It seems that Bergoglio has never found a non-Catholic position on issues relating to governance or moral precepts that he doesn’t like and support. Take for instance the following:

1. Support for LGBTQ’s and homosexual clergy (as long as they are not abusing our youth).
2. Support for regimes and prominent left wing politicians who are pro-death.
3. Support for all socialists, communists and other radical regimes.
4. Support for the globalist elites and their agendas: including increased contraception and abortion, global warming, redistribution of resources to the poor and the confiscation and redistribution of money and goods from the wealthy.
5. Working hand and glove with the UN Sustainability Goals which includes abortion and contraception as part of their solution: a move to save the planet and ignore the saving of souls.
6. Social work promoted above the spiritual aspects of the Faith.
7. “Sins below the belt” are the least serious. Though Our Lady of Fatima said that more people end up in hell due to these sins than any other . . . and, of course, how would the hierarchy of mortal sin matter if you should die with these sins on your soul? Those mortal sins which remain unconfessed at the hour of death will earn you the same fate: eternal hellfire. So now they are unimportant?

It seems the new focus of Bergoglio is political and social rather than religious and salvific for the very sheep he was elected to lead on their path to eternal beatitude.

Venezuela’s collapse, the selling of the Catholic Church to the Chinese State and the support of the globalist elites and morally destitute seem not be enough to dissuade our Church from following these disastrous programs. And lets not forget his support for the wolves that attack Western Culture, especially the invasion of Islam, who hate Jews and Christians, square with his responsibility to protect his sheep? Is the so-called Pope simply a hireling of the worst type; taking sides with the wolves amongst us and ignoring the slaughter of his flock?

There are many other moves that have been made since Bergoglio assumed this office that could be mentioned but do any of them have anything to do with Church Teaching or Gospel teaching? It appears counter-intuitive. The Following article gives us some additional information as to what our true social teaching should be: https://fatima.org/news-views/fatima-perspectives-1271/

This is a companion piece to today’s excellent post from NEO at his site: https://nebraskaenergyobserver.wordpress.com/2019/01/28/venezuela-and-maduro

 

 

A liberal thinks that they stand on high moral ground for allowing anybody to enter our country and become a citizen; regardless of the harm that it causes to the country and the economy of its people. Criminals are ignored, as is the transport of drugs, terrorists and even human traffickers. So walls are immoral and they love to speak about building bridges as though that is some lofty moral mantra that makes those against their liberality seem to be intolerant dolts.

On the other hand. they seem to say that the living wall of a woman’s womb, is up to the individual woman as to whether that wall is able to be breeched at birth or if they will kill the ‘illegal alien’ before it sticks its head out into their private world. And this physical wall of the womb is not even a wall to prevent the child from entering this world but it is a natural protection of the child that is too small to live outside the womb until it has gained sufficient strength to survive in this cruel environment. It is designed to be both porous and a place to nourish and protect the baby until they biologically ready to be birthed.

But alas, liberals claim to have a right to get outraged if you call an illegal alien an’illegal alien’ simply because they are from another country (an alien) and enter without the express wishes of the country being violated (illegal). And conversely, they are not upset by referring to a child in utero as a fetus or a clump of cells (a seeming insult to human dignity). And further, they think they have a constitutional right to kill that baby if they wish. It it a woman’s ‘right’ you know. But woe to the rights of the people of our country who want secure borders from foreign invading hordes who get a wink and a nod as they pander for their future votes.

If a sea turtle’s eggs have more rights than does a human baby in the womb and an illegal alien who may do us harm as a country and as a society has more rights as well, then count me out of such an upside down world that calls these points of view logical and moral. They are neither.

I guess that is why I am a conservative. 

A seismic shift has occurred around the globe and it keeps pointing back to a single pivotal event; The Second Vatican Council. Not that there was a specific item which one can place the problems of this world upon but there was an overall, general shift in attitudes and a mindset launched at that Council. That shift has now spread like a Tsunami around the world. It was akin to a single underwater, landslide event that now has all but engulfed the whole Western World. 

The culture that we once knew, assimilated our lives to, and which gave us a stability of moral and ethical commonality has drowned in its wake. That shift in thought has wrought a cataclysmic demise of love of God, country, culture, tradition, marriage, family, sovereignty and our individual self-awareness; we knew who we were and we were comfortable with it. Since the Council all of that has changed. We no longer know who we are but we do know that we hate who we are.

When the Catholic Church opened its windows to the world, the Catholic Church made its worship more Protestant and the idea of ecumenism spread naturally from religions to now include, ideologies, economics, social conventions and our shared moral values. And what we see today seems to be a kind of self-loathing: a loss of faith, a loss of culture, art, music, true intellectualism and a perverse desire to embrace that which we are not. But this mindset, meant to be an ‘updating’ of the Catholic faith, did not stop at the doorstep of the Catholic Faith. 

The Protestants embraced these ideas as well as did the newly formed Vatican II Catholics; albeit many of the faithful saw immediately that the Modernist spirit of the world had wrought far more destruction than a mere update.  Many Catholics left their parishes for traditional one’s and families became split between liberal, left wing ideologies and the old status quo of our world preceding the Council. Views on sexuality changed. Our comfort with the things previously unthinkable was erupting like a volcano. And so much of the world rejoiced at this Catholic move to ‘reach out’ and ’embrace’ the values of the world no matter what they were. In fact the world joined them on many fronts. We collectively ended our moral stances on many issues, including abortion and euthanasia, and socialism became a mid-point to a friendly embrace with the Communists, Marxists and other condemned ideologies. Now even these  are  being embraced by the far left.

We have a Pope today in the Catholic Church that is a standard bearer of the New World Order brought about by these changes. So he is loved by the world of the left and despised by those of a more conservative and traditional mindset. Here are the things where he truly shows himself to be a cheerleader for that which would have made many a past saint blush. He supports the Islamic invasion of Europe, the EU, the Communist Church against his underground, persecuted Church in China. He loathes the sovereignty of nations and lobbies for open borders. He is a champion for communistic methods for the redistribution of goods and money. And, of course, he supports or reaches out to every left wing agenda that comes his way; from global warming all the way to LGBTQ and gender issues. He and the world elites are in simpatico. He works with the UN towards these goals and ignores the moral issues that are rife in their ‘sustainability’ goals. 

And thus one can see the divide in the Catholic Church between the Traditionalist and the New Order Catholics is essentially the same beast that we see in politics, globalism, economics and the sexual revolution. It is essentially a divide between the core principles that developed and then galvanized the Western European Culture. It fuels the immigration issue as it does the Brexit issue and it is all but tearing this world apart. It seems as though the forces of dark and light are beginning to be felt and might soon be unleashed to do their battle in the light of day. Thank you Vatican II for launching us into a future that has shown itself to be more of a nightmare than a dream for a more united and peaceful world. Forgive them Father for they knew not, then, nor do they know not now, what they have done and what they continue to do.

Like Arianism, bad ideas sometimes have a blossoming, like an outbreak of the flu. It has not yet run its course but appears to still be in full bloom. Modernism has become the view of the world and it eats away at the whole of Christianity in a way that, if it is not finally eradicated and a vaccine is not forthcoming, would, if it were to continue, destroy even the Gospels; no Original Sin and thus no need for Christ to become incarnate as man and offer Himself as the Lamb of God Sacrifice for the sins of mankind. To believe that we are all ‘becoming’, in an evolutionary sense, leads man to believe in ourselves rather than the efficacy of the Son of God for our salvation.

Though this was written primarily for Catholics, it has profound implications for all of Christendom. If you all remember, this was a subject that was so fraught with ideologues that it created the schism of contributors and authors here at AATW some time ago. But it is still a subject that will not go away and needs to be kept in mind if we are to ever find a cure for this plague of Modernism that has swept across the Western World.  After all, it has all but driven Christianity underground and transformed it into arm of politics that is all about ‘becoming’ (in an evolutionary senes) and has a euphoric, cosmic element that is the stuff of a modern model for a new 21st century utopian paradise. It is pure novelty at best.

There was nothing Catholic about Teilhard and one can argue that there was nothing Christian in his theology either. __ Scoop

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This Appeared at 1Peter5. Please read and discuss (if you find it interesting).

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Teilhard de Chardin: Model of Ambiguity for a Future Pope

 Peter Kwasniewski January 16, 2019

To a degree not yet as widely recognized as it should be, Pope Francis – Jorge Bergoglio, S.J. – is showing himself to be an admirable disciple of his Jesuit forerunner Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881-1955), the Piltdown paleontologist and “Omega Point” mystagogue, who exercised an enormous influence on the young Jesuit Turks of the twentieth century. Gerard M. Verschuuren, in his new book The Myth of an Anti-Science Church: Galileo, Darwin, Teilhard, Hawking, Dawkins – just released by Angelico Press, and worth reading for many reasons, but above all, because of the superbly written chapter on this controversial figure – tells us:

His greatest stature was reached when he became almost an oracle and icon to many of what a twentieth-century Jesuit should be. Teilhard had become their role model. In spite of ecclesiastical admonitions regarding Teilhard-the-Ideologue, his ideas kept spreading in the Society of Jesus. Not only has his way of thinking infiltrated – or infected, according to some – the thinking of Jesuits, but it would also become a major element of thinking in other Catholic groups. Many Jesuits and other theologians have adopted Teilhard’s evolutionary approach[.] (118)

I will assume, for the purposes of this article, that the reader has a basic sense of who Teilhard was: a scientist who contributed to a number of interesting (if not always above board) scientific enterprises and a writer of ponderous poetico-theologico-scientific tomes such as The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu that were roundly mocked by scientists and, on account of their palpable pantheism, landed him in deep trouble with his then conservatively-headed Jesuit order as well as with the Holy Office of the Inquisition (today’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith).

In what follows, I am more interested in pointing out the striking parallels that emerge between him and his confrere, Bergoglio.

Verschuuren assembles an impressive series of quotations from across Teilhard’s whole career to show that he was, indeed, a card-carrying Modernist who perfectly fit the definition given by St. Pius X. First, let us consider how Modernism operates, according to Verschuuren (emphasis added):

What Modernism basically does is to harness religious belief and practice to the cultural modes and whims of civilization in any given era by asserting that there is no permanent datum of faith, no dogma, and no fixed belief in Catholicism. This means that, due to new developments in society and science, the Church can deny in one age what she had affirmed in a previous age as essential dogma. Modernism is the preservation of the formulae of doctrine emptied of their meaning, in order to adapt the Faith of the Church to the alleged requirements of modern society.

Not surprisingly, in the eyes of the Church, Modernism and Catholicism cannot possibly live in the same religious house. Catholicism acknowledges that what was true in Church doctrine yesterday cannot be false today, and what was immoral yesterday cannot be moral today. Modernists, in contrast, seem to have lost faith in their Faith and its orthodoxy; Charles Péguy called them people who no longer believe what they believe. Therefore, Modernism has been condemned by the Church on several occasions for trying to transform Catholicism from the inside. [i]

How strikingly the emphasized sentences describe the party in command of the Catholic Church today!

For his part, Teilhard de Chardin manifested both sides of the Modernist. On the one hand, he wanted to “aggiornamentize” or update Christian doctrine until, ceasing to be what it had been historically, it essentially turned into modern thought. His preferred medium for the transition was evolutionary scientism. He believed not only that the evolution of species had already been adequately demonstrated, but also that evolution is the paradigm for grasping the whole of reality, including its spiritual aspects. He argued that matter evolves into spirit and that spirit will evolve into the cosmic Christ. The general framework is a Hegelian progressivism in which, in spite of momentary setbacks and conflicts, the whole universe, with mankind at its crest, is gradually improving, rising, and achieving spiritualization.

As a result, Teilhard rejected the doctrine of the creation and fall of Adam and Eve and, more pointedly for the Holy Office, the doctrine of original sin, which he called “an absurdity.” For Teilhard, the first men (there were many of them) were prehistoric primates of weak intelligence, and the “fall” simply describes the alienation from God of insufficiently spiritualized beings. Thus, there is no place whatsoever for the doctrine of a sin attaching to human nature by way of natural generation from Adam – in spite of the fact that this was taught as a de fide dogma by the Council of Trent.

Teilhard’s views on polygenism and original sin were among those condemned in Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis of 1950. Yet Teilhard’s reaction, while apparently submissive in the public forum, was fiercely contemptuous in private. He characterized Humani Generis in the following words: “A good psychoanalyst would see in it the clear traces of a specific religious perversion – the masochism and sadism of orthodoxy; the pleasure of swallowing, and making others swallow, the truth under its crudest and stupidest forms” [ii].

On the other hand – and this is a crucial point for understanding the general ecclesial crisis in which we find ourselves today – Teilhard, like many Modernists before and after him, refused to leave the Catholic Church, no matter how “badly” he felt he was treated by it. For him, the goal was to ride out the waves as long as possible, to influence and infiltrate, to make disciples, plant seeds, and publish (or, in his case, arrange for posthumous publications, since for the final period of his life, he was under strictures). He really believed he had the mission of changing the Church from within. Although he no longer professed the Catholic Faith – he once said to Dietrich von Hildebrand that St. Augustine “had spoiled everything by introducing the supernatural” (!) – the idea of being an ex-Catholic, sitting on the outside of the institution, held no appeal for him. It was as if he thought that only the Catholic Church provided the infrastructure necessary for the transmission of a synthetic, worldwide philosophy.

Thus, in a letter dated January 26, 1936, he wrote:

What increasingly dominates my interest is the effort to establish within myself, and to diffuse around me, a new religion (let’s call it an improved Christianity if you like) whose personal God is no longer the great Neolithic landowner of times gone by, but the Soul of the world … as demanded by the cultural and religious stage we have now reached.

In another letter about five years later, on March 21, 1941, he declared: “According to my own principles, I cannot fight against Christianity; I can only work inside it by trying to transform and convert it.” In response to a defrocked priest whom he refers to as “Fr. G.,” Teilhard wrote on October 4, 1950:

Basically I consider – as you do – that the Church (like any living reality after a certain time) reaches a period of “mutation” or “necessary reformation” after two thousand years; it is unavoidable. Mankind is undergoing a mutation, how could Catholicism not do the same?

His evolutionist-pantheistic-animistic point of view prompted him to admit: “I find I can’t but realize again (and even more profoundly) the size of the abyss which separates my religious vision of the World and the vision in the Exercises of Ignatius.” A Jesuit who can no longer embrace the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius is not only not a Jesuit in reality; he is not even a Catholic. We are, accordingly, hardly surprised to read these words from 1934: “If by consequence of some internal upheaval, I came to lose successively my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, my faith in the Spirit, it seems to me that I should continue to believe in the World.”

Teilhard de Chardin was a lifelong believer in Marxism. With typical flair, he announced in a letter of August 14, 1952: “The Christian God on high and the Marxist God of Progress are reconciled in Christ. … As I love to say, the synthesis of the Christian God (of the above) and the Marxist God (of the forward) – Behold! that is the only God whom henceforth we can adore in spirit and in truth.” No wonder, as Verschuuren notes, “Teilhard is the only Roman Catholic author whose works were put on public display with those of Marx and Lenin in Moscow’s Hall of Atheism.”

In a homage to Teilhard that should send chills down our spines for its modern applicability, his disciple Henri Rambaud proclaimed:

[Teilhard] was perfectly sincere in calling himself a Christian and even a Roman Catholic since, in his own eyes, the only disagreement between himself and the Church arose from the fact that he was already thinking then what the Church did not yet know she would be thinking shortly. … [I]nstead of being in agreement with the Church of today, he is in agreement with the Church of tomorrow.

Read the rest of it here: https://onepeterfive.com/teilhard-chardin-ambiguity-pope/

Time and movement is life, thought, sight, sound, suffering, joy and all other realities that we experience in the human condition. It even seems to be both the essence of life and being, space and existence itself. 

Take music, for instance. If one were focused on a beautiful piece of music with no other thought in our mind we are carried along, almost as life itself is carried along by movement that exists in time. If time and movement freeze then the string being plucked or the horn being played would not vibrate and therefore it would not be like a still shot of a particular group of pitches, it would cease and lose its being. In other words it would ‘wink out’ into absolute silence or nothingness.

The same concept can also be applied to both sight, thinking, emotions and everything else that we call life itself. For without vibrational waves, in time, we have no neurons firing, we have no vibrating electrons to produce light and no thoughts whatsoever or a means to experience anything; no suffering, no joy, no love, no nothing. All are dependent on that life by which we were given through time and movement and seems utterly mysterious; at least to me it does. So without time and movement it might be conceived in a manner of how some view death of the living when the heart stops, the brain quits thinking, and the nerves quit firing. But it is even more than that; It becomes the void where all light, sound, thought, feelings and existence itself ‘wink out’; and all measures of life simply cease and being itself falls into a void of nothingness. Everything ceases.

So it seems to me that religiously if we are to accept that God created the entire cosmos out of nothing, that this seems rather apt. And when John says that ‘In the beginning was the Word . . .’ it seems not only apt but a great mysterious event which seems to have no other better argument for why there is existence itself. And to boot, how do we imagine space if not with time, movement and speed? And can any meaningful understanding of size and space exist without the others? Thereby the cosmos itself becomes utterly non-sensical in such a thought experiment as this.

The Word it seems to me is the first act of creation; for a word spoken is dependent upon a thought, a vibrating voice, a meaning and thus an intelligence, that creates both time and movement and sets into motion a creation of that which is ineffable to our understanding. Where did the thought originate and how is a Word proclaimed that in and of itself lies outside of time, space and movement? Being itself, which God expressed as His Name, ‘I AM Who AM’,  but can our created human minds truly understand or grasp the concept of a pre-existent Being as we are contingent beings.  For we do not exist outside of time and we are made void if time and movement were to end. And the space we occupy is dependent upon the same.

So we are left with the mystery of whether we are part of that vibrating voice in time, space and movement that He uttered and that it will not return to God void. So we are left in almost a nihilist understanding unless we somehow posit that the Word spoke by God is Life itself and that He desired that His Life, which somehow does not require time and movement, was an act of Love so that other beings, made in His image, might be spawned as children created and birthed in a womb of earthly realities; that is to say of space, time and movement etc. 

Heaven then seems to me to be a new birth from this life into a New Life which is far beyond anyone’s capability of understanding. For it is a share in the very Being of God Himself, Who needs neither time, movement nor space to exist. He simply IS. This eternal moment doesn’t even scratch the surface of what such a state of being might be like. We have no examples to compare it with.

Just sharing some thoughts which are far above my pay grade; which at my age is non-existent. I guess for this retiree all time and movement has stopped economically since it has simply slipped into the void and ‘winked out’ of existence. See? I think I’m onto something here.

I found this presentation by Roberto de Mattei which appears at the Remnant a very important analysis of our situation in this world which has thrown off the shackles of Christianity and has overshadowed the light of the Good with its absence of light; the darkness of evil. __ Scoop

A Shadow Moves About the Ruins by Roberto de Mattei

THE PANORAMA WE have before us is one of ruins: moral ruins, political ruins, economic ruins; the Church’s ruins, the ruins of the whole of society.

In this scene, a silent shadow moves about the ruins like a ghost: Josef Ratzinger, who after his resignation from the papacy, wished to keep the title of Pope (Emeritus) and the name of Benedict XVI.

I believe that the abdication of Benedict XVI, on February 28, 2013, will go down in history as an even more disastrous event than the pontificate of Pope Francis, to which it opened the doors.

The pontificate of Pope Francis certainly represents a leap forward in the process of the Church’s auto-demolition, following the Second Vatican Council. However, this is only a stage, the last one of this process: we could say that it represents its ripe fruit.

The essence of the Second Vatican Council was the triumph of pastoral theology over doctrine, the transformation of pastoral theology into a theology of praxis, the application of the philosophy of Marxist practice to the life of the Church. For the Communists, the true philosopher is not Karl Marx, the Revolution’s theorist, but Lenin who carried out the Revolution, proving Marx’s thought. For Neo-Modernists, the true theologian is not Karl Rahner, the principal ideologue of the revolution in the Church, but Pope Francis, who is fulfilling this revolution, putting Rahner’s thought into pastoral practice. There is no rupture, therefore, between the Second Vatican Council and Pope Francis, but historical continuity. Pope Francis represents Vatican II in action.

Benedict XVI’s renunciation of the papacy represents a historic rupture, but in another sense. For starters, it is the first papal resignation in history which has taken place without clear reasons, without valid motives. It is a gratuitous, arbitrary act, rendered contradictory by the way in which it took place. Today in the Church, there is a situation of apparent diarchy and of real confusion, in which many doubt that he who is the pope – Francis – is truly pope, and he who is not the pope – Benedict – is a non-pope. This is a historic novelty without precedent. Benedict XVI is the one responsible for it.

But the gesture of Benedict XVI also has a symbolic reach, which must be understood in its deepest sense.

There are symbolic gestures that express the metaphysical significance of a historic occurrence. Such is the example of the humiliation of Canossa, in January, 1077. Pope Saint Gregory VII refusing to receive Henry IV and leaving him for three days in the cold outside of the Canossa castle, affirmed the primacy of the Papacy over political power with this gesture, proclaiming the freedom of the Church before the world, and forcing the world to bow before the Church. It was an act of courage that gave glory to God, and honored the Church.

Benedict XVI’s act of papal resignation was not only an admission of impotence, but a gesture of surrender. It was an act that expressed the defeatist spirit of the churchmen of our time, whose main sin isn’t moral corruption but cowardice. I say this with all the respect due to the figure of Benedict XVI, and with a certain compassion for this elder, made to watch the historical consequences of his decision by Providence. But we must have the courage to say it, if we do not want to be accomplices to this spirit of resignation and lack of confidence in the supernatural aid of Grace, which sadly today has spread among many Catholics, faced with an advancing revolutionary course.

Every soul has a vocation, every man has a mission to carry out. Renouncing the carrying out of one’s mission carries a grave responsibility. Resignation as the Vicar of Christ entails an immense responsibility: it is forsaking the highest mission which a man can have on this earth: governing the Church of Christ. It is an escape from the wolves, on the part of he who in his homily on April 24, 2005, said: “Pray for me, that I will not flee for fear of the wolves.”

And yet, Benedict XVI during his pontificate, carried out a courageous gesture: the concession of the motu proprioSummorum Pontificum, on July 7, 2007. Thanks to this action, the number of priests who offer the old Mass multiplied throughout the world, and for this, we must be grateful to him. But what was important in that motu proprio was not so much the de factoaspect, or rather, the permission to celebrate Mass according to the ancient Roman rite for every priest, but the de jure recognition that that Rite had not been abrogated, and could never be abrogated.

With that act, Benedict XVI bowed to the Tradition of the Church, he admitted that no one – not even the Pope – could undermine it; that everyone – including the Pope – had to submit themselves to it.

Today, there is an open fight between two camps and two standards, that of Tradition and that of Revolution. The first, as Saint Ignatius recalled in his meditation on the two standards, is held by Christ, “our High Captain and Lord,” the second by “Lucifer, the mortal enemy of our human nature.” The standard of those who love the Truth of the Gospel, recognizing Jesus Christ as King of Heaven and earth, and the standard of he who claims to transform the Church and construct a new religion based on his own opinion.

“But,” affirms Pope Saint Pius X in the encyclical E supremi apostolato, “no one of sound mind can doubt the issue of this contest between man and the Most High. Man, abusing his liberty, can violate the right and the majesty of the Creator of the Universe; but the victory will ever be with God – nay, defeat is at hand at the moment when man, under the delusion of his triumph, rises up with most audacity.”[1]

We must have confidence in victory, but we need to be convinced that we cannot win without fighting. And today the battle is, first of all, that of words which break silence, defeat falsehood, and destroy hypocrisy, as Archbishop Carlo Mara Viganò did with his courageous testimony.

The Benedict Option

On September 11, 2018 in Rome, a presentation of Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option[2], was held at the Chamber of Deputies. Among the presenters was Archbishop Georg Gänswein, Prefect of the Papal Household.

Dreher is an ambiguous character, he presents himself as Catholic, but he left the Church to join the Orthodox religion. The title of his book is also ambiguous because the “Benedict option” of which he speaks is not that of Saint Benedict, but that of Benedict XVI. In a recent interview with the daily newspaper “Il Giornale,” a journalist asked him: “There are some who think that the ‘Benedict option,’ means ‘Ratzinger option.’” Dreher responded: “Well, I mean Saint Benedict but it is true that Benedict XVI is the second Benedict of the Benedict option”[3]

Archbishop Georg Gänswein, for his part praised the “marvelous inspiration of the book,” which would represent a confirmation of the prophethood of Benedict XVI. I hold that between the “seeds of renewal” and the post-modern world, a peaceful coexistence cannot exist, but only war, and I have defined Dreher’s exit strategy as ‘catacombist’: the illusion of saving one’s self, forming “arks of salvation,” of privileged islands, where one can live the Faith, renouncing to fight the modern world.

The Benedict option appears as a fruit of the refusal of the militant conception of Christianity, which spread after the Second Vatican Council. Walls must be substituted by bridges, so that opposed world visions will not exist, and the different religious confessions can unite based on a generic sentiment of transcendence. This exist strategy from the modern world is very different than that of the true Saint Benedict.

The Benedictine monks were conquerors. They left the world to conquer it. This is why Pius XII defined Saint Benedict as “the father of Europe,” affirming that “while the barbarian hordes flooded the provinces, he who was called the last of the Romans, reconciling Romanity and the Gospel, brought true aid to unite the peoples of Europe under the banner of the auspice of Christ and to give a happy structure to Christian society. In fact, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Baltic, legions of Benedictines were dispersed, who with the Cross, books, and plow tamed those rough and uncivilized peoples.”[4].

The vocation of the monks was complimentary to that of the knights. Monks and knights constituted the Christian society of the medieval age. The highest expression of the medieval age was the monk-knights, like the Templars, whose rule was written by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. We need these men, but above all this spirit, today. The prospective of Rod Dreher and Archbishop Gänswein seems to be to the contrary: that of preparing Catholics to patiently put up with persecution, awaiting better times, to return in spirit to the era of the catacombs, because the possibility of an imminent triumph of the Church over the modern world cannot be seen. But is this truly so?

The Constantinian Shift and the Social Reign of Christ

Throughout the history of the Church, there has perhaps never been a more tragic moment than the dawn of the fourth century. A dawn red with blood when the age of the persecutions reached its culmination under the Emperor Diocletian.

From one end of the Roman Empire to the other, with the exception of Constantius Chlorus’ Britany, Christians were torn apart, crucified, decapitated. Christianity had to be extirpated from the face of the earth. Christians were defenseless, they had only the strength of their Faith and the help of the Holy Ghost, which fortified them. Who would have ever said that the hour of resurrection, known only to God, was so close? Who would have imagined that the blood of the martyrs would be transformed into the purple of the Christian empire of Constantine? And yet, that’s what happened.

On October 28, 312, the history of the Roman Empire and of the whole Church changed. A young leader, Constantine, battling with Maxentius to win the throne of Rome, had a vision. A blazing Cross appeared in the sky with the words In hoc signo vinces: in this sign, in the name of this sign – the Cross – you will conquer. And then, Eusebius and Lactantius recount, the Lord appeared to Constantine during the night, exhorting him to print this Cross on the standards of his legions. Under the sign of the Cross, Constantine faced Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge, at the gates of Rome, annihilated the enemy army and ascended the imperial throne. This date signaled an epochal turning point, destined to go down in history as the “Constantinian shift.”

There is no historian who denies the weight of this event. It was the birth, following three centuries of Christianity, of Christian civilization. A civilization born from the sacrifice of Calvary, from the grace of Pentecost, from the mission which Jesus Christ entrusted to His disciples: that of converting not only individual souls, but peoples, nations, the masses. But this civilization, this triumph of the visible Church, has its origin in a battle which had at its front two armies: one which raised the symbols of paganism, the other which fought in the name of the Cross of Christ.

We can say that there has never been a deeper, or more profound or faster social metamorphosis in human history, than that brought about by the victory at the Milvian Bridge. A most profound change because paganism which had dominated mankind for millennia, was inexorably condemned to death, while a new civilization rose from its ruins, the social fruit of Christianity.

This change took place thanks to a battle which may be defined as the first holy war of the Christian era. A war fought for Christ, and in the Name of Christ, and the promise of victory was tied to the Christian character of this battle. The motto in hoc signo vinces joins the symbol of the Cross to victory: not only an interior victory over disordered passions and sin, but a historic victory which confirms how Christianity received from Christ the mission to plant the Cross in the public domain, of conquering not only souls but society, its institutions, and customs, in this way creating Christendom.

Starting in the fourth century, the Church made herself visible, she raised her banner – the banner of the Cross – she began a triumphant march through history, the goal being the social reign of Christ, the prefiguration of His eternal reign in Heaven. This reign was only partially brought about in the medieval age; we still await its fulfillment, because the Church exists in history, she fights and wins in history. The social reign of Christ will be a total upheaval. Evil – although it will not disappear because it is destined to accompany the history of the Church until the end times of the antichrist – will be reduced to a situation like that in which good is today: isolated, condemned, charged, abhorred.

Pius XII in the encyclical Summi Pontificatus[5] of October 20, 1939, sketching a plan for his pontificate, affirmed that only the acknowledgment of the social reign of Christ could allow man to return to that degree of civility which medieval Christian Europe enjoyed[6]. “In the recognition of the royal prerogatives of Christ and in the return of individuals and of society to the law of His truth and of His love lies the only way to salvation.”

The reign of Christ cannot be separated from that of His divine Mother, Mary, because as the theologians recall, Mary in Her role as Mother of God has been associated with the work of the Divine Redeemer. “Christ is King from all eternity, Mary became Queen at the moment in which She conceived the Father’s Only-Begotten Son. Christ is King because He is God and Man-God; Mary is Queen because She is His Mother and Associate.”[7].

The Marian theophany of the last two centuries, from Rue du Bac to Lourdes to Fatima, bears witness to the role which Our Lady must have in the establishment of the social reign of Christ, which is also the social reign of Mary, the triumph of the Church over the revolution it assails.

A Fluid Church in a Fluid Society

The modernists reject the social reign of Christ, accusing the “Constantinian shift” of having betrayed the Gospel’s ideals, as a compromise of Christians with power. This anti-Constantinian mythology developed in the radical schism of the Reformation, between the Anabaptists and the Theosophists who placed themselves at Luther’s left. These saw in the “Constantinian bond” of Church and state, a sacrilegious union which needed to be destroyed and substituted by the principle of religious liberty, intended as the right to profess any religion held to be true.

The ideas of the radical reformers were expressed in Holland in the 1600’s especially, and from there, spread to England where they constituted one of the intellectual foundations of Masonry which saw the light with the institution of the Grand Lodge in London in 1717. Masonry organized the French Revolution, that intended to break the Constantinian bond of altar and throne, in the name of the supreme ideals of absolute liberty, equality and fraternity. In the 1800’s, liberalism denied the public role of the Church in society, seeking to confine the Christian presence to the strict freedom of individual consciences, to bring it back to the catacombs. These texts were repeatedly condemned by the Papal Magisterium but the anti-Constantinian mythology penetrated the Catholic Church on the inside, through modernism.

“The end of the Constantinian era”[8] was announced by one of the fathers of the Nouvelle Théologie, the Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu, in a famous conference held in 1961. Chenu aspired to free the Church from what he defined as the three decisive factors of her compromise with power: the primacy of Roman law, the Greek-Roman logos, and the liturgical language of Latin.[9] The Church no longer had to face the problem of Christianizing the world but accepting its secularist development, breaking every tie with Tradition, renewing her doctrine through (pastoral) praxis.

The modernists deny the social reign of Christ because they deny the visible dimension of the Church. They want to liquidate the structures of the Church, they want a fluid church in a fluid society, like a river which runs in a perpetual flow. According to Father Roger-Thomas Calmel: “Doctrines, rites, and the interior life are subjected to a process of such a radical and refined liquefaction which no longer allows for a distinction between Catholics and non-Catholics. Because ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ the definite and the definitive are considered outdated, the question arises as to what it is that impedes non-Christian religions to also be part of the new universal church, constantly updated by ecumenical interpretations.”[10].

The fluid church requires fluid Catholics without an identity, without a mission to carry out, incapable of fighting: because fighting means resistance, resistance means staying, staying means being: and Tradition is nothing else than being which opposes itself to becoming which flows toward the sea of nothingness. Tradition is that which is stable in the perennial becoming of things, and that which is unchangeable in a changing world, and it is such because it has in itself a reflection of eternity.

The anti-Christian revolution which spans history, hates being in all its expressions, and counteracts it with the denial of all that in reality is stable, permanent, and objective, beginning with human nature, dissolved by gender theory.

So, the ruinous horizon before us is an expression of this revolutionary process, it is the result of a process of liquefying society and the Church, carried out by agents of chaos, by societies which would like to recreate or destroy the world. This route, however, leads to an inevitable defeat of the revolution.

In fact, the revolution, like evil, does not have its own nature, but exists only insofar as it is the privation and a deficiency of good. “The being of evil,” – explains Saint Thomas – “consists precisely in being the privation of good.”[11]. Evil, which is the privation of being, can spread, like darkness in the night, following daylight. But the darkness does not have in itself the power to defeat the light in a total and definitive way, because it (darkness) draws its very existence from the light. Infinite light, which is God, exists. “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness,” says Saint John (1 John 1:5). Absolute darkness does not exist, because radical nothingness cannot exist. Our existence is the living negation of nothingness. Evil advances when good recedes. Error is affirmed only when the truth is extinguished. The revolution wins only when Tradition surrenders. All revolutions throughout history have taken place only when an authentic opposition is lacking. For this reason, every abdication is an act of surrender and retreat.

However, if there is an evil dynamic, there is a dynamic of goodness. A remnant – even a minimal one – of light cannot be extinguished, and this remnant has in itself the irresistible strength of daybreak, the possibility of a new day with the sunrise. This is the drama of evil: it cannot destroy the last remnant of good that survives, it is destined to be destroyed by this remnant. Evil cannot stand even the smallest surviving good, because it glimpses its defeat in the good which exists. The dynamism of evil is destined to shatter itself against that which stays, which remains solid in society’s liquefaction. Therefore, the final step in the process of today’s self-dissolution eroding the rock on which the Church was founded, is destined to witness the death of the revolution and the sprouting of the beginning of an opposed life: a mandatory itinerary of restoration of faith and morals, of truth and of the social order to which it corresponds: this principle is the Catholic counter-revolution.

Social philosophy has several laws which should be remembered. One of them is that  history is made by minorities who fight to establish a project, an idea – right or malformed as the case may be. The strength of these minorities is proportionate to the strength of their passions, which can be ordered to good or can be disordered. These have an immense, propelling force, because they advance ideas, they put them into action. The strength of a warrior is proportionate to the breadth and intensity of his love; and there is no higher love than that which a man can have for the Church and Christian civilization, the love which drove the noblest of history’s ventures: the heroic deeds of the Crusades. In our dramatic, historic time we need to rediscover the perennial spirit of the Crusades, not that of the catacombs.

(Order a poster print of this original Remnant artwork from The Remnant’s Store )

The Spirit of Crusade

Please read the rest here: https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/4286-church-in-crisis-the-final-act-of-vatican-ii

 

Last evening I was moved to look to see if an old college friend of mine was still living in Brooklyn and was thinking about giving him a call should his phone number be the same; for his phone and residence had  not changed in many decades. So, before calling, I Googled his name: Barnett Berger and added Brooklyn, NY to my search.

The first entry gave me the assurance that he was still at the same residence and his phone had not changed. But the second entry set me back and my heart sunk a bit as I took the content of this short post into my mind. Here it is in its entirety: (https://suehollisterbarr.com/barnett-berger-a-rare-soul/)

Barnett Berger: A Rare Soul

Posted on August 3, 2016

In a community of Brooklyn writers, it is perhaps fitting that Barnett Berger was first met on a bus route, the No. 71, which no longer exists.  He was carrying an old book that likely shares the same fate.

He explained that he spoke slowly because he’d suffered a stroke.  But his careful, unhurried speech…reminiscent of some smoky beat-generation coffee house of long ago…became his signature sound.  The drawn-out strains of classic jazz, which he lived for and listened to as he wrote, could be heard clearly as he read his poetry in his characteristic drawl.  We were once or twice able to guess the piece that had inspired a poem before he told us its name.

This music was Barnett’s life, his love for it so pure that his belief that he didn’t have the talent to play it only fueled his commitment to it as an ardent fan.  For Barnett, music was life’s all and everything, the very reason for our existence.  Like a consummately attentive lover, he appreciated the subtlest differences between recordings of the same work.  He knew his facts but would share them quietly, full of reverence for the mystery from which all art is born.

Was he contemplating such thoughts…all the things that exist in the present and all the things that now exist only in the past…when he was struck by a car and died?

It had to be him; for I had not reached out to him for probably 10 years and we had pretty much lost contact. But how many other Barnett Berger’s in Brooklyn could there be who were such fans of jazz?

Barney and I had gone to school together at Long Island University and would go to small out of the way places (like Slug’s Saloon on the lower east side of Manhattan) to listen to some of the best jazz groups in the world. Slug’s Saloon was where the talented trumpet player Lee Morgan lost his life when he was shot while on stage by a girl friend. So when I say we went to out of the way places, I mean some of them were filled with junkies and in neighborhoods I would no longer go near in my present state of mind. But we were young and we felt invincible as do most early 20 year olds.

Barney visited me here in SC on several occasions and we enjoyed reminiscing and listening to jazz when he was here. But alas, all good things come to an end and we grew more and more distant and the visits ceased one year and that was that except for an occasional phone call to him.

The last time we spoke, he did not seem to be his old self. I am supposing now that perhaps he may have had the stroke that was mentioned in the above article. So I did not call again. I am sorry I didn’t.

I confirmed the guess that the article was my friend by calling his old college roommate who said that he had been contacted by the executor of the estate and that indeed he had been struck by a bus or a car and was pronounced dead immediately. I was also told that in his later years he had become religious and began attending synagogue; something new that I only had hints of his having an interest in renewing. Nor did I know that he began to write poetry though he was an intelligent man, having received his MSW from Columbia University.

God rest your soul, Barney. You were a good friend and your life was a mystery even to many of us who knew you. You lived alone all your life and I am to this day unsure if it was by choice or by circumstance. A mysterious loner and somewhat of an enigma to the end. I for one, will miss him for he reminds me of the uniqueness of every individual. Only God knows the secrets that lie in each of us and what makes each of us who we are.

Traditional Catholicism has now entered our vocabulary as a pejorative term used to describe radical, right wing, fundamentalist, rigid legalistic enforcers of doctrine and are, in essence, anti-Catholic in the sense that they have not followed the path or the way of the Novus Ordo Mass and the Ecumenical movement brought about by Vatican II. They are throwbacks to an era that nobody within the Church wants to return and therefore they are almost considered to be a heresy of sorts that denies that the Holy Spirit has led the Church to overturn the teachings of countless Popes, Saints, Theologians and in some instances the Scriptures themself not to mention all the warnings against Liberalism and Modernism which was beginning to infiltrate the Church from the ideas spawned by Protestantism, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. (Read the following for more in-depth background: https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/4261-breaking-the-oath-before-they-started-abusing-kids-they-were-abusing-god)

But why don’t these attacks ring an alarm bell in the minds of those who have seen this transformation take place? It is the same tactics used by the far left politicians and educators of the past 100 years who are redefining the meaning of words and want nothing to be written in stone. The Bible should then be looked at as malleable, doctrines should be changed, language changed, prayer changed, music and art changed, practices changed and all things old should give way to the new Church that is no longer at war with the World the Flesh or the Devil. We see it in the destruction of our laws and the way the left wants to destroy the Constitution and the Bill of Rights so why should we be scandalized or amazed at the recent changes these last 60 years or so?

To be a Traditional Catholic used to be a compliment as it indicated that one had an unfailing commitment to keep the Faith intact for all generations following as our forefathers did for our sakes. It was a badge of honor to follow the traditions and practices of our spiritual culture and to hopefully persevere in this Faith for the remainder of our days and pass it on unadulterated in both Teaching and Practice. Today it is as though 2000 years of Tradition has been turned on its head and rendered unthinkable, fossilized nonsense. If it is nonsense, then Christ was nonsense, as He Himself gave us much to think about concerning the future of the Church as did His Apostles: Matthew 16:18-19; Matthew 28:18-20; John 14:26; John 14:18. 

And, of course, there is this warning that seems to have already been substantially fulfilled in our lives today:

         “3 For there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears:

          4 And will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables.” __ 2 Timothy 4:3-4 Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition

.

And this is a characteristic of self-loathing; that one is in the political or national sense traitorous to their country, tribe, religion and therefore themselves. It is reminiscent of what Karl Marx and George Soros proved themselves to be: traitors to their own heritage. Both thought that the hierarchical natural state of God’s creation was not good enough and that they, being more just and merciful than God (whom neither believed in) could fashion a world that would be better simply because it would be in agreement to their own values (or lack thereof) and therefore Utopian . . . at least for themselves. It is high time that we ask ourselves the question of our times: “Have we essentially become like them, either in essence or in practice?”

My definition of a self-loathing Catholic is one who finds no incongruity between what they accept and don’t accept of Catholic Teaching; even if they vowed obedience to these things during their Confirmation, both in doctrine and practice. It is disingenuous to say the least, a mark on what could be called a person’s character (their word useless – having denied their own vows), and traitorous to Jesus Christ whom they claim to worship and the Church that is indefectible in its authoritative handing on to the Christian faith for all eternity: “18 And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” __ Matthew 16:18 Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition

This same mindset is the current worldly mindset that extends far beyond the Catholic Church. It is easily seen in the rewriting of word definitions and the pejorative meanings given to otherwise normal expressions, the rewriting of history and the subsequent self-loathing of Americans for America and Western Europeans for the Western European Culture which was largely shaped by Christianity. But the people let these go without so much as a whimper and many felt that their self-loathing actually came with a new-found freedom to live licentiously without guilt or shame for desires cooked up by the World the Flesh or the Devil. Satan, it seems has given this new expression of freedom to us that the world of true justice and true morality could not. We are excused not only by our neighbors and peers but also by our conscience . . . if we still have one. 

The real wonder to me is why the total destruction of society and total ruin of civilization itself has not yet occurred; for we know how democratic socialism morphs into an oligarchical socialism and that branches of that type of socialism further morphs into Marxism, Communism and eventual Totalitarianism. But at the root there is also a type of anarchy also prevails amongst the masses. They are self-serving and they no longer have a spiritual Authority to which to answer to. Instead they have pledged their earthly allegiance to the despot or dictator in power. It is a temporal and short lived trade-off for licentiousness in the present to the true freedom, peace, love and security offered by God . . . Who has done all that He can do to gain our cooperation in our ultimate and eternal salvation.

A bird in the hand mentality and the convenience and affordability of a McDonald’s has distorted our sense of value. Our sovereignty and our only job in this life (the imitation and love of Christ and His Teachings) are squandered for a bowl of self-served, quick service convenient pottage. Esau would be proud to watch us sell our birthright for such a temporal and inferior price.

I suppose that is the question I wonder about most in this life: “Are we so short-sighted that we are willing to sell our Traditions, our Nations, our Religion, our Cultures and our eternal salvation for a wink and a nod for the countless sins we commit or are we going to turn to Christ once again and make an effort with the Grace of God to defeat or at least do battle with these enemies of our souls?” I don’t have a magic ball to tell me where the world is going in the future but I do know that each of us individually has a choice to make no matter what the world demands of us to believe or how many  must die as martyrs to reclaim our souls from this fallen world of ours. Lets hope more and more people choose to amend their lives and sin no more, no matter the suffering or the short-term price.

The New Nonsense | Crisis Magazine
by JUSTIN BRADFORD SMITH

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