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| Why Ambiguity Was the Most Lethal Weapon of Vatican II’s Architects |
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Posted by: Stone - 10 hours ago - Forum: Articles by Catholic authors
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Why Ambiguity Was the Most Lethal Weapon of Vatican II’s Architects
![[Image: dce6b5a9f1745e17161ec4cff0eb6fe3_L.jpg]](https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/media/k2/items/cache/dce6b5a9f1745e17161ec4cff0eb6fe3_L.jpg)
Robert Morrison | June 20, 2025
Every single ambiguity of Vatican II tended to undermine Catholic teaching in precisely the way against which the pre-Vatican II popes emphatically warned. This is not mere coincidence. Moreover, the presence of so much ambiguity fundamentally undermines the Catholic Church’s role as truth-teller. The Church obviously knew how to speak clearly and unambiguously on all of the matters that have become so contentious after the Council.
In his 2024 book Flee From Heresy: A Catholic Guide to Ancient and Modern Errors, Bishop Athanasius Schneider provided the following question and answer regarding how Vatican II differs from previous ecumenical councils:
“What was the key difference between Vatican II and all previous ecumenical councils? The previous ecumenical councils formulated the doctrine of faith and morals in articles with the clearest possible assertions, and in concise canons with anathemas, to guarantee an unambiguous understanding of the true doctrine and protect the faithful from heretical influences within or outside the Church. Vatican II, however, chose not to do this.”
... While it is still too early to know whether Pope Leo XIV would cooperate with God’s grace to make the necessary corrections to rectify Vatican II’s ambiguities, it is worth considering why ambiguity was the most lethal weapon of Vatican II’s architects.
In his One Hundred Years of Modernism, Fr. Dominique Bourmaud discussed the evidence we have that the architects of Vatican II employed ambiguity deliberately:
“We could cite a hundred cases of such ambiguity, which was in fact premeditated, as Fr. Laurentin explained: “Here and there, ambiguity was cultivated as an escape from inextricable oppositions. One could lengthen the list of such wordings encompassing opposing tendencies, because they could be looked at from both sides just like those photographic tricks whereby you see two different people in the same picture depending on the angle you look at it. For this reason, Vatican II already has given, and will continue to give rise to many controversies.’”
Fr. Laurentin’s image of the photographic trick is quite revealing because he and others were truly attempting to trick the well-meaning Council Fathers into accepting passages that could be read with an anti-Catholic meaning. The liberals could do this only by persuading these Council Fathers that the passages could also be read with a seemingly orthodox meaning.
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre opposed this effort with his November 27, 1962 intervention at Vatican II, in which he encouraged his fellow Council Fathers to express the Council’s teaching in a “dogmatic and scholastic” form that would help promote precision of thought and expression:
“It is of the highest importance that ‘the whole of traditional Christian doctrine be received in that exact manner, both in thought and form, which is above all resplendent in the Acts of the Council of Trent and of Vatican I,’ according to the very words of the Sovereign Pontiff. So for these very important reasons, it is absolutely essential to maintain these two objectives: to express doctrine in a dogmatic and scholastic form for the training of the learned; and to present the truth in a more pastoral way, for the instruction of other men.” (I Accuse the Council!, p. 5)
Archbishop Lefebvre proceeded to suggest two sets of documents: “one more dogmatic, for the use of theologians; the other more pastoral in tone, for the use of others, whether Catholic, non-catholic or non-Christian.” As Archbishop Lefebvre recounted, the proposal was not well-received:
“The proposal met, however, with violent opposition: ‘The Council is not a dogmatic but a pastoral one; we are not seeking to define new dogmas but to put forward the truth in a pastoral way.” (I Accuse the Council!, p. 4)
All throughout the history of the Catholic Church, theologians have worked to make Catholic teaching more and more clear, accurate, and complete. At Vatican II, this clarity was sacrificed in the name of a “pastoral” approach. In hindsight, we now know that this pastoral aspect of the Council has only yielded confusion and apostasy. Unfortunately, though, the pastoral aspect of the Council persuaded the Council Fathers to allow for ambiguous expressions.
Although Archbishop Lefebvre lost the battle of trying to have the Council express its teaching in a “dogmatic and scholastic” form that would have prevented ambiguities, he did not surrender in his attempts to counteract heterodoxy. One of the most illuminating passages written about Vatican II is from Archbishop Lefebvre’s They Have Uncrowned Him, in which he describes his work to oppose the liberal theologians:
“It is certain that with the 250 conciliar fathers of the Coetus we tried with all the means put at our disposal to keep the liberal errors from being expressed in the texts of the Council. This meant that we were able all the same to limit the damage, to change these inexact or tendentious assertions, to add that sentence to rectify a tendentious proposition, an ambiguous expression. But I have to admit that we did not succeed in purifying the Council of the liberal and modernist spirit impregnating most of the schemas. Their drafters indeed were precisely the experts and the Fathers tainted with this spirit.” (p. 167)
We cannot think properly about the Council if we do not grasp these crucial insights from Archbishop Lefebvre. The initial drafts of the Council’s documents were more liberal than those that were ultimately accepted. Going back to the image from Fr. Laurentin, it was much easier to the see the liberal picture in the initial documents. But the final documents did not efface the liberal pictures; rather, they added to the orthodox pictures that could be seen within the same passages.
Archbishop Lefebvre continued:
“What we were able to do was, by the modi that we introduced, to have interpolated clauses added to the schemas; and this is quite obvious: it suffices to compare the first schema on religious liberty with the fifth one the was written — for this document was five times rejected and five times brought back for discussion — in order to see that succeeded just the same in reducing the subjectivism that tainted the first drafts. . . . [In this declaration,] Dignitatis humanae, of which the last schema was rejected by numerous Fathers, Paul VI himself had a paragraph added which said in substance: ‘This declaration contains nothing that is contrary to tradition.’ But everything that is inside is contrary to tradition! Thus someone will say, ‘Just read it! It is written, There is nothing contrary to tradition’ — well, yes, it is written. But that does not stop everything from being contrary to tradition! And that sentence was added at the last minute by the Pope in order to force the hand of those — in particular the Spanish bishops — who were opposed to this schema. . . Well, let us be logical! They changed nothing in the text!” (pp. 167-169)
So all of these efforts to make the documents more orthodox ultimately served the purpose of allowing the Council Fathers to grow comfortable enough to approve the ambiguous documents that could still be read in a heterodox manner. And, indeed, the statement added at the direction of Paul VI did not change the reality that the authors of the document intended to interpret it in a heterodox manner.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger corroborated all of this in his Theological Highlights of Vatican II, in which he described the same last-minute addition to Dignitatis Humanae:
“Most controversial was the third newly emphasized aspect. The text attempts to emphasize continuity in the statements of the official Church on this issue. It also says that it ‘leaves intact the traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and communities toward the true religion and the only Church of Christ’ (n. 1). The term ‘duty’ here has doubtful application to communities in their relation to the Church. Later on in the Declaration, the text itself corrects and modifies these earlier statements, offering something new, something that is quite different from what is found, for example, in the statements of Pius XI and Pius XII. It would have been better to omit these compromising formulas or to reformulate them in line with the later text. Thus the introduction changes nothing in the text's content; therefore, we need not regard it as anything more than a minor flaw.”
As Michael Davies explained in his The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty (p. 205), Ratzinger was mistaken about the chronology of text added by Paul VI. However, the future Benedict XVI was entirely correct about that fact that the body of the Declaration actually contradicts the teaching of Pius XI and Pius XII.
Benedict XVI would later encourage faithful Catholics to read Vatican II documents in light of Tradition (i.e., the hermeneutic of continuity), and we can assume he was entirely honorable in his intentions. However, such an exercise could only be effective if it fully accounts for the most salient reality: namely, that the Council’s texts were tainted with ambiguities that leave open the possibility to see the liberal meanings that were actually intended by the men who drafted the documents. Without this recognition, the hermeneutic of continuity can only “succeed” by persuading Catholics to abandon reason.
But there is more that could be said against the ambiguities of Vatican II. Whereas it was theoretically possible that every ambiguity could have gone in a more rigorous direction that offended liberal sensibilities, the indisputable reality is that every single ambiguity tended to undermine Catholic teaching in precisely the way against which the pre-Vatican II popes emphatically warned. This is not mere coincidence.
Moreover, the presence of so much ambiguity fundamentally undermines the Catholic Church’s role as truth-teller. The Church obviously knew how to speak clearly and unambiguously on all of the matters that have become so contentious after the Council. The Council Fathers were perfectly capable of speaking even more clearly about the same issues. And yet, in the eyes of all rational readers, they abandoned the clarity and certainty of past statements. In so doing, the Council compromised the Church’s authority in the eyes of Catholic and non-Catholics alike.
Finally, we can see that it avails little for certain scholars to be able to hold the interpretive keys that allow them to read the documents in a quasi-orthodox manner when the vast majority of Catholics have no such knowledge. Countless souls have apostatized over the past sixty years because they see the picture of the Council as Fr. Laurentin explained: they either see a picture that is entirely heterodox, or one that is ambiguous (nobody sees anything that is unambiguously orthodox). And so they either think the Church has changed its teaching or else forfeited its doctrinal authority.
The only solution is to ... affirm the Church’s true teaching. May God grant Pope Leo XIV the grace to do this.
Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!
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| Destruction Reached after 12 Years of Francis |
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Posted by: Stone - Today, 06:50 AM - Forum: Pope Francis
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TIA [slightly adapted and reformatted] | Posted June 18, 2025
The Bergoglian Age in numbers: In ancient Christian countries, but not only, the number of Catholics is declining.
Of course, there are many reasons for this, such as secularization, urbanization, competition from competing ideologies and religions, and the unravelling of family units and traditional values in many places. But the statistics point to a worrying acceleration since the start of Pope Francis' pontificate, particularly in places where bishops and, indeed, the Church as a whole, pride themselves on their progressivism and their entry into the 'marvellous' synodality.
Germany loses 500,000 Catholics a year
A prime example is Germany, spearhead of progressivism in the Church, whose dioceses are, along with the United States, the Vatican's main source of money. In August 2024, Riposte Catholique published statistics on “church exits” in Germany, showing that while their bishops are fleeing ahead in a less and less Catholic “synodal path,” German Catholics are losing interest in their religion:
“Church departures declined compared to last year: 402,694, to be compared with the 2022 figure of 522,821 departures, but the statistical office notes that this is nevertheless the second-highest figure in the history of church departure statistics. If one adds 'deaths, entries and moves,' the number of Church members in Germany has fallen by 591,718. At national level, the statistics still count around 20.3 million Catholics at the reference date of December 31, 2023. A year earlier, the figure was still 20.94 million.
![[Image: P066_Ger.png]](https://traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/HTimages_m-q/P066_Ger.png)
The decline in German Catholics jumped dramatically in recent years
As there are also 18.56 million Protestants in Germany, the majority of Germans are no longer Christian - or rather, no longer officially attached to one of the country's main Christian churches. As a reminder, in 2020 Germany still had 22 million Catholics and 20 million Protestants for a population of 83 million. The decline of the Catholic population can also be seen in another statistic, shared by Katolisch.de on July 9: “In 2011, there were still 23 cities with a Catholic majority in Germany. Now only Münster, Paderborn, Bottrop and Trier remain. In Regensburg and Ingolstadt, for example, the proportion of Catholics has fallen by almost a quarter”
Above all, church departures are accelerating, in line with the dynamics of the “German Synodal Way” and thus with the line of thought promoted by Pope Francis: “if in 2010 181,000 Catholics and 141,000 Protestants had left their churches, in 2020 they were 221,000 and 220,000 respectively.
In 2011, there were 24.07 million Catholics and 23.37 million Protestants - the two religions then accounted for 60% of Germans”.
And of course, fewer Catholics means less tax redistributed to the Church and therefore to the dioceses, and consequently to the Vatican - we'll come back to this: “in 2023, the revenues of the 27 German dioceses will amount to 6.51 billion euros. This represents 330 million euros, or 5% less than in 2022. When inflation is taken into account, the decline is even more marked."
In neighboring Belgium
Equally progressive, the practice has fallen below 1% of the population, and in formerly more practicing Flanders, by 2022 70% of documents registering requests for euthanasia were written in Dutch - the language of the Flemish minority.
Above all, there are barely 30 seminarians left for the whole country, as the head of the Namur seminary explained to the parliamentary commission on abuses in the Church in March 2024: “at the John XXIII seminary in Louvain, 15 seminarians are currently studying for the five Flemish dioceses, and in Namur 17 seminarians are studying for the French-speaking part of the country [including 5 from Liège and 8 from Brussels in 2023].”
Switzerland: 34,000 fewer Catholics per year
In Switzerland, it's no better - statistics for 2022 published online by Riposte Catholique show a 10% acceleration in exits from the Catholic Church compared to the previous year, and above all a higher prevalence of exits in the most progressive diocese, that of Basel:
“In 2022, 34,561 people left the Catholic Church in Switzerland, roughly the same number as in 2021, but significantly more than in previous years (in 2021: 34,182; 2020: 31,410; 2019: 31,772), notes the SPI in a report published on October 30, 2023; compared with 1080 entering the Church and 910 in 2021. At the end of 2022, church membership stood at around 2.89 million (in 2021: 2.96 million). The cantons with the biggest losses are Basel-Stadt (3 out of 100), Aargau (2.7 out of 100), and Solothurn (2.2 out of 100).”
Italy: young people on the verge of extinction
In Italy, religious practice is holding steady... but not among young people, and the cessation of celebrations during the pandemic was an accelerating factor... as was the submission of many Italian bishops to health measures that were as intrusive as they were changeable and ineffective.
![[Image: P066_Ita1.png]](https://traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/HTimages_m-q/P066_Ita1.png)
One of the many abandoned Churches of Italy
Credit: Roman Robroek
In August 2023, Riposte Catholique translated the report by the Italian Institute of Statistics (Istat), which took stock of so much decline - and of Italy's low birth rate:
“Over the past twenty years, religious practice in Italy has steadily declined, down to just half: from 36.4% of the population in 2001 who declared themselves 'practicing,' to less than 19% last year, so fewer than one in five people. The biggest 'leap' was recorded between 2019 and 2020, with the loss of 4 points of mass-goers. This was the year of the pandemic, during which 'face-to-face' celebrations were suspended, but church attendance was permitted."
According to the latest data from the Diocese of Milan, one of the largest in the world, baptisms have fallen from 37-38,000 in the 2000s to 20,000 today. Even taking into account the falling birth rate, this figure is low. As for marriages in the diocese, they have fallen from 18,000 a year in the 1990s to 4,000 today.
Churches are gradually emptying in all age groups, but the most obvious decline is among young people (18-24) and teenagers (14-17). While overall religious practice has fallen by 50% over the last twenty years, for these age groups the decline is two-thirds”.
Poland, South Korea: vocations down by half
In the de-Christianized, aging dioceses of old Europe, where the birth rate is often low, Polish or even South Korean priests often offer an alternative to African or Indian Fidei Donum. But for how much longer? These two countries are experiencing a drastic drop in vocations.
In July 2023, Riposte Catholique reported that the gathering of some 1,400 Polish seminarians at the Jasna Gora shrine was the tree that hid the forest of collapsing vocations:
“In 2021, admissions to Polish seminaries fell by 20%, Poland suffering the double shock after Amoris Laetitia and the closure of diocesan churches during Holy Week 2020, under the pretext of Covid and the so-called 'health' restrictions thereafter - something that had never happened, even under the Communist regime. The introduction of communion by hand and other Rome-inspired innovations didn't help matters either.
“Father Piotr Kot, president of the Conference of Rectors of Major Seminaries in Poland, told the Catholic news agency KAI that 356 seminarians had begun their studies in 2021. This compares with 441 in 2020, a drop of around 20%. The figures were 498 in 2019 and 828 in 2012”. That's a drop of half (57%) since 2012.”
![[Image: P066_Pol.png]](https://traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/HTimages_m-q/P066_Pol.png)
Mass attendance in once staunchly Catholic Poland has fallen
In South Korea, it's no better, reports Fides in February 2025 - not least because of the world's worst birth rate (0.72), but not only because of it, the number of seminarians has fallen by 40% in ten years, and the number of baptized is plummeting as the generations get younger: “according to data from the Dicastery for Evangelization, in 2013 there were a total of 1,264 major seminarians in the various dioceses of the Korean Church.
Ten years later, in 2023, there were 790 seminarians, a drop of around 40% in ten years.
If we look even further upstream at the number of baptized Catholics, in the official statistics of the Korean Bishops' Conference (to 2023), we see that baptized children between the ages of 0 and 4 represent 1.8% of the Korean population; in the 5-9 age bracket, baptized children are 3.9%; and between the ages of 10 and 14, they represent 5.8% of the total Korean population. If we compare these figures with the overall figure, according to which Catholics represent 11.5% of the entire Korean nation, we can see that as the generations go by, their numbers diminish."
In Argentina, 50% less seminarians & 80% fewer entrants
The statistics on the decline in priestly vocations are even more marked in Argentina, the home country of both the Pope and Cardinal Fernandez. Moral affairs don't help: Pope Francis tried to clear a pedophile priest when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Father Julio Cesare Grassi, sentenced to fifteen years in prison in 2009 and incarcerated since 2013 (just as he protected to the bitter end Bishop Zanchetta of Oran, Argentina, who was forced to resign in 2017 but whom he immediately rehired as advisor to the Vatican's administration of the Apostolic See patrimony, but who, in 2025, was sentenced to four years and six months in prison for raping seminarians, a sentence confirmed by the Court of Appeals).
The result of secularization and the Francis effect is a collapse in vocations: “Whereas the country had 2,260 seminarians in 1990, there will be just 481 diocesan seminarians in 2024 according to the American website The Pillar. While the number of religious seminarians is not available, it should be remembered that there were 351 in 2020. It can be estimated that there will be fewer than 900 seminarians in Argentina.
"There is therefore a clear drop in vocations, which is also reflected in the low number of entries to seminaries. This year, there were only 57 entries into diocesan seminaries. As a reminder, in 1997, there were 256 entries, a drop of almost 80% in twenty-five years."
Latin America turns Evangelical
The April 2018 issue of Hérodote magazine provides statistics on the subcontinent as a whole, and looks back at a major shift: Latin America... isn't so much Latin anymore.
“If, in the early 1970s, 90% of Latin Americans claimed to be Catholics, today the figure is just 65%. This decline in Catholicism takes three main forms. Firstly, a decline in the number of Catholics accompanied by an increase in the number of Evangelicals. This is the case in the region's most populous countries, Brazil and Mexico, where Catholics fell from 95% to 61% and 99% to 81% respectively between 1970 and 2014."
This decline is all the more striking given that these are the two countries in the world that still have the highest number of Catholics: Brazil with 172.2 million baptized, or 26.4% of Catholics in the Americas, followed by Mexico with 110.9 million baptized. The decline in the number of Catholics in Brazil is accompanied by a significant increase in membership of Protestant and Evangelical churches, which account for 26% of the population.
![[Image: P066_Lat.png]](https://traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/HTimages_m-q/P066_Lat.png)
The Catholic Faith is declining all across Latin America
The second form of Catholicism's decline is the transformation of the religious landscape in Central American countries, where Catholicism has become a minority religion. All of these countries now have a Catholic population of less than 50%, compared with over 90% in the 1970s.
The decline of Catholicism in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala is all the more striking in view of the strong roots of liberation theology in the 1980s-1990s, and the role played by the Catholic Church in accompanying victims of abuse by both the military dictatorships and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
These three countries, plus Honduras, are also the only ones where Evangelical churches could eventually become the majority: in Nicaragua, 30.4% of the population have joined them; in El Salvador, 35.3%; in Guatemala, 38.2; and in Honduras, 43.9%. Finally, in Chile, it's not the evangelicals but the atheists who are gaining in power, with 16% of the population, while Catholics are declining.
As a result, in 2014, countries that were still monolithically Catholic in 1950 and over 90% in the early 1970s lost 20% of the faithful in Argentina, 34% in Costa Rica, 31% in Brazil, 43% in El Salvador, 47% in Honduras - half of the total, 43% in Nicaragua, 15% in Mexico, 31% in Puerto Rico and 20% in Venezuela. And the number of Catholics has been falling ever since.
A map put online by the Center for Orthodox Journalists in 2024 shows that while Paraguay still has 89% Catholics and Mexico 74%, as well as Colombia, Ecuador and Peru 70%, there are only 57% in Brazil, 52.5% in Chile, 49% in Argentina, now one of the least Catholic countries in Latin America, and 37% in Uruguay. Meanwhile, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua now have between 36% and 43% Evangelicals, Venezuela 23%, Brazil 25%, Mexico just 4.5% and Argentina 7%.
By the way, Argentina has also dethroned Chile regarding the number of people who claim to be agnostics or atheists - 40% of the population. And 13% in Brazil, 5% in communist Venezuela, and 16% in Mexico. Almost half of the Catholic population in a country that was 91% Catholic in 1970: 40% atheist, irreligious or agnostic - the Pope Francis effect is in full swing in Argentina, a real hit.
Will the great Catholic decline affect Africa?
Faced with such a catastrophic picture, some would like to believe that Africa is a Christian sanctuary resisting decline. It's true that vocations remain at a high level, and many African dioceses twinned with the vocation-strapped dioceses of old Europe send them seminarians and deacons to enable them to keep the parish geography at arm's length.
![[Image: P066_Afr.png]](https://traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/HTimages_m-q/P066_Afr.png)
Even Africa is starting to decline following the influence of Francis
Admittedly, Africa has spearheaded the refusal of Fiducia supplicans, and Cardinal Ambongo mentioned the “loss in terms of value, a cultural and moral decadence of the West” to whom he wished, from Kinshasa in DR Congo on January 16, 2024 a “happy demise.”
Yet some bishops' conferences are already worried. In Ghana, the number of Catholics fell by a third between the two censuses of 2010 and 2021, the bishops' conference warned in 2023: “The members of the Ghana Catholic Bishops' Conference (GCBC) propose the development of well-structured catechesis and formation programs, among other proposals, to address the declining number of Catholic faithful" in this West African country. The 2021 Population and Housing Census (2021 PHC) in Ghana shows that the number of Catholics has declined from 15.1% to 10.0% since the 2010 census.”
This article was published by La Paix Liturgique on Febraury 26, 2025 under the title “NUMBERS, JUST NUMBERS? THE FIGURE-BASED REALITY OF THE POST-CONCILIAR AND SYNODAL CHURCH IN EUROPE... AND AROUND THE WORLD”
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| Head of Irish bishops to consecrate country to Sacred Heart for first time in over 150 years |
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Posted by: Stone - 06-21-2025, 07:08 PM - Forum: Global News
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Head of Irish bishops to consecrate country to Sacred Heart for first time in over 150 years
The consecration comes at a time when Ireland, once a devout Catholic country, has become increasingly secularized.
![[Image: ireland-sacred-heart-1.jpg]](https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/ireland-sacred-heart-1.jpg)
Unsplash, Rawpixel
June 21, 2025
KNOCK, Ireland (LifeSiteNews) — Archbishop Eamon Martin, the archbishop of Armagh and president of the Irish Episcopal Conference, will consecrate the entire country to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for the first time in over 150 years this Sunday.
Martin, who also holds the title Primate of All Ireland, will consecrate the nation to the Sacred Heart during a Sunday Mass at the Basilica of Our Lady of Knock on June 22, the Sunday of Corpus Christi, according to the archdiocese. The archbishop emphasized that the consecration is necessary in this age that presents “many challenges to our faith, to our families and indeed to the deepest core of our humanity.”
“We are living in a time of great need for God – for faith, for hope and for love. Our age presents many challenges to our faith, to our families and indeed to the deepest core of our humanity,” Martin said.
“But as a pilgrim people filled with great love and hope in this jubilee year of graces, while recalling the promises of the Sacred Heart made known 350 years ago to Saint Margaret Mary, we have chosen to renew the consecration of our country to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus as its secure refuge from all dangers – visible and invisible,” the bishop added. “All are welcome to our Mass this Sunday in Knock.”
June is traditionally dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The origins of this devotion come from an apparition of Christ to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in Paris in the 1670s, when He revealed the love of His Sacred Heart for the world and asked for reparation for the sins of sacrilege and blasphemy.
READ: Fatima and St. Margaret Mary’s visions of the Sacred Heart providentially connected
Prior to the consecration, the basilica will host the relics of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, St. Claude La Colombiere – the confessor of St. Margaret Mary – and Blessed Mary of the Divine Heart, who influenced Pope Leo XIII to consecrate the world to Our Lord’s Sacred Heart- for the faithful to venerate.
Ireland was previously consecrated to the Sacred Heart on Passion Sunday in 1873, becoming the first country to consecrate itself as a nation to Our Lord’s Sacred Heart.
The consecration comes at a time when Ireland, once a devout Catholic country, has become increasingly secularized. According to the country’s 2022 census, 69 percent of the Irish identify as Catholic, a 10 percent drop from the previous census in 2016. Mass attendance has also declined dramatically, dropping from 93 percent in 1973 to just 43 percent in 2008.
In 2015, 62 percent of the Irish people voted in favor of a referendum to legalize same-sex “marriage,” becoming the first nation to legalize it by popular vote.
READ: Abortions climb to record levels in Ireland with over 10,000 in 2023
Just three years later, in 2018, abortion was legalized by another referendum in which 66 percent of the Irish people voted to repeal an amendment protecting the equal right to life of the mother and unborn child. Abortion numbers have since dramatically increased in the country, with over 10,000 unborn Irish babies being murdered in 2023, a record.
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| The Catholic Trumpet: Part II — The Refusal of Heaven |
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Posted by: Stone - 06-19-2025, 09:13 AM - Forum: The Catholic Trumpet
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Part II — The Refusal of Heaven
![[Image: rs=w:1280]](https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/df55e1a9-c854-4d0b-a2a9-94177954436c/IMG_7004.png/:/cr=t:0%25,l:0%25,w:100%25,h:100%25/rs=w:1280)
The Catholic Trumpet [slightly adapted and reformatted] | June 18, 2025
Part II – The Fatima Command of 1929
In June 1929, Sister Lúcia—then a Dorothean novice in Tuy, Spain—was granted a vision of the Holy Trinity and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, radiant with sorrow and majesty. It was here that Our Lady gave the long-awaited command foretold at Fatima in 1917:
Quote:“The moment has come in which God asks the Holy Father to make, in union with all the bishops of the world, the consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart.”
This was no pious suggestion but a divine mandate. Our Lady revealed that so many souls were being damned for sins against Her that reparation was now demanded by Heaven:
Quote:“So numerous are the souls which the justice of God condemns for sins committed against Me, that I come to ask for reparation. Sacrifice yourself for this intention and pray.”
Heaven’s instructions were exact:- The Pope must unite with all the world’s bishops in a single, public act.
- The act must explicitly name Russia, consecrating it to the Immaculate Heart.
- It must be performed in the spirit of sacrifice and reparation, not vague diplomatic language.
Two years later, in August 1931 at Rianjo, Our Lord issued a grave warning to Sister Lúcia. He compared the hierarchy’s delay to the sin of Louis XIV, who had ignored the Sacred Heart’s command to consecrate France in 1689. That delay ended in regicide and revolution. So too, said Our Lord, would Rome suffer if it delayed:
Quote:“Make it known to My ministers, that given they follow the example of the King of France in delaying the execution of My request, they will follow him into misfortune. Like the King of France, they will repent and will do as I have requested, but it will be very late: Russia will already have spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions against the Church. The Holy Father will have much to suffer! But it will never be too late to have recourse to Jesus and Mary.”
Despite these warnings, no Pope has fulfilled Heaven’s command.
In 1942, Pope Pius XII consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart, but did not mention Russia and acted without the bishops. Our Lord told Sister Lúcia this would shorten the war, but added: “Because it was incomplete, the conversion of Russia would not happen yet.”
In 1952, Pius XII consecrated Russia by name, but still without the bishops. Even Vatican officials later admitted this act “failed to satisfy Our Lady’s request.”
In 1984, Pope John Paul II gathered the bishops for a public consecration—but refused to name Russia. According to Father Gabriele Amorth, the Pope asked during the ceremony, “Can I mention Russia?” His advisors replied, “No.” Fear of human opinion triumphed over divine command.
Before her likely removal or death in the early 1960s, Sister Lúcia repeatedly stated that “the consecration of Russia has not been made,” and that the ceremonies performed “did not correspond to Our Lady’s requests." Her authentic writings and interviews never changed—until the post-Conciliar era produced a strange silence, then sudden reversal.
After 1960, a new “Sister Lúcia” emerged: altered in appearance, tone, and message. Traditional Fatima scholars—including Frère Michel, Fr. Nicholas Gruner, and the real SSPX—reject all post-1960 statements attributed to this figure, which directly contradict Lúcia’s decades of handwritten testimony.
To learn more about this likely replacement, visit SisterLucyTruth.org, the investigative project led by Dr. Peter Chojnowski. There you will find forensic and photographic evidence indicating that the original Sister Lúcia was most likely removed or died in the early 1960s.
THE UNCHANGING VOICE OF FATIMA
Before Vatican II, Sister Lúcia never wavered. She consistently taught that only the Pope, in union with all the bishops, consecrating Russia by name, would fulfill Heaven’s command.
In 1946, she told William Thomas Walsh:
Quote:“What Our Lady wants is for the Holy Father and all the bishops to consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart… If this consecration is made, the Blessed Virgin will convert Russia and peace will reign in the world. Otherwise, Russia will spread her errors throughout the world.”
In 1952, Our Lady again confirmed through Lúcia:
Quote:“Without this consecration, Russia will not convert and the world will not enjoy peace.”
These declarations are final. Even after decades of failed acts and global disasters, Russia has not converted. The world is not at peace. As one Fatima scholar concluded:
Quote:“No consecration was done with the conditions asked for by Our Lady.”
THE CLOCK IS RUNNING OUT
The 1929 command of Fatima is the second great warning in Catholic history, parallel to the Sacred Heart’s 1689 request to France. That first refusal led to the guillotine. This one may lead to apostasy and annihilation.
As Our Lord warned:
Quote:“Like the King of France, they will repent—but it will be late.”
The Pope has not obeyed. The bishops have not united. Russia has not converted.
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| UK votes to decriminalize abortion |
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Posted by: Stone - 06-18-2025, 07:40 AM - Forum: Abortion
- No Replies
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UK votes to decriminalize abortion
The United Kingdom Parliament voted on Tuesday to decriminalize abortion at any stage of pregnancy.
![[Image: shutterstock_611436356.jpg]](https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/shutterstock_611436356.jpg)
Melinda Nagy/Shutterstock
Jun 17, 2025
LONDON (LifeSiteNews) — The United Kingdom Parliament has voted to decriminalize abortion, in a move all but guaranteed to open the floodgates to unlimited abortion-on-demand.
Under the 1967 Abortion Act, abortion was legal through the first 24 weeks of pregnancy for any reason with the approval of two “registered medical practitioners” and legal up to birth if deemed necessary to prevent “grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman” or “risk to the life of the pregnant woman”; or if the child would “suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped,” including Down syndrome.
However, as previously covered by LifeSiteNews and the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, pro-abortion MPs have put forth amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill to gut the U.K.’s existing abortion restrictions.
New Clause 1 by Tonia Antoniazzi MP would decriminalize any role by the woman in abortion, meaning that while the various conditions would remain in place and doctors would still be liable for violations, women could take abortion pills themselves for any reason, at any point, without consequences. New Clause 20 by Stella Creasy MP would go much further, effectively removing all legal restrictions on abortion.
The Guardian reports that the MPs voted on Tuesday to approve Antoniazzi’s amendment. Another vote must be held in both the House of Commons and House of Lords, and receive royal assent, before the change becomes law.
“It is a conscience issue, therefore it is a free vote. And therefore in that sense, it’s in the same category as assisted dying,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer told reporters at the G7 summit in Canada. “But my longstanding in principle position is that women have the right to a safe and legal abortion.”
The Washington Examiner notes that “Nearly 9 in 10 abortions in England and Wales, approximately 86%, in 2022 were medication abortion, as opposed to surgical abortion,” meaning that even the less extreme of the two amendments, New Clause 1, is enough to protect the vast majority of abortions in the U.K.
Liberalizing Great Britain’s abortion laws is out of step with majority opinion in the U.K., according to multiple polls. LifeSite recently covered an Ipsos survey finding that only 34 percent want abortion legal in “all” cases and just under half of young men (46 percent) want it legal in “all” or “most” cases. SPUC highlights a Whitestone poll finding that 62 percent agree that “Having an illegal abortion should continue to be a criminal offence to protect both the unborn and vulnerable women who could be coerced into losing a baby they may have wanted, for example by an abusive partner.”
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| Diocesan Latin Mass to be suppressed in Tulsa, Oklahoma |
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Posted by: Stone - 06-18-2025, 07:36 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
- No Replies
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Diocesan Latin Mass to be suppressed in Tulsa, Oklahoma
The only diocesan Latin Mass in Tulsa will be shut down in July, according to a blogger.
Jun 17, 2025
(LifeSiteNews) — A diocesan traditional Latin Mass that has been held for 13 years in the Diocese of Tulsa, Oklahoma, is to be suppressed by July, according to parishioners.
“I am saddened to report that as of Sunday, June 29th, 2025, A.D., in the Year of Our Lord Jesus Christ, despite my own efforts at a petition, and I am sure other local requests, after 13 years the Latin Mass Community of Ss. Peter and Paul (SSPP) parish, in the Diocese of Tulsa, will be effectively banished, snuffed out, outcast, dispersed, scattered to the winds, destroyed,” a Tulsa Latin Mass attendee wrote on the blog “The Okie Traditionalist.”
SSPP, the only parish church in the Tulsa diocese to hold TLMs each Sunday, has also held Latin Masses on Tuesday through Friday, as well as First Saturdays, according to a TLM website for the diocese. The remaining options for the TLM in the diocese are the nearby Parish of the Most Precious Blood, where the Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP) priests offer Mass daily, and Clear Creek Benedictine Abbey, which also offers daily Latin Masses.
The most recent bulletins for the church do not indicate the coming shutdown of the TLM there, and Bishop David Konderla has not made a public announcement about the shutdown of the Latin Mass at SSPP as of Tuesday afternoon.
The Facebook administrator of the church’s Latin Mass Facebook page has admitted to deleting comments asking for the reason behind the TLM suppression, arguing that it is “not the place” to ask such questions.
The Okie Traditionalist has shared that a “reliable source” affirmed the decision came from Bishop Konderla, and that no reason for the decision has been publicly shared, even secondhand.
The blogger believes the refusal even by the Facebook moderator for the SSPP page to entertain questions about the suppression of the TLM suggests “they don’t want to answer because there isn’t a reasonable answer.”
“Yet the community certainly was, and still is, owed a clear answer, transparency, accountability, and good faith,” Okie wrote.
In 2021, the blogger noted that Bishop Konderla gave “full, official support” for Pope Francis’ TLM-throttling Traditionis Custodes while allowing the Latin Mass to continue at parish churches in the diocese.
Mark Docherty wrote regarding the lack of clarity about the origins and reason for the decision, “A dense fog of plausible deniability clogs the air, preserving the decision maker(s) from any optically poor blowback.”
LifeSiteNews has contacted the Diocese of Tulsa for comment and elaboration about the decision but has not heard back as of publishing.
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| Saul Alinsky and "Saint" Pope Paul VI: Genesis of the Conciliar Surrender to the World Featured |
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Posted by: Stone - 06-16-2025, 06:58 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
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Saul Alinsky and "Saint" Pope Paul VI: Genesis of the Conciliar Surrender to the World Featured
![[Image: saul_paul_maritain_collage.JPG]](https://www.remnantnewspaper.com/web/images/saul_paul_maritain_collage.JPG)
The Revolutionary Fellowship of Pope Montini, Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky
Christopher A. Ferrara, Remnant | August 16, 2018
This article, adapted from a presentation given at the 2018 symposium of the Roman Forum at Lake Garda, examines the origin of the current unparalleled crisis in the Church at its origin: the neo-Modernist uprising during the Interwar Period, culminating in that catastrophe known as the “opening to the world” at Vatican II.
The conciliar “opening to the world” was assisted mightily by two deluded “conservative” visionaries whose roles were absolutely decisive: Jacques Maritain and his disciple Pope Montini, whose relationship and mutual connection to none other than Saul Alinksy are the focus of this piece.
It is no longer possible to deny in good faith that the Council’s outcome has been the spread of an ecclesial disease that now affects virtually every region of the Mystical Body, and which both Maritain and Montini loudly deplored in its earliest stages while resolutely refusing to acknowledge their own role, and that of the Council, in the growing debacle.
For more than fifty years, traditionalist commentators, remarking the obvious, have chronicled the resulting ecclesial decline in every department. They have warned unceasingly that the reformist mania the Council unleashed—to the applause of both Maritain and Montini and their fellow deluded “conservative” reformers—would end in final disaster for the human element of the Church. Final disaster has arrived with the out-of-control papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his circle of homosexual and homosexual-enabling collaborators, whom he has systematically elevated to positions of power in service to his veritable dictatorship over the Church.
Admitting precisely what traditionalist observers of this pontificate have been saying about Bergoglio over the past five-and-a-half years, the virulently pro-homosexual Father Thomas Rosica declares: “Pope Francis breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants because he is ‘free from disordered attachments.’ Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.”
What Rosica lauds is nothing other than the attempt to impose a personality cult on the universal Church, unbound by any doctrine or practice the head of the cult deems unacceptable. The “new phase” is in fact the terminal phase of the post-conciliar revolution in the Church.
The Revolutionary Fellowship of Pope Montini, Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky
The next phase in Church history will be a total restoration of every single element of Tradition the revolution has overthrown. But it now appears that this inevitable restoration will have to involve a divine intervention of the most dramatic sort, for aside from a few remaining traditionalist communities the human element of the Church, from the head on down, has rendered itself incapable of turning definitively away from what has been done or allowed to be done in the name of the most unfortunate ecumenical council in Church history. To recall the prophecy of Our Lady of Good Success:
Quote:In order to free men from bondage to these heresies, those whom the merciful love of My Most Holy Son will destine for that restoration will need great strength of will, constancy, valor and confidence in God. To test this faith and confidence of the just, there will be occasions in which everything will seem to be lost and paralyzed. This will be, then, the happy beginning of the complete restoration.
[…]
During this unfortunate epoch, injustice will even enter here, my closed garden. Disguised under the name of false charity, it will wreak havoc in souls. The spiteful demon will try to sow discord, making use of putrid members, who, masked by the appearance of virtue, will be like decaying sepulchers emanating the pestilence of putrefaction, causing moral deaths in some and lukewarmness in others.
[…]
[T]he spirit of impurity that will saturate the atmosphere in those times. Like a filthy ocean, it will inundate the streets, squares and public places with an astonishing liberty. There will be almost no virgin souls in the world.
[…]
How the Church will suffer on that occasion the dark night of the lack of a Prelate and Father to watch over them with paternal love, gentleness, strength, and prudence. Many priests will lose their spirit, placing their souls in great danger. Pray insistently without tiring and weep with bitter tears in the secrecy of your heart, imploring our Celestial Father that, for love of the Eucharistic Heart of my Most Holy Son and His Precious Blood shed with such generosity and by the profound bitterness and sufferings of His cruel Passion and Death, He might take pity on His Ministers and quickly bring to an end those ominous times, sending to this Church the Prelate that will restore the spirit of its Priests.
Maritain’s Papal Disciple
![[Image: paul_and_maritain_3.jpg]](https://www.remnantnewspaper.com/web/images/paul_and_maritain_3.jpg)
While he lived to regret the ecclesial ruin he had provoked and then sought desperately to repair—too little, too late—Pope Montini was a revolutionary who had been formed by the “conservative” Modernism of another revolutionary: Jacques Maritain. As Montini famously admitted: “I am a disciple of Maritain. I will call him my teacher.”[1] Maritain’s Integral Humanism (1936) was nothing less than the “‘petit livre rouge’ (‘little red book’) of a whole generation of Christians.”[2] That is, liberal Catholics like Montini, the child of haute bourgeois “patriots” of the Italian state created by the revolutionary violence of the so-called Risorgimento.Like Maritain himself, Montini was seduced by the ignis fatuus of a New Age of humanity in which the Church, happily reconciled to pluralist democracy and the modern conception of rights, would be the leaven of a New Christendom, free from the disabling structures of what Maritain dismissed as the surpassed “sacral age” of medieval Christendom to which there could never be a return in any form. Montini and Maritain were typical of the false prophets of modernity who could not see, even as it was happening, what the pre-conciliar Popes readily predicted would happen were the Church ever to accommodate her teaching to the spirit of the age with its non-negotiable demand for the extinction of the Catholic confessional state.
The “First Modern Pope,”[3] the deluded disciple of a deluded layman, would lead the Church on a disastrous deviation from the path of all his predecessors, only to be “confronted with the shattered assumptions of his whole pontificate.”[4] In his The Peasant of the Garrone, published in 1966, Maritain joined Montini in lamenting the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council while absolving it of any blame for the post-conciliar neo-Modernist uprising he deplored even though his own “thought,” which had spawned an international cult of Maritainismo to which Montini belonged, was instrumental in facilitating that uprising during and after the Council.
Maritain and Alinsky
In Peasant, Maritain writes of his own relationship to a fellow revolutionary, Saul Alinsky:I see in the Western world no more than three revolutionaries worthy of the name—Eduardo Frei in Chile, Saul Alinsky in America, ... and myself in France, who am not worth beans, since my call as a philosopher has obliterated my possibilities as an agitator…. Saul Alinsky, who is a great friend of mine, is a courageous and admirably staunch organizer of “people’s communities” and an anti-racist leader whose methods are as effective as they are unorthodox.[5]
Inexplicably enough, Maritain was infatuated with the cigar-chomping, Jewish agnostic community organizer, whom he first met in 1945 during his wartime and post-war sojourn in America. The Maritain scholar Bernard Doering notes that whenever Maritain and Alinsky met, they “spent long hours exploring the democratic dream of people working out their own destiny. Both accepted democracy as the best form of government.”[6]
Alinsky’s vaunted career as a social justice warrior in Chicago, where he developed deep connections with the progressive priests and prelates of the Chicago archdiocese, produced little or nothing in the way of actual justice. But, at the urging of none other than Maritain, he did produce a couple of influential books on how to be an effective rabble-rouser and political dirty trickster in the promotion of socialist causes. From “the very first days of their friendship in wartime America,” Doering writes, “Maritain had been urging, indeed relentlessly prodding, Alinsky to publish an explanation of his methods of community organization, a kind of handbook for authentic revolution.”
Alinsky wrote his Reveille for Radicals specifically at Maritain’s request, and Alinsky gave him the exclusive rights to the French translation. In a letter of recommendation for a foundation grant to Alinsky, Maritain described him as “practical Thomist”—an example of just how elastic was Maritain’s so-called Thomism. In the same letter, he described Alinsky as “a great soul, a man of profound moral purity…”[7]
It was Maritain who also urged publication of Alinsky’s last work, the infamous Rules for Radicals (1971), which would influence the careers of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Apparently, Maritain either failed to read or decided to overlook much of the content of the book whose publication he would later laud.
Rules is dedicated to “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.” In Rules, Alinsky declares: “Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement.”[8] He then immediately contradicts himself by laying down one dogma after another, including:
1) The “sacred right” to revolution.
2) The dictum that “Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.” “The spiritual life of the Haves,” quoth Alinsky, is merely “a ritualistic justification of their possessions.”
3) Various ethical rules for the social justice warrior, including the right to employ blackmail other immoral means if really necessary to achieve a so-called social justice end.[9]
According to Alinsky’s ethical rules “the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is, and always has been, ‘Does this particular end justify this particular means?’” “Ethical standards,” says Alinsky, “must be elastic to stretch with the times.” “To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles,” he further declared.
Alinsky even quotes Maritain—unfairly and out of context—to support his claim that SJW’s who will not fight dirty have “fear of soiling ourselves by entering the context of history is not virtue, but a way of escaping virtue.” Ethical judgments, says Alinsky, “must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point,” and “the less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.”[10]
Here is an example of Alinsky’s “moral purity” from the pages of Rules:
Quote:I have always believed that birth control and abortion are personal rights to be exercised by the individual. If, in my early days when I organized the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago, which was 95 per cent Roman Catholic, I had tried to communicate this, even through the experience of the residents, whose economic plight was aggravated by large families, that would have been the end of my relationship with the community.
Some years later, after establishing solid relationships, I was free to talk about anything, including birth control. I remember discussing it with the then Catholic Chancellor. By then the argument was no longer limited to such questions as, “How much longer do you think the Catholic Church can hang on to this archaic notion and still survive?”[11]
This was written at the same time neo-Modernist opposition to the Church’s teaching on marriage and procreation was impelling Montini to produce the document that became Humanae Vitae. In spite of all this, Maritain wrote to his beloved friend Alinsky in 1971, one of his last letters, to praise Rules as:
Quote:“A great book, admirably free, absolutely fearless, radically revolutionary…. I regard the book as history-making. If middle-class people can be organized and develop a sense of and a will for the common good—and if Saul is there to inspire them—they are able to change the whole social scene for the sake of freedom.”[12]
After a few timid objections to Alinsky’s amoral situation and utilitarian ethics, for which he apologizes, Maritain concludes his dithyrambic epistle to the agnostic Jewish agitator: “You know that I am with you with all my heart and soul. Pray for me, Saul. And God bless you. To you, the fervent admiration and abiding love of your old Jacques.”[13]
In an interview with Playboy Magazine very shortly before his death from a heart attack in 1972 at the age of 63, which interview is part of a declassified FBI file, the man Maritain asked to pray for him declared that he would unhesitatingly choose hell over heaven:
Quote:PLAYBOY: Having accepted your own mortality, do ·you believe in any kind of afterlife?
ALINSKY: Sometimes it seems to me that the question people should ask is not “is there life after death?” but “Is there life after birth?” I don't know whether there’s anything after this or not. I haven’t seen the evidence one way or the other and I don't think anybody else has either. But I do know that man’s obsession with the question comes out of his stubborn refusal to face up to his own mortality. Let’s say that if there is an afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreservedly choose to go to hell.
PLAYBOY: Why?
ALINSKY: Hell would be heaven for me. All my life I’ve been with the have-nots. Over here, if you’re a have-not, you’re short of dough. If you’re a have-not in hell, you’re short of virtue. Once I get into hell, I’ll start organizing the have-nots over there.
PLAYBOY: Why them?
ALINSKY: They’re my kind of people.
Alinsky and Montini
![[Image: paul_saul.jpg]](https://www.remnantnewspaper.com/web/images/paul_saul.jpg)
The 30-year-long intimate friendship between “old Jacques” and Alinsky gave rise to a connection between Alinsky and Maritain’s foremost disciple, the future Pope Paul VI. Montini was then Archbishop of Milan, to which post he had been sent off without being made a cardinal after Pius XII lost confidence in him on account of his Modernist tendencies.
In his study The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky, P. David Finks notes that “For years Jacques Maritain had spoken approvingly to Montini of the democratic community organizations built by Saul Alinsky.”[14] Accordingly, in 1958 Maritain arranged for a series of meetings between Alinsky and Archbishop Montini in Milan. Before the meetings, Maritain had written to Alinsky to tell him that, as Finks recounts: “the new cardinal was reading Saul’s books and would contact him soon.”[15]
There were three meetings between Montini and Alinsky in Milan during the late spring of 1958.
On June 20, 1958, Alinsky wrote to Maritain: “I had three wonderful meetings with Montini and I am sure that you have heard from him since.”[16] Among the subjects discussed, according to Nicholas Hoffman, was how to counter rising Communist influence in the industrial north of Italy without “reinforcing reactionary elements that had less interest in democracy than in squelching the working man.”[17] In other words, the old liberal game of using the threat of one political trap to drive the people into the jaws of another: oppose communism with soft socialism, just as socialism had been opposed by the Party of Order in France. And, in fact, soft socialism became Italian policy under the Moro government elected in an alliance with the Socialists in 1963.
We will never know what exactly passed between Montini and Alinsky during those “three wonderful meetings” in Milan, but we do know that upon his return to Chicago from Italy, Alinsky wrote as follows to George Shuster, two days before the papal conclave that elected John XXIII: “No, I don’t know who the next Pope will be, but if it’s to be Montini, the drinks will be on me for years to come.”[18]
What did Alinsky know? What did he learn from his “three wonderful meetings” with the man who was soon to become the First Modern Pope? He learned what Maritain already knew about his disciple: that if and when Montini became Pope, there would be a revolution in the Church.
And so there was. It was Pope Montini who would declare after the Council on the pages of L’Osservatore Romano (July 3, 1974): “The important words of the Council are newness and updating… the word newness has been given to us as an order, as a program.”[19] Never in Church history had a Pope uttered such nonsense in a public address to the Church universal.
Willful Blindness, Desperate Retrenchment
As Doering observes: “Every single one of accomplishments of the Second Vatican Council listed by Maritain in the first part of The Peasant of Garrone had been proposed thirty years before in Integral Humanism” as being “prerequisite to a radical revolution and a Christian transformation of the temporal order.”[20]
But the post-conciliar Church witnessed, not a “Christian transformation of the temporal order,” but rather what Maritain himself, writing in 1966, remarked with astonishment as “a complete temporalization of Christianity!”[21]—accompanied by a rapid collapse of Catholic faith and discipline without precedent in Church history. Both Montini and Maritain were left to wonder why. Of course, this unmitigated disaster could not possibly have had anything to do with what Maritain and his disciple had helped unleash at the Council, whose documents, particularly Gaudium et spes, Dignitatis Humanae and Apostolicam Actuositatem (On the Apostolate of the Laity), breathe Maritain’s “thin” (versus “thick”) Modernism—the very thing Pius XI had reprobated in Ubi Arcano Dei, only 14 years before the appearance of Integral Humanism:
Quote:Many believe in or claim that they believe in and hold fast to Catholic doctrine on such questions as social authority, the right of owning private property, on the relations between capital and labor, on the rights of the laboring man, on the relations between Church and State, religion and country, on the relations between the different social classes, on international relations, on the rights of the Holy See and the prerogatives of the Roman Pontiff and the Episcopate, on the social rights of Jesus Christ, Who is the Creator, Redeemer, and Lord not only of individuals but of nations.
In spite of these protestations, they speak, write, and, what is more, act as if it were not necessary any longer to follow, or that they did not remain still in full force, the teachings and solemn pronouncements which may be found in so many documents of the Holy See, and particularly in those written by Leo XIII, Pius X, and Benedict XV.
There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which We condemn, no less decidedly than We condemn theological modernism.[22]
In Peasant, Maritain expounded the delusional social modernist line of Cavour’s new age of “a free Church in a free state,” meaning a subjugated Church in a tyrannical state. At the Council, boasted Maritain in his heady French prose, “the Church has broken the ties which pretended to protect her, and has rid herself of burdens which people used to think equipped her better for the work of salvation. Free henceforth from these burdens and these ties, she mirrors better the true face of God, which is Love, and for herself asks only liberty. She spreads her wings of light.”[23]
Being the self-deluded visionary that he was, Maritain failed to recognize the historical reality the pre-conciliar Popes had unanimously deplored. The Church had not been freed from her so-called burdens and ties in the Catholic confessional state of the so-called sacral age; rather, they had been ripped from her by force and violence, washed away in rivers of blood as Pope after Pope condemned the destroyers of Christian civilization and the fatal errors on which their new order was based. What Maritain hailed, then, was the Church’s formal surrender to political modernity.
And yet, in the same book, published only a year after the Council’s close, Maritain lamented an ecclesial development he had never noticed before the Council. It seemed that the Church was suddenly kneeling before the world: “The present crisis has many diverse aspects. One of the most curious spectacles it offers us is a kind of kneeling before the world, which is revealed in a thousand ways.”[24]
Maritain had observed no such kneeling only four years earlier at the Council’s commencement, but he failed or refused to link this emergent situation in any way to the Council’s vaunted “opening” to the very world before which so many Catholic churchmen were suddenly bending the knee. On the contrary, he hastened to exonerate the Council:
Quote:If there are any prophets of the avant-garde or of the rear guard who imagine that our duties to the world, such as they have been brought to light under the grace of the Holy Spirit by the Second Vatican Council, erase what the Lord Jesus Himself and His apostles have said of the world—The world hates me, The world cannot receive the Spirit of truth, If anyone loves the world the love of the Father is not in him, and all the other texts that I recalled earlier—I know well what must be said of such prophets… they are poking the finger of God in their eye.[25]
One cannot reasonably avoid the conclusion that both Maritain and his disciple Pope Montini willfully blinded themselves to the undeniable fact that this sudden posture of kneeling before the “modern world” was connected to the very Council whose inexplicable optimism about that same world—here the word fatuous fights for acceptance—strictly precluded any admission that the world hated Christ more than ever; that more than ever the world rejected His word; that more than ever love of the world was excluding love of the Father.
Despite his insistence on absolving the Council of any complicity in the sudden “temporalization of Christianity,” Maritain had earlier admitted even during the Council that something was seriously amiss with its proceedings. Writing in early 1964 to another of his intimate friends, Julien Green, the French-American novelist and closeted homosexual, Maritain confided the following about what was happening in the Council hall:
Quote:The kind of throwing of the reins on the horse’s back by John XXIII was absolutely necessary, but what a risk at the same time. All that is professionally intellectual (professors, universities, seminaries), seems to me either spoiled or in a very dangerous position. A certain exegesis has gone mad and become stupid.
There is a new modernism full of pride and obstreperousness that seems to me more dangerous than that of Pius X’s time. (It was after all a rather strange spectacle to see all the bishops of the Council—the Teaching Church—each one flanked by his experts, professors, scholars and pedants of the Taught Church, of whom a good number were off their intellectual rails, and of whom almost none had any wisdom.) So, it is in the middle of all this hubbub that the work of the Holy Spirit is carried out.”[26]
The “hubbub” Maritain described, this suddenly emergent “new modernism,” was an ecclesial catastrophe that had begun in the Council’s very midst. He, like his student Montini, simply refused to see this.
Perhaps it was only fitting that none other than the duo of Maritain and Montini would rush to salvage the legacy of their precious Council by means of Pope Paul’s Credo of the People of God. As Sandro Magister reveals in an important essay, during the previous year, just after publication of Peasant, the then 85-year-old Maritain heard from Cardinal Journet that he was about to meet with the Pope concerning the already chaotic post-conciliar state of the Church, which included publication of the radically heretical Dutch Catechism. Maritain wrote back to say that he had an idea: “The Sovereign Pontiff should draft a complete and detailed profession of faith, in which everything that is really contained in the Symbol of Nicea would be presented explicitly. This will be, in the history of the Church, the profession of faith of Paul VI.”[27]
Journet presented Maritain’s suggestion to the Pope during his meeting in January of 1968, during which he told Paul that the state of the Church was “tragic,” with the Dutch even daring to “substitute one orthodoxy for another in the Church, a modern orthodoxy for the traditional orthodoxy” as the Pope’s commission on the Dutch catechism warned him. In the midst of what was already a doctrinal emergency, the first Synod of Bishops, meeting in Rome in September of 1967, had already presented Paul with “a declaration on the essential points of the faith” he would be well advised to reaffirm. Paul VI met again with Cardinal Journet, telling him that he and Maritain [!] should “prepare for me an outline of what you think should be done.”
Maritain then drafted a profession of faith based on the Nicene Creed, sending it to Journet who gave it to Montini. Maritain’s draft, with almost no emendations, became the Credo of the People of God, solemnly proclaimed by Pope Paul on June 30, 1968. Maritain realized that Paul VI had essentially used his draft when he read the text of the Credo in the newspaper.
Consider the staggering implications: Less than three years after the close of the great Second Vatican Council, endlessly vaunted for having eschewed any mere restatement of Catholic doctrine and dogma in favor of a new and vital formulation of the Faith that would appeal to the itching ears of “contemporary man,” Montini had to publish an emergency text that was precisely a restatement of Catholic doctrine and dogma—drafted by the layman who was his mentor!
In the immortal words of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre after he saw a demonstration of the New Mass concocted by Bugnini’s Consilium: “Is this for real?”
Conclusion: The Bitter Harvest of a Revolutionary Fellowship
The relationship between Maritain, Montini and Alinsky was an early reflection of the de facto fusion of the human element of the Church with the world—the “temporalization of Christianity” Maritain was forced to recognize—that has since characterized the post-conciliar crisis as a whole. Thus was the New York Times able to observe early in the Bergoglian pontificate that none other than Barack Obama had “fit seamlessly into a 1980s Catholic cityscape forged by the spirit of Vatican II, the influence of liberation theology and the progressivism of Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin, the archbishop of Chicago, who called for a ‘consistent ethic of life’ that wove life and social justice into a ‘seamless garment.’”[28]
The Times notes that Obama, the young community organizer in Chicago’s progressive Catholic environment, which Saul Alinsky was instrumental in creating, was mentored by Gregory Galluzzo, “a former Jesuit priest and disciple of the organizer Saul Alinsky.” Obama even “had a small office with two cloudy glass-block windows on the ground floor of Holy Rosary, a handsome red brick parish on the South Side, where he would pop down the hall to the office of the Rev. William Stenzel, raise a phantom cigarette to his lips and ask, ‘Want to go out for lunch?’”.
As the Times further observes, while operating on a grant from the Archdiocese of Chicago, “Obama became a familiar face in South Side black parishes. At Holy Angels Church, considered a center of black Catholic life, he talked to the pastor and the pastor’s adopted son about finding families willing to adopt troubled children. At Our Lady of the Gardens, he attended peace and black history Masses and conferred with the Rev. Dominic Carmon on programs to battle unemployment and violence. At the neo-Gothic St. Sabina, he struck up a friendship with the Rev. Michael L. Pfleger, the firebrand [i.e., ultra-Modernist dissenter from doctrine and dogma] white pastor of one of the city’s largest black parishes.”
As a Senator in the Illinois State Senate, Obama, the social justice warrior from Alinsky’s Chicago and Bernadin’s corrupt, homosexual-infested Archdiocese, would refuse to support the Born Alive Protection Act, presented to the state legislature when it was revealed that the survivors of late-term induced abortions in Chicago hospitals were being left to die after delivery.[29] As President of the United States he would defend “partial birth abortion,” the compulsory subsidy of contraception by Catholic nuns, and federal “guidelines” for “transgender bathrooms” in public schools. And today, the Catholic bishops of America, most of whom probably voted for Obama, are united in the conviction that Donald Trump, usurper of the New World Order, must be stopped.
Behold the last and bitter harvest of a revolutionary fellowship between Catholic churchmen and the world, exampled early on by the link between Jacques Maritain, Saul Alinsky and “the First Modern Pope.”
[1] In Catherine M.A. McAuliffe, “Jacques Maritain’s Embrace of Religious Pluralism and the Declaration on Religious Freedom”, 41 Seton Hall Law Review 593 (2011) at 610.
[2]Ibid., p. 598.
[3]From the title of Peter Hebblethwaite’s definitive biography of Montini.
[4]Romano Amerio, Iota Unum (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 1996), p. 68.
[5]Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garrone (Eugene Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 1966), p. 23 & n. 16.
[6]Bernard Doering, “Jacques Maritain and His Two Authentic Revolutionaries,” 96 (archival article, State University of New York at Stony Brook).
[7]Bernard Doering, The Philosopher and the Provacateur: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), xx.
[8]Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 4.
[9]Ibid., Chapter 2 (“Means and Ends”).
[10]Ibid., 34.
[11]Ibid., pp. 93-94.
[12]Doering, op. cit., 110.
[13]Ibid., 112.
[14]P. David Finks, The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), p. 114.
[15]Ibid., p. 115.
[16]Bernard Doering, The Philosopher and the Provacateur: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p.79.
[17]Nicholas von Hoffman, Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky (New York: Nation Books, 2010), 186.
[18]Finks, op. cit., p. 115.
[19]Amerio, op. cit., p. 112.
[20]Doering, op. cit. xiii.
[21]Ibid., p. 56.
[22]Ubi Arcano Dei (1922), nn. 60-61 [paragraph breaks added]
[23] Peasant, p. 4.
[24]Ibid., p. 53.
[25]Ibid., p. 63.
[26]Maritain to Green, February 13, 1964 in The Story of Two Souls: the Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Julien Green (New York: Fordham University Press, 1988), 201-202.
[27]Sandro Magister, The Credo of Paul VI, who wrote it and why,” June 6, 2008 http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/art...html?eng=y; accessed on June 26, 2018.
[28]Jason Horowitz, “The Catholic Roots of Obama’s Social Activism,” March 22, 2014 @www.nytimes.com/2014/03 /23/us/the-catholic-roots-of-obamas-activism.html; accessed on July 22, 2018.
[29]“Former Nurse on Obama’s Controversial Abortion Vote,” Fox News, August 21, 2008 @ www.foxnews. com/ story/2008/08/21/former-nurse-on-obama-controversial-abortion-vote.html
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| The Catholic Trumpet: What Rome Refused to Hear: Sister Lucia’s Last Public Warning |
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Posted by: Stone - 06-15-2025, 07:18 AM - Forum: The Catholic Trumpet
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What Rome Refused to Hear: Sister Lucia’s Last Public Warning
The Catholic Trumpet | June 13, 2025
What follows is the most accurate, side-by-side Spanish-English translation of the last public testimony of Sister Lucia of Fatima—given to Fr. Agustín Fuentes, Vice-Postulator for the causes of Jacinta and Francisco, on December 26, 1957.
This text was officially archived by Fatima’s appointed historian, Fr. Joaquín María Alonso, who affirmed its authenticity after sixteen years of exhaustive research. Every word has been translated from the original Spanish with doctrinal precision and historical integrity. Footnotes provide clarity on suppressed passages and theological context.
This is not hearsay. It is Sister Lucia’s own testimony—preserved, authenticated, and now made unassailably clear.
This is the original Spanish reproduction of the 1957 interview between Fr. Agustín Fuentes and Sister Lucia of Fatima, later defended as authentic by Fr. Joaquín María Alonso, C.M.F.—the official archivist of Fatima. The text of this interview was first published with ecclesiastical approval in 1959 and republished in various approved sources. Fr. Alonso affirmed that the contents of this interview were entirely consistent with Sister Lucia’s authentic message and Fatima’s theological framework. [See original post for Spanish version - The Catacombs]
Interview of Rev. Fr. Fuentes with Sr. Lucia
December 26, 1957
“I want to tell you about the last conversation I had with Sister Lúcia on December 26 (last year). I found her in her convent. She was very sad, very pale and haggard[^4]. She told me:
“No one has listened”
“Father, the Most Holy Virgin is very sad, because no one is paying attention to Her message, neither the good nor the bad. The good continue on their path of goodness, but without heeding this message; and the wicked, not seeing that the punishment of God is already hanging over them for their sins, also continue in their path of evil, ignoring this message. But believe me, Father, God is going to punish the world, and He will punish it in a terrible way. The punishment from Heaven is imminent.”
The Secret Not Yet Revealed
“Father, how long is it until 1960, and what will happen then? It will be very sad for everyone — not a cause for joy — if the world does not pray and do penance before then. I cannot give more details, since it is still a secret. According to the will of the Blessed Virgin, only the Holy Father and the Bishop of Fatima are allowed to know the Secret, but they have chosen not to know it so that they would not be influenced. This is the third part of the Message of Our Lady, which will remain secret until 1960.”
Russia, the Scourge of God
“Tell them, Father, that the Blessed Virgin has repeatedly told us – my cousins Francisco and Jacinta as well as myself – that several nations will disappear from the face of the earth. She said that Russia would be the instrument of Heaven’s chastisement for the whole world, if we do not first obtain the conversion of that poor nation.”
“The decisive battle” between Mary and Satan: the fall of consecrated souls and priests
Sister Lucia also told me: “Father, the devil is waging a decisive battle against the Blessed Virgin. And the devil knows what is most offensive to God and what, in a short time, will win for him the greatest number of souls. Thus he is striving to win over the souls consecrated to God, because in this way the devil leaves the souls of the faithful abandoned by their leaders, and he seizes them more easily.
That which afflicts the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus is the fall of religious and priestly souls. The devil knows that religious and priests who abandon their beautiful vocation drag many souls to hell. … The devil wants to take possession of consecrated souls; he tries to corrupt them in order to lull the souls of the laity to sleep, and thus lead them to final impenitence. He employs every trick, even suggesting that they delay their entry into religious life. From this results the sterility of the interior life, and among the laity a coldness (lack of enthusiasm) regarding renouncing pleasures and dedicating themselves entirely to God.”
What Sanctified Jacinta and Francisco
“Also tell them, Father, that my cousins Francisco and Jacinta offered themselves in sacrifice because, in all the apparitions of the Most Holy Virgin, they always saw Her very sad. She never smiled at us. This sadness, this anguish that we noticed in Her, penetrated our souls. That sadness is caused by the offenses against God and by the punishments which threaten sinners. And so we children — not knowing what to think — could do nothing except invent various means of praying and making sacrifices. Another thing that sanctified these children was having seen the vision of hell.”
The Mission of Sister Lucia
“Father, that is why my mission is not to point out to the world the material chastisements that are certain to come if the world does not pray and do penance beforehand. No! My mission is to point out to everyone the imminent danger we are in of losing our souls for all eternity if we remain obstinate in sin.”
The Urgency of Conversion
Sister Lucia also told me: “Father, we should not wait for a call to penance to come from Rome on the part of the Holy Father for the whole world; nor should we wait for it to come from our bishops in each of their dioceses, nor even from the religious orders. No! Our Lord has already used these means many times, and the world has paid no attention. That is why now it is necessary for each one of us to begin to reform himself spiritually; he must save not only his own soul, but also all the souls that God has placed on his path….
(Sister Lucia continued) “… The devil does everything in his power to distract us and take away our love for prayer; either we will all be saved together or we will all be damned together.”
The Last Times
“Father, the Blessed Virgin did not tell me that we are in the last times of the world, but She made me understand it by three reasons.”
The Final Battle
“The first reason is that She told me the devil is fighting a decisive battle against the Virgin. And a decisive battle is the final battle, where one side will be victorious and the other side will suffer defeat. So, now we must choose our side. Either we are for God or we are for the devil. There is no other possibility.”
The Last Remedies
“The second reason is that She told my cousins, as well as me, that God is offering two last remedies to the world. They are the Holy Rosary and devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. These are the last two remedies, which means there will be no others.”
Sin against the Holy Spirit
“The third reason is that, in the designs of Divine Providence, God exhausts all other remedies before punishing the world. But when He sees that the world pays no attention, then — as we say in our imperfect way of speaking — He offers His Most Holy Mother as the “last means” of salvation, with “right fear”[^5]. And it is with proper fear because if we despise and reject this last means, we will have no more forgiveness from Heaven, for we will have committed a sin which the Gospel calls the sin against the Holy Spirit[^6]. This sin consists in openly rejecting, with full knowledge and consent, the salvation that He offers us. Let us remember that Jesus Christ is a very loving Son, and He does not permit us to offend and despise His Most Holy Mother. Throughout many centuries of the Church’s history, we have recorded clear testimony of how Our Lord Jesus Christ has always defended the honor of His Mother, shown by the terrible punishments that befell those who attacked the honor of His Most Holy Mother.”
Prayer and Sacrifice, and the Holy Rosary
Sister Lúcia told me: “Two are the means for the salvation of the world: prayer and sacrifice.” Regarding the Rosary, Sister Lúcia said: “Look, Father, the Most Holy Virgin, in these last times in which we live, has given a new efficacy to the recitation of the Holy Rosary. She has given this efficacy in such a manner that there is no problem, no matter how difficult, whether temporal or above all spiritual, in the personal life of each one of us, of our families, of the families of the world or of religious communities, or even in the lives of peoples and nations, that cannot be solved by the Rosary. There is no problem, I tell you, no matter how difficult it is, that we cannot resolve by praying the Holy Rosary. With the Holy Rosary we will save ourselves. We will sanctify ourselves. We will console Our Lord and obtain the salvation of many souls.”
Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary
“**Finally, devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, our Most Holy Mother, consists in considering Her as the seat of mercy, of goodness and of pardon, and as the secure door by which we will enter Heaven.”
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| Statues of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Virgin Mary beheaded at Texas church |
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Posted by: Stone - 06-15-2025, 07:04 AM - Forum: Anti-Catholic Violence
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Statues of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Virgin Mary beheaded at Texas church
The Texas incident is part of a pronounced uptick in vandalism and other attacks on Catholic churches over the past several years.
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St. Martha Catholic Church in Porter, Texas
Shutterstock
Jun 12, 2025
PORTER, Texas (LifeSiteNews) — Statues of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and of the Blessed Virgin Mary were found beheaded at a Texas church on Sunday.
Catholic journalist Sachin Jose posted to X on Wednesday a picture of the remaining body of the Sacred Heart statue outside St. Martha Catholic Church in Porter, Texas, showing the head has been roughly hewn off. The perpetrator has stolen the statues’ heads and remains unidentified as of Thursday afternoon, according to Fox 26 Houston.
The incident is especially tragic considering that Catholics devote the month of June to devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
“This isn’t just vandalism … it’s a hate crime against the Mother of God and the faith of millions. If this were any other religion, it would be headline news. The silence is telling,” a Catholic father wrote on X in response to the beheading of the Blessed Virgin statue.
The incident is part of a pronounced uptick in vandalism and other attacks on Catholic churches over the past several years. From 2020 through February 2024 alone, there were at least 400 attacks on Catholic churches in the U.S., according to data compiled by CatholicVote.
According to CatholicVote, these attacks increased as part of an eruption of the civil unrest that swept the country in May 2020 after the death of George Floyd. Violence spiked again after the leak of the draft of the Supreme Court opinion Dobbs v. Jackson that overturned Roe v. Wade.
However, Canada has also seen a rise in attacks on Catholic churches, so much so that U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance has drawn attention to them.
“Canada has seen a number of church burnings in recent years thanks to anti-Christian bigotry,” Vance wrote on X in December, adding, “All over the world, Christians are the most persecuted religious group.”
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| Detroit Archbishop Closes Ten Latin Masses |
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Posted by: Stone - 06-15-2025, 07:01 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
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Detroit Archbishop Closes Ten Masses in the Roman Rite
gloria.tv | June 13, 2025
Archbishop Edward Weisenburger will abolish at least ten Masses in the Roman rite by July.
In a June 13 letter, he acknowledged that "there are many faithful who have found spiritual richness in this form of the Mass."
He is "permitting" the Mass to continue in four places, in accordance with the Holy See's parameters. His long-term goal is to lead all Catholics into the Novus Ordo.
Beginning July 1, the traditional Latin Mass will be offered at St. Joseph Shrine in Detroit and three non-parish churches in each of the archdiocese's additional regions, as follows:
- Central Region: St. Joseph Shrine in Detroit (Institute of Christ the King)
- South Region: St. Irene Church in Dundee
- Northwest Region: Our Lady of Orchard Lake Chapel in Orchard Lake
- Northeast Region: St. Joseph Church in Port Huron
Permission to celebrate at all other sites will expire on June 30, 2025.
Archbishop Weisenburger is "grateful for the cooperation in implementing this new direction."
According to Rorate-caeli.blogspot.com, the term "all other sites" to be closed down refers to at least ten parishes that offer Mass every Sunday and often on weekdays.
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| Cardinal Grech: "Laypeople Should Take Over Some Sacraments" |
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Posted by: Stone - 06-15-2025, 07:00 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
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Cardinal Grech: "Laypeople Should Take Over Some Sacraments"
gloria.tv | June 13, 2025
"Lay people can and should do more than just the day-to-day running and financial administration of a parish; they can even take over some rituals and sacraments", Maltese Cardinal Mario Grech, head of the ex-synod, told TimesOfMalta.com on 30 May.
He cited a [disastrous] example from Switzerland, where a couple effectively runs a parish with only occasional visits from priests. The couple presides over christenings, funerals and weddings instead of the priest [however, this particular parish is dead and survives only due to compulsory church tax].
"The shortage of vocations can be a grace from God. Some are scandalised by these words because they could prompt the Church to recognise and utilise the diverse gifts present among all Christians, rather than concentrating power solely within the clergy."
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