

Though extremely clever, the Francis brand is better with its right than its left because it’s only taken a day for us to bounce back.  Mahound’s Paradise chimed in.

One of the headlines yesterday was that in honor of the upcoming Jubilee Year of Mercy, Pope Francis has granted to every priest the authority to absolve the sin of abortion, at least for the Jubilee year. The implicit subtext is that priests did not have this authority before. The relevant text is reprinted at the end of this post.

While this declaration has been hailed in many quarters as a sort of stunning development–an example of the Pope’s new Church of Mercy in action, its actual effect in terms of the practical ability to obtain absolution for abortion is . . . wait for it . . . almost zero.

Why do I say that?

Because priests could do it anyway.

Or to put it differently, as with many things surrounding this Pope, the reality is different from the hype.

The word ‘hype’ is so apt for this Propagandist-Pope.

The writer goes on to describe the many, many ways that the restrictions on Confession and absolution for abortion are legally lifted already.  In reality there are no limits upon the Mercy of God for the repentant.  Of course, most people do not know that.  They think the Church is all about hating people.

Here the reader may stop and ask, isn’t this all just so complicated? Shouldn’t the Pope be commended for making it simple and transparent (during the Jubilee Year only, we should add, then we go back to the regular rules)? The answer to this is that while the rules might be somewhat complicated–it’s taken me 1,000+ words to explain them–the reality or the practice is not. If one has been a party to abortion, “easy” absolution has always been available, or, more accurately, has been available at least since 1983 and in many cases earlier.

The truth of the matter of course is that the real impediment is not some 24 hour waiting period that would apply in only a small minority of cases anyway, but the state of mind of the potential penitent–not desiring to obtain absolution from a priest, or being afraid of it, ignorant as to its importance or whatever.

The Pope’s announcement was, to put it simply, a PR move.

This is the cold hard truth about FrancisMercy.  It’s PR.  ‘Mercy for the peripheries’ to put it another way.  It’s supposed to reel in the lost, but it will only serve to do two things:

  1. Confirm them in their sins.
  2. Make Pope Francis look like the Messiah again so he can be harnessed by the Left.

He is a ‘transformational figure,’ remember, meaningful to much more than just ‘catholics.’

But those who are wise as serpents in these matters might look on it in another way: It’s a PR move to stress the goodness and mercy not of God, but of this Pope, and to implicitly condemn the “old” or “traditional” Church (in other words the eternal Catholic Church) of being, well, mean.

(I should note that the sub-headline to many stories on the Pope’s announcement plays exactly into that–“traditionalists” were “dismayed” at the Pope offering an “easy out” to such a grave sin. Given the stress by traditionalists on confession, that’s almost a complete inversion of the truth.)

If the Pope were truly interested in saving those who were prisoners of mortal sin, he would call all non-Catholics to convert (you need to be a Catholic, obviously, to receive the sacrament of absolution) instead of implying that it doesn’t matter and condemning those who think it does–“proselytism is solemn nonsense…the most important thing is to journey together towards the good.”

If the Pope were truly interested in reminding his flock of the necessity of confession, he would ask all Catholics to go and go regularly, and require that his bishops and priests make it more readily available. Announce it from the pulpit often, allot more time to it, put the confession booths back and stop storing hymnals in them.

If the Pope were truly interested in offering absolution to those who were a party to abortion, he would implore them to see a priest today, not wait until the start of his own Jubilee Year on December 8.

That is the last word on the subject of yesterday.

 

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?