“Where
do We Go From Here?”
When Pope Francis Totally Bans the Latin Mass
In
his rage against anyone and anything that stands in
the way of his ecumenical vision of a Church bleached of
its Catholicism, it is widely reported that Francis soon
plans to crush, once and for all time, what he
sees as the principal obstacle to this agenda: the Latin
Mass. It is, as he sees it, the last vestige, not simply
for the Catholic Church to become sufficiently
de-Catholicized (much in the way that much of the
Novus Ordo
“Mass of Paul VI” has been)
but
totally expunged.
The Latin Mass
alone cannot easily be aligned with, nor could it
ever, even marginally, be embraced by other “ecclesial
communities” that long ago, during the Protestant
Revolt, left the Church, finding her teachings and
worship abhorrent and hateful.
Francis, then, has
decided, to stamp it out! Every extant remnant that
could in some way, however remote, recall the life of
the Church as it existed before Vatican II is to be
remorselessly expurgated from living memory.
I had written about
this some time ago in another article (https://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/loss-of-language-and-other-paradigms-in-catholic-church.htm)
outlining the ecumenical need for the extinction of any
memory of the Catholic Church prior to Vatican II, much
in the way that North Korea implemented the “Three
Generations Solution” to eradicate any memory of what
life was like in North Korea prior to the Communist Kim
dynasty extending from Kim Il Sung in 1948 to present
day Kim Jong Un. By programmatically throttling the
transmission of culture from one generation to the next,
it succeeded — within three generations — in isolating
the last generation from any memory of the first. Only
the State remained.
In a similar manner,
Pope Francis is equally determined that only Vatican II
will remain.
For this to happen,
the Latin Mass must go. It is the most monumental,
emblematic, and visible institution that is the sine
qua non of anything identifiable as uniquely
Catholic. And for this reason it is seen by Francis as
the most dangerous.
After 2000 years it
just will not go away by itself! It has survived
200 centuries of persecution, oppression, infiltration,
corruption, scandal, intrigue, pagan armies, heretics,
apostates, dictators, unworthy pontiffs, depraved
cardinals, craven bishops; every imaginable adversary —
and never folded.
There is a reason. And
this time will be no different.
Even if Francis closes
all the doors to all the Churches that celebrate the
Latin Mass, he does not (because he cannot)
abolish, let alone stop, the Mass of the Ages celebrated
in Latin as it has been celebrated without interruption
for nearly 2000 years. The Apostolic Constitution Quo
Primum of 1570 binds us
forever to the Mass as it was celebrated prior
to 1962. As the Church survived previous
disasters, it will survive Francis.
For a time, the Master
gave the Steward keep of the House, and even keys to the
doors, but what is written on the hearts of men is
etched more deeply and universally than the instructions
that came with the keys — instructions that the Steward
in the Master’s absence tossed away, seizing the House
and imagining it his own. There is a parable to this
effect, yes?
I will come to the
point: Francis cannot take your being Catholic
away from you. He can seize all the properties belonging
to the “Post-Catholic-Conciliar-Church” of Vatican II:
the buildings, the chattel, the real estate, the bank
accounts; in a word, everything tangible that is
the “property” of the Church. St. Athanasius spoke
poignantly of this in a deeply moving letter to his
flock during the Arian heresy (included below). Your
Traditional Catholic parish may be taken from you, yes.
But your
Traditional Catholic
Faith, together with the Latin language through
which it has ever been liturgically expressed,
and that treasury of countless
prayers, devotions, litanies, chants, hymns, classical
requiems, masses and motets in Latin — these beautiful and
sacred gifts that God Himself has nurtured within you
and which have become part of the fabric of western
culture itself — can never be taken from you by
any decree,
papal or otherwise
— simply because they may be
offensive to other “ecclesial communities”
outside the Catholic Church; communities in many
ways deeply antagonistic to the Church and what she
authentically teaches.
How would this be possible? Can the sacred love
in your heart that is inescapably bound up with your
being a traditional Catholic, be subject to law, interdiction,
suspension? Can it be abolished as ecumenically “incorrect”?
Are you no longer a “Catholic”
in the eyes of the Post-Catholic-Conciliar-Church if the
word “Traditional” is prefixed to it, or is in some way
predicated of it?
We opened this article
with a question: “Where do We Go From Here?” that
is to say, when Pope Francis totally prohibits
the Latin Mass in parishes throughout the world.
This — unquestionably
— is the foremost question in the mind of virtually
every traditional Catholic throughout the world. “Where
do I go now?”
It is a question in
desperate need of answering. By some accounts, the
answer will be required before mid-July of this year,
2024.
In the few days ahead,
we will attempt to provide something of an answer, if
only the beginning of an answer — and for that,
we ourselves desperately pray.
Geoffrey K.
Mondello
Editor
Sunday, June 30, 2024
The Commemoration of the holy Apostle Paul
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The Holy Catholic Faith
Where is it And Who is Keeping
it?
Has the
Post-Conciliar Church
Lost Custody of the Faith?
All indications are that is has.
The “Dark
Ages” — that disdainful term for the period in history following
the collapse of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D. until the 15th
century (a period correctly described as the Middle
Ages) is understood by the secular world to have
lasted roughly 1000 years, beginning in Florence, Italy.
Within the
post-Conciliar Catholic Church, however, it appears
that the term extends well beyond the 15th century;
indeed, some 500 years beyond it! According to contemporary
Catholic thought articulated within the past five papacies,
the “Dark Ages” really ended in 1965 at the conclusion
of the Second Vatican Council. All the doctrines and teachings
prior to that Council were only imperfectly, deficiently,
and insufficiently articulated or defectively understood.
The 1000
Years of Darkness
Only
the Second Vatican Council finally attained to enlightenment
in the divine economy, and after 1,965 years of suspension,
it alone has provided the final, sufficient, and correct
understanding of God and Church, man and nature. Prior to
that, according to post-Conciliar thought, Catholics had
essentially lived in darkness, specifically the darkness
of the “pre-Conciliar Dark Ages.” It may be said that where
the Rational Enlightenment “saved the world from religion,”
Vatican II saved the Church from Catholicism.
This argument
— that God concealed the “real” truth from us for
either 1500 years on the one hand (concerning Protestants)
or for 2000 years on other (concerning Vatican II) does
not, of course, speak well of God’s munificence, truth,
or goodness — and that it is the very argument to
be brought against Protestants by Catholics, is good to
keep in mind. Why would a good, loving, and truthful God
conceal the real nature of the Church, the Sacraments,
and true worship from us for so long?
Pay No
Attention to What You See!
We are told
so many times that what we see is no indication of what
is real.
It is true
in two venues: the political landscape, which
is really of not much interest to us here except as a paradigm
of our being told that what we perceive to be oppressive,
unjust, and despotic, is really a benevolent government
open to all its constituents. We are simply not socially-enlightened
enough (“woke” enough) to see it, you understand.
The other
venue, of course, is the ecclesiastical landscape,
specifically the Vatican, and more specifically the papacies
of the Vatican II pontiffs and the various Dicasteries under
them. Within this crumbling landscape we are told that all
the dismantling, removal, renovation, and ultimately the
detritus following Vatican II has resulted in a more beautiful,
vibrant, healthy, and faithful Church, with pews filled
at Sunday Masses; a Church brimming with baptisms, confirmations,
marriages, vocations, ordinations … a chrysalis bursting
in a renewal of all things holy and good! We are
simply too “rigid,” too “backward,” not “progressive-enough”
to see it. Because we do not “walk in Accompaniment with
the Spirit,” we are blind … you understand.
From Bergoglio’s dismissive
perspective, “looking back (indietrismo) is useless,”
1
and given Francis’s
insolent treatment of those who worship as our forefathers
did for 200 centuries, they are equally useless as well.
They are impediments to his progressive agenda; to use his
words, they are “imbavagliando,” “gagging” the Church.2
His aggressively
Modernist agenda set in motion by Vatican II, apparently,
is too far advanced for the possibility of retrenching.
It is “useless” to even entertain the possibility of
rapprochement with the Mass of the Ages and the 2000-year
spirituality inseparable from it; a Mass within which we
immediately find sanctity, solemnity, sacrality, holiness,
heavenliness, beauty, spirituality, form, sobriety, chant,
mystery, the choir of angels; in short, all that is egregiously
absent within the bland, mundane, and very worldly
Novus Ordo
“Mass of Paul VI.”
What, Exactly,
are We to Understand by “Keeping — and Having
Kept — the Catholic Faith”?
The notions
of Keeping, and having kept, the Catholic
Faith can only be understood as retaining (keeping), and
having preserved (kept), the one true holy Catholic and
Apostolic Faith that has been kept and
practiced for the 2000 years prior to Vatican II
— even when the practice of that venerable Faith has been
unjustly deprived through ecclesiastical duress.
That unchanging and unchangeable Faith is kept in
the unwavering allegiance to it despite persecution and
even deprivation. It can be physically removed from
us, but it cannot be taken away from us.
Indeed,
why do we keep anything at all? We only keep what
we want and value; what is good and beautiful. Understanding
this, we must ask, is there anything more beautiful this
side of Heaven than the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass?
… than the Faith bequeathed to us by our fathers, by the
Saints, by the Martyrs — the Faith that has generated the
greatest and most brilliant constellation of saints and
martyrs in the history of the Church?
It cannot
be the case that Faith of the Church for the 2000 years
preceding December 8, 1965 (when the Second Vatican
Council was formally concluded) is no longer the Faith of
the Church now — for if the Faith is different
then the Church, which is
the embodiment of that Faith, is different, and if
the Church is different, the Church is no more. This cannot
be. Christ promised that this cannot be.
But it
can be said that the teaching of the Church
is now vastly different from the teaching of the
Church for the 200 centuries prior to John XXIII and his
five successors, and most especially in what are presented
to us as the “Conciliar” documents of Vatican II, documents
that vastly, even essentially, diverge from
centuries of incontestably authoritative Catholic teaching.
So much
so, in fact, that in its latest iteration under the papacy
of Francis, we have begun to ask in earnest, perhaps for
the first time in our lives, “has the post-Conciliar Catholic
Church, or perhaps more accurately, the “Post-Catholic-Conciliar-Church”
— an increasingly different Church that first emerged
from Vatican II and has continued to diverge from
it through every successive papacy until that rupture with
the past has culminated in a Church, together with its hierarchy,
largely lost custody of the Catholic Faith?
Loathsome
Since beginning this article
some days ago, some alarming news has begun to emerge from
credible sources that has necessarily changed the tenor
of this discussion, one which, much to our consternation,
now concerns not simply the nature of the custody
of the Faith vis-à-vis the papacy of Francis and the disaffected
ecclesiastical apparatus in the Vatican under him, but concerning
nothing less than the integrity*
of the Catholic Faith itself. It has come to our attention
that under the direction of Pope Francis, English Cardinal
Arthur Roche, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship,
together with other powerful figures within the Roman Curia
are preparing to completely abolish — for all time
— and with no possibility of reclaiming — what they
perceive as the threat posed by the celebration of the Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass in Latin — in other words, The Latin
Mass, TLM, as it has been celebrated for 2000 years
which must yield to the Novus Ordo (New Order)
“Mass of Paul VI” exclusively — a Mass now
barely half a century (54 years) in the making
… and still in the making. In order to accomplish
this with absolute, clinical exactitude, Francis & Friends
have determined to stamp out the Latin Mass as something
loathsome.
Such fear of something holy! As though the Mass of 2000
years can be shackled and plunged into a dungeon of unfathomable
depth, hidden from sight, concealed as a destructive secret,
and made irrecoverable to memory! How can we begin to imagine
such malice in the Church toward those within the
Church; how are we to begin to grasp the Church promulgating
such an evil law and with an iron fist as hateful
as the crushing fist of any petty dictator?
Too Catholic (for Ecumenism)
The Latin Mass, however, must
go: apart from the many contrived and ultimately superficial
reasons for abolishing the Latin Mass, the principal reason
is this: it is an impediment to Ecumenism,
the very corner-stone of Vatican II.
This is the real reason behind the vitriolic,
almost pathological animosity exhibited toward the Latin
Mass by the liberal, Modernist Church of Vatican II and
its principal proponent, Jorge Bergoglio: The Latin Mass
is not amenable to non-Catholics; it is … too Catholic,
it bears within itself the history, the memory, the devotion,
the filial love of two hundred centuries of generations
of Catholics who cleaved to the Faith through persecution
and hardship and for many, to the point of the shedding
of their blood.
Dwindling participation on
the Novus Ordo (Vernacular) Mass, and an alarming
increase in participation in the (Latin) Mass, especially
among young Catholics, appears to be the principal motivation
behind this draconian measure. The belief that Traditional
Catholics will become Vernacular “Paul VI Mass” Catholics
by heavy-handed decree; that they will be forced into this
free-form Mass by Procrustean measures, is nearly delusional.
It will not happen. I do not know what will happen,
but I am confident that this fiction will not occur.
Schism may occur. Were this the case, it would appear
from several informed sources that Francis himself would
be the formal cause of schism, and hence the Schismatic.
This is not a shocking possibility.
Of course,
we must ponder the question on everyone's mind: the fearful
question that wrenches our gut: where do
Traditional Catholics go from here — should the hammer
fall on the Faithful?
Who is To Answer This?
Shall Canon Lawyers decide
this … who are part of the very ecclesiastical apparatus
that is prejudicial against the continued celebration of
the Latin Mass? Even were Canon Lawyers able
to answer this (they are not), it is not theirs to decide,
for:
Ecclesiastical
law derives its formal authority from the supreme
legislator understood as the reigning Roman Pontiff
who, in his person, “possesses the totality of
legislative, executive, and judicial power.”
In other
words, since there is no superior above the pope,
3
Francis is exempt from, and
not subject to, Canon Law
… and will do as he has ever
done: whatever he wills, which, as
a matter of record, has not always, or even often, been
just, or even good.
Francis alone, then — temporally
speaking — will determine where we go from here, and given
his outspoken animosity toward the Latin Mass that preceded
Vatican II for 2000 years, and his even greater contempt
for Traditional Catholics, it appears that he is prepared
to offer us two options only:
-
Go to the Novus
Ordo (New Order) “Mass of Paul VI”
-
The second option is
intended to be optimally coercive:
No Mass at all. Essentially, “Attend
the Novus Ordo Mass or leave the Church.”
What crime, we must
ask, have these Catholics committed in continuing
to worship in Latin (until Francis repealed Summorum
Pontificum, three years ago in Traditionis Custodes,
2021) as their Catholic Religion has always worshipped up
to a mere 70 years ago? Is this the crime
that will cause them to be expelled from the Church?
Who is prepared to call
the Tridentine Mass — the worship of God in Latin
—
a crime?
This Missal, This Mass
(the Tridentine Mass), promulgated in Quo Primum
(Pope Pius V, 1570):
“Grant[s] to all priests of the Latin
Rite the right to celebrate the Roman Mass [of 1570]
in perpetuity.”4
Whether or not, under the iron
fist and the unbending will of Francis, matters come to
such a destructive, divisive, and unimaginably ignominious
conclusion remains to be seen. Perhaps it is rumor after
all. By all accounts, we will know by mid-July.
Why the Vatican has said
nothing to quash these rumors is a matter of ominous speculation.
Geoffrey K.
Mondello
Editor
Saturday, June 22, 2024
Feast of St. Paulinus, Bishop and Confessor
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_________________________
*
integrity: the quality or state
of being complete, sound, unimpaired or undivided, uncompromised
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/integrity;
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/integrity
1
https://thedialog.org/vatican-news/pope-francis-reminds-u-s-catholics-being-backward-looking-is-useless/
2
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2022/06/14/pope-francis-traditionalist-gag-243151
3 “The First See is judged
by no one” (#1404, The Code of Canon Law of the Catholic
Church, 1983).
4 “We require then that
all men, everywhere, shall embrace and observe the teachings
of the sacred and holy Roman Church, mother and mistress
of other churches; and that at no time in the future should
Mass be sung or recited otherwise than according to the
manner of the missal which we have published,
in any of the churches of the provinces of Christendom,
of Patriarchal, Cathedral, Collegiate or parochial status,
secular and regular belonging to any kind of order, monasteries,
both of men and women, also the military orders, and churches
without cure of souls or chapels, in which conventual Mass
is customarily celebrated or ought to be celebrated according
to the rite of the Roman Church, either aloud with a choir,
or in a low voice.”
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/pius05/p5quopri.htm
Vindictive,
Arrogant, Despotic, and Vengeful
Francis is a Pope ...
but
not
a “Holy” “Father”
Understand this:
To love the
pope is to will him every good and no evil.
This is what
it means for a Catholic to love anyone.
We love Pope
Francis in this way; we will him every good and no evil.
Do we admire
him? Absolutely not! Do we esteem him. No! Is he
dear to us? Not in the least.
He is, canonically,
our pope — but few of us would predicate of him the two
consecutive words historically associated with the Vicar
of Jesus Christ on Earth: “Holy Father.” He has consistently
demonstrated himself to be neither.
Holiness is
not vindictive, arrogant, despotic, and vengeful.
A Father does
not abuse his children, favoring some, punishing others,
giving shelter to those who please him while leaving those
who do not please him out in the cold, generously feeding
his favored ones, while starving the ill-favored in the
hope that they will soon perish.
Such a man,
whatever he may be, is neither holy nor a father in any
accepted understanding of either word.
A holy
man does not do these things.
A father
does not do these things.
Ergo, a “Holy
Father” does not do these things.
But Francis
does.
Consider his
treatment of virtually every Catholic, whether cleric,
episcopal, or lay, who adheres to the Traditional Latin
Mass that has been loved and practiced for the entire 2000-year
history of the Church — until it was brutally quashed by
an edict from Francis in his motu proprio “Traditiones
Custodes” on 16 July 2021, callously depriving them
of their most cherished patrimony as Catholics in continuity
with every Catholic for the past … not 20 years, not even
200 years, but 2000 years! … and with the simple
stroke of a pen wielded by an authoritarian hand that tolerates
no opposition and crushes all dissent.
This is Francis
(“the humble”) who famously encourages all others
to “walk in spiritual accompaniment”1
and “to listen to and hear one another”
2 — as long, apparently,
as they walk, lockstep, with him and agree with
him in all matters spiritual, social, socio-sexual,
environmental, economic, and even political.
In living memory
no other pope has been so remorselessly, so openly punitive
toward those he deems to be impediments to his radically
progressive agenda to remake the Church in his own image,
an image presciently sculpted in the background by
Fazzini in the Modernist Pope Paul VI Audience Hall;
an image of things distorted and ultimately hideous.
Cross Francis
and your career is over, your position is lost, your vocation
itself is in peril and your very livelihood will likely
be suspended; you will never be granted an audience with
him, no matter how high your ecclesiastical rank (think
Cardinal Zen of China whom Francis has refused to see
as he pursues his own Ostpolitik with Communist China).
Francis is nothing if not vindictive. Were the Vatican a
crime syndicate (it is not …. is it?) Frankie
would be a real “Capo” … less any pretensions to refinement.
Consider this:
bishops have lost their dioceses. Joseph Strickland of Tyler,
Texas is the most notable to come to mind in America.
Priests by
the scores have been “cancelled” (too many to enumerate.
See Coalition for Canceled Priests) — they have had
their faculties for celebrating the Mass and the Sacraments
revoked, and their means for living removed.
One Cardinal
and critic of Francis (Raymond Burke) was punished twice:
first, by being removed by Francis as Prefect of the Supreme
Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the court of final
appeal at the Vatican: and then, not satisfied, Francis
then went on to take away his living quarters in Rome and
still not satisfied, stopped his stipend for living! I
did say “Capo,” yes? Un bell'uomo, sì?
3
So, what are
we, as Catholics, to make of Francis?
It is a question
I struggle with daily. There are, I think two categories
that we are contending with in addressing this question.
Much like a Venn Diagram 4
there are areas where they overlap and become particularly
problematic, and I think that this is intentional on the
part of Francis as a means of obfuscating issues that would,
of themselves, be clearly distinguishable and susceptible
to clear interpretation.
I believe that
Francis wishes to avoid precision because precision makes
no allowance for ambiguity: it redounds to unmistakable
clarity which then calls for a necessary resolution. It
is particularly within that ill-defined penumbra on the
margins of issues where Francis feels that his arguments
may at least provisionally survive as minor or temporary
premises, at least long enough to carry forth what is essentially
an enthymeme or sorites to what he realizes is an an
illegitimate conclusion. But it is the conclusion, nevertheless,
that he strives for, that he wishes to achieve at any cost.
We must understand that it is a matter of arriving at the
conclusion that is important to Francis, regardless
of the means or the legitimacy of the conclusion. In this
sense, his logic, if you will, is not an extension,
but merely an expression of his will. Friedrich Nietzsche
would understand this at once as an expression of his famous
axiom,
“der Wille
zur Macht,” or the “the Will to Power.”
An Abusive Father
Still, even
as an abusive father, we love Francis as we ought.
It is the way
Christ commanded us to love others; even, given the present
environment in the highest echelons of the Vatican, those
who hate us; those who vigorously persecute us; those who
very clearly have no good will toward us.
However — because
we will him every good and no evil (that is to say, because
we love him — and, a fortiori — love Christ all the
more) we do not and will not follow so many of Francis’s
“moral teachings,” for they do not accord with the
Truth, which, for Catholics, is not simply a
“logically consistent proposition”, but a Person:
Jesus Christ and what He Himself taught.
5 Most often they touch upon things in
which he has no competence and certainly no mandate: economies,
politics, nation-state issues, liberal social-sexual and
moral issues in which he demonstrates very clear partisan
preferences, environmentalism, the evils of select economic
systems, an overweening affection for “mother earth” and
indigenous things, a soto-voce reproach of an unstated
evil implicit in western culture in particular and civilization
in general, especially vis-à-vis the motherly humus of the
Amazonian model nurtured by Pachamama in Brazil.
His “spiritual”
teachings are less clear. They are not always consistent
with the authentic and historical teachings of the Church
that we find in the Sacred Deposit of Faith and the Magisterium
of the Church. Nor are they (meager as they are in comparison
with his “moral teachings”) always consistent with Sacred
Scripture, and this is particularly troubling.
His “moral
teachings,” however, especially as they come to us through
his simpering alter ego “Tucho” Fernandez are particularly
pernicious inasmuch as they are intentionally invested with
the authority of the office of the Dicastery of the Doctrine
of the Faith which, up to eight months ago, was an office
of serious matters headed by individuals with serious intellects
and profound theological credentials. That this is no longer
so, is abundantly clear.
The DDF appears
to have become merely another facet of Francis’s ego writ
large. This is quite an accomplishment for a (proudly) humble
man. But a humble man becomes a dangerous man when the currency
of his humility is found to be counterfeit. When it is revealed
that the carefully curated “persona” and the “real”
person of whom it is a publicized fiction are no longer
negotiable, predictable alliances can result. This
is where “Tucho” comes in. He is as famously bright as Francis
is famously humble and this is a useful collaboration where
there are things to be done in the dark, things that would
redound both to the rehabilitation of Francis’s image that
has become tarnished of late, and to the progression of
his agenda that appears to have become stymied. Tucho, ever
eager to comply, is the man for the job; a noted “creative”
writer of fiction-of-sorts, especially of the type that
would now avoid scrutiny and publicity in polite company,
what better choice for becoming Francis’s alter-persona?
Francis will
find impenetrable shadows in that man, both moral and intellectual;
shadows that will play with light … while eluding it; never
permitting too bright a light to penetrate a lurking darkness
where evil things come to light.
Making Our Choice
If we must
choose between what the Church and Sacred Scripture has
taught for 2000 years — and what Francis teaches, our choice
as Catholics is determined right out of the gate: Scripture
and two unbroken millennia of Church teaching prior to Francis
and Vatican II.
Yes, both.
Why both? Because
Francis declared that he himself is the only pontiff bold
enough to fulfill what had been proposed by that most unfortunate
Council known as Vatican II, and up to his own pontificate
never fully enacted. It can broadly be summed up in
one (rather long) word: Ecumenism — understood as “religion-in-general-and-no-religion-in-particular-especially-not-Catholicism-and-perhaps-no-religion-at-all.
Ecumenism is generally understood as the endeavor to restore
a recalcitrant “Christian unity” between the Catholic Church
and nominally Christian communities that had separated themselves
from the Catholic Church subsequent to disputes concerning
doctrine or dogma. Most often it was both which, for various
reasons, they had found unacceptable, inconvenient, or impractical
to purposes at hand, resulting in virtually hundreds, if
not thousands, of ecclesial bodies with contradictory, conflicting,
and theologically irreconcilable beliefs, not only with
the Catholic Church but between the mutually opposing denominations
themselves.
The Second
Vatican Council, having failed to achieve this ecumenical
unity (Protestants did not return to the Catholic Church,
so the Catholic Church gradually Protestantized itself to
minimize the conflict in doctrine, dogma, liturgy, and worship,
effectively achieving a kind of unilateral ecumenism
through adopting Protestantism for all practical
purposes. The next logical step in this radical “progressive”
impetus was, of course, native Interreligious/Interfaith
Dialogue. Following this, in a still more natural progression,
is Indifferentism: all religions — however incompatible,
and despite being logically and theologically
contradictory and inconsistent, are nevertheless equally
true ... even if the realization of several, or one, is
achieved through abolishing all the others. That this
is, in the minds of rational men, illogical, impossible,
and therefore madness, is quite beside the point: it simply
pleases us to maintain that this is so. We saw this repeatedly
in Assisi under three pontiffs:
John Paul II (twice), Benedict XVI, and, of course,
Francis (twice). Not to be outdone, Francis brought
Indifferentism (and blasphemy), into
Vatican Gardens themselves with
Pachamama.
One day, perhaps
not far off, Vatican II will be remembered and understood
for what it was and is: a scourge on the Church and — as
every great heresy has ever been from Gnosticism to Protestantism
— the calamitous defection from what is good and holy to
what is ultimately banal and absurd.
It is man apart
from God. For all its pretensions, it is nothing more than
this.
Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
Wednesday May 8, 2024
Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary