“I was born poor, I have lived poor, I wish to die poor” ...Pope St. Pius X

In keeping with his vision of a Church “of the poor and for the poor” Pope Francis met with and suspended the Bishop of Limburg, Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst last week. The bishop had been in the news for the better part of a month due to costly renovations of his residence totaling upwards of forty million dollars. The German Bishops’ Conference is currently conducting an investigation into the affair and no punishment will be permanently set until that time. However, Vatican observers are predicting that if the Bishop is found guilty, he will not be reinstated as the Bishop of Limburg.

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?”

- Alice in Wonderland -

The CISP (International Coordination Summorum Pontificum) has announced that His Eminence Dario, Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos will be celebrating Pontifical High Mass in St Peter’s Basilica on Saturday 26 October at 11 o’clock during the pilgrimage of the people of Summorum Pontificum to Rome.

Holy Mass on 26 October will allow Diocesan and Religious Priests, Seminarians, and the faithful among the people of Summorum Pontificum to show Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos their gratitude and affection for everything he has done in the service of the Church, especially at the time of the preparation of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, during which His Eminence was a witness and of which he is the living memory.

“I have the humility and ambition to want to do something.”

-Pope Francis

Over the past several weeks we have watched, stunned, as Pope Francis conducts little short of a public jeremiad against Catholics he deems insufficiently in tune with Vatican II’s “dynamic of reading the Gospel, actualizing its message for today”—whatever that means—which he insists is “absolutely irreversible” even as the destruction from the failed conciliar aggiornamento continues to mount.

“The Syllabus in complete form is already in La Civiltà Cattolica in 1850. It is nothing other than the codification, the unconditional  approval, the supreme papal sanction of those principles and doctrines that, already at the time of the definition of the Immaculate Conception, that periodical had assumed the task of promoting, and which for years and years it tenaciously supported.” (A. Dioscordi, “La rivoluzione italiana e la Civiltà Cattolica”, Atti del XXXII congresso del Risorgimento italiano, Rome, 1956, p. 94.)

The Catholic world has been shaken by the recent interview with Pope Francis appearing in the Jesuit journal, La Civiltà Cattolica [Italian for Catholic Civilization, it is a periodical published since 1850 without interruptions by the Jesuits in Rome. It is among the oldest of Catholic Italian periodicals and is directly revised by the Secretariat of State of the Holy See before being published.] Having done my doctoral dissertation on the first twenty years of that periodical’s history, I thought it might be interesting to Remnant readers to know that they can find in its original articles—and, in fact, in its very reason for existence—all the grounds necessary for a faithful critique of the pope’s words. For La Civiltà Cattolica was founded in 1850 precisely to combat the obvious Church weakness and surrender to willfulness that were the inevitable by-product of the kind of “open” approach to “diverse” modern men that the Holy Father is now once again promoting. Perhaps recalling this life-giving lesson from the journal’s past may inspire second thoughts tempering the truly deadening effect of the words found in its current pages.

The Consequences of an Off-the-Cuff Papacy

Let me say it at the very outset: no Pope should make it a habit to offer his spontaneous reflections to the world. This is so because the world is not the Church’s friend but rather her perennial adversary. And by “the world” I mean, of course, the powers and principalities that dominate the human scene when the grace of God is rejected. This is why Paul VI lamented, as the Second Vatican Council’s vaunted “opening to the world” had already begun to cause endless calamity, that “the opening to the world became a veritable invasion of the Church by worldly thinking. We have perhaps been too weak and imprudent.” (Speech of November 23, 1973).  Indeed, the very mission of Our Saviour was, as He Himself declared (John 16:33), to “overcome the world,” not to be “open” to it.

The Bizarre Case of Catholic Answers Live vs. “Radical Traditionalists”

On May 31^st, Catholic Answers Live radio host Patrick Coffin and apologist Tim Staples launched a two-hour attack on “radical traditionalism” which I responded to here. Apparently, the overall response to the show was not favorable. In a July 12th blog post entitled “Meet the Mad-Trads” host Patrick Coffin described the reaction as follows:

We found ourselves on the business end of a nasty backlash. Of all the hot-button issues we’ve tackled head-on with me behind the mic (start the list with abortion, sexual sin, feminism, and homosexuality) no previous topic generated the kind of vitriol from (some) listeners. _[1]

Dr. Ron Paul chats with Fr. Gruner, seated next to His Beatitude  Mar Ignatius Joseph III Younan, the Syrian Catholic Patriarch of Antioch,  who flew in from Syria for the Fatima Center's Path to Peace Conference

NIAGARA, Sept. 8 -- Despite a Southern Poverty Law Center attempt to derail the Fatima Center's "Path to Peace Conference" in Niagara Falls this week, the event went off without a hitch, and, in fact, attendance numbers exceeded the organizers' expectations.

Hello! My name is Tom and I am not a Traditionalist. It's August 31, 2013. My eyes are red and puffy. I have been crying on and off since the end of our family rosary last night. From what I can tell, I will be crying some more in the near future. But the story I have to tell is not a sad one, or at least, it shouldn't be, although for me, my wife, and my 10 children, it is definitely a bitter sweet one.

If anything characterizes this newspaper, it is the Editor’s willingness to buck the tide of public opinion, even Catholic opinion, even traditionalist Catholic opinion.

 Putting Catholic Answers back into the spotlight, apologists Tim Staples and Patrick Coffin hosted again the topic of “Radical Traditionalism” during the evening of August 12th. For all intents and purposes, this re-run was damage control, as back in May, the two hosts managed (during their previous same-titled show) to offend every type of Catholic who attends the traditional Mass, whether out of preference or doctrinal conviction.