Abp. Vincenzo Paglia: Men Like This Make Saints in FrancisChurch

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I'm selling this unseemly and ostentatious castle for a good price on behalf of 'the poor'

I’m selling this unseemly and ostentatious castle for a good price on behalf of ‘the poor’

Archbishop Paglia, the postulator for the cause of once-blocked Liberation Theology icon, Oscar Romero, and perhaps the only person who seems to have first-hand knowledge that Pope Benedict supposedly lifted it after blocking it for a generation, is being accused of fraud.

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, a Vatican official, is under investigation by Italian prosecutors on suspicion of embezzlement and price fixing during the sale of an historic castle, according to media reports Wednesday.

The sale of the San Girolamo castle in central Italy has already led to the arrest of two employees of the diocese of Terni where Paglia, who is president of the Holy See’s council for family matters, was bishop.

Now prosecutors are probing Paglia on allegations of criminal conspiracy and fraud in relation to the sale of the castle four years ago to real estate company IMI immobiliare, which was headed by one of the arrested diocese employees.

Diocese funds were allegedly used illegally and money was found to be missing from diocese funds.

According to Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, which cited the prosecutor for the city of Terni in central Italy, Paglia is alleged to be one of the instigators of the fraud.

The mountain of things we are supposed to believe in the new FrancisChurch just gets higher and higher!  Pope Francis doesn’t endorse the condemned Communist-produced heresy of Liberation Theology and neither did murdered, I mean ‘martyred,’ Archbishop Romero, but both of them repeatedly spoke and acted just like Liberation Theologists.  Both associated with the leaders of the movement and receive their praises, and the FrancisChurch has placed its guiding ‘lights’ at the seats of highest honor in the Church.

The denials are perfunctory.  The beatification itself is telling.  Martyred for loving the poor?  How do you love the poor by defending Marxist guerillas?

It’s not like we can put any confidence in the FrancisChurch saint-making operation, which completely ignores all semblance of ancient protocols, or any indication of approval from Heaven or the faithful whatsoever.  Are we required to honor such saints, made by men who approve heresy, who even admit as much?

Here we learn that the man guiding the Romero cause seems to have been bilking the system for quite some time.  Can we expect more from a man who promotes Catholic-Communism as some saintly crusade?

While the San Girolamo castle in the Narni area of central Italy is considered to be of great artistic and cultural value it is now believed to be left abandoned.

At the same time, the Terni diocese is one of the most indebted in Europe, with a deficit of some 25 million euros (about $27 million).

Paglia, 70, was the diocese bishop from 2000-2012 before Pope Benedict named him to the Pontifical Council for the Family, which promotes and protects family interests in the church.

He is also one of the most prominent Vatican officials who is a member of the Sant’Egidio Community, influential in Italy for its commitment to working with the poor and immigrants.

Pope Francis has issued strong statements against corruption, including during a visit in March to mafia territory in Naples.

“Corruption stinks, corrupt society stinks,” he told residents, adding that “we all have the potential to be corrupt and to slip into criminality”.

Sounds like those might just be words.

When the Catholic Church becomes nothing more than a politicized tool and a massive bureaucratic agency with a bishop’s face painted on the office door, why should we be surprised to hear they’re all in on the skim.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Liberation Theology: Dissident Leo Boff Says Oscar Romero and Pope Francis Lived It

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Paragon of FrancisChurch Theology

Paragon of FrancisChurch Theology

The HuffPo has an brief interesting study about now beatified Archbishop Oscar Romero and his importance to FrancisChurch.  It’s notable because it’s fairly honest and it has some actual information about these much cloaked and propagandized subjects.

A golden thread links Pope Francis to Oscar Romero, the murdered archbishop whose beatification the Pope ordered to take place last weekend, to the rapturous acclaim of the people of El Salvador and the wider world.

The thread is that of liberation theology, the movement that swept through Latin America, and then other parts of the world, 40 years ago. It maintains that the Gospel contains a preference for poor people — and insists that the Church has a duty to work for political and economic as well as spiritual change.

That’s exactly true.  Liberation Theology maintains the blatant lie that the Gospel contains a preference for poor people.  It doesn’t.  The Gospel proclaims and exemplifies the discipline of poverty and the virtue of charity.  A preference for poor people would be a cruel bigotry on God’s part.

The second lie of Liberation Theology is this worldly agenda for ‘political change’ which is beneath the Gospel and more akin to the Theology of Judas.

Conservatives in the Catholic Church do not like this. They have taken to asserting that Romero was not a liberation theologian. There is an irony in that, for they had spent the previous three decades blocking Romero’s path to sainthood by arguing the opposite. Then they said that to canonize the murdered cleric would effectively endorse liberation theology too.

It is ironic but it’s not conservative.  Any writers who’ve read Romero’s actual words know he had some affinity with the Liberation Theologists, but professional catholics often pretend otherwise.  The popes in our generation were wise and correct to suppress the Romero cause.  Pope Francis has not been so.

Conservatives saw this radical pro-poor movement, at the height of the Cold War, as a Marxist Trojan horse that would allow communism into South America through the back door. Its followers saw it as the words of Jesus in action.

Which was right?  It’s not just a matter of who holds the papacy.

In the years that followed, the mainstream Catholic Church took on board many of the insights of liberation theology. But conservatives in the Vatican and in the Latin American hierarchy worked behind the scenes to counter its influence — and block any attempts to move Romero along the path to becoming a saint.

There is an effective answer to these machinations and manoeuvrings. It is the one given by the man who is indisputably one of the founding fathers of liberation theology, Leonardo Boff, a former Franciscan friar who left the priesthood after the Vatican ordered him to a period of “obsequious silence” under the conservative papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

When asked if Pope Francis was a liberation theologian, Boff gave an answer that would apply as aptly to Romero. “The important thing is not whether he is for liberation theology but [whether he is] for the liberation of the oppressed, the poor and the victims of injustice. And that he is without question. Pope Francis has lived liberation theology.”

Oscar Romero lived it too. He was not a theoretical theologian. He stood unflinchingly by the poor — and died for it.

Standing for the poor is not Catholicism.  It’s love.  Dying for the poor, if such a thing were to happen, is not martyrdom.  It’s getting murdered.  Dying for the robbed or the oppressed is even better, but it’s not necessarily dying for the poor.  But most importantly, living and dying for Liberation Theology does nothing but hurt the poor and endanger their souls as well with a ruthless and materialist heresy.

If that, as Leo Boff asserts, is what both Romero and Pope Francis lived out in their words and deeds, then he’s right.  It doesn’t really matter.

 

 

 

Cardinal Kasper catholicism at Georgetown

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Porous and non-institutional

Porous and non-institutional

They love Cardinal Kasper in American faux-catholic academia.  He was unloading at Georgetown recently.  The go-to source for all things Francis, Jesuit AmericaMag, has the report.

Cardinal Walter Kasper offered the highlight speech of this Memorial Day weekend’s Georgetown University/Marymount University conference marking the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council. He spoke Saturday morning at Washington’s National Cathedral, the event’s third sponsor and chief ecumenical partner. 

The President Emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity offered new hope for the unity of Christians in the 21st century. Quoting Isaiah 43, “Behold, I do something new,” the cardinal explained, traditional ecumenism is being transformed by the rise of the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches. Compared to the Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches, these churches are mostly non-dogmatic and less institutionalized expressions of the Gospel. 

Is it bad to have something be an institution?  Doesn’t that just mean it’s both old and effective?  Are we all Rousseauian radicals and romanticists now?  Must everything be reduced to nothing before these men are satisfied?

Yes.  It must.

These younger, growing churches are more emotional in their worship styles and more voluntarist in their organization. Their members don’t so much belong to a church, as members of the older churches do, but choose their churches. In that respect they represent a contemporary social development in which religious identities are more transitory and church boundaries more porous. 

All churches must face that porosity as a sign of the times, Kasper suggested; and the older churches must examine themselves as to what they can learn from the younger Evangelical and Pentecostal ones. The growing importance of Evangelicals and Pentecostals, he suggested, will re-shape and renew 21st century ecumenism.

This is Christian leadership?  The emotions of the times drive the Church.  The Church doesn’t drive the times…unless something really bad happens.  Then it’s the Church’s fault.  Right, Diarmuid?

Can the doctrine. Shelve the rubrics. Make everything voluntary. Be porous.

The rise of the Evangelicals and Pentecostals, the cardinal said, constitutes a fourth stage in the history of the churches. The first was the divergence of the Oriental  churches from the Mediterranean churches (Greek and Latin) after the Councils of Nicea and Chalcedon. These ancient churches of the Middle East, which lay beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, never accepted the doctrines of the great councils, and so are sometimes called Non-Chalcedonian.

The second phase was the break of the Orthodox East from the Latin West in the Great Schism in 1054. The third was the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, which split Western Christianity into Protestant and Catholic branches.

Look to the history of schism and heresy for guidance.  There’s a magisterium Cardinal Kasper can obey.