Habemus authentice
Catholicus Papa? ”
*
Do We Have an
Authentically
Catholic Pope?
It
is typically
the prerogative of the Protodeacon of the
College of Cardinals who ceremoniously proclaims the election of a new
pope with the words “Habemus Papam!” or “We have a Pope” — following
a conclave of the Cardinal Electors who nominated him.
With something far more profound and painful than “regret”, we have
come to acknowledge what had become increasingly obvious — and which
found its clearest expression, its culmination, in the radical “papacy”
of Jorge Bergoglio (“Francis”).
The See of Rome is no longer
authentically Catholic — in the way that Catholicism had been
understood and practiced for the 2000 years preceding Vatican II.
Allow me to explain:
With something far more profound and
painful than “regret,” we now encounter the tragic possibility, if not
the realization, that the state of the Church under the ruthless pontificate
of Francis is one in which it appears not simply to have lost,
but to have repudiated her very identity, and ceased to be authentically
Catholic. Under the faithless stewardship of Francis, it seems to have
devolved into something of a simulacrum of what had once been the Catholic
Church for 2000 years — and is no more.
The Memory of the Odor of Sanctity
Apart from the magnificent architecture
of another age, the beautiful art, sculpture, and statuary uniquely
and inextricably identifiable as Catholic, the Church has become much
more a recalcitrant memory that we cannot, and will not, relinquish;
it still possesses the odor of sanctity, as from the incense in a thurible
passed before the altar of sacred memories too dear to allow us to say
that they are nothing more than memories, reflections on what was was
and is no more; something still sacred despite its depredation. Holy
Mother Church has suffered much and needlessly under the radical pontificate
of Francis.
Without retreating in the least from the One, True, Holy, and Apostolic
Catholic Church to which our forefathers — and the great saints, scholars,
composers, and artists of eons past — had cleaved for two millennia,
we find the claim at least plausible, if not painfully credible,
that,
The See of Rome is no longer identifiably Catholic, at least as Catholicism
had been understood and practiced for the 2000 years preceding Vatican
II and most especially under the pontificate of Francis.
Francis is not, of course, the sole
cause of the Church’s
dissolution into something ultimately pointless and tiresome, although
he has been the single greatest catalyst in this sorry narrative. That
concatenation of events began with Vatican II some 60 years ago and
culminated in what now appears, to some, to be an imminent collapse
of historical Catholicism. Perhaps collapse is too energetic a word:
assimilation may be closer to the mark. The Church has been assimilated
into — and become largely indistinguishable from — the secular culture
against which it defined itself for two millennia. In becoming simply
another iteration of the world, it has made itself superfluous. Who
needs two “Worlds”?
One is sufficient to strain one’s wits.
If this were not enough in its ecumenical pursuit of an egalitarian
anonymity that made it neither offensive nor obtrusive in the City of
Man, it resorted to the innocuous, if inane, refuge of religious
indifferentism where all gods are God and no contention exists in
the realm of minds; where every contradiction is sublated into a synthesis
called “ecumenism,” and where logic is banished as fomenting disagreement.
In the logical world of the Law of the Excluded Middle, Ecumenism has
become the Included Middle, or perhaps more apropos of
the times, the Inclusive Middle. And somewhere in this absurd
morass, the veritable Roman Catholic Church has been either misplaced
or displaced, and no one appears to be clear about which one
it is, or if it is either at all! One thing is sadly certain: it is
the topic for an argument. And that it is so is a scandal indeed.
What, then, does this say about Francis
in the mix?
This is not to say that “Pope
Francis” — is not a legitimate pope.
He is a legitimate pope — but
he is not an authentically Catholic pope. As we
have stated
elsewhere:
The Seat of Peter is
indeed occupied ... but that it is occupied by a madman — Jorge Bergoglio
— appears to be of little consequence to those who hold that merely
occupying the Seat of Saint Peter — by any means — of itself necessarily
corroborates his fidelity to the Catholic Faith and in some unfathomable
way equally attests to his sanity — despite 10 years of what appears
to be recurring manic episodes (think the Roman Emperor Caligula who
proclaimed his divinity, nominated his horse, Incitatus, as consul,
and routinely conversed with the moon) to say nothing of patently illogical
utterances (“spaces and power are preferred to time and processes”,
“Space hardens processes”) — coupled with his unpredictable and often
incomprehensible behavior (think “Pachamama”).
We do not maintain that
the Roman Catholic Church of our forefathers no longer exists, nor that
the office of the pope is vacant — we simply argue that it miraculously
exists despite its extreme attenuation following Vatican II and the
manifold repudiation of sound Catholic teaching by the post-Catholic-conciliar
church that succeeded it — but did not, and cannot, supplant it.
Confused?
Legitimacy
pertains to law or legality — in other words, conforming to canonical
standards and requirements — authenticity pertains to the substance,
to what is substantive (L. substantia, “the quality of
being real”, “the reality of a thing, as distinct from outward appearance”1.)
In other words, it pertains to what possesses reality as distinct
from appearances, or in the present case, simply meeting criteria to
be deemed legal.
An Example May Help
Jack Ma Jun
is legitimately the owner of Alibaba, a Chinese technology giant
involved in e-commerce, retail, and Internet assets — whose personal
net worth is $38 billion dollars — but he is also a member of
the Chinese Communist Party. Communism, you may remember, eliminated
private ownership of the means of production together with all
class distinctions — all property is publicly owned
and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs.
All are equally “comrades” sharing in a wealth commonly generated and
commonly distributed.
As a member of the Chinese Communist
Party, Jack is legitimately one of the Proletariat, eschewing
private ownership, personal wealth, a disproportionate share in the
means of common production, and is in the same “Class” as a rice farmer
(the average Chinese annual income is approximately $1,375 USD).
Jack Ma Yun is legitimately a member of the Communist Party,
although he is indisputably an authentic Capitalist — but he
is not and cannot be a legitimate Capitalist — for Capitalism
is the antithesis of Communism: it is the Enemy of the People.
Even while Jack is overseeing more than 100 Chinese companies, and making
38 $Billion dollars in the process, these companies are, somehow, nevertheless
considered “state-run entities” under the central control of government.
While a legitimate Communist
Party member, Jack Ma Yan nevertheless remains authentically
a Capitalist. The two do not coincide.
An Enormous Crisis of Identity
The authentic Catholic Church ceased to be identifiably
and authentically Catholic following that calamitous consistory
known to us as “Vatican II” which occurred between October 11, 1962
until December 8, 1965. Since that initial and unprecedented defection
from Sacred Tradition 2 by Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli
“John XXIII”, and Giovanni Montini, or Pope Paul VI who concluded the
Council. These two pontiffs, in collaboration with what appears to have
been a body of disaffected cardinals 3 who nominated them,
sought to implement what had basically become little more than a
Modernist agenda with many of the implicitly heretical ideologies
that defined it — and which Saint Pope Pius X had clearly enumerated
in his encyclical
Pascendi Dominici Gregis
in 1907, stating that
Modernism is the “synthesis of all heresies”, and
therefore unequivocally antithetical to the One, True, Holy Catholic
Church of the preceding 2000 years.
As a matter of public record and verifiable assertions, Jorge Bergoglio
appears to be the de facto “pope” of what has became, in significant
aspects, a possibly new religion altogether; a secularized
religion that superficially resembles the authentic Catholic
Church as it existed prior to 1962 — which it has largely denounced
— while choosing to retain a simulacrum of it. It is a church that has
been laboriously articulated through a secular lens and then
framed in terms largely acceptable to Protestantism and inseparable
from it, the new evangel of Ecumenism — rather than
promoting the Gospel through the unparalleled missionary zeal that had
accompanied the Church for millennia.
In other words, Jorge is, essentially, an actively and legally presiding
High Priest — but of a deeply infected “Conciliar Church”
that is, in many ways, distinct from, and in significant
ways opposed to, what we have understood as the “Holy Roman
Catholic Church” for 2000 years. The conclave that elected
Francis appears to have been overwhelmingly compromised even
if it was canonically lawful. The Electors possessed the legitimate
faculties to elect — but obstinately remained in an ideological
encampment both inimical and antithetical to the historical Catholic
Magisterium
(See
Saint Gallen conspiratorial group).
They in fact possessed
the legitimate (the legal) right to vote in a papal conclave,
but that legal right of itself does not and cannot ensure that
their votes will be exercised in diligent conformity to, and
not in defection from, established and indefectible Magisterial
teaching. While they are morally bound to do so, something verging on
a bankruptcy of morals has also, sadly, infected the episcopacy itself.
The formal papacy of Jorge Bergoglio is unquestionably
the most perfidious and destructive in the 2000-year history
of the Catholic Church. We do not “judge” the man — that is reserved
to God. We do, however, examine his public statements and actions
in light of the Sacred Deposit of Faith and Tradition
(Tradere: “to hand down, to pass on”
1 )
entrusted to Holy Mother Church by God — and find them irreconcilable
with Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, the Depositum
Fidei, and the canons of logic.
The question now is, where are we to find the One, Tue, Holy,
Catholic, and Apostolic Church from time immemorial? It is
and ever will be. Christ promised as much. But if the “First
See” can no longer be found in Rome, where is it? Where is the “authentic”
Chair of Saint Peter rather than its legal simulacrum? And
if we can discover it, who occupies it? — if anyone! If we hold
that “the Chair is empty” in light of the repudiation of orthodox Catholic
canons— are we to be understood as “Sedevacantists” ... or simply “orthodox”?
God by
any other name ...
Is, then, being an orthodox Catholic, or even a Sedevacantist
(who holds that the Chair of Saint Peter is temporarily vacant) more
scandalous than a “Post-Conciliar Catholic” who maintains that
there is no inconsistency in worshipping Pachamama idols together with
Jesus Christ, or who holds that the God of the Catholic Saints and Martyrs
is the same god as Islam’s Allah (a concept no Muslim would tolerate)?
Or, for that matter, that the Sixth Commandment against adultery is
not incompatible with divorce, and that, moreover, cohabitating adulterers
can receive Holy Communion in good conscience — no matter what God
said! Are “Post-Conciliar Catholics” more in keeping
with the mind of Christ in promoting “Accompaniment” (in sin, more often
than not) as more vital than conversion to the end of the
salvation of souls— indeed, that the efforts of Missionaries to
proselytize pagans into the one true Faith is, really, just so much
“solemn nonsense”, as Jorge describes it?
We believe, rather, that we must be understood simply as orthodox Catholics
must always be understood: as faithful to the Sacred Deposit of
Faith and the authentic Magisterium of the Church articulated
over the two millennia preceding “Vatican II”, and the widely vaunted
“Aggiornamento” that resulted in the unmitigated abdication of Catholicism
as a clearly distinguishable, uniquely identifiable, and, in the economy
of salvation, the indispensible religion — an inevitable
abdication resulting from the pursuit of Ecumenism and the Hydra
it spawned as we watched in horror as it ineluctably mutated into something
verging on pantheistic.
Largely secular issues such as discrete national states, politics,
economics, environmentalism, commercial ventures, social justice, global
warming, immigration, sovereign borders, aboriginal cultures, plastic
in the ocean — to mention a few — have no place in an institution established
solely to the end of the salvation of souls. Their strident
advocates are many and broadly strewn throughout the “City of Man”.
Only one institution — the Holy Catholic Church — is the sole advocate
of the “City of God” to which it calls all men to eternal salvation
and everlasting happiness.
Much, much, more remains to be said — so much of authentic Catholicism
remains to be articulated against the hyphenated-Catholics:
-
Neocathechumenal Way “Catholics”
-
New-Age Catholics
-
Charismatic-Catholics
-
Neo-Catholics
-
Progressive-Catholics
-
Traditional-Catholics
-
Orthodox-Catholics
-
Liberal-Catholics
-
Progressive Catholics
-
Conservative-Catholics
-
Trad-Catholics
-
Neo-Trad Catholics
-
“Recognize and Resist” Catholics
So much remains to be re-acquired because it has not been taught for
60 years. It has been forgotten, contemptuously dismissed, suppressed,
and ridiculed by Jorge Bergoglio as “rigid” — by which
assessment we must also account Christ as the paradigm of “rigidity,”
for He was absolutely inflexible in His teachings!
Grains of Incense
-
Joseph Ratzinger (“Benedict XVI”)
-
Karol Józef Wojtyła (“John Paul II”)
-
Albino Luciani (“John Paul I”)
-
Giovanni Montini (“Paul VI”)
-
Angelo Roncalli (“John XXIII”) the Proto-New-Age-Pontiff
with the clarion to “throw open the windows of the Church”
Each of the above shamefully offered more than “a grain of incense”
to false gods on the altar of Ecumenism in
Assisi and elsewhere. The kissing of the
Koran by nominally Catholic popes was not simply scandalous, but treasonable
to the Catholic Faith and to Christ Himself to Whom alone allegiance
and latria is due. Jorge’s claim that virtually all religions
worship the same God is a blatant abrogation of the very First Commandment:
“Thou shalt not have strange
gods before me.”
(Exodus 20.3). There are far too many
instances to enumerate in which the One, True, Holy Catholic Faith
is either attenuated, ignored, or dismissed altogether by every pontiff
since Pius XII.
Of course, we understand that such insistence on authentic Catholicism,
on the factual rendering of the Gospels and Epistles, the Church Fathers,
the Sacred Deposit of Faith, and Tradition, will be greeted with much
hostility, contempt, ridicule, and disdain. We can certainly count on
this from Francis alone whose undisguised contempt for traditional Catholics
is well known. However, it has ever been the conviction of the saints
that a faithful Catholic cannot be on mutually good terms with the
World and God. Saint James was clear about this:
“Know you not that the friendship of
this world is the enemy of God?”
(St. James 4.4)
So was St. John:
“If
the world hates you, know that it hath hated Me before you. If you had
been of the world, the world would love its own: but because you are
not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore
the world hates you.” (Saint John 15.18-19)
It remains to be said that the reluctant position into which we find
ourselves forced is not of our own choosing; it was, and remains
deeply painful. Obedience to the pope was the sine qua non of
every orthodox Catholic. It was unthinkable that a pope would openly
contradict God, Holy Scripture, the Sacred Deposit of Faith, and Tradition.
Indeed, to defend all four was, as we say, his “job description”
— even to the point of the shedding of his blood. He was the faithful
shepherd when all others fled. He laid down his life for his flock —
as Christ did for him. He did not lead them into strange and foreign
pastures, nor did he open the gate of the sheepfold to flocks that were
not his own. Should a wolf in sheep’s clothing attempt to enter, his
staff was ready and swift. After all, the sheep were entrusted to him,
to do his master’s will — not his own. When this obligation to
obedience, however, became obedience to sin and false gods, we flee
the false shepherd who urges us to “accompany” him in implementing the
priorities of the world, rather than the evangel of Christ.
We never left the sheepfold and never will — it was the shepherd
who fled the fold to bring in recreants to mingle with and adulterate
the faithful, and we can no longer call him our own — who belongs to
these strange others as well. Yes, Francis is our legitimate
pope — but he has nothing in common with the sheep. To use his own idiom,
it is he who “does not smell like the sheep.” In the absence
of a true shepherd who is one with his sheep, if we must bar the gate
ourselves, and at so great a cost to ourselves, bar it we will until
the one with the Key arrives at the time of God’s choosing.
Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
January 8, 2024
Feast of the Epiphany
_____________________________
*
“Do we have an authentically Catholic pope?”
1
The Latin Oxford Dictionary, Oxford
University Press, 1968
2
“traditio:” ‘the transmission of
knowledge, teaching; the handing down of knowledge; an item of traditional
knowledge, belief, etc. from “trado” to” hand or pass over (to
a person to hold)’. The Latin Oxford Dictionary, Oxford University
Press, 1968.
In this regard, it is important to see
the word ‘tradidi”,
together with its context, in
I Corinthians 11.2
in the ancient Latin Vulgate.
3 Cardinal Josef Frings, Fr.
Henri de Lubac, S.J., Fr. Karl Rahner, S.J., Fr. Gregory Baum, Fr. Bernard
Haring, CSsR, Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx,
O.P., Fr. Hans Urs Von Balthasar, S.J., Fr. Hans Kung, and Fr. Annibale
Bugnini who was responsible for the destruction of the entire liturgy.
Bugnini was the secretary of the Pontifical Preparatory Commission on
the Liturgy, that would become the Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy.
He was described by Fr. Louis Bouyer, a peritus for the liturgy at Vatican
II, as “a man as bereft of culture as he was of basic honesty.”
Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
January 8, 2024
Feast of the Epiphany
Printable PDF Version
Comments? Write us:
editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
Totally
Faithful to the Sacred Deposit of Faith entrusted
to the Holy See in Rome
“Scio
opera tua ... quia modicum habes virtutem, et servasti verbum
Meum, nec non negasti Nomen Meum”
“I
know your works ... that you have but little power, and
yet you have kept My word, and have not denied My Name.”
(Apocalypse 3.8)
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