Remnant Articles
“A voice in Rama was heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel bewailing her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not” (Matthew 2:18)The coming of the Savior brings not only joy but suffering. Christmas Day is immediately followed by the Feast of St. Stephen, the first martyr. Two days later we commemorate the Holy Innocents slain in place of the Holy Child. Herod, a usurper of the rightful authority in Judea, is filled with rage and anger when he hears of the possible arrival of the true authority within his dominion. He cannot find the Holy One so as to lay hands on Him and so he unleashes his fury on the Holy Innocents, those new to life and unable to defend themselves. All illegitimate tyrants eventually lash out in injustice for deep down they know their position is ultimately untenable.
A New Herod’s Offensive against the Children of the Immaculata
By: Brian McCall | Remnant Columnist
What is one to think of the Pope’s Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (EG)? In a document of 50,000 words spanning 223 typeset pages—straining the hortatory genre beyond all reasonable limits—one would naturally expect to find a good deal of orthodox Catholicism; and that is there. Francis is, after all, the Pope, even if he doesn’t like to call himself that and refuses to add the traditional pontifical “P.P.” to his signature on this or any other document.
On November 3rd, Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi commented on reports that Pope Francis would name women Cardinals for the February consistory. Almost immediately, certain Neo-Catholic media pundits, as well as the secular press, began to spin the words of Lombardi to imply that he strongly opposed the idea of women Cardinals. Catholic Online chose the headline, “Pope Francis Will Not Appoint Women as Cardinals,” while the Irish Times went with, “Vatican dismisses reports of women cardinals.” Conservatives focused on the fact that Fr. Lombardi called the reports “nonsense” and that it is “…simply not a realistic possibility that Pope Francis will name women cardinals for the February consistory. “
The Neo-Catholic Road to Cardinalettes
By: Chris Jackson | Remnant Columnist
A Letter from a Recent Lutheran Convert
Dear Folks at The Remnant:
I've been a lurker to your website for a while, and a subscriber to your fine newspaper for a few months now. Your paper has been a continual source of clarity and....well, sanity.
You mentioned in a recent YouTube shtick (it was with Matt and Ferrara), that you were going to devote future YouTube conversations to the problem of the New Mass. It made me think of my own case.
“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.
Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos to Celebrate Pontifical in the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome
By: Alberto Carosa | Rome Reporter
“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.
Dialogue with the Living Dead | A Deadening Moment in the Civiltà’s Present Critiqued by its Living Past
By: John Rao | Remnant Columnist, New York
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 31st, 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]