I said it on March, 13, 2015, and it needs repeating…
Monthly Archives: May 2015
A Catholic without “heresy”, is a “catholic” without faith, hope & charity
Editorial, May 25, 2015: All Christians know that Christ Jesus is their Lord and Master. By “master”, we mean “teacher”, “instructor”, the One who shows us the way to Heaven and the way to get to Heaven.
Consequently, the teachings of Jesus Christ are the very essence of Christianity, and Christianity is in its essence a religion defined by Christ’s teachings.
Now, just as the christian church which is true to Christ in all His teachings, both doctrinal and moral, is the true Church of Christ — and this is the Catholic Church — so is Christian faith, hope and charity defined by the affirmation of Christ’s teachings, and not just some of them (for even a pagan can admire some of them), but all of them. And not just professing with one’s lips that they are true, but living and obeying them in one’s own person and life. This is, infact, what it means to be a true Christian, a true Catholic.
It follows then, that saying what is NOT the teaching of Christ and what transgresses His teaching is absolutely necessary. For just as it is necessary to every property owner, who wishes to retain his property, that he know the boundaries of that property and defend them and his title to them, so in matters of being a Christian, the fidelity which leads one to accept and put into practice the teachings of Our Lord and Master, requires that we know precisely where those boundaries are, so that we might not be fooled into thinking that something is nor is not part of Christ’s teaching.
The ancient word, which Christians use for this, comes from the Greek word, αἵρεσις (haeresis), which means “choice”. The first Christians used this word to signify a teaching which differed from Christ’s teaching, because they understood simply and truly that the litmus test for being a disciple of Christ was that the disciple accepted everything Christ taught and chose to believe nothing which was disharmonious with it.
So, the choice to believe other masters was called a αἵρεσις, and thus that false doctrine was called also a heresy.
For this reason, we can say that without the word, “heresy”, a Christian could not distinguish a true disciple from a false one. For many are the antichrists which have gone out from us, says the Apostle St. John in 1 Jn 2:18 ff..:
18 Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that Antichrist cometh, even now there are become many Antichrists: whereby we know that it is the last hour. 19 They went out from us, but they were not of us. For if they had been of us, they would no doubt have remained with us; but that they may be manifest, that they are not all of us. 20 But you have the unction from the Holy One, and know all things. 21 I have not written to you as to them that know not the truth, but as to them that know it: and that no lie is of the truth. 22 Who is a liar, but he who denieth that Jesus is the Christ? This is Antichrist, who denieth the Father, and the Son. 23 Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father. He that confesseth the Son, hath the Father also. 24 As for you, let that which you have heard from the beginning, abide in you. If that abide in you, which you have heard from the beginning, you also shall abide in the Son, and in the Father.
Hence, the Christian who refuses to use the word, “heresy”, in regard to false teaching, is in truth the Christian who no longer wishes to follow Jesus Christ. He has chosen instead to live and get along and not rock the boat. And thus he no longer has either right faith, nor true hope in the salvation Christ’s promised; and most of all, he has not the charity which binds the disciple to His Master and holds his fellow Christian as dear as himself, wishing to guard him from the danger of damnation by warning him, with the word, “Beware, what that man is saying is heresy!”
The Bergoglio Effect in Ireland: “The Mass has ended”
by Antonio Socci, unofficial English translation by the From Rome blog.
That Ireland, ancient fortress of Catholicism, has gone over to the people of “gay” marriage (“and who am I to judge”, as the Bishop of Rome is want to say), is a historical event. If this sounds like the profound rumble of an avalanche, as in the collapse of a mountain falling down, it is just to ask, “Is this an Bergoglio effect?”
Besides, in South America, the Church has already been crumbling for years (the statistics are horrible); now in Europe, the heart of Christendom.
That which renders secularism dominant — as Cardinal De Lubac used to say — is the propulsion and instrumentalization of “a Christianity ever more in the minority, reduced to a vague and impotent theism.”
Barack and his Puppets
Today, only such a theism is permitted. Instead, the Catholic Church as She has been known upto now is threatened even as regards Her existence.
There is only place for a ridiculous laicized parody of Herself, as the humanitarian “courtesan” (as Andrea Emo would have it), as an “agency for religion” which on the great life issues submits herself to the dictates of Obama-like ideology, which renounces proselytism and the “Catholic God” (as Bergoglio says, “There exists no Catholic God”), which dissolves herself into an ecumenical freemasonry of so many religions, which busies herself with the climate and the recycling of garbage, teaching good manners (Good Morning! Good Evening! Thank you! and Pardon me!) and goofy-pleas for the help of the poor. But for the true Catholic Church, there is no longer any seat at the table, as the drama of the last great pope, Benedict XVI shows, “fired”, self-incarcerated and silenced.
The True Church
The Church has illumined and conquered the darkness of the world of the gods and has rehabilitated the history of a pagan and anti-human age: the Church of the Word of God made Flesh, who has the presumptuousness to announce the Truth, the Church of the great Saints, of the Martyrs, of the Missionaries, the Church of the Divine Liturgy and of the masterpieces of Art, the Church of Mother Teresa, of great ideas, of great popes, of Padre Pio, with Her outbursts of the supernatural, the Church which has held Herself firm head-to-head with the ferocity of the Mohammedan and the great genocidal totalitarianisms of the 20th Century: this Church, today, no longer has the rights of citizenship.
Yesterday, Msgr. Galantino (Secretary of the Italian Bishops’ Conference) — according to a tweet from Alberto Mingardi — seems to have said at a conference: “When the Church was Catholic and the Mass was in Latin …”.
A Freudian slip which is explosive and revealing. In fact, today, we are in the midst of the last act of the “liquidation of the Catholic Church,” as Giuseppe Prezzolini foretold, a layman but concerned with the abyss to which the Catholic world was running, anxious as it was to be “modernized” and to surrender to all the ideological fashions of the moment.
But, to liquidate the Church, it is not the persecutions, nor the hatred of the secularist, but — as Paul VI said — it’s the “self-demolition” from within which is the cause.
The way to the abyss was undertaken not with the Council — as certain lefebrvians think — but at its end, exactly 50 years ago, with the “post-Conciliar” age.
In the days following, in the newspapers, one was reminded of the 5oth anniversary of the first Mass in Italian, and another layman like Elémire Zolla, in those days, came to underline the event in apocalyptic tones: “The 7th of March, the Mass dies, Gregorian chant dies. Heard for the last time. Now, as a dry branch, the Church shall be burnt.”
In reality, the problem was not only the use of the vulgar language in the liturgy (a thing, which I think is positive), but the successive “liturgical reform” of 1969 and above all the de facto, but illegal, banning of the Mass of the preceding millennia of Catholic liturgy.
Joseph Ratzinger made us understand, many years afterwards, the enormous error, even theological, which was committed at that time. Which would have colossal consequences, even in the tragic loss of faith.
To Save the Cathedral
But, curiously, in those days, the ones to raise the alarm, in a dramatic manner, for this Church which in an instant has refused its own bimillenarian rite (that around which our Cathedrals were constructed), were above all the laymen-intellectuals.
Who protested with the same consternation with which we contemplate, today, the tragic devastation wrought by Isis in the ancient Middle-East.
On September 5, 1966, there was issued the first appeal to Paul VI to safe-guard the Latin-Gregorian liturgy (a few months before the devastating flood which struck the ancient, Catholic beauty of Florence).
That manifesto/appeal was signed by some 40 great intellectuals and it is impressive, today, to read some of their names: Jorge Luis Borges, Salvatore Quasimodo, Eugenio Montale, Giorgio De Chirico, Robert Bresson, Jacques Maritain, François Mauriac, Gabriel Marcel, Maria Zambrano, Cristina Campo, Elena Croce, Wystan Hugh Auden, Jorge Guillen, Elémire Zolla, Philip Toynbee, Evelyn Waugh, Salvador De Madariaga, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Julien Green, Elsa Respighi, Francesco Gabrieli, José Bergamin, Fedele D’Amico, Luigi Dallapiccola, Victoria Ocampo, Wally Toscanini, Gertrud von Le Fort, Augusto Del Noce, Lanza Del Vasto.
The appeal made a great impression, even in the Vatican, but di not succeed in stopping the landslide. Thus, in 1971, another was made, and the number of intellectuals who added their names was even more.
I remember some of their names: Agatha Christie, Graham Greene, Harold Acton, Mario Luzi, Andrés Segovia, William Rees-Mogg (the director of the Times), Joan Sutherland, Guido Piovene, Giorgio Bassani, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ettore Paratore, Gianfranco Contini, Giacomo Devoto, Giovanni Macchia, Massimo Pallottino, Rivers Scott, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Colin Davis, Robert Graves, Yehudi Menuhin, Kenneth Clark, Malcolm Muggeridge.
Self-Demolition
It was for the most part, useless, but little by little the same Paul VI became aware of the tragedy which was in course: the collapse of religious practice, the thousands of priests and religious who abandoned the habit, the catholic intellectuals who submitted to marxism, the great part of the youth seduced by the myths of the revolution (by Fidel Castro, by Mao, by the Vietcong, by Che Guevara, and last by Stalin), the spread of the Theology of liberation and of the modernist theologies which demolished Catholic Doctrine.
Paul VI, in his last years, spoke in ever increasing dramatic tones: “We believed that after the Council there would have come a day of sunshine in the history of the Church. There came, instead, a day of clouds and storms, and of darkness”, “from somewhere the smoke of Satan has entered into the temple of God”, “the opening to the world was a true invasion of worldly thought in the Church … We we have been, perhaps, too weak and imprudent.”
Paul VI denounced “those who try to knock the Church down from within” and he began to cite the books of Louis Bouyer, “The Decomposition of Catholicism” and “Religieux et Clercs contre Dieu.”
To his friend Jean Guitton, he confided: “There is a great turmoil in this moment in the world and in the Church, and what is in question is the faith. I find myself, now, repeating the obscure phrase of Jesus in the Gospel of Saint Luke: “When the Son of man returns, shall He still find faith upon earth?” What strikes me when I consider the catholic world,” the Pope continued, “is that inside Catholicism there seems to sometimes prevail a mentality of the non-catholic type, and it might happen that this non-catholic thought within Catholicism becomes stronger tomorrow. But it shall never represent the thought of the Church.”
Then, thanks be to God, there arrived John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger. The Barque of Peter was tirelessly repaired, the compass of the Faith found its way and a generation of young people experienced anew the beauty of Christianity.
But this was the spring which was bitten by some sort of powerful and obscure frost, which for the first time in the history of the Church, placed before us the drama of a “Pope emeritus” self-imprisoned in the Vatican and of a “bishop dressed in white” which was acclaimed by all the eternal enemies of the Catholic Faith, who has brought the Church into a submission with the worldly ideologies of the 70’s (having even re-exhumed the theology of liberation and its founder Gutierrez, which now pontificates from the Vatican).
We seem to have reached the final abyss. Unless God….
(Published in the Libero, May 24, 2015: this English translation is currently unapproved, but if the author gives us some corrections, it will be amended in the next few days. — The translator, while not agreeing with all of the authors judgements, nevertheless believes that the article poses significant contributions to Catholic thought for the present hour).
Who is the False Prophet?
Rome, May 22, 2015: The interpretation of St. John the Apostle’s Book of the Apocalypse is the most difficult of all the books of the Bible, precisely because it is a prophetic book which speaks in symbolic language of the things which are to come.
Of the Antichrist the Fathers of the Church have spoken much, and speculated much. They concur that he will be a real human person, a man, whose mother will be of the race of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and whose father will be a Catholic Bishop.
But of the false prophet, they have not said much.
From the Scripture, we can readily see however, that the false prophet is one who will easily deceive even the elect, speaking as he does in sweet and convincing ways.
Who is the False Prophet, then? — The man who excuses sin, the man who ignores God, the man who belittles the teaching of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the man who presents Christ in a false light, the man who undermines the Catholic Church.
But above all, the False Prophet will be the man who succeeds in getting nearly the entire world to agree with him, expressly or implicitly by their silence.
We have no way of knowing with certainty if we are at the end of the world or not. But we do know that it is a mortal sin for any Catholic to be silent when the truth of the Faith or the integrity of the Church is attacked or sullied.
Cardinal Bergoglio, has without a doubt, proved to be the man whose duplicity, deceits, maneuvering, errors and outright heresies and blasphemies deserve to be denounced from every pulpit, in every Catholic Monastery, Convent, and home.
The silence of so many proves that they are sinning gravely against their duty to be faithful to Christ.
The silence of so many Bishops proves that they are not worthy of their office.
The silence of so many Cardinals proves that they love themselves more than Jesus Christ.
Many are meriting eternal damnation by their silence, just as they will in the days of the False Prophet, whensoever be the days of his coming.
This day, then, choose life or death; speak the truth and denounce the errors and the man, or remain silent and merit eternal Hell fire. It’s your choice.
Pope Francis “knows very well what he is doing”
Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernandez, the theologian widely acknowledged to have been the lead ghostwriter of Pope Francis’s much-praised apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, recently gave an interview that is remarkable for the crudity of its categories, the tendentiousness of its contentions, and, above all, what it portends for the silent lambs. The Archbishop’s way of talking about the Church is so far from what one would expect from a serious theologian and vir Ecclesiae, it’s difficult, for me at least, not to despair at the significance of this man’s being one of the advisors on whom the Holy Father is reputed to rely the most.
The interview is here, and those who care about how we should love the Bride of Christ should be scandalized by the mentality it bespeaks and the future it all but promises. Keep in mind that its all-but-named target at one point is the recent and utterly unprecedented suggestion (here) by Cardinal Muller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, that a new role for the CDF would be to provide a “theological framework” for this pontificate. As readers will recall, Cardinal Muller was one of Pope Benedict’s last senior appointments in the Roman Curia.
Continue reading at Mirror of Justice Blog.
“The Francis effect is to disarm us”
A stunningly brilliant analysis of the current crisis in the Church, with a 100% Catholic response, by Fr. Linus Clovis of St. Lucia.
Cardinal Pell says that “Team Bergoglio” are atheists
Cardinal Pell, the other day at Rome, has confirmed the conclusion of the From Rome Blog, that “Team Bergoglio” is a heretical conspiracy, when he said that the party in the Church pushing for a change in Church discipline are “atheists”.
See the Cardinal’s words at the Deus Ex Machina Blog.
See our article, below….
The real agenda beind widespread political support of “Gay Marriage”
Why does the Lord at times threaten His Church with chastisement?
Logo for “Year of Mercy” by Jesuit Father is bizarre and scandalous
Here is one layman’s reaction…William Tapley.
If the Pope was an effective communicator and faithful disciple of Christ in communicating, you would expect something like this logo would never happen, let alone be considered.
Without a doubt the logo is sowing confusion, because being composed of mixed symbols, it is in a word confusing.
The logo by the Jesuit Father — who we believe does not have the artistic talent or appreciation for the achievements of Catholic Art, in past or modern times — departs radically from the Scriptural images used by Our Lord.
First, because to return to the image given us by Our Lord: to seek the 1 lost sheep, leaving aside the 100, is an image of the love of Our Redeemer, not of His Mercy. Mercy consists in His deed of dying for us, like a lamb, upon the Cross, while saying, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do!”
The ancient depiction of the aureole about Christ’s Head should contain a clearly visible Cross, normally 3 of the 4 arms. But showing 2, Mr. Tapley takes them as horns.
Others, this time a Brit, have taken scandal. Here is what End Times News, a protestant source, is saying:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K2I1_l-1s4
He has taken scandal, among other things, with the Vatican’s English translation of the accompanying prayer, which by failing to distinguish, as can be done in English, between relative pronouns which refer to God and those which refer to creatures, such as Our Lady, has led him to an awful misunderstanding, or at least given him occasion to be scandalized.
From Rome believes, in addition, that the choice of the logo shows a great insensitivity to the victims of clerical abuse, because it appears to show the abduction of a man by another man, exalted as an act of mercy.
Our Lord did in fact say, “Out of the fullness of one’s heart, does the mouth speak.” It seems, therefore, that not only the artist but all those involved in choosing the Logo, need to look to their heart and ask how is it, that such a confused and twisted image is recognized by them as an apt symbol for a “Year of Mercy”?
From Rome thinks it has everything to do with the false theology upon which Pope Francis has based the entire year.
For it is a law of the spirit, that no one can exalt anything unto the level of the divine, without committing the sin of idolatry; whereupon, with such a spirit of sin, the entire spiritual life and judgement of the idolater becomes corrupt. — This spiritual principal can be distilled from reading the entirety of Scripture, especially the Old Testament prophets.
For more about the fundamental problem with the Year of mercy, see our campaign, #Y4Tc.