Saturday, September 27, 2014
Friday, September 26, 2014
SSPX USA calls for a rosary novena to defend family
Approaching rapidly is the October 2014 Extraordinary Meeting of the Synod of Bishops: “Pastoral Challenges to the Family in the Context of Evangelization”. This Synod will be held from October 5-19 and potentially has the grave danger of undermining the Church's doctrinal and moral teachings on marriage and family issues.
To counteract this danger, the USA District Superior, Fr. Jurgen Wegner, is asking everyone to join in a rosary novena for the defense of the family:
I request that all pastors dedicate at least three sermons in October and November to the fundamental truths about marriage. I request also that you invite all the faithful to join us in a novena of rosaries from September 29th to October 7th. We will offer our rosaries for the defense of the family. Please encourage everyone to pray the 15 decades of the rosary."
This rosary novena corresponds with DICI's publication of an article and pertinent excerpts from a new book (which will be published in October) concerning the recent response that Cardinal Kasper gave to some eminent writers against his publicly made and unorthodox comments (see below for some links):
The Rise of Bergoglianism ( The Remnant Newspaper - written by Christopher A. Ferrara )
Here is an inescapable truth that ought to trouble every Catholic: Francis is the first Pope in the history of the Church to be universally lauded by “the rulers of the world of this darkness… the spirits of wickedness in the high places.” (Eph. 6:12) Even Barack Obama, a veritable forerunner of the Antichrist, is “hugely impressed” by Francis. There is no need to demonstrate yet again the copious outpouring of the world’s unprecedented praise for a Roman Pontiff. The world’s love affair with Francis has woven itself into the very Zeitgeist, as any Internet search for the terms “Pope Francis” and “revolution” will reveal. “Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you! for in the same manner did their fathers to the false prophets.”
One can only laugh at the neo-Catholics’ frantic attempts to attribute this apocalyptic development to a massive misunderstanding of a really very tradition-minded Pope. In his The Devastated Vineyard (1973), the late great Dietrich von Hildebrand warned that “[t]he poison of our epoch is slowly seeping into the Church herself, and many have failed to recognize the apocalyptic decline of our time.” Concerning von Hildebrand, the future Pope Benedict XVI wrote: “I am personally convinced that, when, at some time in the future, the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time.” (Soul of a Lion, p. 12). Compare von Hildebrand’s intellectual honesty with the propaganda of today’s neo-Catholic commentators: confronted with what is by now a vast perfusion of the poison of our epoch in the Church, they resolutely administer the anodyne of false optimism to their gullible public; and when even their own public begins to awaken to the reality of our situation, they block the comment boxes of their virtual realm in the blogosphere, lest reality intrude and make a shambles of their kingdom of illusion.
Here in the real world, this is what we know: At the conclave in 2013, a liberal South American Jesuit succeeded Pope Benedict following Benedict’s mysterious, curiously qualified and absolutely unprecedented “renunciation” of the “active ministry” of the papacy. Despite his now endlessly vaunted “pastoral style,” the former Archbishop Bergoglio presided over the continuing decomposition of the Catholic faith in the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires from 1998-2013, when the number of diocesan priests, religious priests, and men and women religious all declined steadily. We have learned of Archbishop Bergoglio’s “Pinocchio Mass” and his “Tango Mass,” his lighting of Menorahs in synagogues while wearing a kippah, the lending of his Cathedral “to Protestants, Muslims, Jews, and even to partisan groups in the name of an impossible and unnecessary interreligious dialogue,” and his celebration in the same Cathedral of the tenth anniversary of the UN-backed, syncretistic United Religions Initiative, funded by George Soros and Bill Gates—a movement which, like Francis himself, condemns “proselytism.” We have learned as well of Bergoglio’s “meetings with protestants in the Luna Park arena where, together with preacher of the Pontifical House, Raniero Cantalamessa, he was ‘blessed’ by Protestant ministers, in a common act of worship in which he, in practice, accepted the validity of the ‘powers’ of the TV-pastors.”
It is hardly surprising that Archbishop Bergoglio left behind him, not only empty seminaries and defecting faithful, but a diabolical “freak show” that includes the priestly “blessing” in a parish church of the “marriage” of a transsexual-homosexual “couple,” and the public baptism—complete with happy photos of the priest and the “couple”—of a child born to a woman who now claims to be a man and a man who now claims to be a woman.
Yet this same prelate, emerging from a Protestantized Church in Latin America that is losing millions of souls to sects whose ministers do Protestantism better—and whom he calls “brothers” he has “no desire to convert”—now expounds, as Pope Francis, what he seems to think is a bold new ecclesial vision that he, unlike any of his predecessors, is equipped to realize. In the process, Francis has spent the past eighteen months belittling almost daily virtually every aspect of the Church’s apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions. He has consistently displayed his contempt for the Church’s infallible definitions of irreformable doctrine (disparaged as “fixed formulations learned by heart or by specific words which express an absolutely invariable content”), her perennial disciplinary rules for the safeguard of doctrine (ridiculed as “little rules of behavior,” “small things… small-minded rules”), her discipline of systematic theology (“starched Christians, too polite, who speak of theology calmly over tea”), her immemorial Latin liturgy (dismissed as “a kind of fashion” to which people are “addicted”), the contemplative life of her religious (deriding cloistered nuns for being “too spiritual” and having a “flight attendant smile”), and even her homiletics (disdaining “excellent preachers” whose sermons are “mere vanity” because they supposedly “have failed to sow hope”, “compassion” and “closeness” the way Francis does).
As audacious as it may be to say this, Francis seems intent on belittling Revelation itself in keeping with his (one must say) idiosyncratic reading of the Gospel. According to Francis, “the Church acts like Jesus. She does not give lectures on love, on mercy. She does not spread a philosophy, a path of wisdom throughout the world. ... Of course, Christianity is all this, but as a consequence, in reflection. The Mother Church, like Jesus, teaches by example, and uses words to illuminate the meaning of her gestures.”
That is exactly the opposite of the truth. Our Lord is precisely a divine teacher, who illustrates what He teaches by the good deeds He performs, including His miracles. Francis has it backwards: the Eternal Word precedes and motivates what the Church accomplishes in the order of charity; the Church’s teaching does not arise as a consequence of mere “reflection” on the example of good works. In an ironically Pelagian twist, Francis effectively reduces the Faith to works and the whole of Catholic doctrine to a mere “reflection” on works. But the Magisterium consists of the revealed truths that Christ Himself and the Apostles actually uttered in their own words, in keeping with Our Lord’s divine commission to “make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded thee.” The Gospel is filled with what Francis derides as “lectures”—even as he delivers yet another of his own lectures on the Church’s failings and inadequacies.
The sheer scope of Francis’s ambition is staggering, suggesting an element of delusion. As he declares in his sprawling manifesto, Evangelii Gaudium (EV): “I dream of a ‘missionary option’, that is, a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world rather than for her self-preservation.” EV expounds Francis’s vision of a “reform” of literally everything in the Church and the world:
“a new chapter of evangelization,”
“new paths for the Church’s journey,”
“new narratives and paradigms,”
“a new order of human relations,”
“a new way of living together in fidelity to the Gospel,”
“new contributions to theological reflection,”
“new directions for humanity,”
“new signs and new symbols, new flesh to embody and communicate the word,”
“a new mindset which thinks in terms of community and the priority of the life of all over the appropriation of goods by a few,”
“a new political and economic mindset,”
“new forms of cultural synthesis,”
“new processes in society,”
“new horizons for thought” and “a new social situation…”
One might be tempted to laugh at the grandiose vacuity of it all, and it is far from clear how the document can be categorized as part of the papal magisterium at all. As Cardinal Burke rather diplomatically put it, EV is “a distinct kind of document, and I haven’t quite figured out in my mind exactly how to describe it. But I would not think that it was intended to be part of papal magisterium. At least that’s my impression of it.”
One can only laugh at the neo-Catholics’ frantic attempts to attribute this apocalyptic development to a massive misunderstanding of a really very tradition-minded Pope. In his The Devastated Vineyard (1973), the late great Dietrich von Hildebrand warned that “[t]he poison of our epoch is slowly seeping into the Church herself, and many have failed to recognize the apocalyptic decline of our time.” Concerning von Hildebrand, the future Pope Benedict XVI wrote: “I am personally convinced that, when, at some time in the future, the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time.” (Soul of a Lion, p. 12). Compare von Hildebrand’s intellectual honesty with the propaganda of today’s neo-Catholic commentators: confronted with what is by now a vast perfusion of the poison of our epoch in the Church, they resolutely administer the anodyne of false optimism to their gullible public; and when even their own public begins to awaken to the reality of our situation, they block the comment boxes of their virtual realm in the blogosphere, lest reality intrude and make a shambles of their kingdom of illusion.
Here in the real world, this is what we know: At the conclave in 2013, a liberal South American Jesuit succeeded Pope Benedict following Benedict’s mysterious, curiously qualified and absolutely unprecedented “renunciation” of the “active ministry” of the papacy. Despite his now endlessly vaunted “pastoral style,” the former Archbishop Bergoglio presided over the continuing decomposition of the Catholic faith in the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires from 1998-2013, when the number of diocesan priests, religious priests, and men and women religious all declined steadily. We have learned of Archbishop Bergoglio’s “Pinocchio Mass” and his “Tango Mass,” his lighting of Menorahs in synagogues while wearing a kippah, the lending of his Cathedral “to Protestants, Muslims, Jews, and even to partisan groups in the name of an impossible and unnecessary interreligious dialogue,” and his celebration in the same Cathedral of the tenth anniversary of the UN-backed, syncretistic United Religions Initiative, funded by George Soros and Bill Gates—a movement which, like Francis himself, condemns “proselytism.” We have learned as well of Bergoglio’s “meetings with protestants in the Luna Park arena where, together with preacher of the Pontifical House, Raniero Cantalamessa, he was ‘blessed’ by Protestant ministers, in a common act of worship in which he, in practice, accepted the validity of the ‘powers’ of the TV-pastors.”
It is hardly surprising that Archbishop Bergoglio left behind him, not only empty seminaries and defecting faithful, but a diabolical “freak show” that includes the priestly “blessing” in a parish church of the “marriage” of a transsexual-homosexual “couple,” and the public baptism—complete with happy photos of the priest and the “couple”—of a child born to a woman who now claims to be a man and a man who now claims to be a woman.
Yet this same prelate, emerging from a Protestantized Church in Latin America that is losing millions of souls to sects whose ministers do Protestantism better—and whom he calls “brothers” he has “no desire to convert”—now expounds, as Pope Francis, what he seems to think is a bold new ecclesial vision that he, unlike any of his predecessors, is equipped to realize. In the process, Francis has spent the past eighteen months belittling almost daily virtually every aspect of the Church’s apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions. He has consistently displayed his contempt for the Church’s infallible definitions of irreformable doctrine (disparaged as “fixed formulations learned by heart or by specific words which express an absolutely invariable content”), her perennial disciplinary rules for the safeguard of doctrine (ridiculed as “little rules of behavior,” “small things… small-minded rules”), her discipline of systematic theology (“starched Christians, too polite, who speak of theology calmly over tea”), her immemorial Latin liturgy (dismissed as “a kind of fashion” to which people are “addicted”), the contemplative life of her religious (deriding cloistered nuns for being “too spiritual” and having a “flight attendant smile”), and even her homiletics (disdaining “excellent preachers” whose sermons are “mere vanity” because they supposedly “have failed to sow hope”, “compassion” and “closeness” the way Francis does).
As audacious as it may be to say this, Francis seems intent on belittling Revelation itself in keeping with his (one must say) idiosyncratic reading of the Gospel. According to Francis, “the Church acts like Jesus. She does not give lectures on love, on mercy. She does not spread a philosophy, a path of wisdom throughout the world. ... Of course, Christianity is all this, but as a consequence, in reflection. The Mother Church, like Jesus, teaches by example, and uses words to illuminate the meaning of her gestures.”
That is exactly the opposite of the truth. Our Lord is precisely a divine teacher, who illustrates what He teaches by the good deeds He performs, including His miracles. Francis has it backwards: the Eternal Word precedes and motivates what the Church accomplishes in the order of charity; the Church’s teaching does not arise as a consequence of mere “reflection” on the example of good works. In an ironically Pelagian twist, Francis effectively reduces the Faith to works and the whole of Catholic doctrine to a mere “reflection” on works. But the Magisterium consists of the revealed truths that Christ Himself and the Apostles actually uttered in their own words, in keeping with Our Lord’s divine commission to “make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded thee.” The Gospel is filled with what Francis derides as “lectures”—even as he delivers yet another of his own lectures on the Church’s failings and inadequacies.
The sheer scope of Francis’s ambition is staggering, suggesting an element of delusion. As he declares in his sprawling manifesto, Evangelii Gaudium (EV): “I dream of a ‘missionary option’, that is, a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world rather than for her self-preservation.” EV expounds Francis’s vision of a “reform” of literally everything in the Church and the world:
“a new chapter of evangelization,”
“new paths for the Church’s journey,”
“new narratives and paradigms,”
“a new order of human relations,”
“a new way of living together in fidelity to the Gospel,”
“new contributions to theological reflection,”
“new directions for humanity,”
“new signs and new symbols, new flesh to embody and communicate the word,”
“a new mindset which thinks in terms of community and the priority of the life of all over the appropriation of goods by a few,”
“a new political and economic mindset,”
“new forms of cultural synthesis,”
“new processes in society,”
“new horizons for thought” and “a new social situation…”
One might be tempted to laugh at the grandiose vacuity of it all, and it is far from clear how the document can be categorized as part of the papal magisterium at all. As Cardinal Burke rather diplomatically put it, EV is “a distinct kind of document, and I haven’t quite figured out in my mind exactly how to describe it. But I would not think that it was intended to be part of papal magisterium. At least that’s my impression of it.”
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