Welcome, Guest
You have to register before you can post on our site.

Username
  

Password
  





Search Forums

(Advanced Search)

Forum Statistics
» Members: 273
» Latest member: Anna Roome
» Forum threads: 6,455
» Forum posts: 12,074

Full Statistics

Online Users
There are currently 400 online users.
» 0 Member(s) | 397 Guest(s)
Applebot, Bing, Google

Latest Threads
Pope Francis says Synod’s...
Forum: Pope Francis
Last Post: Stone
Yesterday, 05:59 AM
» Replies: 0
» Views: 56
If We Want to Promote the...
Forum: Articles by Catholic authors
Last Post: Stone
Yesterday, 05:54 AM
» Replies: 0
» Views: 56
Fr. Ruiz: Renewal of the ...
Forum: Rev. Father Hugo Ruiz Vallejo
Last Post: Stone
Yesterday, 05:44 AM
» Replies: 16
» Views: 1,359
Fr. Ruiz's Sermons: Last ...
Forum: Fr. Ruiz's Sermons November 2024
Last Post: Stone
11-25-2024, 06:38 PM
» Replies: 0
» Views: 47
The Simulacrum: The False...
Forum: Sedevacantism
Last Post: Stone
11-25-2024, 06:36 PM
» Replies: 0
» Views: 69
Interview with the Editor...
Forum: The Recusant
Last Post: Stone
11-24-2024, 07:15 PM
» Replies: 0
» Views: 150
Purgatory Explained by th...
Forum: Resources Online
Last Post: Stone
11-24-2024, 09:03 AM
» Replies: 37
» Views: 4,021
Last Sunday after Penteco...
Forum: Pentecost
Last Post: Stone
11-24-2024, 08:57 AM
» Replies: 5
» Views: 11,666
Fr. Hewko's Sermons: Twen...
Forum: November 2024
Last Post: Stone
11-23-2024, 10:30 PM
» Replies: 0
» Views: 111
Fr. Hewko's Sermons: Feas...
Forum: November 2024
Last Post: Stone
11-23-2024, 10:27 PM
» Replies: 1
» Views: 144

 
  SSPX Archives: Is the New Mass Legit?
Posted by: Stone - 11-07-2022, 01:53 PM - Forum: New Rite Sacraments - No Replies

Taken from the extract reprinted in The Recusant #59, pages 22-26

This article, from the archive of the old SSPX US District website, originally appeared in 2011. Its opening words, which speak of Benedict XVI’s “liberation of the Mass of All Time” and bemoan how disobedient the bishops’ conferences had been to poor old Pope Benedict in the intervening four years, have not aged well. But since all that is a distraction, amusing though it may be, from the main point of the article, we have cut them out. Source: http://archives.sspx.org/news/is_new_mas..._legit.htm


Is the New Mass Legit?

[…] Archbishop Lefebvre always contested the legitimacy of the liturgical revolution of 1969. We will show this in three ways, of increasing importance: the legal aspect, the historical context, and the dogmatic context.

A. The legality of the New Mass

A law is legitimate only when it is duly promulgated by the lawfully constituted authority. But to this condition must be added another of supreme importance and essential to make it a law: it must be for the common good.[1] And precisely on this score, the Novus Ordo Missae is most defective as was attested at the time of its promulgation by no less than Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci:

Quote:“It is clear that the Novus Ordo no longer intends to present the Faith as taught by the Council of Trent… It represents, both as a whole and in its details, a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Mass as it was formulated in Session 22 of the Council of Trent. The “canons” of the rite definitively fixed at that time erected an insurmountable barrier against any heresy which might attack the integrity of the mystery.”[2]

The legal aspect here does not address so much the question of the suppression of the Old Mass, since its continuous existence was supported not only by the general norms of the new Code, (can. 20) but was openly admitted by Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum. Rather, the legal question we wish to study deals with the juridical validity of the promulgation of the NOM. Here, we are largely indebted to Itinéraires, the magazine of Jean Madiran, which was the French voice of Tradition years before the liturgical changes.

We need to look at the Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum (April 3, 1969) which allegedly promulgated the Novus Ordo Missae.[3] Most of the document describes the novelties and the final part never declares clearly what the Pope commands, forbids, or concedes. As to the final Nonobstant”, it is too generic to pretend to abrogate the perfectly clear legislative act of St. Pius V who promulgated the Mass of All Time. It appears that Paul VI never wanted to render his missal mandatory, with a truly juridical obligation. Why?

Itinéraires could say as early as 1970 that the future was already present: a constant process of mutation. Changed were the “original” edition of the Institutio Generalis (see below regarding the theological aspect), and the editio typica [typical edition.] of the Novus Ordo rite within months. The Apostolic Constitution in its second Latin edition was enriched with a new paragraph drawn from the French/Italian version, as we are to explain presently.[4]

• The original Constitution concluded rather innocently with: “From all that has been said so far regarding the New Roman Missal, in the end, we are now pleased to draw a conclusion.”[5] But, sensing that something was missing, the French and Italian translators (not to speak of other versions) boldly modified the text making it say: “We want (placet!) to give force of law (cogere et efficere!) to everything (quiddam!) which we have exposed above regarding the new Roman Missal.”

• The same translators also completed the authentic Latin text of the Apostolic Constitution, adding: “We order that the prescriptions of this Constitution become effective on  November 30th of this year, the First Sunday of Advent.”[6] Both these modifications and additions objectively constitute a forgery. This alone manifests the essential problem of a Constitution which some wish to be mandatory, but which, in its authentic tenure, is not.

• The question remains why Pope Paul VI seemed to substitute in fact another law to one which he did not abrogate by right. Worse is the other stunning question: why did he not say clearly that he did not want to abrogate the other? Why leave the minds of confused priests and laymen in the agonizing doubt that everything was taking place then as if the authors (which ones?) were imposing an obligation while letting you free to believe the opposite?


B. The Historical Context

Cardinal Gut, the Prefect who presided over the liturgical reform, gave a revealing insight into the pressure which led the Pope to promote the New Mass:

Quote:“We hope that, now, with the new dispositions, contained in the documents, this sickness of experimentation will come to a stop. Until now, the bishops had the right to authorize experiments but, sometimes, such limits have been trespassed and many priests simply did what they wanted. Then, what happened is that, sometimes, they imposed themselves. One could not, very often, stop these initiatives taken without authorization because they had gone too far. In his great goodness and in his wisdom the Holy Father yielded, often against his will.”[7]

As any decent legislator would do, Paul VI, in establishing his liturgical reform, elucidated the motives of such drastic changes. Here they are[8] :

• The reform is an act of fidelity to the “demands” of Vatican II.

• It is meant to revive the languid and awaken the sleepy.

• It wishes to supplant the “opaque glass” of the old Mass by another which will be a “transparent crystal” for “the children, the youth, the workers, and businessmen.”

• It wishes to be “a resolute gymnastic of Christian sociology.”

What about the “ecumenical” motive? As strange as it appears, Paul VI never invoked this motive. This omission rightly raised the eyebrows of Protestants and Catholics alike who, unanimously, recognized it on every page of the Ordo. Said an intimate friend of the Pope, Jean Guitton:

Quote:“There was with Pope Paul VI an ecumenical intention to remove, or at least to correct, or at least to relax, what was too Catholic, in the traditional sense, in the Mass and, I repeat, to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist service…”[9]

As to the motives given by the Holy Father, the most important would be the first, stating, in a democratic fashion, that this was the will of the conciliar bishops. He directs us to #50 of [Vatican II’s] liturgical decree Sacrosanctum Concilium. But was it really so? The said paragraph recommends indeed in generic terms a certain revision of the Mass. Yet, when these 2,000 bishops signed this paragraph, did they wish the suppression of the Offertory? Did they wish the addition of ad libitum new Canons to compete with the Roman Canon from the 3rd century? Did they want such ambiguous Ordinary texts of the Mass that these would immediately seem agreeable to men who have no faith in transubstantiation, the sacrificial oblation, and the Catholic priesthood? No! Certainly, the Council never wanted such a revolution.*

In the same context of the end of that fatal year, 1969, we need to add a letter addressed to the Pope, utterly unnoticed by the press, signed by 6,000 Spanish priests.[10]

Quote:“…We shall not speak of the doctrinal Catholic reasons; we could not expose them better than the document A Brief Critical Study of the New Order of Mass, which Your Holiness has recently received, accompanied by a letter signed by Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci, and which one would need to refute in details according to the doctrine of the Council of Trent if one wished to prove the orthodoxy of the Novus Ordo.

We shall not speak of this, but we shall bring up the Protestant reasons. Mr. Max Thurian affirms in La Croix of May 30, 1969 that, with the Novus Ordo. “non Catholic communities will be able to celebrate the Last Supper with the same prayers as the Catholic Church. Theologically this is possible.” Thus, if the celebration by a Protestant is theologically possible, this means that the Novus Ordo expresses no dogma with which the Protestants are in disagreement.

But the first of these dogmas is the Real Presence, essence and centre of the Mass of St. Pius V. Could a Protestant pastor celebrate the Novus Ordo if he was to perform the consecration in the intention used by the Catholic Church? “Lex orandi, lex credendi”: the liturgy is the highest expression of our faith. Where shall we go if, in the best of cases, the Mass silences the Catholic truths? If the good people, with no knowledge and against their will, are thrown into heresy, as long as they preserve the Christian morals (unfortunately, they do not), they will save their soul. But this will not be the case of those who will have pushed them into it. Most Holy Father, we do not want to endure this responsibility. This is why we boldly address this letter to you, after we begged of you in a previous one (November 5, 1969) to allow the universal Church to preserve the Mass of St. Pius V together with that of the Novus Ordo.”

In the name of the Pope, some Roman authority (which one?) demanded total submission and blind obedience from all these most devoted priests. The strangest thing is that none of them reacted and nothing was heard anymore of this tyrannical act.**  Moreover, an Italian committee was gathering signatures to petition Paul VI to abrogate the New Mass. Behold the judgment proffered by Vatican Radio: “Do you wish to be sure of disobeying the Pope: sign!”[11] Hence, whoever dares to make a petition to the Pope is in the state of disobedience! This idiotic idolatry to the goddess of false obedience, unheard of during twenty centuries of the Church, raised no protest.

* This rhetorical point has been made by several people down the years, including the late Michael Davies in more than one of his booklets. And whilst it is tempting to point to all the conservative passages in Sacrosanctum Concilium and claim that the new Mass is not sanctioned by Vatican II, the truth of the matter, alas, is that it very much is. Likewise, although many of the Council Fathers doubtless never intended to give birth to anything approaching Paul VI’s New Mass, there were surely others who very much did. A careful reading of Sacrosanctum Concilium is very revealing on this point. The many “conservative-” or “Catholic-sounding” passages serve no other purpose than to deceive the more “conservative” Council Fathers into letting the document pass. Each of these passages is effectively nullified by another which is far more radical and which would later be exploited to bring about the liturgical revolution known to us today as the New Mass. A thorough yet easy-to-read expose of this very point can be found in “The Great Façade” by Ferrara & Woods (The Remnant Press, 2002). - Editor

** “The strangest thing” indeed! Catholics faithful to Abp. Lefebvre’s fight, who oppose the SSPX betrayal, may not find it so strange. How many priests must have sent letters of protest to Menzingen in 2012? And yet today, what has become of them all? As a rule, people find it easier to be brave when they think that they are part of a group of like-minded comrades-in-arms; nobody likes the thought of finding himself all alone on the battlefield. Priests, being human, are no exception to this rule. History is made by the tiny number of heroic individuals who are brave enough to stand-out alone for what is right; the vast majority, who swim with the stream, are forgotten.

This cowardly servility reigns almost universally: it is the sentiment of most cardinals who dare neither speak to the Pope nor ask anything from him, not even to beg: they would be tagged disobedient to the Pope, and they accept this slavish tyranny. Is it not true that where truth and justice cease to be upheld, arbitrary despotism reigns, with no basis and no limits?

Does not the statement of Louis Veuillot express aptly the mindset of many churchman: “there is no one more sectarian than a liberal.”


C. The Theological Context

We have already alluded to the underlying dogmatic truths which the New Mass has silenced or covered in ambiguous terms, so as to please heretical communities. These half-truths (and half-errors) were markedly expressed in what can only be called the definition of the New Mass:

Quote:“The Lord’s Supper, or Mass, is a sacred synaxis, or assembly of the people of God gathered together under the presidency of the priest to celebrate the memorial of the Lord.”[12]


This text was found so offensive and raised such a worldwide uproar that Rome had to come up with something less heterodox. They revised the definition into something less heretical, but did not touch anything in the rite itself, the perfect expression of the early definition. Yet, this definition and this rite omits or denies the three doctrines which are at very heart of the Mass: the priest who, by his sacerdotal character, is alone capable of consecrating the Eucharist; the propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass; and the real and substantial presence of the Victim of Calvary through transubstantiation.

The SSPX has presented a book to the attention of Rome, The Problem of the Liturgical Reform. It explains how the new Mass is the plain expression of underlying principles drawn from the theology of the Paschal Mystery [NB: this refers to the false interpretation of the Paschal Mystery as found in the New Mass, as opposed to the correct one expressed in all of the traditional liturgical rites - sspx.org]. Here are the book’s conclusions:[13]

• The propitiatory aspect of the Mass has been effaced from the new missal because the Paschal Mystery holds that there is no debt to be paid in order to satisfy divine justice offended by sin. But, by refusing to see that the Redemption includes the act by which Christ paid to God the entire debt of pain incurred by our sins (the doctrine of vicarious satisfaction), the theology of the Paschal Mystery sets itself in opposition to a truth of the Catholic Faith.

• The structure of the new missal is that of a memorial meal that celebrates and proclaims the divine Covenant and not that of a Sacrifice. But, by considering the Mass as a sacrifice only insofar as it is a memorial which contains “in mysterio” the sacrifice of the Cross, the theology of the Paschal Mystery weakens the visibility of the sacrifice as taught by the Church, and can no longer “vere et proprie”- truly and properly - designate the Mass as a sacrifice. This cannot do justice to a truth of Faith, and seems thereby to incur the condemnation pronounced by the Council of Trent as regards the “Nuda commemoratio” - mere commemoration.

• The New Mass has displaced Christ the Priest and Victim, and replaced it with the Kyrios who communicates Himself to the assembly, making the Eucharist no longer a visible sacrifice but rather a mysterious symbol of Christ’s death and resurrection.

Insofar as it rests upon philosophies of the symbolic type, this notion of sacrament cannot be reconciled with the Church’s doctrine on the sacraments. Because this notion corrupts the branches of theology where it is introduced, it is dangerous for the Faith. Now, even if one wanted to contest the heretical elements of the New Mass, the sole refusal to profess Catholic dogmas quintessential to the Mass renders the new liturgy deficient. It is like a captain who refuses to provide his shipmen with a proper diet. They soon become sick with scurvy due, not so much to direct poison, as from vitamin deficiency. Such is the new Mass. At best, it provides a deficient spiritual diet to the faithful. The correct definition of evil - lack of a due good – clearly shows that the New Mass is evil in and of itself regardless of the circumstances. It is not evil by positive profession of heresy. It is evil by lacking what Catholic dogma should profess: the True Sacrifice, the Real Presence, the ministerial priesthood. This deficiency had already been denounced by Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci months before the New Mass was promulgated:

Quote:“The recent reforms have amply demonstrated that new changes in the liturgy could not be made without leading to complete bewilderment of the faithful, who already show an indubitable lessening of their faith. Among the best of the clergy, the result is an agonizing crisis of conscience, numberless instances of which come to our notice daily.”[14]


Footnotes
1 Michiels, Normae generales Juris Canonici (1929), p. 486, and in The Problem of the Liturgical Reform, Angelus Press (2001), p. 106.
2 The Ottaviani Intervention, p. 28, TAN Books (1992); cf. the PDF.
3 Itinéraires, #140, pp.39-2, February 1970.
4 Ibidem, p. 45.
5 “Ad extremum, ex iis quae hactenus de novo Missali Romano exposuimus, QUIDDAM nunc COGERE et EFFICERE placet.”
6 Our version for the French, published from La salle de Presse du Saint Siège (sic, in Documentation Catholique, n. 1541, June 1, 1969, col. 1 initio).
7 Documentation Catholique n.1551, Nov. 16 1969, p.1048. col. 2.
8 L'Osservatore Romano (Italian Ed.) of November 20-27.
9 December 19, 1993 in Apropos (17), p. 8ff. In Most Asked Questions About the Society of St. Pius X [online version here], Angelus Press (2011), p. 39.
10 December 11, 1969, Priestly Association of St. Anthony Mary Claret; see Itinéraires, #140, pp.32 ff.
11 La Croix, Jan 6, 1969, quoted by J. Mardiran in Itinéraires, #141, p. 9.
12 Institutio Generalis, §7, 1969 version.
13 The Problem of the Liturgical Reform, Angelus Press (2001), pp.80-98 passim.
14 The Ottaviani Intervention, p. 28, Tan Books (1992).

Print this item

  The Recusant #59: What About SSPX Masses today?
Posted by: Stone - 11-07-2022, 11:23 AM - Forum: The New-Conciliar SSPX - Replies (6)

The following article is taken from The Recusant #59, pages 18-21. It follows a reprint of Fr. Marc Van Es's Angelus article: The Attendance at Today's Masses.



...to anyone who has read the previous article carefully and understood it, one fairly obvious question suggests itself:

What About SSPX Masses today?

The old SSPX expressed, with great clarity, why one should not go to Indult Masses. What about the present day SSPX, ought we to go to Mass there? Not surprisingly, there does not exist an article by the SSPX explaining why one should avoid the SSPX. Instead therefore, let us try to apply what the old SSPX and Archbishop Lefebvre used to say and see how it applies to the SSPX in our time.

“To attend the ‘indult’ Mass is at least to approve implicitly and to encourage the work of the destruction of Catholic Tradition undertaken by the official hierarchy.” (Fr. Van Es)

Likewise, to attend the modern SSPX Mass is at least to approve implicitly and to encourage the betrayal of Catholic Tradition and the slide into liberalism and compromise undertaken by the SSPX hierarchy.

It is also means, at least implicitly, approving the work of the modern conciliar hierarchy with whom the SSPX have been working ever more closely and whom they no longer condemn.

“[The Indult Mass is a] means and bait to attract the traditional Catholics now considered as schismatics because they are no longer considered as “being in communion” with the present-day Rome, of liberal and modernist tendency.” (Fr. Van Es)

In our own time, the modernist infiltrators who are destroying the Church no longer consider the compromised SSPX as being “schismatic” or off-limits. Even the arch-modernist Pope Francis has decided to announce that he now provides jurisdiction for their confessions; their ordinations are also done with the approval of modernist Rome. Even SSPX marriages are performed by modernist Novus Ordo priests. SSPX leaders, for their part have said all sorts of flattering and obsequious things regarding the modernist authorities against whom the SSPX used to be fighting. To all intents and purposes, they can now be considered as being “in communion” once again by the present-day Rome of liberal and modernist tendencies, albeit still in a somewhat “canonically irregular” situation. That is how the modernist Romans consider them, and it is also how the outside world seems to see things. Small wonder then that they no longer talk about “neo-modernist” or “neo-Protestant” Rome or the “conciliar church” but rather speak about it as though it were one and the same as eternal Rome.

By the contrast, the Catholics who today are still considered as being “not in communion,” “schismatic,” “rebellious” and are the targets all the other epithets which used to be hurled at the SSPX, are undoubtedly those of what is called the Resistance. In our day, these are the Traditional Catholics who must not let themselves be baited or tempted with either Indult Masses or those of the SSPX.

“[The Indult Mass] constitutes a danger for the faith of the faithful, a danger which comes from the priests themselves who are celebrating it. Because to obtain this indult from the official hierarchy, these priests must fulfil the following conditions: ‘That it should be very clear that these priests have nothing to do with those who place in doubt... the doctrinal soundness of the Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI, in 1970 and that their position should be without any ambiguity and publicly known.’ ” (Fr. Van Es)

In our day, the SSPX Mass too constitutes a danger for the faith of the faithful, for the same reason. The SSPX’s change of position, from rejecting the legitimacy of the New Mass to accepting it, is a real one. It may not be as “clear and unambiguous” as the acceptance required by the Indult and one might still encounter an SSPX priest who didn’t get the memo or who is playing a game of pretending that he is still living in the year 2011. But the official corporate acceptance (“We declare that we accept…”) of the New Mass as “legitimately promulgated” by Paul VI, can be found in the April 2012 Doctrinal Declaration. It was signed, sealed and handed over to modernist Rome and can be found in the March 2013 issue of the SSPX’s
own internal bulletin, Cor Unum. What cannot be found anywhere is a corresponding repudiation, retraction, denial or rephrasing of that acceptance by a Superior General on behalf of the whole SSPX. Therefore, as the official position of the SSPX, it stands.

“In the hands of the official hierarchy, the Tridentine Mass serves therefore as a temporary means and bait to attract the traditional priests and people and to destroy at the same time the work of Catholic restoration, started by Archbishop Lefebvre, Bishop de Castro Mayer and their priests.” (Fr. Van Es)

In our own time, has not the compromised conciliar SSPX made great use of the Tridentine Mass to try to lure people away from the Resistance? How else does one explain the egregious articles and videos, noted in these pages and elsewhere, which play on the emotions of their audience, exhorting them to be grateful for their regular Tridentine Masses, etc.? Does not the unwillingness of the modern SSPX to spread itself thin, in the manner of the old SSPX, also play into this?

“Hundreds of priests, seminarians and faithful have been lured with the Tridentine Rite and now are made to forcibly return to the ranks and the spirit of the Council.” (Fr. Van Es)

With priests, some far less subtle means have been employed to stop them leaving the SSPX and joining the Resistance: threats, transfers, isolation, psychological torture, expulsion, destitution as well as the constant playing on their anxiety towards the perceived material discomfort. What is clear to any impartial observer is that all, priests, seminarians and faithful are being made “to return to the spirit of the Council.” That the SSPX can give its priests and faithful permission to take experimental “covid” injections or promote a Darwin-friendly cosmology which requires a wholly modernist interpretation of Sacred Scripture are two recent signs of this slide. That there is so little outcry or pushback visible from any SSPX priests or faithful in response to such things is itself another sign.

“This work of destruction continues by the approval of Indult Masses close to our important Mass centres... A good method to empty the latter or at least to prevent them from developing.” (Fr. Van Es)

Since this article first appeared in English in 1994, the SSPX around the world has seen many chapels close and even one of its seminaries (Goulburn, Australia). And yet in recent years it has not been the modernist Romans who are responsible for this “work of destruction” but the SSPX authorities themselves. With the approval of the General House, the British District has lost perhaps 40% of its Mass centres since the late-1990s. The SSPX priests, including the District Superior, tell the faithful of those closed chapels that they should go to the Indult Mass instead. To the modern SSPX it didn’t make sense for them to have a chapel in Portsmouth when the faithful could be sent instead to the Indult Mass said by the Franciscans in Gosport.

So the SSPX Masses and the Indult Masses are no longer the bitter rivals in competition with one another in the way they were when the Fr. Van Es article appeared; rather the SSPX see themselves as complementary, almost as another indult option to be added to the Fraternity of St. Peter, the Institute of Christ the King and all the rest. The very small number of priests available to the Catholic Resistance prevents it from having anything like the impact that the SSPX used to have, and yet there is quite a bit of evidence that wherever the Resistance gains a foothold, both conciliar diocese and the SSPX react accordingly. Here is one example. When Resistance priests began making regular visits to a small group of faithful deep in rural Suffolk in 2016, the SSPX decided that after all they would be able to send a priest on regular trips up to that out-of-the-way part of the world, despite never having done so before, and despite the fact that it was not anywhere near any of their Mass circuits and the fact that they had just shut down their only Mass centre in the whole of East Anglia, in neighbouring Norfolk. As the years went by, the diocese likewise took more of an interest in the Traditional Mass and after a little while, the once-a-month Indult Mass was transformed into a dedicated Indult priory with daily Traditional Mass and two Masses on Sunday, located in a privately owned chapel in Suffolk. Coincidentally this very same chapel had not seen the Tridentine Mass once in all the years since the Council until the Resistance started using it in 2016. Rumour has it that the SSPX District Superior declined any interest in setting up a regular SSPX Mass there because it had already become “too closely associated with the Resistance.” Who knows if that is true, but if so it would be both very amusing and quite telling.

“To attempt to restore the Traditional Mass without considering the historical context of the crisis of the Faith is to become a blind instrument in the hands of the conciliar hierarchy.” (Fr. Van Es)

Is this not the point upon which the priests and faithful of the Resistance have been insisting since the Resistance began? Our fight is not merely about the Traditional Mass. It is about the whole crisis in the Church, it is about the Faith, and to place the Mass above the crisis of Faith
in order of importance is tantamount to betrayal. Many faithful were given the grace of understanding the crisis in the Church and the SSPX’s fight against modernism. Many faithful were given the grace of perceiving the gravity of the SSPX’s betrayal of that fight in 2012 and 2013.

And yet a significant number of those faithful, alas, chose not to openly oppose the SSPX.

Their motive for acting thus, in most cases it seems, was access to the Traditional Mass. Correspondingly, many priests who could see what had happened, but who chose not to openly oppose their superiors, seem to have had as their motive access to the chapel and the faithful who attend it. To paraphrase Fr. Van Es one last time, have they not, in effect, become blind instruments in the hands of the conciliar church?


What Conclusion Can We Draw From All This?

That the precept of attending Sunday Mass is obligatory for all Catholics who have reached the age of reason but that some may be excused particularly those who are only near Masses “of Pope Paul VI” or traditional Masses said under the “Indult” or the Masses of the present-day SSPX. Why? Firstly, because of the danger for the faith coming from the priests who celebrate or from the faithful who attend them; secondly, legitimisation is given to the new liturgy and finally an approval more or less implicit of the work of destruction of the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Tradition.

“When they affirm that they have not given up anything, it is false. They have given up the possibility of contradicting Rome. They cannot say anything now. They must remain silent because of the favours they have received, and it is now impossible for them to denounce the errors of the conciliar church. Very slowly they accept... From the point of view of ideas, they turn very gently and end up admitting the false ideas of the Second Vatican Council, because Rome has granted them some favours for Tradition. This is a very dangerous situation.” - Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre


[Image: recusant.png]

Print this item

  Archbp Viganò: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is wrong to praise the diabolical revolution of Vatican II
Posted by: Stone - 11-07-2022, 10:23 AM - Forum: Archbishop Viganò - Replies (1)

Archbp. Viganò: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is wrong to praise the diabolical revolution of Vatican II
It appears that in recent decades the model of the Church which has inspired the proponents of Vatican II is that of the 'civitas diaboli,' judging by the support that the Holy See offers to globalist ideology, to the neo-Malthusian delusions of the ‘green economy,’ to transhumanism, and to the entire gender and LGBT repertoire.

[Image: GettyImages-457486164-810x500.jpg]

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, flanked by Prefect of the Pontifical House and his former personal secretary Georg Ganswein ® arrives at the Holy Mass for the closing of Extraordinary Synod held by Pope Francis at St. Peter's Square on October 19, 2014, in the Vatican City
Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images

Nov 7, 2022
Editor’s note: Below follows the full text of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s latest essay, “DE HOC MUNDO: The ‘secularization’ of authority as a premise for religious freedom and ecumenical dialogue theorized by Vatican II.”

Regnum meum non est de hoc mundo.” (My kingdom is not of this world) – Jn. 18:36

(LifeSiteNews) — The wound inflicted by the Second Vatican Council on the ecclesial body and – consequently – on the entire social body is anything but healed after sixty years, and indeed continues to become gangrenous with very serious damage before the eyes of all.

The enthusiastic and self-congratulatory tones with which the Bergoglian Sanhedrin praises the Council cannot cancel the ruin it has brought to the Church and to souls.

In my previous essay on the self-referentiality of the “conciliar church,” I highlighted some crucial aspects of this identity crisis, to which an element that I consider fundamental in understanding the subversive nature of the Council has recently been added. I am referring to the letter that Benedict XVI sent to the rector of the Franciscan University of Steubenville on October 7.

I have wanted to address this theme in greater depth: examining Ratzinger’s thesis is indispensable in order to identify the ideological premises and the methods of practical fulfillment of the revolution inaugurated by Vatican II on the doctrinal, moral, liturgical, and disciplinary fronts within the Catholic Church.


The permanent revolution

I have used the expression “revolution inaugurated by Vatican II” because it now seems clear to me that the intolerable excesses that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has indulged in for almost ten years are simply the coherent application in the ecclesial sphere of the principle of “permanent revolution” theorized in the social sphere by Marx, Engels, and Trotsky. The idea of “permanent revolution” arises from the observation of the ideologues of Bolshevism that the proletariat was not so enthusiastic about communist methods and that, if they wanted to spread class struggle throughout the world, it was necessary to force it by means of authority and make it irreversible: because only in the revolution does the χάος (chaos) occur that drives the subversive action against the social order.

A similar way of proceeding has been adopted by the Bergoglian church: since the conciliar revolution has not been welcomed with enthusiasm by the “Catholic proletariat,” the Central Committee of Santa Marta resorts to what Lenin called the “transcription of the revolution,” extending the mentality of Vatican II also into those doctrinal areas which initially none of its proponents would have dared to touch.

This is why the Synod on Synodality is necessary, that is, the establishment of a sort of “permanent Council,” or rather a “permanent aggiornamento” which makes itself the promoter of supposed instances of the base – the ecclesial version of the proletariat – such as the female diaconate and the “radical inclusion” of couples who are divorced and remarried, cohabiting couples, polygamists, and homosexual couples with adopted children who adhere to the LGBT movement.

It will be noted that these requests, which are all completely inadmissible from a doctrinal and moral point of view that is faithful to the Magisterium, do not constitute a faithful and spontaneous picture of what the clergy and faithful are demanding from the Supreme Authority of the Church, but rather the fraudulent fiction of Bergoglian propaganda, along the lines of the manipulations that have already been experienced earlier at the Synod on the Family that gave birth to the heretical monstrum called Amoris Lætitia.

And also in this case, reality is distorted by the revolution in order to adapt it by force to its own dystopian thought, with the presumptuous idea of having a solution that is better than that which the two-thousand-year-old wisdom of the Church or the will of its Founder intended to arrange. We are dealing with mass manipulation applied in the ecclesial field, using the techniques of the worst totalitarian regimes that today are adopted both by the globalist elite with the pandemic farce and the ecological transition, and also by the Bergoglian sect that is an ally and supporter of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Agenda 2030.


The Ratzingerian synthesis of the people of God and the Mystical Body

Benedict XVI’s letter of October 7, 2022, lays out what he had already stated in his speech to the German Parliament on September 22, 2011. His first formulation of his criticism of medieval Augustinianism,1 however, occurred in his dissertation “People and House of God in Augustine’s Doctrine of the Church,” presented in Paris long ago, on the occasion of the 1954 Augustinian Congress.

Recalling an idea developed by the Harnack school, Ratzinger stated:

Quote:The two Civitates did not mean any corporate bodies, but rather the representation of the two basic forces of belief and unbelief in history… The Civitas Dei is not simply identical with the institution of the Church. In this respect, the medieval Augustine was indeed a fatal error, which today, fortunately, has been finally overcome.

The theme addressed by the dissertation and briefly touched on by the letter is the ecclesiological doctrine of the Mystical Body, which, according to the author, ended with Pius XII’s Encyclical Mystici Corporis. In the last years of the 1950s, as Pius XII was ill, there was a resurgence of the rerum novarum cupiditas2 of the progressive theologians, for whom the supernatural dimension of the Church was too spiritual and therefore had to be replaced with the more seductive Augustinian phrase of “people of God,” easily interpretable both in an ecumenical key for its inclusion of the Jewish people of the Old Law and also in a democratic key for possible sociological and political developments. Obviously, this ideological definition reveals its modernist background perfectly coherent with the thought of Harnack and his pupil.

It will not escape notice that this theme of the 25-year-old Ratzinger would also be addressed by the Council, and therefore there is no surprise in the pride with which the Pope Emeritus refers precisely to the themes that were decisive in his theological formation and in his ecclesiastical career and which are now put into practice by his successor.

The philosophical approach of Joseph Ratzinger is essentially Hegelian, and therefore it is imbued with “absolute idealism,”3 following the scheme of “thesis-antithesis-thesis.” In this case, between the Catholic thesis of the Mystical Body and the progressivist antithesis of the people of God, Vatican II and the post-council supposedly ended by accepting the exact synthesis that he had theorized in his 1954 dissertation: “the Church is the people of God existing as body of Christ,” in which Christ gives himself to the believer as Body and transforms him into his own Body.

A bold thesis, on closer inspection, that risks confusing the substantial difference between the Body of Christ truly present in His entirety in the Eucharistic species and the Body of Christ realized mystically by the union of the living members of the Church with her divine Head. This confusion would have then permitted not a few progressive or completely heretical theologians to wink at Protestants thanks to the imprecise formulation of “Body of Christ.” It would equally have given Francis the opportunity to appropriate the daring pauper-eucharistic metaphors of Raniero Cantalamessa, who defines the poor as the “true Body of Christ,” whose “real presence” is supposedly realized among those who by welcoming them welcome Him.


Civitas Dei and civitas diaboli

The problem that arises is complex and developed: it consists of two aspects, one ad intra, relative to what the “conciliar church” is and wants to be; the other ad extra, relative to its role in the world and relations with other religions.

The ad intra aspect touches the nature of the institution, seeking to deconstruct it in a democratic and synodal key under the false pretext of a rediscovered “wider spiritual dimension” to the detriment of dogma; the ad extra aspect implies an “ecumenical” approach to the world, dialogue with sects and false religions, and the renunciation of the evangelization of peoples, replacing it with an ecological and philanthropic message that has neither dogmas nor morality.

The error of the “medieval Augustine,” according to Benedict XVI, supposedly consisted in having wanted to identify the Civitas Dei with the visible Church, while it is evident that that is valid as a model for the Christianitas: that is, the transnational society in which the laws and regulations achieve the Psalmist’s hopes: “Beatus populus, cuius Dominus Deus eius” (Blessed are the people whose God is the Lord – Ps. 143:15).

Doctrine teaches us that precisely because of her earthly dimension, the Church Militant is at the same time holy like the heavenly Jerusalem and sinful in her members, infallible in her Magisterium and fallible in her ministers. Nor is it true that St. Augustine or his medieval commentators pointed to the State as the civitas diaboli; on the contrary, they recognized its providential role in the economy of salvation and the need for civil authority to conform not only to the natural law but also to the Catholic Magisterium.

If there is a civitas diaboli recognizable by its ontological evil, it must be identified in the New World Order and in all those equally transnational organizations that work for the establishment of the globalist synarchy. The Bergoglian sect is no exception, which not by chance is an ally and supporter of these subversive criminals.


The Ratzingerian critique of medieval Augustinianism

Another very serious theological error that adulterates the true nature of the Church lies in the essentially secularist foundations of conciliar ecclesiology, which seeks to adapt the objective reality to its own ideological scheme that is in continual mutation.

I use the term “secularist” (laicista) because it seems clear to me that this vision is totally devoid of a supernatural gaze: that all-encompassing gaze that knows how to see earthly realities sub specie æternitatis (under the form of eternity) not for mere intellectual speculation but because it is animated by the theological virtues. In the nonsense of these intellectuals there emerges a disconsolate lack of passion, of guts, of blood: it is all theoretical, all established in order to aseptically frustrate (Christ’s) redemption and cancel the ordo christianus (Christian order), appropriating the Orwellian methods of cancel culture.

This error, insinuated in the texts of Vatican II and in particular in Dignitatis Humanæ concerning religious freedom and in Nostra Aetate concerning the relation of the Church with non-Christian religions and Judaism, places the “conciliar church” in deliberate discontinuity with the Catholic Church, “for the first time,” according to the words of Benedict XVI. He states:

Quote:It addressed the freedom to choose and to practice religion, as well as the freedom to change it, as fundamental rights of the liberty of man. Precisely by virtue of its most profound reasons, such a conception could not be extraneous to the Christian faith, which had entered the world with the claim that the State could not decide on the truth and could not demand any type of worship. The Christian faith claimed freedom for religious conviction and for its practice in worship, without thereby violating the right of the State in its own order: Christians prayed for the emperor but did not worship him. From this point of view, it can be said that Christianity, with its birth, brought the world the principle of freedom of religion.4

The misunderstanding is based on the double meaning that is attributed to the term “freedom of religion.” In the Catholic sense it indicates the freedom of the baptized person to publicly profess the true Faith without obstacles on the part of the state. In the modernist sense it refers to the abstract liberty of anyone with a belief to have the same right and the same liberty recognized on the part of the state.

Another misunderstanding arises when the state that recognizes particular rights and privileges for the Church is considered indifferently in comparison with the state that professes a false religion or declares itself “secular” and forbids the profession of the true religion or equates it with any other cult. The Church has always sought, over the centuries, to prudently reconcile her rights with the diverse situations of the nations in which Catholicism was not tolerated or was persecuted: provoking anti-Catholic rulers to persecute their Catholic subjects would be a reckless or imprudent act. Nevertheless, the fact that the Church can ask for tolerance for herself and for her faithful in situations of numerical minority does not imply that equal rights apply to other situations in which the Church sees her institutional role recognized by a state that officially professes to be Catholic.

And yet, in the name of the “freedom of religion” theorized by Vatican II, it was the hierarchy itself that asked nations like Spain or Italy to renounce recognizing it as the state religion, modifying the Concordats and abrogating the privileges that centuries of Catholicism had legally recognized. From this point of view, it is therefore improper to affirm that “Christianity, with its birth, brought to the world the principle of freedom of religion,” indeed, because of its diversity it had face the persecution and martyrdom of its own faithful. The first Christians did not ask to have the Most Holy Trinity admitted to the Pantheon, but rather to be left free to practice their own monotheism that so amazed the Romans. And they claimed this “freedom of religion” for themselves, certainly not for the pagans, whom they sought (successfully) to convert to the true Faith.

It seems that it is being forgotten that the Church is the holder of rights that derive directly from God, and that it is up to the state to recognize them and protect them, not merely as a quantitative matter, but because the Catholic religion is objectively true and socially indispensable to the pursuit of the common good. In this regard, it is worth quoting Leo XIII:

If there is a remedy for the evils of the world, this can happen in no other way than a return to Christian life and customs. This is a solemn
Quote:principle, that in order to reform a society in decadence, it is necessary to bring it back to the principles that have given it being, the perfection of every society is placed in the effort to reach its purpose: in such a way that the generating principle of the motions and social actions may be the same that generated the association. Therefore to deviate from the primitive purpose is corruption; returning to it is salvation.5

The fact that the state may deny the recognition of these rights is accidental, and the Church can also decide not to impose herself; but it is not up to her to claim rights for those who spread error, with the sole purpose of ingratiating herself with them or giving proof of an ecumenical zeal that is totally extraneous to her mission.


The falsification of reality to make a false idea seem true

On closer inspection, traditional thought is much more attentive to the role of persons who hold institutional positions – popes, kings, prelates and rulers, faithful and subjects – than to the abstract concept of the institution: because the Lord died to save our souls, not legal entities; and because the Church has the task of converting all peoples, including the rulers of nations, in such a way that even the role they play may be enlivened by grace and may contribute to the greater good of the people they govern.

This mythical “medieval Augustine” did not commit any error: neither in pointing out the supernatural paradigm to which the earthly authorities – both spiritual and temporal – must conform, nor in theorizing the subordination of civil power to religious power, with both together subject to the power of God.

The fatal error was committed rather on the strongly ideologized front of ecclesiastical neo-modernism and political progressivism, whose followers seek, without any foundation, to attribute to “political Augustiniansm” a doctrinal formulation that according to them does not correspond to the message of the first centuries. St. Augustine never claimed that the authority of the state is in some way detached from true religion. Instead, the Bishop of Hippo declared:

Quote:We say that [Christian emperors] are happy if they rule justly; if they are not lifted up amid the praises of those who pay them sublime honors, and the obsequiousness of those who salute them with an excessive humility, but remember that they are men; if they make their power the handmaid of His majesty by using it for the greatest possible extension of His worship; if they fear, love, and honor God; if more than their own they love that kingdom in which they are not afraid to have rivals; if they are slow to punish and ready to pardon; if they apply punishment only as necessary to govern and defend the state and not to gratify their own enmity; if they grant pardon, not that the violation of the law iniquity may go unpunished but with the hope that the transgressor may amend his ways; if they compensate the severe decisions that they are often constrained to make with the mildness of compassion and with munificence; if their luxury is as much restrained as it might have been uncontrolled; if they prefer to govern depraved passions rather than many nations, and if they conduct themselves this way not out of longing for a futile glory but for love of eternal felicity; if they do not neglect to offer to the true God the sacrifice of humility, clemency and prayer for their own sins. We say that Christian emperors endowed with such qualities that they are happy in the present age through hope, and in the age that follows they will be happy in the enjoyment of the reality itself, when the object of our waiting will have come true.6

In fact, it is not possible that a society composed of individual persons who each have the moral duty to recognize Divine Revelation and obey the Commandments of God and the authority of the Church may evade the same duty. Just as it is not true that the presence of other religions, numerically relevant regardless of the aberrations of doctrine that they teach, can legitimize an attitude of resigned acknowledgment of the marginalization of the one true religion, above all when this loss of consent and of support from the state and society is mainly due to the abdication of the Catholic hierarchy on the basis of conciliar deviations.


The sacrality of authority against totalitarian drifts

The formulation of St. Augustine – which is not exhausted in the “De Civitate Dei” but finds ample orthodox clarification in the entire corpus of his writings – should be read in coherence with Sacred Scripture and the Catholic Magisterium, which moreover are heirs of the vicarious vision of civil authority that belonged to the people of Israel itself, whose kings were representatives of the authority of God, as also were the Christian monarchs, beginning with Byzantium.

The sacrality of civil authority, inherited from Greco-Roman civilization, was so deeply rooted in the Christian world that it even assumed ceremonial connotations proper to Holy Orders: we may think of the anointing of the monarch with Chrism, or the liturgical vestments of the eastern emperor and the czars of Russia, the coronation ritual of the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and the prelate-like ceremonies of the doge of Venice. But also in the Comuni of Italy, apparently presented as more “secular” with respect to the monarchies, the concept of the well-ordered res publica was developed in the Middle Ages in coherence with the Faith and exemplified by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the frescoes of the “Allegory of Good Government” in the Palazzo Publico of Siena.

Artificially separating the harmony and hierarchical complementarity between spiritual authority and temporal authority was an unfortunate operation that created the premise, whenever it was realized, for either tyranny or anarchy. The reason is all too obvious: Christ is king of both the Church and of nations, because “all authority comes from God” (Rom. 13:1). Denying that rulers have the duty to submit to the Lordship of Christ is a very serious error, because without the moral law the state can impose its own will, regardless of the will of God, and therefore subverting the divine κόσμος (order) of the Civitas Dei in order to replace it with arbitrary free will and the infernal χάος (chaos) of the civitas diaboli.

And here we understand how both the one and the other civitas constitute a model to strive for and not an actuated reality, without either abstruse “spiritualizations” or coarse “realisms.” We also understand how behind these merely intellectual speculations lies the idealist approach of a Hegelian matrix, which arises from the desire to create a fictitious reality to be opposed to the reality willed by God, indeed to impose a Promethean alternative to the Passion of the Savior, which scandalizes precisely because of the redeeming cross and the fact that, in the economy of redemption, the cross is a royal throne: regnavit a ligno Deus (God reigned from the tree).

To believe that the world is able to not be Christian and can do without God by surviving on its own is a hellish and blasphemous chimera.

The secularization of ecclesiastical authority
On the other hand, those who wanted to give a theological patina to the secular nature of the State – as a necessary consequence of the “freedom of religion” that was theorized for individuals – necessarily had to deny the doctrinal premises of Scripture, the Fathers, and the Magisterium, appealing to an alleged corruption of the true Christian message in the work of the medieval thinkers. As can be seen, doctrinal deviation is always based on lies, historical falsification, and the ignorance of the interlocutors on whom they want to impose their errors.

The consequences are devastating and visible for all to see: if a societas perfecta is not required to recognize the Lord as its sovereign, this must necessarily also apply to the earthly Church, whose hierarchy can therefore decide to exercise its authority simply for the purpose of maintaining power and not within the well-defined boundaries established by Her divine Founder.

It is no coincidence that the post-conciliar period did everything to cancel the doctrine of the Kingship of Christ, tampering with the liturgical texts of the feast instituted by Pius XI in 1925 with the Encyclical Quas Primas.

Ratzinger speaks of “my ecclesiology,” affirming that the Church can neither call herself Civitas Dei nor can she presume to consider still current the doctrine that Pius XII defined in his 1943 Encyclical Mystici Corporis. The Pope Emeritus writes:
Quote:“But the complete spiritualization of the concept of the Church, for its part, misses the realism of faith and its institutions in the world. Thus, in Vatican II the question of the Church in the world finally became the real central problem.”

So central as to modify Catholic doctrine in order to appear à la page, dialoguing, inclusive, philanthropic. But it was precisely the loss of its role as Domina gentium (Lady, or mistress, of the gentiles) which led the “conciliar church” to a renounced, marginal position of social irrelevance: it is the pretium sanguinis (blood price) with which it stained itself, betraying the mandate of Christ and allowing itself to be polluted by the ideas of the world. And if the Church up until Pius XII had the Civitas Dei as a model and considered herself the Mystical Body of Christ, despite the weakness of her members, it appears that in recent decades the model which has inspired the proponents of Vatican II is rather that of the civitas diaboli, judging by the support that the Holy See offers to globalist ideology, to the neo-Malthusian delusions of the “green economy,” to transhumanism, and to the entire gender and LGBT repertoire.

30 October 2022

Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Regis



Footnotes

[1] The term medieval Augustinianism means the development of Augustinian thought, in particular relative to the political and social implications of the doctrine about the Civitas Dei and the civitas diaboli, which according to the innovators distorted the original thought of Saint Augustine, exasperating for example the theocratic vision of power, both civil as well as ecclesiastical. It goes without saying that this criticism is specious and is based on real historical falsifications: the idea that all power originated from God was already very clear to the Bishop of Hippo and its explanation in medieval political Augustinianism is perfectly coherent with Tradition.

[2] Sallust, Bellum Catilinæ, 48 Rerum novarum cupiditas Catilinæ animum incendebat. Catiline burned with desire for a revolution [literally: with the desire for novelty].

[3] Hegelian idealism marks the abandonment of Aristotelian logic (also called the logic of non-contradiction), in favor of a new so-called substantial logic. Being is no longer statically opposed to non-being, but is made to coincide with the latter by passing into becoming. Hegelian idealism, which resolves all the contradictions of reality in absolute Reason, will have an immanentistic outcome, recognizing in itself, and no longer in a transcendent principle, the goal and ultimate aim of Philosophy.

[4] Joseph Ratzinger, Opera omnia, volume VII/1, Gli insegnamenti del Concilio Vaticano II, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2016, Prefazione (Castel Gandolfo, 2 Agosto 2012).

[5] Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum, 27 (15 May 1891).

[6] De Civitate Dei, V, 24.

Print this item

  Women managers have improved Vatican more than men, pope says
Posted by: Stone - 11-07-2022, 09:05 AM - Forum: Pope Francis - No Replies

Pope says women's rights fight is 'continuous struggle', condemns mutilation



ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE, Nov 6 (Reuters) - Pope Francis said on Sunday the fight for women's rights was a "continuous struggle", and condemned male chauvinism as deadly for humanity and female genital mutilation as a crime that must be stopped.

Speaking to reporters on the plane returning from a four-day trip to predominantly Muslim Bahrain, he also praised women he has appointed to managerial jobs in the Vatican, saying they had improved things there.

He made no mention of campaigns to let women move on beyond that and become clergy - the pope and his predecessors have said the question of women

Francis was responding to a question about women protesting in Iran but turned to the topic of women's rights in general.

"We have to tell the truth. The struggle for women's rights is a continuing struggle," he said, listing historic struggles such as the fight for the right to vote.

"We have to continue struggling for this because women are a gift. God did not create man and then give him a lapdog to play with. He created both equal, man and woman," he said.

"A society that is not capable of (allowing women to have greater roles) does not move forward," he added.

Francis denounced male chauvinism, acknowledging there was still too much of it around the world, including in his native Argentina. "This chauvinism kills humanity," he said.

He also condemned as a "criminal act" female genital mutilation (FGM), repeating a major call he made in February on the U.N. International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation.

According to the United Nations, FGM is concentrated in about 30 countries in Africa and the Middle East but is also practiced by immigrant populations elsewhere. More than four million girls are at risk of undergoing FGM this year, the U.N. says.

He spoke of women he has appointed to managerial roles in the Vatican, mentioning by name Sister Raffaella Petrini, a nun who as the deputy governor of Vatican City is effectively the most powerful woman there.

"I have noticed that every time a woman is given a position (of responsibility) in the Vatican, things improve," he said.

He also cited the impact of five women he appointed to a department that oversees Vatican finances.

"This is a revolution (in the Vatican) because women know how the find the right way to go forward," he said.

Francis also has appointed women as deputy foreign minister, director of the Vatican Museums, deputy head of the Vatican Press Office, as well as four women as councillors to the Synod of Bishops, which prepares major meetings.

The Church teaches that only men can become priests because Jesus chose men as his apostles.

Print this item

  What Are Those Mysterious New Towers Looming Over New York’s Sidewalks?
Posted by: Stone - 11-06-2022, 05:50 PM - Forum: General Commentary - Replies (1)

What Are Those Mysterious New Towers Looming Over New York’s Sidewalks?
As the city upgrades to 5G wireless, the streetscape is changing. Not everyone is impressed.

[Image: d268194f41cdf22d14871f0d082b8421901568ac.webp]
A tall 5G tower at an intersection in Manhattan’s Chinatown.A new 5G tower on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown.Credit...Amir Hamja for The New York Times

NYT | November 5, 2022


A curiously futuristic tower recently appeared on the corner of Putnam and Bedford Avenues in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. A gray column topped by a perforated casing, at a whopping 32 feet tall, it reaches higher than the three-story brick building behind it.

Sixty-year-old Marion Little, who owns Stripper Stain & Supplies, the hardware store that has operated on that corner for 17 years, said that he and his neighbors had received no warning. One day there were workers outside; then the tower materialized.

“We were shocked because we had no idea what it was,” Mr. Little said. Since it’s right outside his store, people keep asking him about it. “They’ve been emailing me, calling me weekends, Facebooking me, like, ‘Yo, what’s that?’ and I’m sitting there like, ‘I have no clue.’”

The object in question is a new 5G antenna tower erected by LinkNYC, the latest hardware in New York’s sweeping technological upgrade.

New York City has an agreement with CityBridge, the team behind LinkNYC, that involves installing 2,000 5G towers over the next several years, an effort to help eliminate the city’s “internet deserts.” Ninety percent will be in underserved areas of the city — neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and above 96th Street in Manhattan.

Once the towers are activated, residents will have access to free digital calling and free high-speed Wi-Fi as well as 5G service. Many of the locations were previously home to pay phones.

According to officials in the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation, 40 percent of New York City households lack the combination of home and mobile broadband, including 18 percent of residents — more than 1.5 million people — who lack both.

The 5G towers, as well as fiber cables underground, will make up an infrastructure that carriers like AT&T and Verizon can use to provide better service to customers. Most of the towers, including the one on Mr. Little’s corner, have not yet been activated.

But as is often the case when something new appears on the New York City streetscape, people seem startled by the large structures — and some have expressed unfounded fears about 5G. They’re concerned about the towers’ sheer size and, in some cases, the wrecked views from third-floor windows. Mr. Little also questioned the practicality of placing the tower on his corner at the B26 bus stop: “The buses turn here,” he said. “It’s going to be easy to miscalculate and hit the thing.”

Another 5G tower popped up in Fort Greene, on the corner of Vanderbilt and Myrtle Avenues, again, by a bus stop — the B69. It looms alongside a three-story residential building with a ground-level liquor store.

Mark Malecki, 26, who moved to New York City in mid-October from Richmond, Va., has an intimate view framed by his third-floor bedroom window. “I wasn’t even quite sure what it was,” he said.

[Image: 62f42ee792caa00ea8138bdfbd3d680f7275e552.webp]

A 5G tower in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn is 32 feet tall.
The new tower at the corner of at Bedford and Putnam Avenues in Bedford-Stuyvesant caught residents by surprise.Credit...Amir Hamja for The New York Times

Just down the street lives Renee Collymore, a 50-year-old Brooklynite who said her family is “four generations deep in this neighborhood” and who serves as the Democratic liaison for the 57th Assembly District in Fort Greene. She has been wary of the tower since it appeared this summer.

As the head of the Vanderbilt Avenue Block Association, Ms. Collymore said, “Never have I heard one mention of residents asking for a tower to be placed where we live.” She plans to hold a meeting about it.

“Before this tower came, I had fine service,” Ms. Collymore continued. “What, a call dropped every now and then? So what. You keep going.”
In Manhattan’s Chinatown, where a tower cropped up on the corner of Mulberry and Bayard Streets, one resident of a nearby building declared it a “monstrosity.”

“Who wants to look at something like that?” she asked.

The towers are not the only 5G antennas being installed in New York City. Others are going up on city property, like traffic lights and streetlamps.
At the end of September, jackhammering could be heard outside of the six-story brick building on the Upper East Side where Chelsea Formica, 32, lives with her husband, Joe, and their infant son.

Ms. Formica was in New Jersey visiting her mother when Joe called. “He was like, ‘Hey, you know, they put something up outside of our window. I’m just laying here on the couch and it’s pretty big.’” Then Ms. Formica got home. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God,’ freaking out. It’s huge. It’s so big.”

Workers for the telecommunications company ExteNet had installed a cylindrical object roughly the size of a human being: a 5G antenna that is 63 inches tall and 21 inches in diameter, according to the company. It is accompanied by a box that is 38 inches high, 16 inches wide and 14 inches deep — about the size of a filing cabinet or a night stand.

The imposing antenna is mounted on top of a slender pole, three stories high — more than 30 feet in the air — and right in front of Ms. Formica’s living-room window. It’s also just steps away from where their 5-month-old baby sleeps, which makes Ms. Formica uncomfortable.

“People say that it is safe; the F.C.C. says it’s safe and everything,” she said. “We’re just worried that it’s so close to my son’s bedroom.”

Alex Wyglinski, the associate dean of graduate studies and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, said residents need not worry. He noted that 5G is non-ionizing radiation, on the opposite end of the spectrum from ionizing rays that people need protection from, like UV rays and X-rays.

In addition, Dr. Wyglinski said, the tower “cannot just blast energy everywhere. It’s going to be hyper-focused points of energy going directly to your cellphone.”

And while the towers are tall, “you’ll get used to it,” he said. Just like streetlights and traffic lights, he added, “this will get integrated into the cityscape.”

Ms. Formica and her next-door neighbor Virginie Glaenzer, whose window view is also dominated by the antenna, took a measuring tape to the sidewalk and discovered that the newly installed pole is slightly less than 10 feet away from the building, a distance that typically triggers a community notification process, according to the agreement between New York City and ExteNet.

Ms. Glaenzer and Ms. Formica contacted their local representatives and handed out fliers urging their neighbors to do the same. They would like to see the antenna removed — or at least moved across the street, alongside the Asphalt Green turf field and not next to a residential building.

Julie Menin, the New York City Council member who represents Ms. Formica, Ms. Glaenzer and the rest of District 5, said that she has, on behalf of her constituents, asked the city to hire a third party to conduct emissions tests on the antennas to ensure that they comply with federal regulations, and the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation has agreed to do so.

The city also asked ExteNet to move the antenna, but ExteNet said it had no plans to do so. Ms. Formica said she wouldn’t feel comfortable living next to it once it is turned on. She isn’t sure she would move out, she said, but she would consider her options. “I think I would look into a lawyer.”

As for Ms. Glaenzer, she laughed as she pointed to some crystals she’d placed in a bowl on the windowsill in front of the antenna. “They’re supposed to remove the radiation,” she said, shrugging. “You’re just holding on to whatever you have.”

Print this item

  Pope Francis preaches ‘fraternity’ divorced from Catholicism at interfaith meetings in Bahrain
Posted by: Stone - 11-06-2022, 05:15 PM - Forum: Pope Francis - Replies (1)

As mentioned several times on this forum, these errors of Pope Francis do not originate with him. He 'simply' regurgitates Vatican II Ecclesiology. In this case,

Quote:The Vatican II Council document "Unitatis Redintegratio" heretically teaches that "…the Holy Spirit does not refuse to make use of other religions as a means of salvation."

John Paul II's document "Catechesi Tradendae" repeats the same heresy.

This is not mentioned to excuse him only to point out that these errors have been repeated by all the Conciliar popes, not just Pope Francis.





Pope Francis preaches ‘fraternity’ divorced from Catholicism at interfaith meetings in Bahrain
Pope Francis used his speeches during the historic trip to promote his type of 'fraternity' and 'unity in diversity.' He did not promote the Catholic faith.

[Image: pope-grand-imam-810x500.jpg]

Screenshot/Twitter

Nov 5, 2022
BAHRAIN (LifeSiteNews) – During the course of his short visit to the predominantly Muslim country of Bahrain, Pope Francis has promoted irreligious “fraternity,” echoing controversial writings described as “blasphemous” and dangerous to the Catholic faith.

On Friday, Pope Francis took part in a number of events as part of his Apostolic Journey to Bahrain, including the closing ceremony of the Bahrain Forum for Human Coexistence; a private meeting with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar (now the pope’s regular supporter at such events); a meeting with the Muslim Council of Elders; and an Ecumenical Meeting for Peace.

At all of his public meetings, Pope Francis made repeated calls for “fraternity, dialogue, and peace,” adding to this a call for “unity in diversity.”

The 85-year-old Pontiff did not mention his belief in Jesus Christ during the interfaith addresses, speaking of the Savior only during a meeting with other Christians.

While the transcript of his numerous addresses contain limited quotations from Scripture – selectively used and truncated in order to promote the theme of “unity” – Francis’ various speeches chiefly drew from the 2019 Abu Dhabi document on Human Fraternity which he drew up with the Grand Imam, along with other ecumenical texts.


‘Religious freedom’ must underline society

Repeatedly quoting from the Abu Dhabi document in his address at the Bahrain Forum, Francis depicted the document as the key to resolving “the stormy sea of conflicts.” He stated that the document called for more “prayer” which must be rooted in “religious freedom.”


Francis echoed the theme of his September address at an ecumenical meeting in Kazakhstan – where he denounced “proselytism and indoctrination” – saying that “it is not enough to grant permits and recognize freedom of worship; it is necessary to achieve true freedom of religion.”

Quote:Not only every society, but also every creed is called to self-examination in this regard. It is called to question whether it coerces God’s creatures from without, or liberates them from within; whether it helps people to reject rigidity, narrow-mindedness and violence; whether it helps believers to grow in authentic freedom, which is not doing what we want, but directing ourselves to the good for which we were created.

He also re-iterated his calls for an end to the death penalty, speaking of the “right to life, of the need to guarantee that right always, including for those being punished, whose lives should not be taken.” As the Church, albeit in recent decades with stringent qualifications, has always upheld the legitimacy of the death penalty for murder, this is a rupture with Catholic doctrine.

READ: Swiss bishop condemns the Synod on Synodality as a ‘marketing campaign’ for heresy


Calls for ‘future of fraternity’ at Muslim council

Following a private meeting with the Grand Imam, Francis addressed the assembled Muslim Council of Elders, praising them for seeing “in extremism a danger that corrodes genuine religion” and promoting “respect, tolerance and moderation.” “As-salamu alaikum (Peace be upon you)!” said the Pope in his greeting at the mosque of the Sakhir Royal Palace.


Francis referenced the inter-religious document he signed only weeks ago in Kazakhstan, which originally stated that “pluralism and differences in religion…are expressions of the wisdom of God’s will in creation.”

He warned the Muslim leaders that “social, international, economic and individual evils, as well as the dramatic environmental crisis of our time on which we have reflected here today, ultimately derive from estrangement from God and our neighbor.”

[Image: Screenshot-2022-11-04-at-15.01.21.png]

Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tayyeb at the Muslim Council of Elders

Here, the Pope also issued one of strongest calls for “fraternity” which he made during the weekend, confusingly urging his audience to place “openness to heaven ahead of differences of earth.”

Quote:I believe that increasingly we need to encounter one another, to get to know and to esteem one another, to put reality ahead of ideas and people ahead of opinions, openness to heaven ahead of differences on earth. We need to put a future of fraternity ahead of a past of antagonism, overcoming historical prejudices and misunderstandings in the name of the One who is the source of peace.

“We are called to proclaim with the wisdom of our elders and fathers, that God and neighbor come before all else, that transcendence and fraternity alone will save us,” he stated, addressing the Elders as “brothers in Abraham.”

Pope Francis notably avoided promoting a Catholic understanding of God as Trinity, instead employing language such as “One who loves humanity, the One whose name is peace” or “the Creator.”


Ecumenical prayer meeting promoting ‘unity in diversity’

Shortly after, Pope Francis took part in an ecumenical Christian prayer meeting held in the cathedral of Our Lady of Arabia, in Awali.

Here he told the ecumenical leaders, “By our divisions, we have wounded the Lord’s holy body, yet the Holy Spirit, who joins all the members together, is greater than our divisions according to the flesh.”

[Image: Screenshot-2022-11-05-at-14.16.38.png]

Pope Francis addressing the ecumenical prayer meeting

“Consequently it is right to say that what unites us far exceeds what divides us,” he continued, “and that, the more we journey according to the Spirit, the more we will be led to desire and, with the help of God, restore full unity among us.”

Francis referred to Pentecost, the day on which the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles who then preached and converted thousands to the Catholic faith. Here Francis focused on the event to praise “unity in diversity,” with a heavy emphasis on diversity.

“Let us remember, though, that the unity to which we are journeying is a unity in diversity,” he said.

When he then mentioned the Apostles’ preaching mission on Pentecost, Francis again avoided promoting the Catholic faith, and instead asked, “Are we truly people of peace?”


Catholic teaching on evangelization

Pope Francis’ exhortations of a  “fraternity” and a “unity” divorced from the Catholic faith are controversial.

Pope Leo XIII condemned such arguments in his 1888 encyclical Libertas. Referring to the Church’s relationship with other religions, Leo wrote that the Catholic Church tolerates

Quote:certain modern liberties, not because she prefers them in themselves but because she judges it expedient to permit them, she would in happier times exercise her own liberty; and, by persuasion, exhortation, and entreaty would endeavor, as she is bound, to fulfill the duty assigned to her by God of providing for the eternal salvation of mankind.

Leo noted that “one thing, however, remains always true — that the liberty which is claimed for all to do all things is not, as We have often said, of itself desirable, inasmuch as it is contrary to reason that error and truth should have equal rights.”

While much of Francis’ Bahrain visit has been rooted in the Abu Dhabi document and the kind of “fraternity” promoted by his encyclical Fratelli tutti, both these texts are problematic for Catholics.

The Abu Dhabi text has been described as seeming to “overturn the doctrine of the Gospel” due to its promotion of equality of religions in a form of “fraternity.”

According to Church historian Roberto de Mattei, when “fraternity” is divorced from Christian charity, “far from constituting an element of cohesion in society,” it “becomes the source of its disintegration.” He argued that “if men, in the name of fraternity, are forced to live together without an end that gives meaning to their sense of belonging, the ‘ark’ becomes a prison.”

Fratelli tuttiF” has also been similarly condemned by former Papal Nuncio to the U.S., Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, as promoting a “blasphemous” form of brotherhood without God as well as “religious indifferentism.”

Viganò added that “religious indifferentism, implicitly promoted in the text Fratelli tutti, which defines as ‘a good for our societies’ the presence of any religion – instead of ‘the liberty and exaltation of Holy Mother Church’ – denies in fact the sovereign rights of Jesus Christ, King and Lord of individuals, of the societies and of nations.”

Print this item

  The Judgement of Nations Series
Posted by: Stone - 11-05-2022, 06:32 AM - Forum: Catholic Prophecy - Replies (7)

A series of short articles reviewing various approved Church mystics and prophecies. A reminder that:

Quote:When the Church approves private revelations, she declares only that there is nothing in them contrary faith or good morals, and that they may be read without danger or even with profit; no obligation is thereby imposed on the faithful to believe them. Speaking of such revelations as (e.g.) those of St. Hildegard (approved in part by Eugenius III), St. Bridget (by Boniface IX), and St. Catherine of Siena (by Gregory XI) Benedict XIV says: "It is not obligatory nor even possible to give them the assent of Catholic faith, but only of human faith, in conformity with the dictates of prudence, which presents them to us as probable and worthy of pius belief)" (De canon., III, liii, xxii, II).  [Taken from the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia]




The Judgment of Nations - I
The Latter Times & the Judgment of Nations

TIA / Margaret C. Galitzin [adapted]| May 13, 2021


Recently I came across a small book titled The Latter Times [Los Ultimos Tiempos] by a Spanish Doctor of Sacred Scripture, Fr. Benjamin Sanchez, born in 1905. (1) This short work, which examines public and private prophecies about the Latter Times, is quite interesting and significant for our days. This is particularly so because many Catholics, overwhelmed by the apostasy and sin of our days, are wrongly thinking that we are in the End Times that will immediately precede the Last Judgment.

Based on Scripture and prophecies that agree with it, Fr. Sanchez correctly situates our disastrous days in History. The results of his study confirm the prophecies of Fatima and Quito, as well as those of the great Marian prophet St. Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort, which speak of a great chastisement to be followed by a long period of peace, the Reign of Christ through Mary [...].

[Image: G010_Orv.jpg]

Detail of the Last Judgment – Cathedral of Orvieto

In general, the Scriptures and private prophecies that Fr. Sanchez sets out warn us of a great chastisement that will come over all humanity – a Judgment of Nations – to be followed by a long period of peace and universal well-being. When he uses the expression Latter Times, he emphasizes that it does not refer to the end of the world created by God. In the great universal catastrophe that is coming, the world will not be completely annihilated.

Rather, the remnant of mankind that survives the chastisement will be changed and purified. With a zeal for the glory of Our Lord and Our Lady, they will build a better world. Many of the prophecies speak of a great leader, a man sent by God, a prophetic figure beloved by Our Lady, an Eliatic figure, who will lead this restoration.

In the era that will follow, Fr. Sanchez notes, “Christ will reign from one end of the world to the other, and all His enemies will fall at his feet (1 Cor 15:25) to render Him their vassalage. His Church will be gloriously triumphant throughout the earth. (2)

The End Times or Final Judgment, will take place only after that period of God’s triumph on earth. The great chastisement and purification of the world should not be confused with the Final Judgment, Fr. Sanchez emphasizes, for Scriptures tells us that not even the Angels of Heaven know the day or the time of the latter.

What is announced in Scripture and prophecies, which will be presented in this series of articles, is not the end of the world, but rather what he calls the Judgment of Nations that will take place during a Great Chastisement that will come upon a world that has lost the faith and grievously transgressed all the laws of God. It is a Chastisement that will take place in our times foretold by Scriptures and more clearly described in various approved prophecies.

Let us begin this series with a look at just several of the quotes from Scripture (3) that confirm a Chastisement or Judgment of Nations, to be followed by a time when a purified remnant will fear and glorify the Lord.


Scripture on a Great Chastisement & Purified Remnant

Isaiah prophesizes a Latter Times when the earth, profaned by its inhabitants, will be devastated and only a few of the faithful will remain:

[Image: G010_Isa.jpg]
Isaiah the Prophet, Congonhas do Campo, Brazil

“Behold the Lord shall lay waste the earth, and shall strip it, and shall afflict the face thereof, and scatter abroad the inhabitants thereof. And it shall be as with the people, so with the priest: and as with the servant, so with his master: as with the handmaid, so with her mistress: as with the buyer, so with the seller: as with the lender, so with the borrower: as with him that calleth for his money, so with him that oweth.

“With desolation shall the earth be laid waste, and it shall be utterly spoiled: for the Lord hath spoken this word. The earth mourned, and faded away, and is weakened: the world faded away, the height of the people of the earth is weakened. And the earth is infected by the inhabitants thereof: because they have transgressed the laws, they have changed the ordinance, they have broken the everlasting covenant.

“Therefore shall a curse devour the earth, and the inhabitants thereof shall sin: and therefore they that dwell therein shall be mad, and few men shall be left.” (24:1-6)

The small number of survivors of this great chastisement is foretold in the imagery of the few olives that still cling to the tree after it has been shaken:

“It shall be thus in the midst of the earth, in the midst of the people, as if a few olives, that remain, should be shaken out of the olive tree: or grapes, when the vintage is ended.” (Is 14:13)

What is important to note is that some inhabitants, albeit few, will remain after the Great Chastisement, which is a definitive sign that it is not the end of the world.


The Judgment of Nations

The Day of the Lord announced in Sophonias will be the Judgment of the Nations, where each will receive just punishment and the remaining faithful will be led by a “chosen (pure) lip” so that all might serve and give glory to the Lord:

[Image: G010_Bab.jpg]
The destruction of Babylon, above, became the archetype of all divine chastisements

“The great day of the Lord is … near and exceeding swift … That day is a day of wrath, a day of tribulation and distress, a day of calamity and misery, a day of darkness and obscurity, a day of clouds and whirlwinds … And I will distress men, and they shall walk like blind men, because they have sinned against the Lord: and their blood shall be poured out as earth, and their bodies as dung. …

“For my judgment is to assemble the Gentiles, and to gather the Kingdoms: and to pour upon them my indignation, all my fierce anger: for with the fire of my jealousy shall all the earth be devoured. Because then I will restore to the people a chosen lip, that all may call upon the name of the Lord, and may serve Him with one shoulder.” (1: 14-17, 3: 8-9)


A Renewed World, Not the Latter Times

A Great Chastisement will come over the earth, Zacharias foresees, where only a third part will be left. These, however, will be tried and purified and will call on the name of the Lord:

“And there shall be in all the earth, saith the Lord, two parts in it shall be scattered and shall perish: but the third part shall be left therein.

“And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined: and I will try them as gold is tried. They shall call on my name, and I will hear them. I will say: Thou art my people: and they shall say: The Lord is my God.” (13:8-9)

This should suffice to demonstrate that the universal Judgment of Nation, which will be something all will see and experience, is not the Final Judgment, which will be at the end of the world.

Continued



1. Rector of the Seminary of Zamora and Canon of the Cathedral of Zamora, he was a prolific writer on Scriptures, the Four Last things, Communism, and promoter of devotion to Our Lady and praying the Rosary.
2. Rev. Benjamín Martin Sánchez, The Last Times: Public and Private Prophecies, English Trans. by André Marie Bonzaález, TOP, 1st ed., Imprimatur: Bishop Eduardus Zamorensis, 1968, p. 9.
3. Other Scriptural references cited by Fr. Sanchez include the following: On the remnant who will convert after the chastisement: Is 6: 11-13, Is 66: Is 66: 15-16,19,21, 2 Pet 3:10-13); On the conversion of the remaining Jews in Latter Times: Osee 3:5, Mach2:7, Deut 4:30, Is 4:3, Soph 3:13; On the Judgment of Nation: Soph 1:8-9, 13.

Print this item

  Military Researchers Develop Corpse-Eating Robots
Posted by: Stone - 11-04-2022, 09:55 AM - Forum: General Commentary - No Replies

Military Researchers Develop Corpse-Eating Robots

[Image: img.jpg?w=2000&ssl=1]


I didn't believe this headline when I saw it but wired.com is considered a reputable source. And from the second source, "The project began in 2003 and is a DARPA-funded venture.."

So for your 'twilight zone' reading of the day: 


https://www.wired.com/2009/07/military-r...ng-robots/


https://www.mysterious-times.com/2018/05...ng-robots/

Print this item

  Pfizer, BioNTech start COVID-flu combination vaccine study
Posted by: Stone - 11-04-2022, 08:03 AM - Forum: Health - No Replies

Pfizer, BioNTech start COVID-flu combination vaccine study


Nov 3 (Reuters) - U.S. drugmaker Pfizer Inc (PFE.N) and its German partner BioNTech SE have started an early-stage study to evaluate a combination vaccine targeting COVID-19 and influenza, the companies said on Thursday.

The single-dose vaccine candidate is a combination of Pfizer's mRNA-based flu shot and the companies' Omicron-tailored COVID-19 booster shot.

The early-stage study, which is being sponsored by BioNTech, aims to evaluate the combination shot's safety, tolerability and immunogenicity, or the ability to generate immune response.

The trial is being conducted in the United States and the companies aim to enroll 180 volunteers between the ages of 18 and 64. The first participant in the study was dosed earlier this week.

Rivals Moderna Inc (MRNA.O) and Novavax Inc (NVAX.O) are also developing combination vaccines targeting both COVID-19 and influenza. read more

Print this item

  Benedict names “always and only Pope Francis” in the Mass
Posted by: Stone - 11-04-2022, 08:00 AM - Forum: Sedevacantism - No Replies

Benedict names “always and only Pope Francis” in the Mass


November 2, 2022 (Steven O’Reilly adapted - emphasis mine unless otherwise stated) – Over the last couple weeks or so, I commented on an unintended humorous account, as told by Br. Bugnolo, regarding Andrea Cionci applying the hermeneutical approach of his supposed Ratzinger Code to certain comments made by Archbishop Ganswein with regard to Don Minutella and Benepapism.  My article, and the link to Br. Bugnolo’s, may be found in a Roma Locuta Est article titled Ratzinger Code: “Don’t believe your lying eyes”.  This article, in turn, provoked a response from Andrea Cionci, which, in turn, led to my penning a rebuttal article.  My rebuttal, and the link to Cionci’s original article, may be found in a Roma Locuta Est article titled A Response to Andrea Cionci and his “Ratzinger Code”.  To date, Signor Cionci has not responded to the rebuttal.  I don’t think he will.

Now, as noted, these articles address some comments Archbishop Gänswein had made to certain priests regarding the Benepapist controversy.  However, there is one comment in particular that Gänswein made I’d like to highlight here, as I had not specifically addressed it in my other articles above.  The commentary below is part of Br. Bugnolo’s summary account of Gänswein’s statements made during a phone conversation with a priest associated with Don Minutella.  Bugnolo writes (emphasis added):

Quote:In summary, the phone call:  Don Minutella is a nut, theologically out of his mind. His book is not worth the paper it is written on. That Pope Benedict is totally faithful to Pope Francis. That he names not himself but Pope Francis in the Canon of the Mass. That there are errors in the Declaratio, but that it remains valid.  This communication was like a kick in the legs, to use a metaphor from soccer.  The telephone call ended by asking Father Gebhardt to seek spiritual counsel to avoid further canonical penalties.


Again, my articles above deals with this commentary, and the rest of Br. Bugnolo’s unintended humorous account of Cionci’s attempt to explain away the meaning of Gänswein’s comments regarding Don Minutella, et al.

The point though, in this article, is simply to highlight that here we have confirmation from Gänswein, as if we needed it, that Benedict clearly does not believe himself to be pope, as he “names not himself but Pope Francis in the Canon of the Mass.” Attempts to dismiss Gänswein’s words, or through any attempt to reinterpret them to mean anything else in light of a supposed Ratzinger Code are obviously desperate.  The whole “Plan B”[1] and “Ratzinger Code” house of cards has collapsed.

Indeed, in the actual video, Don Minutella said the Gänswein stated that Benedict does not name himself in the Canon of the Mass but “always and only Pope Francis” (“sempre e soltanto…“) [See video found here; time stamp 16:10 – 16:18]. Those Benepapists who believe Benedict XVI intentionally retained his Petrine office really have no good answer to this.  If Benedict believes himself pope, then why is he lying during the Mass?

Recently, a[s] noted above, we have considered Cionci’s comical attempts to explain away some of what Gänswein said to the 8 priests (see Ratzinger Code: “Don’t believe your lying eyes”) as well as Cionci’s nonsensical attempt to defend his position on “Pontefice Sommo”[ even after conceding the truth of my counter-evidence (see A Response to Andrea Cionci and his “Ratzinger Code”), but if he offered a “Ratzinger Code” explanation of Benedict naming “always and only” Francis in the Mass, I have not seen that in any article to date.

Now, by coincidence, on Ann Barnhardt’s site, she recently entertained a question from one of her readers as to whether it was okay to go to a Mass where a priest names Francis in the canon of the Mass (see here). Ms. Barnhardt answers in the affirmative, and states her reasons.  But neither the original question or Ms. Barnhardt’s answer consider what Benedict does. Whether she does elsewhere, I don’t know.  Regardless, the difficulty remains that Benedict names “always and only” Pope Francis in the Mass, and not himself.  For those believing Ms. Barnhardt’s “substantial error” theory — a theory, and its variants, already back on its heels; this undermines any theory which alleges Benedict still believes himself pope in some way alongside Francis because Benedict “always and only” names Pope Francis.

On what grounds can Benepapists credibly attack those who accept the validity of Benedict’s resignation? The obvious question here is, if Benedict does not believe himself pope, why should anyone else?

Print this item

  In Paradisum, from the Traditional Catholic Requiem Mass
Posted by: Stone - 11-04-2022, 07:36 AM - Forum: For the Souls in Purgatory - No Replies

In Paradisum
from the Traditional Catholic Requiem Mass

This is the traditional, simple and wonderful Gregorian chant as found in the rites of the funeral Mass for the Roman Church.
The Latin lyrics and English translation follow: 

In paradisum deducant te Angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Ierusalem.  Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere æternam habeas requiem

May angels lead you into paradise; upon your arrival, may the martyrs receive you and lead you to the holy city of Jerusalem.  May the ranks of angels receive you, and with Lazarus, the poor man, may you have eternal rest.



Print this item

  The Catechism of the Council of Trent 1923 [Audiobook]
Posted by: Stone - 11-04-2022, 07:00 AM - Forum: Resources Online - No Replies

The Catechism of the Council of Trent


Video description

Catechism of the Council of Trent: All those who had part in the work of the Catechism were instructed to avoid in his composition the particular opinions of individuals and schools, and to express the doctrine of the universal Church, keeping especially in mind the decrees of the Council of Trent. On November 2, 1563 the Council of Trent enjoined on all bishops to see that the Catechism should be faithfully expounded to the people by all parish priests. January 17, 1566 Pope Saint Pius V succeeded Pope Pius IV. One of the first acts of the new Pontiff was to point a number of expert theological revisors to examine every statement in the Catechism from the viewpoint of doctrine.

This Catechism is unlike any other summary of Christian doctrine, it enjoys a unique authority among manuals. It was issued by the express command of the Ecumenical Council of Trent. It subsequently received the unqualified approval of many Sovereign Pontiffs. In his Bull of June 14, 1761, Pope Clement XIII said that the Catechism contains a clear explanation of all that is necessary for salvation and useful for the faithful, that it was composed with great care and industry and has been highly praised by all, that by it in former times the faith was strengthened, and that no other catechism can be compared with it. He concluded than, that the Roman Pontiffs offered this work to pastors as a norm of Catholic teaching and discipline so that there might be uniformity and harmony in the instructions of all.

Pope Leo XIII wrote that, “This work is remarkable at once for the richness and exactness of its doctrine, and for the eloquence of its style; it is a precious summary of all theology, both dogmatic and moral. He who understand it well, will have always at his service those aids by which a priest is enabled to preach with fruit, to acquit himself worthily of the important ministry of the confessional and of the direction of souls, and will be in a position to refute the objections of unbelievers.” Pope Saint Pius X declared that pastors should give catechetical instructions, and for this purpose they should use the Catechism of the Council of Trent.

In addition to Popes and Councils, many Cardinals, Bishops, and other very distinguished and learned ecclesiastics, distinguished for their learning and sanctity, vied with one another in eulogizing the Catechism of Trent. Among other things they have said that not since the days of the Apostles has there been produced in a single volume so complete and practical a summary of Christian doctrine as this Catechism, and that, after the Sacred Scriptures, there is no work that can be read with greater safety and profit.

Cardinal Valerius, the friend of St. Charles Borromeo, wrote of the Catechism: “This work contains all that is needful for the instruction of the faithful; and it is written with such order, clearness, and majesty that through it we seem to hear holy Mother the Church herself, taught by the Holy Ghost, speaking to us. ... It was composed by order of the Fathers of Trent under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and was published by the authority of the Vicar of Christ.” Salmanticenses, the great Carmelite commentators on St. Thomas, paid the following high tribute to the Catechism: “The authority of this Catechism has always been of the greatest in the Church, because it was composed by the command of the Council of Trent, because its authors were men of highest learning, and because it was approved only after the severest scrutiny by Popes Pius V and Gregory the XIII, and has been recommended in nearly all the Council that have been held since the Council of Trent.”

The preceptor of St. Francis de Sales said: “The Catechism of the Council of Trent was inspired by the Holy Ghost.” Dr. John Hagan, Rector of the Irish College in Rome, writes thus: “The Roman Catechism is a work of exceptional authority. At the very least it has the same authority as a dogmatic encyclical, it is an authoritative exposition of Catholic doctrine given forth, and guaranteed to be orthodox by the Catholic Church and her supreme head on earth. The compilation of it was the work of various individuals; but the result of their combined labors was accepted by the Church as a precious abridgment of dogmatic and moral theology. All official documents have occasionally been issued by Popes to explain certain points of Catholic teaching to individuals, or to local Christian communities; whereas the Roman Catechism comprises practically the whole body of Christian doctrine, and is addressed to the whole Church. Its teaching is not infallible; but it holds a place between approved catechisms and what is de fide.” 

Translated into English with notes by Fr. John A. McHugh and Fr. Charles J. Callan. Imprimatur 1923.






Print this item

  Benedict XVI Has Himself Painted As "Pope Emeritus"
Posted by: Stone - 11-04-2022, 06:46 AM - Forum: General Commentary - No Replies

Benedict XVI Has Himself Painted As "Pope Emeritus"

[Image: l2xp7yo0aind6o3bffyk2pt3izw8l5cxxv1rh6k....ormat=webp]


gloria.tv | November 4, 2022

Russian-born artist Natalia Tsarkova who lives in Rome and officially portrayed John Paul II (2000) and Benedict XVI (2007) has now painted the latter as “Pope emeritus” as well.

Tsarkova told EWTN.com about the rosary she painted in Benedict’s hand that it is “part of him; it’s his favorite rosary.” Other details of the picture include the pectoral cross and the fisherman’s ring, the sign of the Petrine office which Francis doesn't wear.

The painter unveiled the portrait in the presence of Benedict at a 3 November ceremony at Palazzo Cesi, a hotel near the Vatican.

The image shows Msgr. Georg Ratzinger (+2020) and Archbishop Georg Gänswein, as well as the women caring for Benedict. Other details include Benedict's red-haired cat washing itself in the background and a reflection in a jug showing Benedict XVI playing the piano.



[Image: cayk8fq0ztj4sd6b8lwp89himqlblyiv21lfwab....ormat=webp]


[Image: qhphj05xzrh3buvbdmc2y37olb20l3jbfrf529w....ormat=webp]


[Image: l6rlur8ezkmkzfcfa7to3nt4x9nhp04s1wzrilu....ormat=webp]

Print this item

  UK man becomes first to receive bank microchip implant for making purchases
Posted by: Stone - 11-03-2022, 07:12 AM - Forum: Global News - No Replies

UK man becomes first to receive bank microchip implant for making purchases
One British former MP and commentator predicted that microchip implants are ‘the future for all of us.’

[Image: man-being-microchipped-810x500.png]

Man receiving microchip implant in left hand
wocomoDOCS / YouTube

Nov 2, 2022
(LifeSiteNews - adapted) — In a major victory for transhumanism, the first British man has been implanted with a bank card microchip, enabling him to make purchases with only the tap of his hand.

The British daytime program This Morning shared last week that Arnie Szoke, 40, from West London, is the first British man to have his banking information surgically implanted in him via chip.

‘It’s like a normal card but you have to be more precise where you tap,” the NHS healthcare assistant told The Sun. “It means I don’t have to keep a wallet with me all the time.” He added that the last time he had used cash, “£40 went missing along with my work pass card.”

Like a normal bank card, his microchip will eventually expire, and will need a £130 replacement procedure in 2029, according to The Sun.

Former MP Gyles Brandreth, who regularly appears on This Morning, raved about the technology as “marvelous,” according to the Daily Mail, predicting, “’It’s going to be the future for all of us. I think when we’re babies, like a pet, our cat has got an implant so it can go through the cat flap and it identifies it.”

“I want that to happen,” Brandreth continued. “And even in my forehead, it would light up with my name.”

Reactions to This Morning’s coverage were mixed, with some celebrating the technology, and others wary of its potential consequences.

The chip reminded another viewer of the “Mark of the Beast” foretold in Scripture.


World record-holding U.K paralympic athlete Ellie Simpson, who has cerebral palsy, had no qualms about the device, by contrast.


Szoke bought the chip, which costs £220 ($249), from the British-­Polish start-up ­Walletmor. The product’s website explains that the chip is used together with an “independent digital wallet” called Purewrist, and that it can be surgically implanted in a “medical aesthetics clinic.”

While it remains to be seen how bank microchip implants will catch on in the U.K. and other countries, thousands of people in Sweden have already been implanted with microchips to replace traditional forms of payment information, boarding passes, government identification, and key cards.

Implanted microchips are a major feature of, and step towards transhumanism, which is an effort to “transcend biology through technology,” as Dr. Joseph Mercola has explained.

Privacy advocates have noted that microchip implants, if widely adopted, could usher in unprecedented levels of totalitarianism by which governments could track and control a spectrum of human behaviors.

Edwin Black, investigative journalist and author of War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, has pointed to China as an example of this kind of authoritarianism, as it already punishes and rewards its citizens through a social credit system programmed into their smartphones.

For example, during COVID, China used a color-coded system to restrict its citizens’ freedom of movement according to their “vaccination” status. A number of Chinese citizens reported this summer that the government turned their health codes to “red” to prevent their travel to banks to protest the freezing of their funds.

Many Christian commentators have noted that implanted bank microchips bear an eerie resemblance to the “Mark of the Beast” from the Book of Revelation in the Bible.

As stated in the Bible: “And he shall make all, both little and great, rich and poor, freemen and bondmen, to have a character in their right hand, or on their foreheads. And that no man might buy or sell, but he that hath the character, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

In Revelation, St. John writes about a “second beast” of the Apocalypse who would force people to be branded and make it illegal for anyone to participate in commerce without the brand.

Print this item

  St. Robert Bellarmine: On the End Times
Posted by: Stone - 11-03-2022, 06:35 AM - Forum: Resources Online - No Replies

Print this item