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Saturday, December 18, 2021

A Schismatic Pope?

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A Schismatic Pope?

“It is not to be excluded that I will enter history as the one who split the Catholic Church... I am not afraid of schisms ...” -Jorge Mario Bergoglio

As expected, and just in time for Christmas, Msgr. Roche, the Latin Mass-hating Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments (CDW) has issued, on the authority the Latin Mass-hating Pope, a “clarification” of “Traditiones custodes” (TC) in the form of answers to eleven questions (dubia). 

 

But that is Bergoglio’s modus operandi: erect an apparatus to hide the naked exercise of his tyrannical will.  

The questions are, of course, made up. No one is actually asking them of the CDW (except perhaps a few hostile bishops whose dubia were solicited for the purpose of this charade).  Similarly, the “survey” of opinion on the implementation of Summorum Pontificum (SP) that preceded TC was contrived to elicit a negative response from some bishops while all the positive responses have been hidden. And so it was with Bergoglio’s synods, where dissenting views were systematically excluded from published documents. Just as we will never see the full proceedings of the Synods or the actual responses to the “survey,” so will we never see the “dubia” we are supposed to believe arrived at the Vatican from urgently inquiring parties. But that is Bergoglio’s modus operandi: erect an apparatus to hide the naked exercise of his tyrannical will.  

So, what does Roche’s “clarification” say?  Let me give readers the nutshell without all the phony questions and explanatory notes:

  1. Priests who refuse to concelebrate the Novus Ordo Mass are to be stripped of their faculty to celebrate the traditional Mass.
  2. No priest ordained after the publication date of TC may celebrate the traditional Mass without the Holy See’s (i.e., Bergoglio’s) permission.
  3. Permission to celebrate the traditional Mass can be limited in time, even a very brief time, even one day in principle.
  4. No one may substitute for a priest who has permission to celebrate the traditional Mass unless the substitute priest also has “formal authorization” from the local bishop—or from Bergoglio, as the case may be.
  5. The bishop’s permission to celebrate the traditional Mass is limited to the territory of his diocese, outside of which the priest in question is forbidden to offer the traditional Mass.  Not even the 1984 indult scheme is allowed.
  6. Priests authorized to celebrate the traditional Mass may celebrate only one such Mass per day.
  7. No priest may celebrate the traditional Mass on the same weekday he celebrates a Novus Ordo Mass, which eliminates bi-rituality on any day but Sunday and thereby diminishes the availability of daily traditional Masses.
  8. No deacon or other “instituted minister” may assist at an authorized traditional Mass unless he too has authorization from the local bishop.
  9. The traditional Mass must be banned in parishes, but the local bishop can ask Bergoglio’s permission to celebrate the traditional Mass in a parish only if it is “impossible” to find another place. Even then, however, the traditional Mass must not be listed in the parish Mass schedule.
  10. Priests celebrating the traditional Mass must proclaim the readings in the vernacular, using translations of the Bible approved by the bishops’ conferences, not the translations found in traditional Missals. That is, the readings must be from the tone-deaf, theologically corrupt Novus Ordo versions of the Bible, even if—for now—the traditional liturgical calendar can still be followed.
  11. Because Bergoglio (or so he thinks) has “abrogated” both the traditional Pontificale Romanum (rites performed by bishops) and the Rituale Romanum (rites performed by priests), all ordinations and confirmations according to the traditional rites are now forbidden, as are all traditional rite weddings, baptisms and funerals outside of a few canonically erected traditional parishes, which means they are permitted almost nowhere.

The “wholesale destruction of the Faith” is Bergoglio’s very program.

It did not take a prophet to see this coming. As I wrote nearly three years ago, just after Bergoglio abolished the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei:

I would venture that Bergoglio is quite disposed and is even planning to abrogate SP upon the death of Pope Benedict, should Bergoglio survive him. Then the way would be open to a papal or local episcopal diktat, once again reducing access to the Latin Mass to a mere indult that can be granted or withdrawn at will. The principle (to quote Benedict) that “what was sacred for prior generations, remains sacred and great for us as well, and cannot be suddenly prohibited” would once again be buried by a brutal exercise of raw power.

The aim would be a quarantine of the traditional Latin Mass within a few established societies or communities, followed by ruthless suppression of its celebration by those bishops who have never accepted SP and have sought in every way to undermine its application.

In fact, this prediction was rather mild in comparison to what Bergoglio clearly intends: total annihilation of the Latin liturgical tradition.  His motives are both petty and pathological: He is infuriated by the traditionalist critics he pretends to ignore, so to exact his revenge he contrives to punish all the faithful by depriving them of their God-given liturgical patrimony—as if he had any power to do so. And he despises the Latin Mass because its persistence and growth despite all opposition is a constant demonstration that the time-bound novelties he promotes with fanatical energy are as ephemeral as his own flesh and will soon disappear unless he employs brute force to maintain their existence for a while longer. Bergoglio acts as man who knows his time grows short.

Roche makes clear what the stakes are. The whole purpose of TC, he writes, is to compel every bishop “to ensure that his diocese returns to a unitary form of celebration”—meaning Bugnini’s rotting, fifty-year-old invention, which, to quote the future Pope Benedict XVI in his preface to Gamber’s The Reform of the Roman Liturgy, “abandoned the organic, living process of growth and development over the centuries, and replaced it—as in a manufacturing process—with a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product.”  The result for most of the Church, wrote Gamber in that historic treatise, has been “the real destruction of the traditional Mass” and the consequent “wholesale destruction of the faith on which it was based, a faith that had been the source of piety and our courage to bear witness to Christ and His Church, the inspiration of countless Catholics over many centuries.” (Reform of the Roman Liturgy, p. 102). 

While Bergoglio holds the office of the papacy, he is not a Pope, but a destroyer.  

The “wholesale destruction of the Faith” is Bergoglio’s very program.  And that means he will not stop with TC.  Next will come the “commissioning” of the traditional orders, including the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter and the Institute of Christ the King.  The plan is undoubtedly to dismember them all along the lines of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate.  Bergoglio intends nothing less than the total extermination of traditional Catholicism and all the priestly vocations it attracts. “There is no need to create another church, but to create a different church,” said Bergoglio, quoting the arch-Modernist Yves Congar in the opening address to his ludicrous “Synod on Synodality.”  Here we see the full-blown delusional superbia of a Modernist on the Chair of Peter. 

But Bergoglio is, after all, 85-years-old and missing part of one lung and more than a foot of his large intestine.  Rumors of terminal cancer abound. In his race against time and the Holy Ghost, Bergoglio will stop at nothing to arrest the rapid growth of the traditionalist movement of the young, and then brutally asphyxiate it, lest its thriving in fidelity to Tradition continue to embarrass the terminal corruption of the Novus Ordo establishment and its aged leadership. He intends to force the entire Church to succumb to the irreversible comorbidities of the Novus Ordo, the results of a decaying human work whose lifespan may well not exceed that of a human being.

And so, while Bergoglio holds the office of the papacy, he is not a Pope, but a destroyer.  Anyone with any sense can surely see that now.  It should have been obvious from the moment he stepped onto the balcony of St. Peter’s, without the papal stole, and said “Brothers and sisters, good evening.”  (I am embarrassed to admit it was not obvious to me on that fateful evening, when I praised the new Pope as someone who seemed—yes, I actually thought so—very humble and Marian.)  But long before publication of TC, it had already become obvious to many observers of good will outside traditionalist circles.  Consider, for example, the witness of Dr. Douglas Farrow, a theology professor at McGill University, writing for Catholic World Report in 2018 concerning what he calls “the troubling Bergoglio pontificate”:

The critics are right that the revolution is wrong. This is not reform; it is not even conversion. It is conquestIf it is not stopped, the gates of Hades will prevail against the Church, which will die out everywhere just as it is dying out in the lands of the revolutionaries themselves. We must appeal to Heaven to stop it and be prepared to help stop it, confident in our Lord’s promise that those gates shall not prevail and that his Church will not fail.

Today, there can be no denying that Bergoglio is the leader of an apocalyptic ecclesial coup d’état, an attempted conquest of the Church indeed.

That was more than three years ago.  Today, there can be no denying that Bergoglio is the leader of an apocalyptic ecclesial coup d’état, an attempted conquest of the Church indeed.  Its aim is nothing less than the formal creation of a new religion within the Church’s visible structure that would universally institutionalize, if it were possible, all the tendencies toward ecclesial dissolution and apostasy unleashed by that breach in the Church’s immune system known as the Second Vatican Council.

Recall the teaching of Saint Robert Bellarmine regarding resistance to a hypothetical Pope who, like this one, attacks the Church:

[N]o authority is required to resist an invader and defend oneself, nor is it necessary that the one who is invaded should be a judge and superior of the one who invades; rather, authority is required to judge and punish. Therefore, just as it would be lawful to resist a Pontiff invading a body, so is it lawful to resist him invading souls or disturbing a state, and much more if he should endeavor to destroy the Church. I say, it is lawful to resist him, by not doing what he commands, and by blocking him, lest he should carry out his will; still, it is not lawful to judge or punish or even depose him, because he is nothing other than a superior. See Cajetan on this matter, and John de Turrecremata.[i]

Recall as well the famous observation of the great Thomist Francisco Suarez (d. 1617), who cited earlier authors such as Cajetan (d. 1534) for the proposition, noted by Gamber,[ii] that “a Pope would be schismatic if, as is his duty, he would not be in full communion with the body of the Church as, for example, if he were to excommunicate the entire Church, or if he were to change all the liturgical rites of the Church that have been upheld by apostolic tradition.”[iii]

As noted above, in a statement attributed to him that he has not denied, Bergoglio openly declared the possibility that he “will enter history as the one who split the Catholic Church.” In the other above-noted statement, which appears in a published transcript of one of his airborne press conferences, Bergoglio declared that he is “not afraid of schisms,” meaning the ones he thinks he will provoke in his determination to rid the Church of those he accuses ofan elitist separation stemming from an ideology detached from doctrine. It is an ideology, perhaps correct, but that engages doctrine and detaches it…”. Bergoglio is referring here to orthodox Catholics, as everyone should know after eight years of watching this fount of heresy, blasphemy and ceaseless objurgation of the faithful wage war against any sign of a Catholic revival in the neo-Modernist dystopia over which he presides.

Bergoglio is not afraid of schisms. But it would never occur to him that the only schism he is capable of causing is his own separation from the Church.

Bergoglio is not afraid of schisms.  But it would never occur to him that the only schism he is capable of causing is his own separation from the Church—in precisely the manner foreseen by Suarez.  For not to obey Bergoglio’s absurd commands is to remain faithful to the Bride of Christ and to the Petrine office he has defiled, even to the point of pretending to undo his own living predecessor’s defense of the liturgical tradition. Never has the Church witnessed such unbounded arrogance in a Pope. Even the most tyrannical Popes of the past confined their depredations to specific persons or places, but Bergoglio bids to lay waste to the entire ecclesial commonwealth.

Yesterday the FSSP issued a statement in response to the CDW document, declaring that “The members of the Fraternity of St. Peter promised to be faithful to our Constitutions at the time of our admittance into the Fraternity, and we remain committed to exactly that: fidelity to the Successor of Peter and the faithful observance of the ‘liturgical and disciplinary traditions’ of the Church in accordance with the provisions of the Motu Proprio Ecclesia Dei of July 2, 1988, which is at the origin of our foundation.”  But what will happen when, as seems inevitable barring divine intervention, Bergoglio forces the issue and demands that the members of the Fraternity break their promise to the faithful?  A Pope who thinks he can abrogate the traditional liturgical books of the Church in use from time immemorial, along with the Motu Proprio of his own living predecessor, will think nothing of rescinding the terms of John Paul II’s Ecclesia Dei and directing the outright dissolution of the FSSP. We can only pray that the Fraternity and the other Latin Mass societies launched by Ecclesia Dei will refuse to consent to their own destruction; that this time, finally, there will be no false obedience to unjust and immoral commands that cause incalculable harm to souls.

Christmas Special

“The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law,” said the Pope who gave us Summorum Pontificum, thereby freeing the Latin Mass from forty years of false imprisonment. But Bergoglio evidently believes that his thoughts and desires bind the entire Church, that what he thinks is the Magisterium. As he declared in one of his innumerable press interviews: “I’m constantly making statements, giving homilies. That’s magisterium. That’s what I think, not what the media say that I think.”

As to such a Pope—the likes of which has never been seen in the annals of the papacy—our only response must be non possumus.  And if Bergoglio persists in his insanity the only response of the Church will, in due time, be that of Leo II to Honorius I: “We anathematize… Honorius, who did not attempt to sanctify this Apostolic Church with the teaching of Apostolic tradition, but by profane treachery permitted its purity to be polluted.”

If  “profane treachery” is a condign description of Honorius’s promotion of the lone heresy of Monothelitism, it is surely a fitting description of a Pope who has spent the past eight years belittling Catholic doctrine, altering the Catechism to suit his personal views, twisting Holy Scripture, mocking the faithful and their devotion to Tradition, and undermining even adherence to the Ten Commandments in promoting his heretical Lutheran notion of justification: “[D]o I scorn the Commandments? No. I observe them, but not as absolutes, because I know that it is Jesus Christ who justifies me.

Indeed, the time has come to consider whether the Pope who is not afraid of schisms is really predicting his own sorry fate.

Watch the Latest from RTV:  THE INTOLERANT POPE: Francis Cancels Faithful Catholics

___________ 

[1]Controversies of the Christian Faith, trans. Ryan Grant (Mediatrix Press: 2015), p. 303. See also also, Controversies of the Christian Faith, trans. Fr. Kenneth Baker, S.J. (Keep the Faith: 2016), Third General Controversy on the Sovereign Pontiff, Book II, p. 835.

[2] Reform of the Roman Liturgy, pp. 35-6 & n.27.

[3] [Et hoc secundo modo posset Papa esse schismaticus, si nollet tenere cum toto Ecclesiæ corpore unionem et coniunctionem quam debet, ut si tenat et totem Ecclesiam excommunicare, aut si vellel omnes Ecclesiasticas cæremonias apostolica traditione firmatas evertere.] (Cf. Gamber, Reform of the Roman Liturgy, p. 35-6 & n. 27).

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Last modified on Sunday, December 19, 2021
Christopher A. Ferrara

Christopher A. Ferrara: President and lead counsel for the American Catholic Lawyers Inc., Mr. Ferrara has been at the forefront of the legal defense of pro-lifers for the better part of a quarter century. Having served with the legal team for high profile victims of the culture of death such as Terri Schiavo, he has long since distinguished him a premier civil rights Catholic lawyer.  Mr. Ferrara has been a lead columnist for The Remnant since 2000 and has authored several books published by The Remnant Press, including the bestseller The Great Façade. Together with his children and wife, Wendy, he lives in Richmond, Virginia.