The Blasphemies of Luther



A reproduction of Luther's face based on his death mask

• “Christ committed adultery first of all with the women at the well of Jacob about whom St. John wrote. ‘Was not everyone around Him murmuring: What has He been doing with her?’ After that, with Mary Magdalene, and then with the woman taken in adultery whom He dismissed so lightly. Thus, even Christ, who was so righteous, had to be guilty of fornication before He died.” (1)
  
• “Don’t you think that the drunk Christ, having imbibed too much at the Last Supper, bewildered His disciples with his empty prattling? (2)
  
• “Deus est stultissimus” [God is very stupid]. (3)
  
• “Certainly God is great and almighty, good and merciful and all that one can imagine in this sense, but He is stupid.” (4)
  
• “God always acts like a madman.” (5)
  

• “When the Mass will be turned on its head, we will have turned the papacy on its head! Because it is upon the Mass, like a rock, that the papacy is completely supported, with its monasteries, bishoprics, colleges, altars, ministries and doctrine… All this will tumble down when this sacrilegious and abominable Mass tumbles.” (6)
  
• On the Offertory, he wrote: “Then follows that abomination which is called the Offertory, where everything in it expresses oblation.” (7)
  
• On the Canon of the Mass: “This abominable Canon is a collection of muddled lacunas; … it makes the Mass a sacrifice; offertories are added. The mass is not a sacrifice or the action of one who sacrifices. We see it as a sacrament or a testament. Let us call it a blessing, the eucharist, the table of the Lord or the memorial of the Lord.” (8)
  
• On the tactic to install the Protestant mass: “To securely and happily reach our goal, we must keep some of the ceremonies of the old Mass, so that it will be accepted by the weak, who could be scandalized by too hasty changes.” (9)
  
• On the priesthood
  
• “What a madness to want to monopolize it [the priesthood] only for a few.” (10) For Luther, the priesthood was shared by all the faithful.
  

Catastrophic Contagion

Quote:The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in partnership with WHO and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, conducted Catastrophic Contagion, a pandemic tabletop exercise at the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Brussels, Belgium, on October 23, 2022.

The extraordinary group of participants consisted of 10 current and former Health Ministers and senior public health officials from Senegal, Rwanda, Nigeria, Angola, Liberia, Singapore, India, Germany, as well as Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The exercise simulated a series of WHO emergency health advisory board meetings addressing a fictional pandemic set in the near future. Participants grappled with how to respond to an epidemic located in one part of the world that then spread rapidly, becoming a pandemic with a higher fatality rate than COVID-19 and disproportionately affecting children and young people.

Participants were challenged to make urgent policy decisions with limited information in the face of uncertainty. Each problem and choice had serious health, economic, and social ramifications. 

Quote:Lessons from the exercise

Leaders must prepare now to make difficult, critically important decisions with limited information in the early days of the next pandemic in order to increase the chances that a dangerous outbreak can be contained at the source. In the early days of a major new contagious disease epidemic, there could be a brief window of opportunity to stop it from becoming a pandemic. To successfully contain such an outbreak, decisive and bold action would need to be taken in the face of incomplete data, high scientific uncertainty, and potential political resistance. Thinking through such challenges, preparing in advance to react effectively, and practicing through both high-level tabletop and operational exercises should start now.

It may seem like all these critical policy decisions have been resolved during the COVID-19 pandemic, but they have not. In the Catastrophic Contagion simulation, even a group of some of the wisest and most experienced international public health leaders who lived through COVID-19 wrestled with opposing views on whether countries should impose travel restrictions or close schools to try to contain a serious new epidemic that was disproportionately affecting children. The exercise raised a pivotal question: If future pandemics have a much higher lethality than COVID-19, or for example, if they affect predominantly children, would or should countries take different, stronger, earlier measures to contain it, and what are those measures?   

These are not purely public health and scientific decisions; they will be made by leaders in the context of political, economic, and social realities that can be anticipated and considered in advance. Through routine simulations and operational exercises, we can strategically prepare for such challenges ahead of time. The more effectively we can reach scientific and practical consensus on the best approach to very hard but foreseeable problems, the more we will be ready in the future to protect lives and national economies. Political leaders, in addition to health leaders, must be at the table during exercises to respond effectively during the next pandemic.

Countries should establish a global network of professional public health leaders who can work together to improve epidemic preparedness and response and strive for consensus on scientific issues in advance of the next major outbreak. There is no existing worldwide professionalized network of public health preparedness and response leaders who can work together between and during epidemics to better prepare all countries and provide mutual aid and sharing of best practices during serious epidemics. Establishing an international network of national public health leaders, along the lines of the professionalized “Pandemic Corps” referred to in our exercise, could substantially help countries save lives and livelihoods during major epidemics and recover more quickly. Political leaders, who are entrusted with keeping their citizens safe, could benefit from consensus views offered by such a group, rather than having to make impromptu, high consequence policy decisions when lives are at stake during dangerous outbreaks.

Countries should prioritize efforts to increase trust in government and public health; improve public health communication efforts; increase the resiliency of populations to misleading information; and reduce the spread of harmful misinformation. In future pandemics, we should continue to expect even more major disruptions from misinformation and disinformation. The WHO can be a globally trusted source, and it can share science and public health information widely, but we should not expect it alone to combat or put a stop to the spread of this mis- and disinformation. Countries need to collaborate to anticipate that threat and prepare to combat it with their own laws and procedures. Just as many types of economic and societal harms can be anticipated and accounted for in pandemic preparedness plans, so too can predictable false or misleading health messaging. Concertedly exploring ways to address this phenomenon on a national level in advance of the next pandemic will be crucial to saving lives.

WHO member states should strengthen international systems for sharing and allocating scarce public health resources. Groundbreaking global collaborations, such as the ACT-Accelerator and COVAX, were launched during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, public health leaders still lack confidence in current approaches to fairly allocate medical countermeasures during a future pandemic. Even if there were a global commitment around equity for all countries, implementing equitable allocation will continue to be very difficult in the future, especially if there are practical challenges and special requirements like refrigeration or IV administration. Empowering all regions of the world to save lives during a pandemic would increase equitable access to life-saving treatments and vaccines. Therefore, we need to build up manufacturing, distribution, and administration capacities around the world, paying particular attention to countries with poor infrastructure. This should happen now, rather than during a growing pandemic.

It is clear from Catastrophic Contagion that even after the terrible impact of COVID-19, more preparedness work needs to be done, new decisions need to be made, and additional resources committed. We need to expand the limits of our ability to respond.

saying that 'you who are fighting to save your country from a communist takeover are not alone.'



Heuler Andrey/Getty Images)

Quote:Your Eminence, for six weeks now, millions of citizens have been demonstrating and camping out in front of the army barracks all over Brazil to protest against the proposed communist takeover facilitated by rigged elections. Do you have a message for these courageous people and the Brazilian government?

Quote:So our address to God becomes an address to ourselves: God invites us to join with him, to leave behind the ocean of evil, hatred, violence and selfishness and to make ourselves known, to enter into the river of his love.

This is precisely the content of the first part of the prayer that follows: "Let Your Church offer herself to You as a living and holy sacrifice." This request, addressed to God, is made also to ourselves. It is a reference to two passages from the Letter to the Romans. We ourselves, with our whole being, must be adoration and sacrifice and, by transforming our world, give it back to God.

The role of the priesthood is to consecrate the world so that it may become a living host, a liturgy: so that the liturgy may not be something alongside the reality of the world, but that the world itself shall become a living host, a liturgy. This is also the great vision of Teilhard de Chardin: in the end we shall achieve a true cosmic liturgy, where the cosmos becomes a living host.

And let us pray the Lord to help us become priests in this sense, to aid in the transformation of the world, in adoration of God, beginning with ourselves. That our lives may speak of God, that our lives may be a true liturgy, an announcement of God, a door through which the distant God may become the present God, and a true giving of ourselves to God.

(Benedict XVI, Homily at the Vespers July 24, 2009, in the Cathedral of Aosta, L'Osservatore Romano, English online edition, July 29, 2009)