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.

 

In Praise of Alternate Popes

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Violent tempered, aggressive, unliked, and completely different than the Humble One.

Violent-tempered, aggressive, unliked, and completely different than the Humble One

John Allen has a piece of blatant pro-divorce propaganda today and he trashes the heroic and pious example of the victorious Egyptian Copts in the process.

As Pope Francis gears up for a showdown over divorce and remarriage at October’s Synod of Bishops, marking the latest chapter in a polarizing debate that’s left some Catholics delighted and others disenchanted, he can take consolation that he’s not the pope in the hottest water over the issue.

If you’re delighted then you’re not Catholic.  Only liberals get disenchanted.  That’s  because they’re so easily enchanted.  Faithful Catholics are just furious at the hijacking of our Church.

The world’s other major Christian leader who holds the same title, Pope Tawadros II of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church, is also facing stiff blowback related to a divorce debate. Unlike Francis, however, some members of his own flock don’t just want him to change course, but they actually want him fired.

“He’s one of the worst spiritual leaders we’ve had in recent times,” said Wael Eskander, a well-known commentator on Coptic affairs, applauding recent calls from Coptic activists for Tawadros to be removed and sent packing to the monastery where he lived prior to being named a bishop.

“He’s playing a game he will lose in the end,” Eskander said.

Pope Tawadros is highly popular.  The Egyptian Copts endured a living nightmare after Obama’s pro-Islamist pressure helped topple their long-time president, leaving them ethnic cleansing and scores of churches burned.  Who are these ‘some members,’ and who cares what this ‘well-known’ Eskander thinks?’

Copts form the vast majority of Egypt’s eight to ten million Christians, and while most observers regard the idea of removing their pope as a long-shot, they say the uprising reflects real discontent over the extent to which Church authorities try to assert control over the private lives of their followers.

“People don’t like him very much, because he has a violent temper and he’s seen as aggressive,” said Mina Thabet, a Coptic researcher on human rights. “There’s a real problem between the pope and the people.”

I don’t believe that statement for a minute.  The only people who don’t like Egypt’s Tawadros are displaced Muslim Brotherhood.  But this isn’t really about Copts.  It’s about Francis and his brazen and heretical divorce coup.  Not that Francis believes in divorce, no.  He just thinks separation is mandatory in a host of vague and commonplace circumstances, streamlined annulments are in order, and Eucharistic sacrilege is ‘mercy.’

When it comes to the substance of the divorce question, Francis and Tawadros are drawing fire from opposite sides.

The Catholic leader is generally seen as a moderate, with conservatives alarmed that he might relax his Church’s rules banning communion to anyone who divorces and remarries outside the Catholic Church. Tawadros is seen as a hard-liner, staunchly opposed to allowing Copts to dissolve their marriages under virtually any circumstances.

Francis is not seen as a moderate.  He’s seen as seven steps to the left of Catholic.  If someone like John Allen calls you a hard-liner, it just means you’re nice.

In 2011, a movement was founded called “Coptic 38” to campaign to go back to the earlier, more permissive rules. When he took office three years ago, Tawadros rejected that suggestion out of hand.

Despite the criticism, Tawadros appears to have the backing of other Coptic leaders.

On June 25, a traditional Church body called a “millet council” in Alexandria rejected calls for the pope’s removal, calling the selection of the Coptic leader a “divine choice” that cannot be undone.

Certainly the generally conservative ethos of the Church’s leadership suggests Tawadros won’t find much resistance for keeping reformers at bay.

So much for that unpopular Coptic Pope on the brink of removal.

There’s little indication any such putsch against Tawadros is in the cards, yet there are signs his stance is driving a few Copts away. Estimates provided by Peter Ramses El-Naggar, a lawyer who’s part of the “38” movement, are that since 2008 some 1,200 Copts have converted to Islam, which permits divorce, and that 4,000 more have tried to pursue a civil divorce or joined another Christian denomination.

In a country of over 70 million Muslims, Tawadros is such a bad Pope that Copts jump ship at the rate of over 150 per year! (I’m sure none of them are simply caving under pressure.)

Aside from the coincidence that another pope is wrestling with the same problem, Francis may want to take note of the Egyptian debate for another reason. If he relaxes the Catholic position on divorce and remarriage, it could create ecumenical tensions with churches such as the Coptic Orthodox currently struggling to hold the line.

Isn’t that the opposite of a Catholic stand?  How in the world can a Pope ‘relax a Catholic position on divorce and remarriage?’ A Pope like Francis might lie about it, but he can’t actually do it.   We aren’t the Protestants here.

No matter what happens to Tawadros, the turmoil illustrates a hard truth which, by now, must be clear to his fellow pope in Rome too: When it comes to divorce and remarriage, somebody’s going to be unhappy no matter what you do.

If faithless sinners aren’t unhappy with the Pope then he’s not doing his job.  If, on the other hand, he’s pleasing faithless sinners left and right then, unlike Pope Tawadros II, he actually should be removed.

If a good pope can be threatened off the throne, a bad one can be taken down.  The Church can’t just let the world impose its own popes.  It’s becoming painfully clear that it just doesn’t work.

Church teaching isn’t going to change, and it isn’t going to hibernate until the world somehow becomes more virtuous. It’s going to sit there, Francis or no Francis, demanding action and assent regardless.