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The answer is quite pedestrian; in fact, it is strikingly simple: the centrality and indispensability of Christ is an impediment to something deemed greater than Truth itself which, since Vatican II, has been the ecumenical project, perhaps best understood as religious neutrality. In Ecumenism, all religions (however absurd, illogical, and in manifest contradiction to every other religion) are not just “correct” — but are, in a way that defies reason and logic (to say nothing of Divine Revelation), equally true expressions of the “One, True, Religion” — which becomes understandable when we realize that Ecumenism is the unreserved affirmation of all religions. No one religion is correct or true; all are true, all are correct. Such a statement, of course, is logically absurd. It is a statement in violation of the Law of the Excluded Middle in Logic: p_¬p To wit: one and the same thing cannot both be and not-be at one and the same time in a univocal sense without resulting in irreconcilable contradiction. It is a necessary and inviolable function of human understanding. We hasten to add that this is not Catholicism, but a different religion altogether — which had been mistakenly conflated with Catholicism for 60 years — but which has emerged as a phenomenon of itself and in its own right, having no distinct creed and in need of no doxological credentials — the very phenomenon which we have come to know as Ecumenism. Consider the following which Francis proclaimed to the Plenary Session of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity on May 5, 2022:
The preceding citation is an affront, not only to Traditional Catholics, but to the universal human capacity to reason and understand in coherent and consistent terms. In Ecumenism we confront the illogical, the emotive, the intractable unwillingness to engage in anything construed as possibly inimical to its own peculiar agendum. Any attempt to invoke the canons of reason are understood as a threat to the Ecumenical Project.
For this reason, we insist that Francis is not simply the culmination,
but the personification of the failed logic of that malignant
enterprise — a pantheistic project, really — benignly dubbed
“Ecumenism.” Since Vatican II, reason, logic, and revelation
have been effectively abolished. Ecumenism — not Christ
— is the ne plus ultra, the summit of every religious aspiration
and impulse. Who is the True God?We see this clearly in the three “Inter-Faith-Assemblies” initiated by three successive popes in Assisi: John Paul II on Oct. 26, 1986, “To be together to pray.” Then on January 2002 his next pan-religious prayer meeting in the same venue. This was to be followed by Benedict XVI’s “Meeting for peace” on October 27, 2011, and then Francis’s “Day of prayer for peace” in Assisi, Italy, Sept. 20, 2016).On these occasions, the absence of certainty concerning The One, True, God was the sine qua non of the merest possibility of Ecumenism. Praying to Islam’s Allah, Shinto’s Kami, Hindu’s Trimurti, the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazdā, the African animist’s snake god Dan, or the Buddhist’s Dali Lama (who possesses no fewer than 108 “avatars”), was — in a quite uncertain way — praying to the same god in a kind of iridescent cope. Each iteration of “god” was respectively acclaimed the certain god, even while it was impossible to reconcile all the alternating perceptions and contradictions inherent in those claims. The Catholics were the only faction in the pantheon of contradictory gods who, through their pontifex Maximus Francis, conceded that they, at least, were uncertain; in fact, quite uncertain about the identity of the true “god,” and held the least tenable position of all: that the contradictions were only, and ultimately, illusory in the ecumenical schema. Those brazen enough to insinuate the faculty of reason into the ecumenical paradox and who raised the objection that the contradictions were real— both baffled and infuriated the “progressive” Catholic ecumenist who could, of course, resolve these otherwise insuperable issues in the snap of a chat. It is a strange, recursive world completely apart from the world of men. And its epicenter is the Vatican. It is a world that expropriates madness from the narrow halls of the insane asylum, not only as emblematic of, but necessary to, the absurdity encountered at every level of “higher authority” and “higher learning” within the Church — and most especially the Vatican and Francis-as-pope. This mantra — “the certainty of uncertainty (except the irrational notion of the uncertainty of certainty …)” — appears to verge on something intelligible … until one examines it more closely:
The religious epicenter of
this mental illness, as we have said, is the post-Catholic
Vatican — and its primary sponsor — and vector — Francis,
who infects with faux Jesuitical casuistry, everyone in
proximity to him. As such, Francis is indeed the pathogen
of this devastating disease that manifests itself in “certain
uncertainty.”
Unless you are the keeper of, or an inhabitant within, an insane asylum, such “Analects from Chairman Francis” would be impossible to parse in rational terms, let alone attain to something meaningful, or, for that matter, coherent.
Once this ambitious policy of ambiguity and uncertainty infests
the offices and bookshelves of every seminary rector, pseudo-scholar,
and all the “carefully groomed” future priests in virtually
every Catholic seminary — it entirely suppresses and then
ruthlessly supersedes (but can never abolish) the 2000-year-patrimony
and the indefeasible competency of the quite certain Magisterium
of 2000 years. Together with the equally certain Sacred
Deposit of Faith, and Holy Tradition, which it contemptuously
disdains, it strives to replace all three with both spurious
and meretricious parodies — none of which possess “certainty.” “Pink Palaces”There is a desperate, decisive, and crucial need to return to sanity — and with sanity, certainty — through a complete reversion of all things to what is and ever was genuinely and unapologetically Catholic. This entails everything that has been blighted or obliterated since Vatican II, most especially a specifically numinous and universal language crafted for divine worship — Latin — which is unchanging and unchangeable and hence in no need of meaningless improvisations, no geographic or cultural inflections; it is a language that — for two millennia — was not confined to time and place; it transcended all geographical borders, all cultures and every age, attaining to universality in a way that no other language ever accomplished. The return to sanity must embrace all that has been corrupted: everything religious, liturgical, intellectual, devotional, musical, every rubric, every response, enunciated without ambiguity — everything must be restored to the 2000-year-old form preceding the sacrilege of Vatican II. Apart from this total return, we remain a Church without reason in both its meanings: irrational and without purpose. This cannot be achieved by schism from — but reversion to the One, True, Holy, Catholic Church of our forebears for two millennia — and apart from which (as the Church had constantly and tenaciously held until Vatican II) there is no salvation. She is the Body of Christ of which He is the head, and “there is no other Name [or god, or goddess, or pagan idol] by which we are saved” (Acts 4.12) except Christ Jesus. Our hot-bed-homosexual seminaries, rectors, liberal and disaffected “teachers”; our “carefully groomed” pederast, pedophile, and predatory priests must first be immediately and unceremoniously thrown out, and the buildings they partied in and “co-occupied” must be thoroughly fumigated from the sexual filth that has found fertile ground there, much as a bacterium in a petri dish. They must be reassessed and reformed in stringently Catholic terms that tolerate no aberration. The spectacle of feminist ideologues (both female and male) instructing Catholic MEN on how to become priests must be put to an end and never allowed to experimentally emerge again. That is madness! Imagine laymen instructing women Religious postulants on how to become contemplative, cloistered nuns! In what venue would that occur? In a papally enclosed monastery? A Convent? Impossible! “Steel sharpens steel,” as it is said, and manly men should be examples in the classrooms and elsewhere to forge men for a manly task. The priesthood is nothing less.
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“Elton John’s rather steamy biopic Rocketman, which portrays the entertainer’s drug problems and is the first studio movie to portray gay sex between men in an authentic way.” |
Or, it may go to totally secular real-estate deals such
as the €350 million investment in a luxury London
real estate venture. Because of a blatant lack of transparency
or accountability, your donation may simply be used in money-laundering
for gangsters.
On the other hand, it may have gone to building the $2.2 million Tudor mansion by LBGT-friendly Atlanta Archbishop Wilton Gregory (now the cardinal of Washington, D.C.), or Newark New Jersey's Archbishop John Myers whose archdiocese spent $500,000 “to expand his retirement home, adding an indoor therapy pool, fireplaces and an office library.
It is not only American Catholics who are getting fleeced: German bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst spent $43 million on a new residence and related renovations, including a 5-foot-deep fish tank, filled with Koi carpfish, at a cost of $300,000.
Is this really where you want your very hard-earned money to go? Of course not! — but it routinely does.
Refuse to legitimize this travesty. As we encouraged you earlier, find a Traditional Catholic Church not associated with the religious and financial scam that the Vatican has become since that tragic Council in 1962 — the year when the children sold their Mother into shame.
A Lingering Question
Should we, then, dismiss Novus Ordo Catholics? No! The great majority of them do not know — for they were never taught — the most basic concepts and tenets of genuine Catholicism, let alone proper comportment and apparel at Mass (which, for all appearances, is not a free-for-all for every religious impulse and expression). The blame lays squarely on the narrow shoulders of their “bishops” who never exercised oversight or authority over their priests — and their priests who never assured the proper catechesis of their flocks.
Let us be frank, for the past 60 years Catechesis essentially became crayons and insipid but expensive glossy books with not so much as a crease in their bindings. Most Catholic Masses remain effectively Protestant in tenor, presentation, architecture, statuary, stained-glass, Marty Haugen (not a Catholic) music and “I’m okay, you’re okay” homilies geared to the brainless.
This is not to impugn the piety of the aging congregation who — in the absence of proper and authentic Catechesis — never took the time to examine the unimpeachable credentials of their own religion, or even its differentiation from every other religion.
Despite the ignorance (understood in its actual definition as “a lack of knowledge, an absence of information”) of doctrine and dogma that we almost universally encounter in the post-Vatican II church, it is vital to us, as traditional Catholics, to understand — and answer — two essential points of confusion:
Does this mean that the Eucharist confected by a Novus Ordo priest at a Novus Ordo Mass is not Sacramentally valid?
No. It is still the Holy Eucharist, providing that the priest
“does what the Church does.” This is a very real and canonically
explicit imperative:
“The Council of Trent does not mention the purpose of the sacrament or say that the minister ought to intend to do what the Church intends but what the Church does. Moreover, what the Church does refers to the action, not the purpose. There is required the intention with regard to the action, not in so far as it is a natural action, but in so far as it is a sacred action or ceremony, which Christ instituted or Christians’ practice. If one intends to perform the ceremony which the Church performs, that is enough.” (St. Robert Bellarmine, de Sacramentis in genere, chapter 27) |
Traditional Catholics who (justly) defy Vatican II should be paradigms of humility and holiness, remembering the admonishments of the Apostles:
“If any man says, I love God, and hates his brother; he
is a liar. For he who loves not his brother, whom he
sees, how can he love God, whom he sees not? And this
commandment we have from God, that he who loves God,
love also his brother.” (1 John4.20-21) “We are reviled, and we bless; we are persecuted, and we suffer it. We are blasphemed, and we entreat; we are made as the refuse of this world, the off-scouring of all even until now.” (1 Cor. 4.12-13) |
But we must not and will not
call evil good, nor good evil; nor will we compromise with
deceit, crucifying Truth anew.
Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
Boston Catholic Journal
www.boston-catholic-journal.com
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editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
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1
John18.38
2
Acts 4.12
3
See
Quotations from Chairman Francis
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”
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