God does not wish to see us in affliction, but it is we who draw down sufferings upon ourselves, and by our sins enkindle the flames in which we are to burn. God punishes us, because we oblige Him to do so. St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori
Showing posts with label liberalism is a sin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label liberalism is a sin. Show all posts
Sunday, January 24, 2021
God punishes us.
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
The Man Who Was “Ante-Pope”--Cardinal Carlo Martini
The Man Who Was “Ante-Pope”
Before his death in 2012, Cardinal Carlo Martini eerily called himself an “ante-pope,” a “precursor and preparer for the Holy Father.”
Martini was the leading antagonist to Popes John Paul II and Benedict—a Jesuit famous for groaning that the Church was “200 years behind.” In Night Conversations with Cardinal Martini, he cringed at the “major damage” caused by Humanae Vitae. The Church spoke “too much” about the sixth commandment and sin. He said legal abortion was, ultimately, “positive.”
For Martini saw himself as a dreamer who kept us “open to the surprises of the Holy Spirit.” Hadn’t the prophet Joel said that your sons and daughters would prophesy and your old men would dream dreams? The old cardinal dreamed of young “prophets” who’d criticize the Church and a “strong middle generation” who’d effect “changes.”
Martini said that in “preparation” for the 2005 papal election, he and others discussed the “new answers” that the next pope would “have to give” on sexuality and Communion for adulterers. For Martini was the leader of the St. Gallen “mafia,” the anti-Ratzinger group that wanted a “much more modern” Church under Cardinal Bergoglio.
According to Austen Ivereigh’s The Great Reformer, Cardinal Bergoglio quoted Martini frequently and was introduced by him to the Gallen group after the two Jesuits reconnected in 2001. Cardinal Bergoglio placed second in the 2005 conclave, amidst a “dramatic struggle.” The group reportedly ceased meeting the following year, and Martini—long sick with Parkinson’s—died in 2012.
But in a fiery last interview published immediately after his death, the ante-pope burned with disdain.
The Church was “tired,” its rites were “pompous,” and he who had dreamed of a “young church” now stared at countless ashes. How he wanted the embers beneath the ashes to burn! Where were the men who burned for the spreading of the “spirit”? Where were the men who would preach “discernment” and carry the Eucharist to those in “complex family situations”?
“Are we afraid? Fear instead of courage?” he cried.
As Ivereigh notes, Cardinal Bergoglio could soon be heard quoting the jeremiad, telling the embers to burn beneath the ashes of a Church that kept Jesus “tied up in the sacristry.”
Months later, the “Martini Pope”—as Sandro Magister puts it—now reigned. Pope Francis soon praised Martini as “prophetic”—a “father for the whole church”—and hailed his agenda of “focusing” on synods. In 1999, Martini “had a dream” of hurtling the Church into “permanent” synodality—that is, permanent revolution. The decentralized, “synodal” Church would foment changes on marriage, sexuality, penitential practice, priestly celibacy, women in the Church, ecumenism.
So at the rigged Synod on the Family, one Gallen alumnus, Cardinal Kasper, pushed for Communion for adulterers and another—who had told a king to legalize abortion and a sexual abuse victim to seek forgiveness—waxed poetic about “the womb of mercy.” A leading Martini disciple, Archbishop Bruno Forte, drafted the interim report on the “positive” aspects of sins against purity—and later laughed that Pope Francis had promised to “draw out the conclusions” for Kasper’s proposal because speaking “plainly” would’ve made a “terrible mess.”
Cardinal Baldisseri—who, according to The Rigging of a Vatican Synod?, was overheard explaining how he’d manipulate that synod—calls this year’s synod on young people a “continuation of the subject of the family.” He says the youths bemoaning Church “prohibitions” via web surveys and Facebook will marvelously prophesy what Christ wants to “cut out.”
“As in the days of Samuel and Jeremiah, young people know how to discern the signs of our times, indicated by the Spirit,” the synod’s preparatory document intones. That text, as Matthew McCusker shows, is pervaded with Modernism, which heretically claims that doctrines come from “experience” and thus must “evolve.”
Modernists—as Pope St. Pius X warned—hold that “truth is no more immutable than man himself, since it evolved with him, in him, and through him.”
At a pre-synodal planning seminar with Baldisseri, one young prophet invoked her sage “experience” to lament how “closed” the Church is to those with “radical” views on issues like transgenderism. In other remarks published by the Vatican, she extolled a fourteen-year-old who “need[ed] to create her own religion to find one that is welcoming.”
Another young prophet announced: “The pope asked us to ‘make chaos,’ that’s precisely what we’re doing.”
Indeed, Pope Francis had urged the young—specifically “agnostics,” those “estranged” from the Church, and “atheists”—to “criticize” the Church in fulfillment of Joel 3:1-2. “‘The old will dream dreams, and the young will prophesy,’ namely, with prophecies they will take concrete things forward,” he explained.
He was quoting Martini once again, for the ante-pope had dreamed all this, too. Grandiosely invoking Joel in Night Conversations, Martini presaged that the “things we are waiting for” would gust in “via the uninhibited qualities of young people.” The Church “can’t teach young people anything.” It “can only help them to listen to their inner master.” Being taught by the young is a new “pastoral principle.”
They were Martini’s “glowing coals”—“working to save the world” with their leftist politics, forging new “beginnings” with their “less inhibited approach to sexuality.” Were they “still interested in criticizing us, the Church”?
For their sake, Martini had dreamed of a pope who’d admit Humanae Vitae’s “mistakes”—a pope who wouldn’t need to retract the encyclical because he’d just “write a new one.”
In 2014 Pope Francis was asked if the Church could “take up again” the topic of contraception, for “Cardinal Martini believed it was now time.” He replied that “it all depends on how … Humanae Vitae is interpreted”—and now one of his top theologians, a Pontifical Academy for Life member, says some circumstances “require contraception” under Amoris Laetitia.
Other members of the deconstructed pro-life academy defend aborting children and say we’ve evolved past that wispy term “intrinsically evil” because Pope Francis says “time is greater than space.” The new dean of the similarly subverted John Paul II Institute—who wrote books with Martini and organized a radical “shadow synod”—sits on the commission set to “re-interpret” Humanae Vitae on the sly.
“If it gets too peaceful in the Church,” the ante-pope taught, just recall Christ’s “desire to throw a flaming torch of inspiration onto the earth.”
So once the ante-pope’s torch has burned into Humanae Vitae, burned into the very notion of intrinsic evil, the permanent revolution will blaze forward. It will show us why Martini called Luther a “great reformer” and said “you cannot make God Catholic”; why next year’s Amazon synod will crusade for married priests and women deacons; why the Germans are letting some Protestants receive the Eucharist and a respected Vaticanist says an “ecumenical mass” is being readied; why Pope St. Pius X cried of the Modernists: “What is there left in the Church which is not to be reformed according to their principles?”
Then, like some strong and ominous wind, it will sweep aside the ashes to unveil the ante-pope’s “utopia,” where everyone ends up “transparent and accepted by everyone else.” Then the prophets will cry, with the dreamer, that “the times are long gone when the Church could talk you into having a guilty conscience.” Then the sons and daughters will prophesy that—according to the logic condemned by Ven. Fulton Sheen—there is no Hell, no sin, no judge, and no judgment and so evil is good and good is evil.
Then it shall be as the old ante-pope had dreamed.
That is why we must pray and make reparation and speak out, now.
Tuesday, July 11, 2017
The Catholic Church and the New Left
The Church and the New Left
In common with many other countries, the Catholic Church in America today is closely intertwined with the major party on the left. In my religious congregation, for example, the U.S. Province is 60 to 80 percent Democrat. This is also the case in other religious orders and many whole dioceses. People caught up in this mixing of worlds have to flip back and forth between Catholic concepts and Democrat ideology as they go through the day. Unfortunately, many bishops do not show them anything better.
Catholicism was never meant to be a department of a political party, either party: “The Church, by reason of her role and competence, is not identified in any way with the political community nor bound to any political system. She is at once a sign and a safeguard of the transcendent character of the human person.” (Vatican II)
As its name indicates, Catholicism deals in universals. The dictionary tells us that the word universal means “pertaining to the whole of something, occurring everywhere.” Catholicism holds the total and ultimate meaning for everyone everywhere.
The Church is the Body of Christ who really is the Way, the Truth and the Life – for everyone. For the New Left, however – the Left that we have seen in action over the past few years – this is not and cannot be true. The New Left holds that it holds the total meaning of the world for the world. There can be no legitimate rivals. This mindset comes from the radical wing of the Enlightenment, via various later developments, with its vicious hostility to Catholicism and its denial of the role of Christ.
Now, for example, from Divine Revelation, Catholicism teaches the universals of human nature. Thus, seeing an individual human being means seeing all of the possibilities of that human being. This is the exact opposite of working to kill a human being, born or unborn. Here we come to the foundation of the Left’s thinking. The Left is all about power over human beings – carefully disguised with the claim that it’s for their own good, of course.
Catholicism, on the other hand, is not about power, but simply about the truth. Although some Catholics have misused power over the centuries, for the rest (a very large number), the Catholic truth is Christ taken in the fullness of His presence as the Divine Word – and is its own reward.
For the Left, the reward is power for the Left’s elite core. Their constituent groups get various kinds of payoff.
Catholic thinking is only Catholic thinking when it sets out the universal aspects of man and nature, and our relation to God. So, as might be expected, there is a long tradition of social, legal, and political reflection.
Catholicism conceives of a nation as an entity with sovereignty, a legal structure and its just application, all concepts that the Left only uses when it is convenient.
Historically, the Left always has to leech on wealth and institutions that it did not create, and in the process, the Left elites become prosperous. These pre-existing resources provide power bases for the growth of the Left. Catholicism, on the other hand, is not parasitic. Real Catholicism provides vast services to millions and does not expect anything in return.
The Church knows too, for example, that there are objectively evil acts. The Left does not. Catholicism knows what marriage is. It knows what calumny and detraction are. Acting as if the Church does not know – the radical Enlightenment position as well as the current socialist position – means that God’s revelation in Judeo-Christian history did not happen. And does not matter.
Trying to shoehorn Leftist slogans into the Catholic doctrine and practice eats away at the value of the Church from the inside. When I think of much that has transpired in the Church in the past half-century and more, it reminds me of the Hagfish, which are known to devour their prey from the inside.
Yet one of the Catholic events of recent decades that the Left often celebrates takes a different view: “The Church and the political community in their own fields are autonomous and independent from each other. Both, under different titles, are devoted to the personal and social vocation of the same men.” (Vatican II)
The “different titles,” within the same human being, are the key. When a particular individual acts politically, he has only one source for knowing how things really are. That is the Church. If he acts according to two sets of contrary ideas, he is denying his integrity as a human being. You cannot serve two masters.
Lastly, in some general sense, the people in the pews know whether Father or Bishop is a leftist. They either go along with politicized religion that ends up as some kind of liberal Protestantism or they move on to some other religious community that actually believes and practices a faith that is not consumed by politics.
When segments of the Catholic hierarchy pass on the Faith in a form that is not quite right, or never really mention the inconvenient non-political side of the Faith, they are departing from the fullness and depth of Christ, from the presence among us that He promised until the end of the world.
The New Left does this to all of the institutions onto which it latches. It hollows them out and devours them. Remember the Hagfish!
© 2017 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Standing on My Head: Tolerance, Decadence and Violence
Exceprt---So we see our society not just drifting into decadence, but suddenly seemingly out of nowhere, we are seeing a full flowering of decadence. The decadence is at every level of society, and is exhibited in disgusting behaviors and beliefs in a multitude of different ways. Sexual immorality is everywhere--children are highly sexualized. Adultery and divorce are rampant. Homosexuality is flagrant. Promiscuity, co-habitation and pre-marital sex are everywhere accepted and open. Furthermore, it is not just among the underclass.
Friday, October 7, 2011
The Deceiver by LIVIO FANZAGA***
Satan seduces, but you are the one who decides. Even though his seduction is very powerful, he can not bend your will to do evil. Even though the tempest of thoughts, desires, resentment, and hatred he stirs in your heart is overwhelming, there is no sin without your free and conscious consent. Eve sinned because she wanted to sin. God has put our will exclusively in our hands.
The Corruption**
There are apostles of evil. They are people who besides ruining themselves drag along other souls also. They have perverted themselves into becoming demons, as Saint Catherine of Siena asserted, and thus "fulfill the office of the demons," inducing others to sin. It is truly said that one never sins alone. Our sin is negatively reflected in our neighbors. If we do not repent quickly and return to God the heart is hardened and, almost to reassure ourselves, we drag others along the way of ruin.
Eve was so possessed by evil that she did not hesitate to entice Adam also. "She also gave some to her husband, and he ate" (Gen 3:6). When you examine your life, remember all the times that by your words, evil example, and complicity you have pushed your neighbor into the arms of the evil one. Think of all those souls that are lost in sin because of you. Repent before God, repair the damages you have caused, and make yourself an apostle of good.
The corruptors of souls are the great strength of the demon. In the contemporary world, they occupy very significant and visible positions in various fields such as culture, science, politics or economics, including the realm of the mass media. They have learned the vernacular of flattery and lies from their teacher. Despising truth and exalting error, they disparage good and virtue while exalting evil and vice. They are the faithful servants of Satan, and they will go with him to his kingdom of death in recompense.
Watch out for such people, even if they are very close to you and united to you by bonds of affection. You show your worthiness as a human being by saying no to evil, even if the one who proposes it is most dear to you. If Adam had said no to Eve, he would have undoubtedly saved himself and perhaps even her. No human respect, no bond of friendship, no reason of human nature, nor any interest must ever cause you stay with anyone who proposes evil. It is much better to lose a friend or family member than to lose God for all of eternity.
Nevertheless, Adam took the fruit Eve offered him without argument, and he ate it. He blindly followed his wife, even when fell into the abyss. How many behave like this! Like leaves in the wind, they are dragged where the world wants, and Satan rejoices over the spoils obtained so cheaply. The law of the herd, public opinion polls, and social brainwashing dominate the modern world. You, however, must be very attentive to the voice of God. Keep your conscience illuminated by the Church and never stray from her, no matter what others think, even if they are those whom you love the most.
From Disillusionment to Illusion**
When man commits evil, he is inevitably degraded. He then opens his eyes and all that before seemed beautiful and desirable, afterwards entirely loses its attractiveness. First evil attracts you, then it poisons you. From the illusion of obtaining much happiness follows both disillusionment and disappointment. Once the fruit was eaten "the eyes of both were opened." Adam and Eve had deluded themselves into thinking that they could become "like God" but found themselves deprived of divinity and its gifts. The conscience begins to feel remorse. That God Whom you have driven from your heart by sinning does not abandon you. In His goodness He makes you hear His voice in the depths of your being. It is a voice that disapproves of the evil you have committed and at the same time is an invitation to return to the straight way.
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| OUR LADY OF GRACE |
The disillusionment that comes after every sin, with the verification of the deception, the remorse of conscience, and the consciousness of the damages you have suffered, constitutes a moment of great grace, even though in the context of a spiritual catastrophe. After every sin, the Divine Wisdom opens our eyes so that we see the despicable face of evil. This always happens unless a person, persevering on the way of ruin, suffocates his conscience and hardens his heart.
Adam and Eve, having realized the lie of the tempter and the existential catastrophe into which they had fallen, would have been able and should have cried out to God from the depths of their misery. The Creator in His goodness would have listened to them and would have come to their aid. So we, dear friend, have at the moment of the grace of disillusionment the possibility of a ready rehabilitation, if we turn humbly and contritely to that God Whom we have foolishly abandoned.
Unfortunately, this happens all too rarely. More often, man falls again into that satanic deception, desiring to try again the fruit which has proven to be so untrustworthy and poisonous. The disillusionment is followed by a new illusion, and this process continues, so that man enters into a deadly mechanism that crushes the soul, driving it to blindness and to total death.
Many men waste their lives following illusions which are followed immediately by disillusionment. "Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again," declare Jesus (Jn 4:13). Only the mercy of God can break this satanic chain which renders us slaves, but you must cooperate with the grace which opens your eyes every time you do evil. Think of the last sin you committed. Were you happy to place your trust in the demon? Didn't you become disillusioned, saddened, and degraded? Why then do you wish to repeat the same experience, believing again and again the allurements of the tempter?
There may come a time in which, having sinned, your eyes are no longer opened. It is a very alarming signal, because it means you are entering the spiritual status of impenitence. This happens when you advance unperturbed along the way of perversion and our conscience is finally snuffed out completely. Then the worst crimes can be committed without your feeling remorse. How many souls move in this level of deep darkness, in which they have given their unconditional consent to Satan and to his kingdom of perdition! Only a great grace, with the awakening of conscience, could now save them.
I WOULD SAY IT WOULD BE OUR LADY OF GRACE.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
THE POOR WILL ALWAYS BE WITH US
The poor should be helped through acts of charity, not by demands based on human rights
Few errors have so firmly entrenched themselves for so long a time as has the Error of Liberalism. Few sins have been so misunderstood as has been the Sin of Liberalism. In reprinting this timely book, first printed in English in 1899, we hope to enlighten Catholics as to the causes and effect of and remedies for Liberalism.
http://www.liberalismisasin.com/
Few errors have so firmly entrenched themselves for so long a time as has the Error of Liberalism. Few sins have been so misunderstood as has been the Sin of Liberalism. In reprinting this timely book, first printed in English in 1899, we hope to enlighten Catholics as to the causes and effect of and remedies for Liberalism.
http://www.liberalismisasin.com/
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