Christopher A. Ferrara
More than three years into the Bergoglian pontificate there is no mistaking its principal line of development, which is Francis’s grand obsession: the admission of unrepentant public adulterers in “second marriages” to Holy Communion, the “Kasper proposal” he has been promoting almost from the moment of his election. To that end, Francis has relentlessly put in place a kind of moral mafia to carry out his design. Let us meet some of its soldiers.
First, meet Archbishop Vincenzo (“the Enforcer”) Paglia, head of the (now) ludicrously misnamed Pontifical Council “for the Family”:
Bishop Zubic prays at Franklin Graham's 2014 praise festival in Pittsburgh
In his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis famously, or rather infamously, accused tradition-minded Catholics of exhibiting the “self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism of those who ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past.”
By now we should be used to the Bergoglian tendency to do pretty much everything he condemns in others—above all, issuing judgments about the supposed sins and inadequacies of people he dislikes, especially observant Catholics.
But the Apostolic Constitution Vultum Dei quaerere (VDQ), on “women’s contemplative life,” represents a surprising new extreme of this duplicity. The same Pope who condemns “exclusion” as Pharisaical and lauds “inclusion” as Christian, who professes to reject “the path of exclusion of persons from our community” and to champion “the path of inclusion,” has just mandated in VDQ: (1) the exclusion of foreign nationals as recruits for the cloistered convents that are the monasteries for women; and (2) the exclusion of the elderly from determinations of conventual autonomy—autonomy VDQ itself destroys by requiring that all monasteries join federations whose juridical framework (including a president and council) will inevitably dominate or entirely subsume them.
I cannot add to Hilary White’s comprehensive analysis of this immensely destructive blockbuster, the latest stage in the Bergoglian campaign to convert the entire Church into the equivalent of a banana republic wherein tradition-minded Catholics live in fear of the Pope and his Modernist cronies. Here I will focus on VDQ’s astonishingly blatant call for the exclusion of women from contemplative life based on their national origin or age.
As Circus Bergoglio continues its mockery of the Magisterium concerning marriage, procreation and sexual morality in general, one’s sense of impotent outrage before this spectacle impels one to mock the mockery. May the reader, then, kindly indulge these aptly comparative photos of two clowns from outer space: the one a character from MGM’s cult horror film about alien invaders, the other a cardinal from the outer space of Modernism, Christoph Schönborn, whom Pope Bergoglio has doubly mistaken for “a great theologian” and a former “Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”
Uber-Modernists, Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri and
Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, Love the Joy of Love
Archbishop Chaput has just come out with pastoral guidelines for the implementation of Amoris Laetitia (AL) in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. The guidelines unswervingly maintain the Church’s bimillenial discipline precluding the admission to Confession and Holy Communion of public adulterers who divorce and civilly “remarry” and decline to cease their adulterous sexual relations:
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Remnant readers may know that I wear another hat besides that of Remnant columnist. Back in 1991, at the suggestion of a close friend and confidant, I founded the American Catholic Lawyers Association, leaving behind the private practice of law and devoting my legal career to the defense of the rights of Catholics in the law courts and in the court of public opinion.
Over the past 25 years ACLA, http://www.aclainc.org/, has provided free legal assistance to Catholics under fire by Big Abortion and the forces of secularism in general, providing representation in state and federal courts around the country, in both civil and criminal matters.
ACLA attorneys have been involved in cases as prominent as the fight to save the life of Theresa Schiavo as well as the lesser-known street-level defense of Catholic pro-life activists and conscientious Catholics who are the victims of police harassment employment discrimination and other violations of constitutional and civil rights. For example:
Yet again Francis has told us what he thinks, yet again the Church is rocked by scandal, and yet again the Vatican has had to issue a “clarification” in an effort to calm the storm. As the whole world knows by now, during rambling remarks at a “pastoral conference” for priests of the Diocese of Rome at Saint John Lateran on June 16, Francis declared that “the great majority of our sacramental marriages are null” because the spouses “don’t know what they say” when they say “Yes, for life.”
But Francis is also “sure” that couples in the countryside of northeast Argentina who cohabit out of the husband’s superstitious fear of marriage vows, avoiding Catholic nuptials until they are grandparents, have “a true marriage, they have the grace of marriage, precisely because of the fidelity they have.”
Pope Francis’s Ghostwriter Also Wrote: “Heal Me With Your Mouth. The Art of Kissing”
Victor Manuel Fernández, known as “Tucho” to his fans, is very tight with Francis, his fellow Argentinian. So tight that within three months of his election Francis made Tucho a bishop and then, a month later (June 2013), appointed him titular Archbishop of the titular See of Tiburnia, named after a defunct ancient Roman city in what is now the Austrian state of Carinthia.
Tucho is thus literally the archbishop of nowhere. But the impressive title credentialed him to serve as the go-to guy for the heavy lifting of drafting three meandering, book length excurses presenting Francis’s painfully passé seventies-era, liberal Jesuit “vision” of the Church and the world. Evangelii Gaudium, Laudato Si and Amoris Laetita (AL) all exhibit the Touch of Tucho.
For more than three years now, Francis has been torturing Catholic ears and disturbing Catholic minds with an endless series of heterodox sermons and twisted “meditations” on Scripture, most of them delivered in the chapel of his digs in the five-star hotel at Casa Santa Marta. The daily spectacle has become almost comical: