| Welcome, Guest |
You have to register before you can post on our site.
|
| Online Users |
There are currently 579 online users.
» 1 Member(s) | 574 Guest(s)
Applebot, Bing, Facebook, Google
|
| Latest Threads |
Thursday Night Holy Hour ...
Forum: Appeals for Prayer
Last Post: Stone
6 hours ago
» Replies: 7
» Views: 1,925
|
The Catholic Trumpet: ‘We...
Forum: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre
Last Post: Stone
Today, 08:32 AM
» Replies: 0
» Views: 50
|
Purgatory Explained by th...
Forum: Resources Online
Last Post: Stone
Today, 07:55 AM
» Replies: 32
» Views: 2,689
|
Swiss church installs AI ...
Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
Last Post: Stone
Today, 07:47 AM
» Replies: 0
» Views: 55
|
The Declaration of 1974: ...
Forum: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre
Last Post: Stone
Today, 07:42 AM
» Replies: 0
» Views: 36
|
Feast of the Presentation...
Forum: Our Lady
Last Post: Stone
Today, 07:37 AM
» Replies: 5
» Views: 10,668
|
Fr. Ruiz: Renewal of the ...
Forum: Rev. Father Hugo Ruiz Vallejo
Last Post: Stone
Today, 07:34 AM
» Replies: 11
» Views: 770
|
The Catholic Trumpet: Ann...
Forum: Catholic Prophecy
Last Post: Stone
Yesterday, 03:34 PM
» Replies: 0
» Views: 85
|
Asylum seeker from Afghan...
Forum: Anti-Catholic Violence
Last Post: Stone
Yesterday, 03:22 PM
» Replies: 0
» Views: 56
|
Great-grandson of Archduk...
Forum: General Commentary
Last Post: Stone
Yesterday, 07:08 AM
» Replies: 0
» Views: 87
|
|
|
| November 23rd |
|
Posted by: Stone - 11-23-2020, 10:12 AM - Forum: November
- Replies (1)
|
 |
Saint Clement I of Rome
Pope and Martyr
(† 100)
Saint Clement is a Roman of noble birth, the son of the Senator Faustinian. Saint Paul speaks of him in his Epistle to the Philippians, chapter 4, assuring that Clement had worked with him in the ministry of the Gospel, and that his name was written in the Book of Life. Later Saint Clement was consecrated bishop by Saint Peter himself. He succeeded in the supreme office to Saint Linus, the immediate successor to Saint Peter, and the Liber Pontificalis says that he reigned nine years, two months and ten days, from 67 to 76, ...until the reign of Vespasian and Titus.
It was, we may say, with the words of the Apostles still resounding in his ears that he began to rule the Church of God; he was among the first, as he was among the most illustrious, in the long line of those who have held the place and power of Peter. Living at the same time and in the same city with Domitian, persecutor of the Church, and having to face not only external foes but to contend with schism and rebellion from within, his days were not tranquil. The Corinthian Church was torn by intestine strife, and its members were defying the authority of their clergy. It was then that Saint Clement intervened in the plenitude of his apostolic authority, and sent his famous Epistle to the Corinthians. He reminded them of the duties of charity, and above all of submission to the clergy. He did not speak in vain; peace and order were restored. Saint Clement had done his work on earth, and shortly after sealed with his blood the Faith which he had learned from Peter and taught to the nations.
* * *
Saint Felicitas or Felicity
Mother of the 7 Holy Brothers
Martyr
(† 150)
Saint Felicity was a noble Roman matron, distinguished above all for her virtue. This mother of seven children raised her sons in the fear of the Lord, and after the death of her husband, served God in continence, concerning herself only with good works. Her good examples and those of her children brought a number of pagans to renounce their superstitions, and also encouraged the Christians to show themselves worthy of their vocation. The pagan priests, furious at seeing their gods abandoned, denounced her. She appeared with her pious sons before the prefect of Rome, who exhorted her to sacrifice to idols, but in reply heard a generous confession of faith.
Wretched woman, he said to her, how can you be so barbarous as to expose your children to torments and death? Have pity on these tender creatures, who are in the flower of their age and can aspire to the highest positions in the Empire! Felicity replied, My children will live eternally with Jesus Christ, if they are faithful; they will have only eternal torments to await, if they sacrifice to idols. Your apparent pity is but a cruel impiety. Then, turning to her children, she said: Look towards heaven, where Jesus Christ is waiting for you with His Saints! Be faithful in His love, and fight courageously for your souls.
The Judge, taking the children one by one, tried to overcome their constancy. He began with Januarius, but received for his answer: What you advise me to do is contrary to reason; Jesus, the Saviour, will preserve me, I hope, from such impiety. Felix, the second, was then brought in. When they urged him to sacrifice, he answered: There is only one God, and it is to Him that we must offer the sacrifice of our hearts. Use all artifices, every refinement of cruelty, you will not make us betray our faith! The other brothers, when questioned, answered with the same firmness. Martial, the youngest, who spoke last, said: All those who do not confess that Jesus Christ is the true God, will be cast into a fire which will never be extinguished.
When the interrogation was finished, the Saints underwent the penalty of the lash and then were taken to prison. Soon they completed their sacrifice in various ways: Januarius was beaten until he died by leather straps capped with lead; Felix and Philip were killed with bludgeons; Sylvanus was thrown headfirst from a cliff; Alexander, Vitalis and Martial were beheaded. Felicity, the mother of these new Maccabees, was the last to suffer martyrdom.
|
|
|
| November 22nd |
|
Posted by: Stone - 11-23-2020, 10:02 AM - Forum: November
- Replies (1)
|
|
Saint Cecilia
Virgin, Martyr
(† 177)
Patron of musicians
It is under the emperor Alexander Severus that this young Saint, one of the most fragrant flowers of Christian virginity and martyrdom, suffered for the Faith she had chosen; to choose it was at that moment as certain an end to earthly felicity as it is a guarantee, at every epoch, of the eternal felicity of those who remain faithful to it. Cecilia was the daughter of an illustrious patrician, and was the only Christian of her family; she was permitted to attend the reunions held in the catacombs by the Christians, either through her parents' condescension or out of indifference. She continually kept a copy of the holy Gospel hidden under her clothing over her heart. Her parents obliged her, however, despite her vow of virginity, which most probably they knew nothing of, to marry the young Valerian, whom she esteemed as noble and good, but who was still pagan.
During the evening of the wedding day, with the music of the nuptial feast still in the air, Cecilia, this intelligent, beautiful, and noble Roman maiden, renewed her vow. When the new spouses found themselves alone, she gently said to Valerian, Dear friend, I have a secret to confide to you, but will you promise me to keep it? He promised her solemnly that nothing would ever make him reveal it, and she continued, Listen: an Angel of God watches over me, for I belong to God. If he sees that you would approach me under the influence of a sensual love, his anger will be inflamed, and you will succumb to the blows of his vengeance. But if you love me with a perfect love and conserve my virginity inviolable, he will love you as he loves me, and will lavish on you, too, his favors. Valerian replied that if he might see this Angel, he would certainly correspond to her wishes, and Cecilia answered, Valerian, if you consent to be purified in the fountain which wells up eternally; if you will believe in the unique, living and true God who reigns in heaven, you will be able to see the Angel. And to his questions concerning this water and who might bestow it, she directed him to a certain holy old man named Urban.
That holy Pontiff rejoiced exceedingly when Valerian came to him the same night, to be instructed and baptized; his long prayer touched the young man greatly, and he too rejoiced with an entirely new joy in his new-found and veritable faith, so far above the religion of the pagans. He returned to his house, and on entering the room where Cecilia had continued to pray for the remainder of the night, he saw the Angel waiting, with two crowns of roses and lilies, which he would place on the head of each of them. Cecilia understood at once that if the lilies symbolized their virginity, the roses foretold for them both the grace of martyrdom. Valerian was told he might ask any grace at all of God, who was very pleased with him; and he requested that his brother Tiburtius might also receive the grace he had obtained; and the conversion of Tiburtius soon afterwards became a reality.
The two brothers, who were very wealthy, began to aid the families which had lost their support through the martyrdom of the fathers, spouses, and sons; they saw to the burial of the Christians, and continually braved the same fate as these victims. In effect they were soon captured, and their testimony was such as to convert a young officer chosen to conduct them to the site of their martyrdom. He succeeded in delaying it for a day, and took them to his house, where before the day was ended he had decided to receive Baptism with his entire family and household. The two brothers offered their heads to the sword; and soon afterward the officer they had won for Christ followed them to the eternal divine kingdom. It was Cecilia who saw to the burial of all three martyrs. She then distributed to the poor all the valuable objects of her house, in order that the property of Valerian might not be confiscated according to current Roman law, and knowing that her own time was close at hand.
She was soon arrested and arraigned, but having asked a delay after her interrogation, she assembled those who had heard her with admiration and instructed them in the faith; the Pontiff Urban baptized a large number of them. The death appointed for her was suffocation by steam. Saint Cecilia remained unharmed and calm, for a day and a night, in the calderium, or place of hot baths, in her own palace, despite a fire heated to seven times its ordinary violence. Finally, an executioner was sent to dispatch her by the sword; he struck with trembling hand the three blows which the law allowed, and left her still alive. For two days and nights Cecilia would lie with her head half severed, on the pavement of her bath, fully sensible and joyfully awaiting her crown. When her neophytes came to bury her after the departure of the executioner, they found her alive and smiling. They surrounded her there, not daring to touch her, for three days, having collected the precious blood from her wounds. On the third day, after the holy Pontiff Urban had come to bless her, the agony ended, and in the year 177 the virgin Saint gave back her glorious soul to Christ. It was the Supreme Pontiff who presided at her funeral; she was placed in a coffin in the position in which she had lain, as we often see her pictured, and interred in the vault prepared by Saint Callixtus for the Church's pontiffs. The authentic acts of her life and martyrdom were prepared by Pope Anteros in the year 235. When the tomb was opened in 1599 her body was entirely intact still.
|
|
|
|
| Feast of the Presentation of Our Lady in the Temple -November 21st |
|
Posted by: Stone - 11-23-2020, 09:37 AM - Forum: November
- Replies (1)
|
|
The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Religious parents never fail by devout prayer to consecrate their children to God, His divine service and love, both before and after their birth. Some among the Jews, not content with this general consecration of their children, offered them to God in their infancy, by the hands of the priests in the Temple, to be brought up in quarters attached to the Temple, attending the priests and Levites in their sacred ministry. There were special divisions in these lodgings for the women and children dedicated to the divine service. (III Kings 6:5-9) We have examples of this special consecration of children in the person of Samuel, for example. Today the Church celebrates the feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Temple of Jerusalem. It is very probable that the holy prophet Simeon and the prophetess Anna, who witnessed the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, as we read in the second chapter of the Gospel of Saint Luke (verses 25 ff.) had known His Mother as a little girl in the Temple and observed her truly unique sanctity.
It is an ancient and very trustworthy tradition that the Blessed Virgin was thus solemnly offered in the Temple to God at the age of three by Her parents, Saint Anne and Saint Joachim. The Gospel tells us nothing of the childhood of Mary; Her title Mother of God, eclipses all the rest. Where, better than in the Temple, could Mary be prepared for Her mission? Twelve years of recollection and prayer, contemplation and sufferings, were the preparation of the chosen one of God. The tender soul of Mary was adorned with the most precious graces and became an object of astonishment and praise for the holy Angels, as well as of the highest complacency for the adorable Trinity. The Father looked upon Her as His beloved Daughter, the Son as One set apart and prepared to become His Mother, and the Holy Ghost as His undefiled Spouse.
Here is how Mary's day in the Temple was apportioned, according to Saint Jerome. From dawn until nine in the morning, She prayed; from 9:00 until 3:00 She applied Herself to manual work; then She turned again to prayer. She was always the first to undertake night watches, the One most applied to study, the most fervent in the chanting of Psalms, the most zealous in works of charity, the purest among the virgins, Her companions, the most perfect in the practice of every virtue. On this day She appears as the standard-bearer for Christian virginity: after Her will come countless legions of virgins consecrated to the Lord, both in the shadow of the altars or engaged in the charitable occupations of the Church in the world. Mary will be their eternal Model, their dedicated Patroness, their sure guide on the paths of perfection.
|
|
|
|
| Feast of Our Lady's Presentation in the Temple - November 21st |
|
Posted by: Stone - 11-23-2020, 09:37 AM - Forum: Our Lady
- Replies (6)
|
|
The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Religious parents never fail by devout prayer to consecrate their children to God, His divine service and love, both before and after their birth. Some among the Jews, not content with this general consecration of their children, offered them to God in their infancy, by the hands of the priests in the Temple, to be brought up in quarters attached to the Temple, attending the priests and Levites in their sacred ministry. There were special divisions in these lodgings for the women and children dedicated to the divine service. (III Kings 6:5-9) We have examples of this special consecration of children in the person of Samuel, for example. Today the Church celebrates the feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Temple of Jerusalem. It is very probable that the holy prophet Simeon and the prophetess Anna, who witnessed the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, as we read in the second chapter of the Gospel of Saint Luke (verses 25 ff.) had known His Mother as a little girl in the Temple and observed her truly unique sanctity.
It is an ancient and very trustworthy tradition that the Blessed Virgin was thus solemnly offered in the Temple to God at the age of three by Her parents, Saint Anne and Saint Joachim. The Gospel tells us nothing of the childhood of Mary; Her title Mother of God, eclipses all the rest. Where, better than in the Temple, could Mary be prepared for Her mission? Twelve years of recollection and prayer, contemplation and sufferings, were the preparation of the chosen one of God. The tender soul of Mary was adorned with the most precious graces and became an object of astonishment and praise for the holy Angels, as well as of the highest complacency for the adorable Trinity. The Father looked upon Her as His beloved Daughter, the Son as One set apart and prepared to become His Mother, and the Holy Ghost as His undefiled Spouse.
Here is how Mary's day in the Temple was apportioned, according to Saint Jerome. From dawn until nine in the morning, She prayed; from 9:00 until 3:00 She applied Herself to manual work; then She turned again to prayer. She was always the first to undertake night watches, the One most applied to study, the most fervent in the chanting of Psalms, the most zealous in works of charity, the purest among the virgins, Her companions, the most perfect in the practice of every virtue. On this day She appears as the standard-bearer for Christian virginity: after Her will come countless legions of virgins consecrated to the Lord, both in the shadow of the altars or engaged in the charitable occupations of the Church in the world. Mary will be their eternal Model, their dedicated Patroness, their sure guide on the paths of perfection.
|
|
|
|
| Feast of the Presentation of Our Lady in the Temple -November 21st |
|
Posted by: Stone - 11-23-2020, 09:37 AM - Forum: Our Lady
- Replies (5)
|
|
The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Religious parents never fail by devout prayer to consecrate their children to God, His divine service and love, both before and after their birth. Some among the Jews, not content with this general consecration of their children, offered them to God in their infancy, by the hands of the priests in the Temple, to be brought up in quarters attached to the Temple, attending the priests and Levites in their sacred ministry. There were special divisions in these lodgings for the women and children dedicated to the divine service. (III Kings 6:5-9) We have examples of this special consecration of children in the person of Samuel, for example. Today the Church celebrates the feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Temple of Jerusalem. It is very probable that the holy prophet Simeon and the prophetess Anna, who witnessed the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, as we read in the second chapter of the Gospel of Saint Luke (verses 25 ff.) had known His Mother as a little girl in the Temple and observed her truly unique sanctity.
It is an ancient and very trustworthy tradition that the Blessed Virgin was thus solemnly offered in the Temple to God at the age of three by Her parents, Saint Anne and Saint Joachim. The Gospel tells us nothing of the childhood of Mary; Her title Mother of God, eclipses all the rest. Where, better than in the Temple, could Mary be prepared for Her mission? Twelve years of recollection and prayer, contemplation and sufferings, were the preparation of the chosen one of God. The tender soul of Mary was adorned with the most precious graces and became an object of astonishment and praise for the holy Angels, as well as of the highest complacency for the adorable Trinity. The Father looked upon Her as His beloved Daughter, the Son as One set apart and prepared to become His Mother, and the Holy Ghost as His undefiled Spouse.
Here is how Mary's day in the Temple was apportioned, according to Saint Jerome. From dawn until nine in the morning, She prayed; from 9:00 until 3:00 She applied Herself to manual work; then She turned again to prayer. She was always the first to undertake night watches, the One most applied to study, the most fervent in the chanting of Psalms, the most zealous in works of charity, the purest among the virgins, Her companions, the most perfect in the practice of every virtue. On this day She appears as the standard-bearer for Christian virginity: after Her will come countless legions of virgins consecrated to the Lord, both in the shadow of the altars or engaged in the charitable occupations of the Church in the world. Mary will be their eternal Model, their dedicated Patroness, their sure guide on the paths of perfection.
|
|
|
|
| November 20th |
|
Posted by: Stone - 11-23-2020, 09:29 AM - Forum: November
- Replies (1)
|
|
Saint Felix of Valois
Founder
(1127-1212)
Saint Felix was the son of the Count of Valois. His mother carried him to Saint Bernard at his monastery of Clairvaux, to offer him there to God, when he was three years old; she kept him, however, under her own care and took particular care of him, permitting him, still young, to distribute the alms she was pleased to give to the poor. When the exiled Pope Innocent II sought refuge in France, the Count of Valois, father of Felix, offered his castle of Crepy to the Pontiff, who often blessed the young child whom he saw being trained in virtue. One day when Felix gave away his own habits to a poor beggar, he found them that evening neatly laid on his bed; and he thanked God for this sign of His divine goodness, proving that one loses nothing when one gives to the poor.
When he was ten years old he obtained grace for a prisoner condemned to death, by means of his prayer and his pleadings with his uncle, a lord of whom the man was the subject. Felix had a presentiment that this man would become a saint; and in fact, he retired into a deep solitude where he undertook severe penance and died the death of the just.
The unfortunate divorce of the parents of Felix, and the excommunication of his father, who had remarried and whose condemnation raised serious troubles on his domains, caused to mature in the young man a long-formed resolution to leave the world. Confiding his mother to her pious brother, Thibault, Count of Champagne, Felix took the Cistercian habit at Clairvaux. His rare virtues drew on him an admiration such that, with Saint Bernard's consent, he fled from it to Italy, where he began to live an austere life with an aged hermit in the Alps. For this purpose he had departed secretly, and the servants his uncle sent believed him dead, being unable to trace him; they published the rumor of his death. About this time the old hermit procured the ordination of his disciple as a priest.
After his elderly counselor died in his arms, Saint Felix returned to France. He built a cell in the diocese of Meaux in an uninhabited forest; this place was later named Cerfroid. Amid savage beasts he led an angelic life of perpetual fasting. Here God inspired him with the desire of founding an Order for the redemption of Christian captives. The Lord also moved Saint John of Matha, a young nobleman of Provence, to seek out the hermit and join him. The two applied themselves to the practice of all virtues. It was John who overtly proposed to Saint Felix the project of an Order for the redemption of captives, when his preceptor was already seventy years old. The latter gladly offered himself to God for that purpose, and after praying for three days the two solitaries made a pilgrimage to Rome in the middle of winter. They were kindly received by the Pope, after he read the recommendation which the Bishop of Paris had given them. He too prayed and became convinced that the two Saints were inspired by the Holy Spirit, and he gave his approbation to the Trinitarian Order
Within forty years the Order would have six hundred monasteries. Saint John, who was Superior General, left to Saint Felix the direction of the convents in France, exercised from the monastery which the founders had built at Cerfroid. There Saint Felix died in November of 1212, at the age of eighty-five, only about six weeks before his younger co-founder. It is a constant tradition in the Trinitarian Order that Saint Felix and Saint John were canonized by Urban IV in 1260, though no bull has ever been found. In 1219 already the feast of Saint Felix was kept in the entire diocese of Meaux. In 1666 Alexander VI declared that veneration of the servant of God was immemorial.
|
|
|
|
| November 18th |
|
Posted by: Stone - 11-23-2020, 09:21 AM - Forum: November
- Replies (1)
|
|
Saint Odon or Eudes of Cluny
Benedictine, abbot of Cluny
(† 942)
On Christmas Eve of the year 877, a pious but childless Christian nobleman of Aquitaine implored Our Lord, by the fecundity of His Holy Mother and His Incarnation, to grant him a son. His prayer was heard; Odon was born, and his grateful father, in a prayer offered him — still an infant in his arms — to Saint Martin of Tours (†400) to be his spiritual son. Odon was later taught by a wise priest, then was placed in the court of the Count of Anjou and that of the Duke of Aquitaine. There he was influenced by the passions which reign in courts, and neglected his prayers to think only of games, hunting, and military pursuits. But God did not abandon him, and he was haunted in his dreams by the dangers of a disordered life. He prayed to the Blessed Virgin and begged Her one Christmas Eve to lead him on the narrow path of sanctity.
He was then sixteen years old, and the next day he fell ill with a sickness which increased and for three years kept him on the verge of death. When his father told him he had consecrated him to Saint Martin, Odon renewed this consecration and promised to enter into his service; suddenly then his headaches left him and he recovered from his illness.
He went to Tours to serve in the church of Saint Martin for a time. But when a hermitage was built nearby he retired there to devote himself to prayer and study, while continuing to visit the tomb of Saint Martin every night. He began to study the Scriptures and abandoned all pagan readings. Later he was inspired to enter the monastery of Baume in the diocese of Besançon, and there he received the habit from Saint Bernon, the abbot, in the year 909. He was charged with the instruction of novices and boarding students. When later he returned home on a visit to his parents, they were so touched by his words that despite their age they renounced the world and entered a monastery. When Odon returned to Baume he was ordained a priest.
When Saint Bernon, who had governed six monasteries, died, three of those were entrusted to Saint Odon; these were Cluny, newly founded in 910, Massay, and Deols. He resided in Cluny, of which he is often titled the Founder, because he organized and enlarged this new house. His reputation attracted a large number of vocations. His special care was for children; at that period the schools had taken refuge in the cathedrals and monasteries. He watched with gentleness over the habits, studies, and repose of these dear children. He personally taught them as well as the monks. The Rule of Saint Benedict, providing for the education of children as well as the formation of monks, was followed zealously. Many alms were given to the poor, without concern for the morrow. The charity of Cluny was so abundant that in one year food was distributed to more than seven thousand indigent persons.
Saint Odon visited Rome three times; there he reformed a monastery, and later in France he submitted several abbeys to the discipline of Cluny. These were organized into a federation under the sole abbot of Cluny, with great unity of statutes and regime. It was said that from Benevent to the Atlantic Ocean, the most important monasteries of Italy and Gaul rejoiced in being under his commandment. After celebrating the feast of Saint Martin at Tours in 942, Saint Odon fell ill; and having exhorted all the religious who had come there to see him and learn how to be regular in their observance, he blessed them and gave up his soul to God. He was buried at Tours in the church of Saint Julian.
* * *
Saint Elizabeth of Hungary
Widow
(1207-1231)
Patron of the Third Order of St. Francis
Elizabeth was the daughter of the just and pious Andrew II, king of Hungary, the niece of Saint Hedwig, and the sister of the virtuous Bela IV, king of Hungary, who became the father of Saint Cunegundes and of Saint Margaret of Hungary, a Dominican nun. Another of her brothers was Coloman, King of Galicia and prince of Russia, who led an angelic life amid the multiple affairs of the world and the troubles of war.
She was betrothed in infancy to Louis, Landgrave of Thuringia, and brought up from the age of four in his father's court. Never could she bear to adopt the ornaments of the court for her own usage, and she took pleasure only in prayer. She would remove her royal crown when she entered the church, saying she was in the presence of the Saviour who wore a crown of thorns. As she grew older, she employed the jewels offered her for the benefit of the poor. Not content with receiving numbers of them daily in her palace, and relieving all in distress, she built several hospitals, where she herself served the sick, bathing them, feeding them, dressing their wounds and ulcers. The relatives of her fiancé tried to prevent the marriage, saying she was fit only for a cloister; but the young prince said he would not accept gold in the quantity of a nearby mountain, if it were offered him to abandon his resolution to marry Elizabeth.
Once as she was carrying in the folds of her mantle some provisions for the poor, she met her husband returning from the hunt. Astonished to see her bending under the weight of her burden, he opened the mantle and found in it nothing but beautiful red and white roses, though it was not the season for flowers. He told her to continue on her way, and took one of the marvelous roses, which he conserved all his life. She never ceased to edify him in all of her works. One of her twelve excellent Christian maxims, by which she regulated all her conduct was, Often recall that you are the work of the hands of God and act accordingly, in such a way as to be eternally with Him.
When her pious young husband died in Sicily on his way to a Crusade with the Emperor Frederick, she was cruelly driven from her palace by her brother-in-law. Those whom she had aided showed nothing but coldness for her; God was to purify His Saint by harsh tribulations. She was forced to wander through the streets with her little children, a prey to hunger and cold. The bishop of Bamberg, her maternal uncle, finally forced the cruel prince to ask pardon for his ill treatment of her, but she voluntarily renounced the grandeurs of the world, and went to live in a small house she had prepared in the city of Marburgh. There she practiced the greatest austerities. She welcomed all her sufferings, and continued to be the mother of the poor, distributing all of the heritage eventually conceded to her, and converting many by her holy life. She died in 1231, at the age of twenty-four.
|
|
|
|
| November 17th |
|
Posted by: Stone - 11-23-2020, 09:03 AM - Forum: November
- Replies (1)
|
|
Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus
Bishop, Confessor
The Wonder Worker
(† 270)
Patron against floods, earthquakes, and in desperate cases
Saint Gregory was born in the Pont, of distinguished parents who were still engaged in the superstitions of paganism. He lost his father at the age of fourteen, and began to reflect on the folly of idolatry's fables. He recognized the unity of God and was becoming disposed to accept the truths of Christianity. His father had destined him for the legal profession, in which the art of oratory is very necessary, and in this pursuit he was succeeding very well, having learned Latin. He was counseled to apply himself to Roman law.
Gregory and his brother Athenodorus, later to be a bishop like himself, had a sister living in Palestine at Caesarea. Not far from that city was a school of law, and in Caesarea itself, another which the famous Origen had opened in the year 231 and in which he was teaching philosophy. The two brothers heard Origen there, and that master discovered in them a remarkable capacity for knowledge, and more important still, rare dispositions for virtue. He strove to inspire love for truth in them and an ardent desire to attain greater knowledge and the possession of the Supreme Good; and the two brothers soon put aside their intentions to study law. Gregory studied also in Alexandria for three years, after a persecution drove his master, Origen, from Palestine, but returned there with the famous exegete in 238. He was then baptized, and in the presence of a large audience delivered a speech in which he testified to his gratitude towards his teacher, praising his methods, and thanking God for so excellent a professor.
When he returned to his native city of Neocaesarea in the Pont, his friends urged him to seek high positions, but Gregory desired to retire into solitude and devote himself to prayer. For a time he did so, often changing his habitation, because the archbishop of the region desired to make him Bishop of Neocaesarea. Eventually he was obliged to consent. That city was very prosperous, and the inhabitants were corrupted by paganism. Saint Gregory, with Christian zeal and charity, and with the aid of the gift of miracles which he had received, began to attempt every means to bring them to the light of Christ. As he lay awake one night an elderly man entered his room, and pointed to a Lady of superhuman beauty who accompanied him, radiant with heavenly light. This elderly man was Saint John the Evangelist, and the Lady of Light was the Mother of God. She told Saint John to give Gregory the instruction he desired; thereupon he gave Saint Gregory a creed which contained in all its plenitude the doctrine of the Trinity. Saint Gregory consigned it to writing, directed all his preaching by it, and handed it down to his successors. This creed later preserved his flock from the Arian heresy.
He converted a pagan priest one day, when the latter requested a miracle, and a very large rock moved to another location at his command. The pagan priest abandoned all things to follow Christ afterwards. One day the bishop planted his staff beside the river which passed alongside the city and often ravaged it by floods. He commanded it never again to pass the limit marked by his staff, and in the time of Saint Gregory of Nyssa, who wrote of his miracles nearly a hundred years later, it had never done so. The bishop settled a conflict which was about to cause bloodshed between two brothers, when he prayed all night beside the lake whose possession they were disputing. It dried up and the miracle ended the difficulty.
When the persecution of Decius began in 250, the bishop counseled his faithful to depart and not expose themselves to trials perhaps too severe for their faith; and none fell into apostasy. He himself retired to a desert, and when he was pursued was not seen by the soldiers. On a second attempt they found him praying with his companion, the converted pagan priest, now a deacon; they had mistaken them the first time for trees. The captain of the soldiers was convinced this had been a miracle, and became a Christian to join him. Some of his Christians were captured, among them Saint Troadus the martyr, who merited the grace of dying for the Faith. The persecution ended at the death of the emperor in 251.
It is believed that Saint Gregory died in the year 270, on the 17th of November. Before his death he asked how many pagans still remained in the city, and was told there were only seventeen. He thanked God for the graces He had bestowed on the population, for when he arrived, there had been only seventeen Christians.
|
|
|
|
| Vatican II Architect: Teilhard de Chardin |
|
Posted by: Stone - 11-23-2020, 08:54 AM - Forum: The Architects of Vatican II
- Replies (1)
|
|
Teilhard de Chardin: The Vatican II Architect You Need to Know
November 27, 2017
In the middle of the fourth century, Saint Jerome remarked that the world “awoke with a groan to find itself Arian.” Arianism divided the Church and Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries and beyond by claiming that the Divine Logos, Jesus Christ, was not of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father and not co-eternal with the Father as defined at the Council of Nicea (325 A.D.). Some sought to substitute homoiousios, “of a similar nature,” to find a peaceful solution. However, as the Catholic Church has perennially taught, the truth must be presented whole and complete, without subterfuge or compromise.
In the mid-twentieth century, one may have paraphrased St. Jerome: “the world awoke, without so much as a whimper, to find itself Teilhardian.”
Still troubled by the Galileo affair, the Church bent over backwards in trying to incorporate faith and science into a seamless garment. Following the 1925 Scopes Trial, Darwin’s theory of evolution was more and more presented as dogma by the scientific community, and Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881-1955) took it upon himself to reconcile Darwinian evolution and Catholic theology .
In fact, Teilhard was originally censured and exiled by his Jesuit superiors in 1923 for questioning the doctrines of original sin and eternal damnation. In 1947, upon return from banishment in China, he was once again censured by the Holy Office, Pope Pius XII himself having called his work a “cesspool of errors.” However, Teilhard began further insinuating his ideas among his fellow Jesuits at the French theologate La Fourvière in Lyon by means of unsigned mimeographed monographs. By the mid- to late 1950s, his theories were extolled by many, if not most, Jesuits, including Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, and especially Henri de Lubac, who wrote glowingly of Teilhard: “We need not concern ourselves with a number of detractors of Teilhard, in whom emotion has blunted intelligence” [ii]. By the time of the opening of the Second Vatican Council in October 1962, the Society of Jesus had all but abandoned the Neo-Scholastic theology of Francisco Suarez in favor of Teilhardian evolutionary “cosmogenesis.”
The reason for Teilhard’s popularity, as stated above, was his apparent resolution of the differences between religious truth as proposed by the Catholic Church and scientific “fact” as proposed by Darwinian evolution. The problem was that his solution was neither particularly scientific nor particularly Catholic, a fact he admitted privately to his cousin Léontine Zanta in 1936:
Quote:What increasingly dominates my interests, is the effort to establish within myself and define around me, a new religion (call it a better Christianity, if you like) where the personal God ceases to be the great monolithic proprietor of the past to become the Soul of the World which the stage we have reached religiously and culturally calls for. [iii]
This proposed synthesis is not a “new and better Christianity,” but rather a negation of the Catholic faith, as presented in the definitive dogmatic constitution of Vatican I, Dei Filius (April 24, 1870):
Quote:Deus … est re et essentia a mundo distinctus, in se et ex se beatissimus, et super omnia quae praeter ipsum sunt et concipi possunt, ineffabiliter excelsus. (God … is to be declared as really and essentially distinct from the world, of supreme beatitude in and from Himself, and ineffably exalted above all things which exist, or are conceivable, except Himself.)
Teilhard’s “God,” the “soul of the world,” is identical with nature and consequently subject to change. As Teilhard explains it in his book Human Energy:
Quote:As a direct consequence of the unitive process by which God is revealed to us, he in some way ‘transforms himself’ as he incorporates us. … I see in the World a mysterious product of completion and fulfillment for the Absolute Being himself. [iv]
And, again:
Quote:[God] evolves, via “complexification” and “convergence” to his own perfection, immersed in matter. … One is inseparable from the other; one is never without the other[.] … No spirit (not even God within the limits of our experience) exists, nor could structurally exist without an associated multiple, any more than a center can exist without its circle or circumference[.] … n a concrete sense there is not matter and spirit, all that exists is matter becoming spirit [God]. [v]
One must note that in Teilhard’s writing there is hardly any mention of purely spiritual beings or entities within the existing cosmos. There is virtually no mention of angels or demons, no Satan, no St. Michael, no guardian angels, nor is there much mention of particular judgment or the existence of Hell.**
Teilhard’s “God” is no more nor less than the “god” of Pantheism as described (and rejected) by St. Pius IX in his allocution Maxima Quidem, June 9, 1862:
Quote:There exists no Supreme Being, perfect in His wisdom and in His providence and distinct, all things are God and have the very substance of God. God is thus one and the same thing as the world and consequently spirit is identified with matter, necessity with liberty, truth with falsehood, good with evil and justice with injustice[.]
Teilhard, through his denial of original sin and of the consequent need for redemption, tried to inject Christ into his pantheism by naming him the “Cosmic Christ” or the “Alpha” and “Omega” of revelation. Christ is an emanation of God infused into matter from the beginning, evolving, was born into this world, died, rose from the dead, and ascended – not to heaven, but to the “noosphere,” a spiritual level encircling the earth, where all spirits contained in matter will eventually converge at the “Omega Point,” where Christ awaits us, guiding us on with “unconditional love.” At the “Omega Point,” we, and the entire cosmos, down to the lowliest atom, will be divinized, and “God” will be “all in all” [vi]. The quote was selectively picked from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians 15:28. Whether this “all in all” will be totally spiritual, as in Buddhism and other Eastern religions with which it shares similarities, or whether, as others affirm, humans, alive at the end of time, the “Omega Point,” will become “transhuman,” filled with the transformative knowledge of the “noosphere” (some even citing the internet), is unclear in the writings of Teilhard.
As for Teilhard, the problem of evil is not due to angelic or human malice, but is an inevitable side-effect of the evolutionary process: “In our modern perspective of a Universe in a process of cosmogenesis, the problem of evil no longer exists.” The “Multiple” is “essentially subject to the play of probabilities of chance in its arrangements.” It is “absolutely unable to progress toward unity without engendering [evil] here or there by statistical necessity” [vii]. It appears, then, that there is no room for error or sin, as all is inevitably evolving toward the “Omega Point” drawn on by the infinite love of Christ.
In fact, for Teilhard, the Mystical Body of Christ “forms a cosmic Center for mankind and the whole material universe” [viii]. This insight he claims to have found in St. Paul. The passage – “You … are Christ’s Body[;] … each of you is a different part of it” (I Cor. 12:27) – reveals humanity in its varying functions to be the mystical Body. This is a misreading of St. Paul, who is clearly speaking of the baptized Christian community.
It is just on the part of God and to give relief to you [followers of Christ] who are afflicted and to us as well, when the Lord Jesus will be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire. These [who afflict you now] will be punished with eternal ruin, away from the face of the Lord and the glory of his power[.] (2 Thessalonians 1: 6-8)
It also contradicts the words of Our Lord himself:
Quote:I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. … I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world[.] (John 17: 9-16)
For Teilhard, all religions are an attempt to realize this ultimate transformation, led on by the Cosmic Christ, who animates, loves, and awaits all at the Omega Point.
Teilhard does not deny the role of the Church in bringing about his vision of cosmogenesis. In a letter to his friend Auguste Valensin, S.J., he writes:
Quote:I believe in the Church, mediatrix between God and the world[.] … The Church, the reflectively christified portion of the world, the Church, the principal focus of interhuman affinities through super-charity, the Church, the central axis of universal convergence and the precise point of contact between the universe and Omega Point. … The Catholic Church, however, must not simply seek to affirm its primacy and authority but quite simply to present the world with the Universal Christ, Christ in human-cosmic dimension, as animator of evolution.
Teilhard, therefore, said:
Quote:We must work toward an ecumenism open not only to Christianity, but also to other religions, because all religions of inner necessity converge in the Cosmic Christ and are destined to find their completion in the single Church of Christ.
Having done away with an eternal supernatural order, there is no room for “sanctifying grace” freely bestowed by God, especially through the sacraments (historical Catholic prerequisites to eternal salvation). All that exists is the onward movement of the cosmos toward unity in the Cosmic Christ, who animates and awaits us at the Omega Point.
As to the Eucharist, according to Teilhard, it is by means of the Eucharist that the Church gradually divinizes the world:
Quote:“Adherence to Christ in the Eucharist must inevitably, ipso facto, incorporate us a little more fully on each occasion in a christogenesis which itself … is none other than the soul of universal cosmogenesis.”
Teilhard de Chardin’s “Mass on the (Altar of the) World":
Quote:Since once again, Lord … I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole world my altar and on it will offer you all the labors and sufferings of the world[.] … I will place on my paten, O God, the harvest to be won by this renewal of labor. Into my chalice I shall pour all the sap which is to be pressed out this day from the earth’s fruits[.] … My chalice and my paten are the depths of a soul laid widely open to all the forces which in a moment will rise up from every corner of the earth and converge upon the Spirit. Grant me the remembrance and the mystic presence of all those whom the light is now awakening to a new day[.] … I call before me the whole vast anonymous army of living humanity; those … who, … through their vision of truth or despite their error, truly believe in the progress of earthly reality and who today will again take up their impassioned pursuit of the light[.] … This is the material of my sacrifice, the only material you desire[.] … Receive, O Lord, this all-embracing host which your whole creation, moved by your magnetism, offers you at this dawn of a new day.
In Teilhard’s “Mass,” there is no mention of Christ’s propitiatory death on the cross for the salvation of souls, nor of Transubstantiation [ix] of the Eucharistic Species into the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Rather, this is an offering of all trials and works of humanity to build a future divinized common earthly reality.
Given this brief summary, it should be clear that Teilhard’s “new and better Christianity” is a paean to Darwinian evolution raised to the level of universal theosis and has little or nothing in common with traditional Catholic Christology.
It is therefore not surprising that, at the opening of the Second Vatican Council, the Holy Office, under the pontificate of Pope John XXIII, issued the following “monitum” (warning):
Quote:Several works of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, some of which were posthumously published, are being edited and are gaining a good deal of success. Prescinding from a judgment about those points that concern the positive sciences, it is sufficiently clear that the above-mentioned works abound in such ambiguities and indeed even serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine[.] (Given at Rome, from the palace of the Holy Office, on the thirtieth day of June, 1962. Sebastianus Masala, Notarius.)
It would appear that the case was closed; however, this was not to be. Under the influence of Jesuit periti (counselors), especially Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, the Teilhardian vision re-emerged [x]. Pope Paul VI tentatively wrote in a 1966 address contained in Insegnimenti di Paulo VI, the official compilation of his thought: “Teilhard de Chardin, who gave an explanation of the universe that, among many fantastic and imprudent things, nonetheless understood how to find the intelligent principle that one should call God inside everything. Science itself, therefore, obliges us to be religious. Whoever is intelligent must kneel and say: ‘God is present here’” [xi].
The real revolution, according to Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the present head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, began with Pope John Paul II and his letter to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on 22 October 1996, when he affirmed:
Quote:Some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies – which was neither planned nor sought – constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.
On May 12, 1981, the centenary of Teilhard’s birth, cardinal secretary of state Agostino Casaroli wrote to Cardinal Poupard, rector of the Catholic Institute of Paris, as follows:
Quote:The international scientific community and, more broadly, the whole intellectual world, are preparing to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. … I am happy, Your Excellency, to communicate this message to you on behalf of the Holy Father [Pope John Paul II] for all the participants in the conference over which you preside at the Catholic Institute of Paris as a tribute to Father Teilhard de Chardin, and I assure you of my faithful devotion.
The Vatican Press Office, however, two months later, reaffirmed the monitum, which remains in effect:
Communiqué of the Press Office of the Holy See (printed in L’Osservatore Romano, English ed., July 20, 1981):
Quote:The letter sent by the Cardinal Secretary of State to His Excellency Mons. Poupard on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin has been interpreted in a certain section of the press as a revision of previous stands taken by the Holy See in regard to this author, and in particular of the Monitum of the Holy Office of 30 June 1962, which pointed out that the work of the author contained ambiguities and grave doctrinal errors. The question has been asked whether such an interpretation is well founded.
After having consulted the Cardinal Secretary of State and the Cardinal Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which, by order of the Holy Father, had been duly consulted beforehand, about the letter in question, we are in a position to reply in the negative.
H.H. John Paul II, echoing Teilhard’s “Mass on the Altar of the World,” continued in his praise of Teilhard:
Quote:The Eucharist is also celebrated in order to offer “on the altar of the whole earth the world’s work and suffering” in the beautiful words of Teilhard de Chardin. [xii]
The praise was continued by Cardinal Ratzinger, who said in his Principles of Catholic Theology:
Quote:The impetus given by Teilhard de Chardin exerted a wide influence [on the Council]. With daring vision it incorporated the historical movements of Christianity into the great cosmic process of evolution from Alpha to Omega. … The Council’s ‘Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World’ (Gaudium et Spes) took the cue; Teilhard’s slogan “Christianity means more progress, more technology,” became a stimulus in which the Council Fathers from rich and poor countries alike found a concrete hope. [xiii]
And again, from his Spirit of the Liturgy (emphasis added):
Quote:Against the background of the modern evolutionary world view, Teilhard depicted the cosmos as a process of ascent, a series of unions. … From here Teilhard went on to give new meaning to Christian worship: the transubstantiated Host is the anticipation of the transformation and divinization of matter in the Christological “fullness.” In his view, the Eucharist provided the movement of the cosmos with its direction; it anticipates its goal and at the same time urges it on. [xiv]
Pope Benedict also reaffirmed his praise of Teilhard on July 24, 2009, during the vespers service in the Cathedral of Aosta in northern Italy, as reported by John Allen (emphasis added):
Quote:Toward the end of a reflection upon the Letter to the Romans, in which St. Paul writes that the world itself will one day become a form of living worship, Pope Benedict said: “It’s the great vision that later Teilhard de Chardin also had: At the end we will have a true cosmic liturgy, where the cosmos becomes a living host. Let’s pray to the Lord that he help us be priests in this sense,” the pope said, “to help in the transformation of the world in adoration of God, beginning with ourselves.”
To confirm the shift from traditional Catholic theology to Teilhard’s “new and better Christianity” in July of 2009, Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi, S.J. said, “By now, no one would dream of saying that [Teilhard] is a heterodox author who shouldn’t be studied.”
The current holy father, Pope Francis, as a product of Jesuit education, refers to Teilhard’s eschatological contribution in his encyclical Laudato Si in paragraph 83 (footnote 53):
Quote:83. The ultimate destiny of the universe is in the fullness of God, which has already been attained by the risen Christ, the measure of the maturity of all things [53]. Here we can add yet another argument for rejecting every tyrannical and irresponsible domination of human beings over other creatures. The ultimate purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us. Rather, all creatures are moving forward with us and through us towards a common point of arrival, which is God, in that transcendent fullness where the risen Christ embraces and illumines all things.
In footnote 53 of the encyclical, the pope makes a clear reference to the statements of previous conciliar popes cited above:
Quote:Against this horizon we can set the contribution of Fr Teilhard de Chardin; cf. PAUL VI, Address in a Chemical and Pharmaceutical Plant (24 February 1966): Insegnamenti 4 (1966), 992-993; JOHN PAUL II, Letter to the Reverend George Coyne (1 June 1988): Insegnamenti 11/2 (1988), 1715; BENEDICT XVI, Homily for the Celebration of Vespers in Aosta (24 July 2009): Insegnamenti 5/2 (2009), 60.
We see here Pope Francis’s reliance on Teilhard and his vision of the “Cosmic Christ” drawing all, regardless of religious affiliation, nationality – in fact, all living creatures, and even inert matter, which contains rudimentary “Spirit” – to be Christified at the end of time, or the “Omega Point” of evolution. It explains his fascination with ecology as well as the tearing down of all walls, both political (including the end of nationalism and amalgamation via mass immigration) and religious (via ecumenism): “Proselytism is solemn nonsense.” “Luther’s intention 500 years ago was to renew the Church, not divide her.” As Teilhard expounded in Human Energy, “[t]he age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish, we must shake off our old prejudices and build the earth” [xv].
The evolutionary theories of Teilhard help explain some of the current holy father’s most puzzling statements. In a March 15, 2015 interview, Eugenio Scalfari, the famed atheist reporter, quotes (from memory) as follows: “What happens to that lost soul? Will it be punished? And how? The response of Francis is distinct and clear: there is no punishment, but the annihilation of that soul. All the others will participate in the beatitude of living in the presence of the Father. The souls that are annihilated will not take part in that banquet; with the death of the body their journey is finished.” This interview was first published on the Vatican website but then removed. When questioned, Vatican spokesman Fr. Thomas Rosica did not deny the conversation, but said, “They were private discussions that took place and were never recorded by the journalist.”
These sentiments were reiterated on October 9 of this year, 2017, in an article published by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, once again quoting Eugenio Scalfari:
Quote:Pope Francis has abolished the places where souls were supposed to go after death: hell, purgatory, heaven. The idea he holds is that souls dominated by evil and unrepentant cease to exist, while those that have been redeemed from evil will be taken up into the beatitude, contemplating God. ...The universal judgement that is in the tradition of the Church therefore becomes devoid of meaning. It remains a simple pretext that has given rise to splendid paintings in the history of art. Nothing other than this.
To understand, perhaps, some of Pope Francis’s reticence to clarify passages of Amoris Laetitia, one must recall that neither original sin nor traditional mortal sins exist in Teilhard’s worldview – only infinite mutations or variants in the evolutionary process moved by the unconditional love of the “Cosmic Christ.” Some of the pope’s statements include the following, emphasizing that all who live in loving relationships share, to some degree, in the all-encompassing love of Christ:
Quote:– The unmarried. “I’ve seen a lot of fidelity in these cohabitations, and I am sure that this is a real marriage, they have the grace of a real marriage because of their fidelity[.]”
– The sacramentally married. “ great majority” of Catholic marriages are “null.”
– The so-called “remarried. "Priests could – in some cases – offer the “help of sacraments” to Catholics living in “irregular family situations” as part of a broader effort to support and integrate divorced Catholics in other relationships into the life of the church.
– Homosexuals. “Who am I to judge?”
Further evidence of the underlying Teilhardian influence on Amoris Laetitia are found in the words of Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, Austria, whom Pope Francis named official interpreter of Amoris Laetitia:
Quote:Hardly anyone else has tried to bring together the knowledge of Christ and the idea of evolution as the scientist (paleontologist) and theologian Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., has done. … His fascinating vision has remained controversial, and yet for many it has represented a great hope, the hope that faith in Christ and a scientific approach to the world can be brought together. … These brief references to Teilhard cannot do justice to his efforts. The fascination which Teilhard de Chardin exercised for an entire generation stemmed from his radical manner of looking at science and Christian faith together.
It should be remembered that on October 11, 2016, the weekly bulletin of Cardinal Schönborn’s cathedral in Vienna published, with pictures, a glowing profile of a same-sex couple and their adopted son, titled “we are dads.”
While all the confusion existing in the modern Church cannot be fully laid at his feet [xvi], Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. and his Jesuit confrères, with their “new and better Christianity,” have unfortunately deracinated Holy Mother Church, replacing the worship of the eternal God with the worship of man and creation.
Finally, it is worth mentioning: while there is no direct evidence linking Fr. Teilhard to Freemasonry, their goal is the same: the deification of man. In the words of Manly P. Hall in his Lost Keys of Freemasonry:
Quote:Man is a God in the making. … The true Mason is not creed-bound. He realizes with the divine illumination of his lodge that as a Mason his religion must be universal: Christ, Buddha or Mohammed, the name means little, for he recognizes only the light and not the bearer. He worships at every shrine, bows before every altar, whether in temple, mosque or cathedral, realizing with his truer understanding the oneness of all spiritual truth. It is relevant that Teilhard’s works are read and quoted in the lodges. [xvii]
*Editor’s note: after we received this essay for publication, the news broke at Vatican Insider that the “Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Culture largely approved a proposal to be sent to Pope Francis, asking him to contemplate whether it is possible to remove the Monitum of the Holy Congregation of the Holy Office on the works of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin”. The petition, according to Vatican Insider, was approved on Saturday, November 18, 2017, “during the work of the Assembly on ‘The Future of Humanity: New Challenges to Anthropology’.” Further:
Quote:The proposal, as raised by the online newspaper Sir , is thus motivated: “We believe that such an act would not only restore the genuine efforts of the pious Jesuit in an attempt to reconcile the scientific vision of the universe with Christian eschatology but would also represent a formidable stimulus for all theologians and scientists of good will to collaborate in the construction of a Christian anthropological model which, following the directions of the encyclical Laudato Si, is naturally placed in the wonderful plot of the cosmos. “
Pope Francis is expected to receive the proposal for consideration soon, if not already. As of this writing, no decision has been announced.
NOTES:
It should be mentioned here that a contemporary of Teilhard, Fr. Georges Lemaître, a renowned physicist and the postulator of the “Big Bang” theory, advised Pope Pius XII not to mention his discovery as proof of the doctrine of creation “[i]ex nihilo,” as scientific knowledge, which is refined and always growing and changing and should not be used in defense of the Faith, which is unchanging.
[ii] Henri Cardinal de Lubac, S.J., The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin (New York: Image Books (1967). De Lubac is generally considered the main influence on the Vatican II document The Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes). De Lubac, himself first censured by Pope Pius XII, went on to be named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 1983.
[iii] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Letters to Léontine Zanta, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 114 (letter dated 26 January 1936).
[iv] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of Matter (New York: Harcourt Brace Jahanovich, 1978), p. 54.
[v] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jahanovich, 1969), pp. 57, 58, 162.
[vi] “What we call inorganic matter is certainly animate in its own way[.] … Atoms, electrons, elementary particles … must have a spark of spirit” (Science and Christ, written 1920s, published in English in 1968).
[vii] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Comment je vois, Par. 29, Tr. p.39, cit. Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1968), p. 265.
[viii] Le Coeur de la Matière, (1950), p. 30, cit. “The Body of Christ in the writings of Teilhard de Chardin S.J.,” by Cristopher Moody S.J.
[ix] The Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215 spoke of the bread and wine as “transubstantiated” into the body and blood of Christ: “His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been transubstantiated, by God’s power, into his body and blood.”
[x] David L. Schindler, Heart of the World, Center of the Church (New York: William B. Erdmans, 1996), footnote 34 on p. 22, exposes von Balthasar’s cautious but fundamental dependence on Teilhard.
[xi] Speech to Employers and Workers of a Pharmacy Company, February 24, 1966, in Insegnamenti di Paolo VI, Poliglotta Vaticana, 1966, pp. 992-993.
[xii] Pope John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, (New York: Image, 1996), p. 73.
[xiii] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), p. 334.
[xiv] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), p. 29.
[xv] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy (New York Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), p. 37.
[xvi] See Philip Trower, The Church and the Counter Faith (Oxford: Family Publications, 2006) for a résumé of intellectual currents leading up to Vatican II, or here for an essay on the Jesuit formation of Pope Francis.
[xvii] “The Masonic bishop, priest, or layman will forsake his faith in God and in His Son, Jesus Christ. This may occur slowly but it is inevitable. Sooner or later he will be confronted with the dilemma posed by Monsignor Dillon above. If he remains in the Craft, however, he will lose touch completely with the Divine element in the religion he has secretly betrayed and become preoccupied with the human. He may recite the prayer of the Modernist Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin, with conviction—
“‘May the Lord preserve in me a burning love for the world, and a great gentleness and may he help me persevere to the end, in the fullness of my humanity.'”
This post has been updated.
** Correction: this article originally claimed that “nowhere in Teilhard’s writing is there to be found any mention of purely spiritual beings or entities within the existing cosmos. There is no mention of angels or demons, no Satan, no St. Michael, no guardian angels, nor is there any mention of particular judgment or the existence of Hell”. It has been brought to our attention by a reader that in fact, there is some mention of these things — though very little, and not in a way that expresses with clarity and firmness the Church’s teaching on these matters — specifically, in Le Milieu Divin, under the subheading ‘The outer darkness and the lost souls,’ (p.140-143.). Nevertheless, we have amended the text accordingly in the interest of correctness and fairness to the late Fr. de Chardin.
[/i][i]
Adapted from here.
|
|
|
|
| The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita |
|
Posted by: Stone - 11-23-2020, 08:37 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
- Replies (3)
|
|
The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita
A Masonic Blueprint for the Subversion of the Catholic Church
by John Vennari (Catholic Family News)
Few Catholics know of the Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita, a secret document written in the early 19th Century that mapped out a blueprint for the subversion of the Catholic Church. The Alta Vendita ws the highest lodge of the Carbonari, an Italian secret society with links to Freemasonry and which, along with Freemasonry, was condemned by the Catholic Church. (1) Father E. Cahill, S.J. in his book Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement states that the Alta Vendita was "commonly supposed to have been at the time the governing centre of European Freemasonry." (2) The Carbonari were most active in Italy and France.
In his book Athanasius and the Church of Our Time, Bishop Rudolph Graber quoted a Freemason who declared that "the goal (of Freemasonry) is no longer the destruction of the Church, but to make use of it by infiltrating it."(3)
In other words, since Freemasonry, cannot completely obliterate Christ's Church, it plans not only to eradicate the influence of Catholicism in society, but to use the Church's structure as an instrument of "renewal", "progress" and "enlightenment" to further many of its own principles and goals.
An Outline
The strategy advanced in the Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita is astonishing in its audacity and cunning. From the start, the document tells of a process that will take decades to accomplish. Those who drew up the document knew that they would not see its fulfillment. They were inaugurating a work that would be carried on by succeeding generations of the initiated. "In our ranks the soldier dies and the struggle goes on."
The Instruction called for the dissemination of liberal ideas and axioms throughout society and within the institutions of the Catholic Church so that laity, clerics and prelates would, over the years, gradually are imbued with progressive principles.
In time, this mind-set would be so pervasive that priests would be ordained, bishops would be consecrated, and cardinals would be nominated whose thinking was in step with the modern thought rooted in the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man and other "Principles of 1789" (religious pluralism, equality of religions, separation of Church and State, etc.)
Eventually, a Pope would be elected from these ranks who would lead the Church on the path of enlightenment and renewal. It must be stressed that it was not their aim to place a Freemason on the Chair of Peter. Their goal was to effect an environment that would eventually produce a Pope and a hierarchy won over to the ideas of liberal Catholicism, all the while believing themselves to be faithful Catholics.
These Catholic leaders, then, would no longer oppose the modern ideas of the revolution (as had been the consistent practice of the Popes from 1789 until 1958 who condemned these liberal principles) but would amalgamate them into the Church. The end result would be a Catholic clergy and laity marching under the banner of the enlightenment all the while thinking they are marching under the banner of the Apostolic keys.
Is it Possible?
For those who may believe this scheme to be too far-fetched -- a goal too hopeless for the enemy to attain, it should be noted that both Pope Pus IX and Pope Leo XIII asked that The Permanent Instruction be published, no doubt, in order to prevent such a tragedy from taking place. These great Pontiffs knew that such a calamity was not impossible.
However, if such a dark state of affairs would come to pass, that there would be three unmistakable means of recognizing it;
It would produce an upheaval of such magnitude that the entire world would realize that the Catholic Church had undergone a major revolution in line with modern ideas. It would be clear to all that an "updating" had taken place.
A new theology would be introduced that would be in contradiction to previous teachings.
The Freemasons themselves would voice their cockle-doodle of triumph believing that the Catholic Church had finally "seen the light" on such points as pluralism, the secular state, equality of religions, and whatever other compromises had been achieved.
The Authenticity of the Alta Vendita Documents
The secret papers of the Alta Vendita that fell into the hands of Pope Gregory XVI embrace a period that goes from 1820 to 1846. They were published at the request of Pope Pus IX by Cretineau-Joly in his work The Roman Church and Revolution.(4)
With the brief of approbation of February 25, 1861 which he addressed to the author, Pope Pus IX guaranteed the authenticity of these documents, but he did not allow anyone to divulge the true members of the Alta Vendita implicated in this correspondence.
The full text of the Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita is also contained in Msgr. George E. Dillon's book, Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked. When Pope Leo was presented with a copy of Msgr. Dillon's book, he was so impressed that he ordered an Italian version to be completed and published at his own expense.(5)
In the encyclical Humanum Genus, Leo XIII called upon Catholic leaders to "tear off the mask from Freemasonry and make plain to all what it really is. (6)" The publication of these documents is a means of "tearing off the mask". And if the Popes asked that these letters be published, it is because they want all Catholics to know the secret societies' plans to subvert the Church from within -- so that Catholics would be on their guard and hopefully, prevent such a catastrophe from taking place.
The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita
What follows is not the entire Instruction, but the section that is most pertinent to our discussion. The document reads:
"Our ultimate end is that of Voltaire and the French Revolution - -the final destruction of Catholicism, and even of the Christian idea...
The Pope, whoever he is, will never come to the secret societies; it is up to the secret societies to take the first step toward the Church, with the aim of conquering both of them.
The task that we are going to undertake is not the work of a day, or of a month, or of a year; it may last several years, perhaps a century, but in our ranks the soldier dies and the struggle goes on.
We do not intend to win the Popes to our cause, to make them neophytes of our principles, propagators of our ideas. That would be a ridiculous dream; and if events turn out in some way, if Cardinals or prelates, for example, of their own free will or by surprise, should enter into a part of our secrets, this is not at all an incentive for desiring their elevation to the See of Peter. That elevation would ruin us. Ambition alone would have led them to apostasy, the requirements of power would force them to sacrifice us. What we must ask for, what we should look for and wait for, as the Jews wait for the Messiah, is a Pope according to our needs...
With that we will march more securely towards the assault on the Church than with pamphlets of our brethren in France and even the gold of England. Do you want to know the reason for this? It is that with this, in order to shatter the high rock on which God has built His Church, we no longer need Hannibalian vinegar, or need gunpowder, or even need our arms. We have the little finger of the successor of Peter engaged in the ploy, and this little finger is as good, for this crusade, as all the Urban IIs and all the Saint Bernards in Christendom.
We have no doubt that we will arrive at this supreme end of our efforts. But when? But how? The unknown is not yet revealed. Nevertheless, as nothing should turn us aside from the plan drawn up, and on the contrary everything should tend to this, as if as early as tomorrow success were going to crown the work that is barely sketched, we wish, in this instruction, which will remain secret for the mere initiates, to give the officials in the charge of the supreme Vente (Lodge) some advice that they should instill in all the brethren, in the form of instruction or of a memorandum.
Now then, to assure ourselves a Pope of the required dimensions, it is a question first of shaping him... for this Pope, a generation worthy of the reign we are dreaming of. Leave old people and those of a mature age aside; go to the youth, and if it is possible, even to the children. You will contrive for yourselves, at little cost, a reputation as good Catholics and pure patriots.
This reputation will put access to our doctrines into the midst of the young clergy, as well as deeply into the monasteries. In a few years, by the force of things, this young clergy will have overrun - all the functions; they will form the sovereign's council, they will be called to choose a Pontiff who should reign. And this Pontiff, like most of his contemporaries, will be necessarily more or less imbued with the Italian and, humanitarian principles that we are going to begin to put into circulation. It is a small grain of black mustard that we are entrusting to the ground; but the sunshine of justice will develop it up to the highest power, and you will see one day what a rich harvest this small seed will produce.
In the path that we are laying out for our brethren, there are found great obstacles to conquer, difficulties of more than one kind to master. They will triumph over them by experience and by nearsightedness; but the goal is so splendid that it is important to put all the sail to the wind in order to reach it. You want to revolutionize Italy, look for the Pope whose portrait we have just drawn. You wish to establish the reign of the chosen ones on the throne of the prostitute of Babylon; let the Clergy march under your standard, always believing that they are marching under the banner of the apostolic keys. You intend to make the last vestige of tyrants and the oppressors disappear; lay your snares (nets) like Simon Bar-Jona; lay them in the sacristies, the seminaries, and the monasteries rather than at the bottom of the sea: and if you do not hurry, we promise you a catch more miraculous than his. The fisher of fish became the fisher of men; you will bring friends around the apostolic Chair. You will have preached a resolution in tiara and in cope, marching with the cross and the banner, a revolution that will need to be only a little bit urged on to set fire to the four corners of the world."(7)
It now remains for us to examine how successful this design has been.
The Enlightenment, My Friend, Is "Blowin' in the Wind"
Throughout the 19th Century, society had become increasingly permeated with the liberal principles of the French Revolution to the great detriment of the Catholic Faith and the Catholic State. The supposedly "kinder and gentler" notions of religious pluralism, religious indifferentism, a democracy which believes all authority comes from the people, false notions of liberty, interfaith gatherings, separation of Church and State and other novelties were gripping the minds of post-enlightenment Europe infecting Statesmen and Churchmen alike.
The Popes of the 19th Century and early 20th Century waged war against these dangerous trends in the battle-dress. With clear-sighted presence of mind rooted in an uncompromised certitude of Faith, these Popes were not taken in. They knew that evil principles, no matter how honorable they may appear, could not bear good fruit, and these were evil principles at their worst, since they were rooted not only in heresy, but apostasy.
Like commanding generals who recognize the duty to hold their ground at all cost, these Popes aimed powerful cannons at the errors of the modem world and fired incessantly. The encyclicals were their cannonballs, and they never missed their target. (8)
The most devastating blast came in the form of Pope Pius IX's monumental 1864 Syllabus of Errors, and when the smoke cleared, all involved in the battle were in no doubt as to who was on what side. The lines of demarcation had clearly been drawn. In this great Syllabus, Pius IX condemned the principle errors of the modern world, not because they were modern, bur because these new ideas were rooted in pantheistic naturalism and therefore incompatible with Catholic doctrine, as well as being destructive to society.
The teachings in the Syllabus were counter-Liberalism, and the principles of liberalism were counter-Syllabus. This was unquestionably recognized by all parties. Father Denis Fahey referred to this showdown as Pius IX versus the Pantheistic Deification of Man.(9) Speaking for the other side, the French Freemason Ferdinand Buisson likewise declared "A school cannot remain neutral between the Syllabus and the 'Declaration of the Rights of Man'." (10)
"Liberal Catholics"
Yet the 19th Century saw a new breed of Catholic who utopianly sought a compromise between the two. These men looked for what they believed to be "good" in the principles of 1789 and tried to introduce them into the Church. Many clergymen, infected by the spirit of the age, were caught into this net that had been "cast into the sacristies and into the seminaries". They came to be known as liberal Catholics. Pope Pius IX remarked that they were the worst enemies of the Church. Despite this. their numbers increased.
Pope Pius X and Modernism
This crisis reached a peak around the turn of the century when the liberalism of 1789 that had been "blowin' in the wind" swirled into the tornado of modernism. Fr. Vincent Miceli identified this heresy as such by describing modernism's "trinity of parents". He wrote:
1. Its religious ancestor is the Protestant Reformation;
2. Its philosophical parent is the Enlightenment;
3. Its political pedigree comes from the French Revolution.(11)
Pope St. Pius X, who ascended to the Papal chair in 1903, recognized modernism as a most deadly plague that must be arrested. He wrote that the most important obligation of the Pope is to insure the purity and integrity of Catholic doctrine, and further mentioned that if he did nothing, then he would have failed, in his essential duty.(12)
St. Pius X waged war on modernism issued an Encyclical (Pascendi) and a Syllabus (Lamentabili) against it, instituted the Anti-Modernist Oath to be sworn by all priests and teachers, purged the seminaries and universities of modernists and excommunicated the stubborn and unrepentant.
Pius X effectively halted the spread of modernism in his day. It is reported, however, that when he was congratulated for eradicating this grave error, Pius X immediately responded, that despite all his efforts, he had not succeeded in killing this beast, but had only driven it underground. He warned that if Church leaders were not vigilant, it would return in the future more virulent than ever.(13)
Curia on the Alert
A little known drama that unfolded during the reign of Pope Pius XI demonstrates that the underground current of Modernist thought was alive and well in the immediate post-Pius period.
Father Raymond Dulac relates that at the secret consistory of May 23, 1923, Pope Pius XI questioned the thirty Cardinals of the Curia on the timeliness of summoning an ecumenical council. In attendance were such illustrious prelates as Cardinals Merry del Val, De Lai, Gasparri, Boggiani and Billot. The Cardinals advised against it.
Billot warned, "The existence of profound differences in the midst of the episcopacy itself cannot be concealed ... [They] run the risk of giving place to discussions that will be prolonged indefinitely."
Boggiani recalled the Modernist theories from which, he said, a part of the clergy and of the bishops are not exempt. "This mentality can incline certain Fathers to present motions, to introduce methods incompatible with Catholic traditions."
Billot was even more precise. He expresses his fear of seeing the council "maneuvered" by "the worst enemies of the Church, the Modernists, who are already getting ready, as certain indications show, to bring forth the revolution in the Church, a new 1789."(14)
In discouraging the idea of a Council for such reasons, these Cardinals showed themselves more apt at recognizing the "signs of the times" then all the post-Vatican II theologians combined. Yet their caution may have been rooted in something deeper. They may also have been haunted by the writings of the infamous, illumine, the excommunicated Canon Roca (1830-1893) who preached revolution and Church "reform", and who predicted the subversion of the Church that would be brought about by a council.
Canon Roca's Revolutionary Ravings
In his book Athanasius and the Church of Our Times, Bishop Graber quotes Roca's prediction of a new, enlightened Church which would be influenced by "the socialism of Jesus and the Apostles".(15)
In the mid-19th Century, Roca had predicted: "The new church, which might not be able to retain anything of Scholastic doctrine and the original form of the former Church, will nevertheless receive consecration and canonical jurisdiction from Rome." Bishop Graber, commenting on this prediction, remarked, "A few years ago this was still inconceivable to us, but today?"(16)
Canon Roca also predicted a liturgical "reform". With reference to the future liturgy, he believed "that the divine cult in the form directed by the liturgy, ceremonial, ritual and regulations of the Roman Church will shortly undergo a transformation at an ecumenical council, which will restore to it the venerable simplicity of the golden age of the Apostles in accordance with the dictates of conscience and modern civilization."(17)
He foretold that through this council will come "a perfect accord between the ideals of modern civilization and the ideal of Christ and His Gospel. This will be the consecration of the New Social Order and the solemn baptism of modern civilization."
Roca also spoke of the future of the Papacy. He wrote "there is a sacrifice in the offing which represents a solemn act of expiation ... The Papacy will fall; it will die under the hallowed knife which the fathers of the last council will forge. The papal caesar is a host (victim) crowned for the sacrifice."(18)
Roca enthusiastically predicted a "new religion", "new dogma", "new ritual", "new priesthood." He called the new priests "progressists"[sic] and speaks of the "suppression" of the soutane (cassock) and the "marriage of priests."(19)
Chilling echos of Roca and the Alta Vendita are to be found in the words of the Rosicrucian, Dr. Rudolph Steiner, who declared in 1910 "We need a council and a Pope to proclaim it."(20)
The Great Council that Never Was
Around 1948, Pope Pius XII, at the request of the staunchly orthodox Cardinal Ruffini, considered calling a general Council and even spent a few years making the necessary preparations. There is evidence that progressive elements in Rome eventually dissuaded Pius XII from bringing it to realization since this Council showed definite signs of being in sync with Humans Generis. Like this great 1950 encyclical, the new Council would combat "false opinions which threaten to undermine the foundations of Catholic doctrine." (21)
Tragically, Pope Pius XII became convinced that he was too advanced in years to shoulder such a momentous task, and resigned that "this will be for my successor." 922)
Roncalli Will Canonize Ecumenism
Throughout the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII, the Holy Office under the able leadership of Cardinal Ottaviani maintained a safe Catholic landscape by keeping the wild horses of modernism firmly caged. Many of today's modernist theologians disdainfully recount how they and thew friends had been "muzzled" during this period.
Yet even Ottaviani could not prevent what was to happen in 1958. A new type of Pope "whom the Progressives believed to favor their cause" (23) would ascend to the Pontifical Chair and would force a reluctant Ottaviani to remove the latch, open the corral and brace himself for the stampede.
However, such a state of affairs was not unforeseen. At the news of the death of Pius XII, the old Dom Lambert Beauduin, a friend of Cardinal Roncalli (the future John XXIII), confided to Father Louis Bouyer: "If they elect Roncalli everything would be saved; he would be capable of calling a council and of consecrating ecumenism."(24)
And so it happened just as Dom Lambert foretold. Roncalli was elected, called a Council and consecrated ecumenism. The "Revolution in tiara and cope" was underway.
Pope John's Revolution
It is well known and superbly documented(25) that a clique of liberal theologians (periti) and bishops hijacked Vatican II (1962-1965) with an agenda to remake the Church into their own image through the implementation of a "new theology". Critics and defenders of Vatican II are in agreement on this point.
In his book Vatican II Revisited, Bishop Aloysius J. Wycislo (a rhapsodic advocate of the Vatican II revolution) declares with giddy enthusiasm that "theologians and biblical scholars who had been 'under a cloud' for years surfaced as periti (theological experts advising the bishops at the Council), and their post-Vatican II books and commentaries became popular reading."(26)
He notes that "Pope Pius XII's encyclical Humani Generis (1950) had ... a devastating effect on the work of a number of pre-conciliar theologians" (27) and explains that "During the early preparation of the Council those theologians (mainly French, with some Germans) whose activities had been restricted by Pope Pius XII were still under a cloud. Pope John quietly lifted the ban affecting some of the most influential ones. Yet a number remained suspect to the officials of the Holy Office." (28)
Bishop Wycislo sings the praises of triumphant progressives such as Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, John Courtney Murray, Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, Edward Schillebeeckx and Gregory Baum, who had been considered suspect before the Council, that are now the leading lights of post-Vatican II theology." (29)
In effect, those whom Pope Pius XII considered unfit to be walking the streets of Catholicism were now in control of the town. And as if to crown their achievements, the Oath Against Modernism was quietly suppressed shortly after the close of the Council. St. Pius X had predicted correctly. Lack of vigilance in authority had provoked modernism to return with a vengeance.
Marching Under a New Banner
There were countless battles at Vatican II between the International Group of Fathers who fought to maintain Tradition, and the progressive Rhine group. Tragically, in the end, it was the Liberal and Modernist element that prevailed. (30)
It was obvious, to anyone who had eyes to see was that the Second Vatican Council opened to door to many ideas that had formerly been anathema to Church teaching, but that were in-step with modernist thought. This did not happen by accident, but by design.
The progressives at Vatican II avoided condemnations of Modernist errors. They also deliberately planted ambiguities in the Council's texts which they intended to exploit after the Council. (33) These ambiguities have been utilized to promote an ecumenism that had been condemned by Pope Pius XI, a religious liberty (32) that had been condemned by the 19th and early 20th-century Popes (especially Pope Pius IX), a new liturgy along the lines of ecumenism that Archbishop Bugnini called "a major conquest of the Catholic Church", a collegiality that strikes at the heart of the Papal primacy, and a "new attitude toward the world" primarily promulgated in one of the most radical of all the Council documents, Gaudium et Spes.
As the Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita had hoped, the notions of liberal culture had finally won adherence among the major players in the Catholic hierarchy and was thus spread throughout the entire Church. The result has been an unprecedented crisis of Faith which continues to worsen. While at the same time, countless highly placed Churchmen, obviously inebriated by the "spirit of Vatican II", continuously praise those Council reform's that have brought such a calamity to pass.
Cheers on the Masonic Bleachers
Yet, not only many of our Church leaders, but Freemasons also celebrate the turn of events wrought by the Council. They rejoice that Catholics have fianlly "seen the light,' and that many of their Masonic principles have been sanctioned by the Church.
Yves Marsaudon of the Scottish Rite, in his book Ecumenism Viewed by a Traditional Freemason praised the ecumenism nurtured at Vatican II. He said "Catholics ... must not forget that all roads lead to God. And they will have to accept that this courageous idea of free-thinking, which we can really call a revolution pouring forth from our Masonic lodges, has spread magnificently over the dome of St. Peters." (33)
The post-Vatican II spirit of doubt and revolution obviously warmed the heart of French Freemason Jacques Mitterand who wrote approvingly, "Something has changed within the Church, and replies given by the Pope to the most urgent questions such as priestly celibacy and birth control, are hotly debated within the Church itself; the word of the Sovereign Pontiff is questioned by bishops, by priests, by the faithful. For a Freemason, a man who questions dogma is already a Freemason without an apron." (34)
Marcel Prelot, a senator for the Doubs region in France, is probably the most accurate in describing what has really taken place. He writes:
"We had struggled for a century and a half to bring our opinions to prevail with the Church and had not succeeded. Finally, there came Vatican II and we triumphed. From then on the propositions and principles of liberal Catholicism have been definitively and officially accepted by Holy Church." (35)
Prelot's statement deserves comment, since we must make the distinction between the Church and Churchmen. Despite any claims by Freemasons, it is impossible for doctrinal errors to be "definitively and officially accepted by Holy Church" as such. The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, cannot fall into error. Our Lord promised that "the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it." (Matt. 16:18) But this does not mean that Churchmen, even at the highest levels, cannot be infected with the liberal spirit of the age and promote ideas and practives that are opposed to the Church's perennial Magisterium. (36)
A Break with the Past
Those "conservatives" who deny that Vatican II constitutes a break with tradition, and that it contradicts previous magisterium have failed to listen to the very movers and shakers of the Council who shamelessly acknowledge it.
Yves Congar, one of the artisans of the reform remarked with quiet satisfaction that "The Church has had, peacefully, its October [Communist] Revolution." (37)
The same Father Yves Congar admitted that Vatican IIs Declaration on Religious Liberty is contrary to the Syllabus of Pope Pius IX. He said:
"It cannot be denied that a text like this does materially say something different from the Syllabus of 1864, and even almost the opposite of propositions 15 and 77-79 of that document." (38)
Lastly, some years ago, Cardinal Ratzinger, apparently unruffled by the admission, wrote that he sees the Vatican II text Gaudium et Spes as a "counter-Syllabus." He wrote:
If it is desirable to offer a diagnosis of the text [ Gaudium et Spes] as a whole, we might say that (in conjunction with the texts on religious liberty and world religions) it is a revision of the Syllabus of Pius IX, a kind of countersyllabus .... Let us be content to say here that the text serves as a countersyllabus and as such, represents, on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789. (39)
The new era inaugurated in 1789 consists, in effect, in the elevation of the "Rights of Man" above the rights of God.
In truth, this comment by Cardinal Ratzinger is disturbing, especially since it came from the man who, as head of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is now in charge of guarding the purity of Catholic doctrine.l But we can also cite a similar statement by the progressive Cardinal Suenens, himself a Council Father, who spoke in terms of "old regimes" that have come to an end. The words he used in praise of the Council are the most telling, the most chilling and the most damning. Suenens declared "Vatican II is the French Revolution of the Church." (40)
The Status of the Vatican II Documents
For years, Catholics have labored under the mistaken notion that they must accept the pastoral Council, Vatican II, with the same assent of faith that they owe to dogmatic Councils. This, however, is not the case.
The Council Fathers repeatedly referred to Vatican II as a pastoral Council, a Council which dealt not with defining the Faith, but with implementing it.
The fact that Vatican II is inferior to a dogmatic Council is confirmed by the testimony of Council Father, Bishop Thomas Morris, which at his request was not unsealed until after his death:
I was relieved when we were told that this Council was not aiming at defining or giving final statements on doctrine, because a statement on doctrine has to be very carefully formulated and I would have regarded the Council documents as tentative and liable to be reformed. (41)
At the close of Vatican II, the bishops asked the Council's Secretary General, Archbishop Pericle Felici, for that which theologians call the "theological note" of the Council, that is, the doctrinal "weight" of Vatican II's teachings. Felici replied:
We have to distinguish according to the schemas and the chapters those which have already been the subject of dogmatic definitions
in the past; as for the declarationswhich have a novel character, we have to make reservations. (42)
After the close of Vatican II, Paul VI gave this explanation:
There are those who ask what authority, what theological qualification the Council intended to give to its teachings, knowing that it avoided issuing solemn dogmatic definitions engaging the infallibility of the ecclesiastical Magisterium. The answer is known by whoever remembers the conciliar declaration of March 6, 1964, repeated on November 16, 1964: Given the Council's pastoral character, it avoided pronouncing, in an extraordinary manner, dogmas endowed with the note of infallibility. . . (43)
In other words, unlike a dogmatic Council, Vatican II does not demand an unqualified assent of faith. Vatican II's verbose and ambiguous statements are not on a par with dogmatic pronouncements. Hence, Vatican II's novelties are not unconditionally binding on the faithful.
Catholics may "make reservations" and even resist any teachings from the Council that would conflict with the perennial Magisterium of the centuries.
"A Revolution in Tiara and Cope"
The post-Vatican II revolution bears all the hallmarks of the fulfilling of the designs of the Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita as well as the prophecies of Canon Roca.
1.The entire world has witnessed a profound change in the Catholic Church on an international scale that is in step with the modern world.
2. Vatican IIs defenders and detractors both demonstrate that certain teachings of the Council constitute a break with the past.
3. The Freemasons themselves rejoice that thanks to the Council, their ideas "have spread magnificently over the dome of Saint Peter's".
The Passion of the Church
Thus, the passion that our Holy Church is presently suffering is really no great mystery. By recklessly ignoring the Popes of the past, our present Church leaders have erected a compromised structure that is collapsing upon itself. Though Pope Paul VI lamented that "the Church is in a state of auto-demolition", he, as does the present Pontificate, insisted that the disastrous aggiornamento responsible for this auto-demoiltion be continued full-steam.
In the face of such "diabolic disorientation (the term that Fatima's Sister Lucy employed to describe the present mind-set of many in today's hierarchy) the only response for all Catholics concerned are:
1. to pray much, especially the Rosary.
2. to learn and live the Traditional Doctrine and morals of the Catholic Church as it is found in pre-Vatican II Catholic writings,
3. to adhere to the Latin Tridentine Mass where the Catholic faith and devotion are found in their fullness uninfected by today's ecumenism,
4. to resist with all one's soul the liberal post-Vatican II trends wreaking such havoc on the Mystical Body of Christ,
5. to charitably instruct others in the traditions of the Faith and warn them of the errors of the times,
6. to pray that a contagious return to sanity may sweep through a sufficient number of the hierarchy,
7. to put great confidence in Our Lady and her power to reorient our Church leaders back to Catholic Tradtion,
8. and to never compromise.
Only She Can Help You
Since this present struggle is essentially a supernatural battle, we must not, ignore the supernatural helps given to us at Fatima in 1917. All concerned Catholics should faithfully fulfill the requests of Our Lady of Fatima, and especially work toward the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. For in the promised Triumph of the Immaculate Heart, the unrepentant agents of liberalism, modernism and naturalism will all be gathered in a great ecumenical cluster with the prince of this world to receive the communal head-crushing from the heel of the Queen of Heaven.
Footnotes
- The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol, 3 (New York: Encyclopedia Press, 1913), pp. 330-331.
- Rev. E. Cahill, S.J. Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement (Dublin: Gill, 1959), p. 101.
- Yves Marsaudon, quoted in Dr. Rudolph Graber, Athanasius and the Church of our Time (Palmdale, CA: Christian Book Club, 1974), p. 39.
- Cretineau-Joly, The Roman Church and Revolution,Vol. 2, orig. ed., 1859, reprinted by Circle of the French Renaissance, Paris, 1976. Msgr. Delassus reproduced these documents again in his work The Anti-Christian Conspiracy, Desclee de Brouwer, 1910, Tome III, pp. 1035-1092.
- Michael Davies, Pope John's Council (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 1992), p. 166.
- Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus-On Freemasonry(Rockford, IL: TAN, 1978), par. 31.
- Msgr. Delassus, The Anti-Christian Conspiracy (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1910), Tome III, pp. 1035-1092. The full text of "The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita" is also published in: Msgr. Dillon, Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked (Dublin: Gill, 1885; Palmdale, Calif.: Christian Book Club, n.d.), pp. 51-56.
For a true understanding of Catholic doctrine vs. modern errors, it is imperative to study the Papal Encyclicals and other documents against Liberalism, Modernism and
- Freemasonry from the 19th and early 20th-century Popes. The most important of these are collected in The Popes against Modern Errors: 16 Papal Documents (Rockford: TAN, 1999).
- Fr. Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, C.S.Sp. (Dublin: Regina Publications, 1939), chap. VII.
Quoted in ibid., p. 116 (143).
- Fr. Vincent Miceli, The Antichrist (Harrison, NY: Roman Catholic Books), p. 133.
- Pope Pius X, Pascendi ("On Modernism"), par. 1.
- Fr. Vincent Miceli, The Antichrist (cassette lecture) (Keep the Faith, Inc.).
- Raymond Dulac, Episcopal Collegiality at the Second Council of the Vatican (Paris: Cedre, 1979), pp. 9-10.
- Graber, op. cit., p. 34.
- Ibid., pp. 34, 35.
- Ibid., p. 35.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p. 36.
- Ibid.
- A full account of this fascinating history can be found in: Frere Michel of the Holy Trinity, The Whole Truth About Fatima, Volume 3: The Third Secret (Ft. Erie, Ontario: Immaculate Heart Publications, 1990), pp. 257-304.
- Ibid., p. 298.
- Vicomte Leon de Poncins, Freemasonry and the Vatican (Palmdale, CA: Christian Book Club, 1968), p. 14.
- Bouyer, Dom Lambert Beauduin A Man of the Church (Casterman, 1964) pp. 180-181. Quoted by Fr. Dilder Bonneterre in The Liturgical Movement (Ed. Fideliter, 1980), P. 119.
- Cf. Fr. Ralph Wiltgen S.V.D., The Rhine Flows into the Tiber (New York: Hawthorne, 1967; TAN, 1985); Michael Davies, Pope John's Council (New York: Arlington House, 1977;
- Kansas City: Angelus Press, 1992); and Bishop Wycislo (see next note), which sings praises of the reform.
- Most Rev. Aloysius Wycislo, Vatican II Revisited: Reflections by One Who Was There (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1987), p. x.
- Ibid., p. 33.
- Ibid., p. 27.
- Ibid., pp. 27-34.
- The entire story of the hijacking of the Council by liberal prelates and theologians, and the tragic consequences of this modernist coup, are superbly explained in Fr. Ralph Wiltgen,
- S.V.D.'s The Rhine Flows into the Tiber (New York: Hawthorne, 1967; TAN, 1985) and in Michael Davies' Pope John's Council (New York: Arlington House, 1977; Kansas City:
- Angelus Press, 1992).
- This tactic was admitted by liberal Council peritus Father Edward Schillebeeckx. He said, "We will express it in a diplomatic way, but after the Council, we will draw the implicit conclusions." (Cited from the Dutch magazine De Bazuin, No. 16, 1965, in Iota Unum, by Romano Amerio, Kansas City, MO: Sarto House, 1996.) Another quote (or translation of the same quote) from Fr. Schillebeeckx reads, "We have used ambiguous phrases during the Council and we know how we will interpret them afterwards' " (Archbishop Marcel
- Lefebvre, An Open Letter to Confused Catholics, Kansas City: Angelus Press, 1992, p. 106.)
- Cf. Michael Davies' The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty (Long Prairie, MN: Neumann Press, 1992) for evidence that Vatican II's Dignitatis Humanae (particularly Art. 2) reflects a contradiction with previous Papal teaching. The same is admitted without compunction by the progressive Council theologian Fr. Yves Cougar. See p. 26 of this booklet.
- Quoted in Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, An Open Letter to Confused Catholics (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 1992), p. 89.
- Ibid., pp. 88-89.
- Le Catholicisme Liberal, 1969; also Lefebvre, op. cit., P. 100.
- The great theologian, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada (1388-1468), citing the doctrine of Pope Innocent III, teaches that it is possible for even a Pope to go against the universal customs of the Church. Torquemada writes, "Thus it is that Pope Innocent III states (De Consuetudine) that it is necessary to obey the Pope in all things so long as he himself does not go against the universal customs of the Church, but should he go against the universal customs of the Church, he need not be followed . . ." Cited from Father Paul Kramer, B.Ph., S.T.D., M. Div., A Theological Vindication of Roman Catholic Traditionalism, 2nd edition (St. Francis Press, India), p. 29.
- Lefebvre, op. cit., p. 100.
- Yves Cougar, O.P., Challenge to the Church (London, 1977), p. 147, in Michael Davies, The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty (Long Prairie, MN: Neumann Press, 1992), p. 203.
- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), pp. 381-382.
- Lefebvre, op. cit., p. 100.
- Interview of Bishop Morris by Kieron Wood, Catholic World News, September 27, 1997.
- Lefebvre, op. cit., p. 107.
- Paul VI, General Audience of January 12, 1966, in Insegnamenti di Paolo VI, vol. 4, p. 700, in Atila Sinke Guimaraes, In the Murky Waters of Vatican II (Metairie: MAETA, 1997; TAN, 1999), pp. 111-112.
Source
|
|
|
|
| Summary of the Principal Errors of Vatican II Ecclesiology |
|
Posted by: Stone - 11-23-2020, 08:35 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
- No Replies
|
|
The Vatican II Concept of Ecumenism
The Vatican II concept of the Church as "People of God" is false ecumenism. It leads to the belief that Protestantism is no more than one particular form of the same Christian religion.
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.
The Vatican II concept of Ecumenism, condemned by Catholic moral teaching and law, has arrived at the point of allowing the sacraments of penance, Eucharist and Extreme Unction to be received from "non-Catholic ministers" (Vatican II Canon 844 N.C) and it favours "ecumenical hospitality" by authorizing Catholic ministers to give the sacrament of the Eucharist to non-Catholics.
Vatican II Canon 844 "Christ's faithful for whom it is physically or morally impossible to approach a Catholic minister, may lawfully receive the sacraments of penance, the Eucharist and anointing of the sick from non-Catholic ministers in whose Churches these sacraments are valid. Catholic ministers may lawfully administer the sacraments of penance, the Eucharist and anointing of the sick to members of the eastern Churches not in full communion with the Catholic Church, if they spontaneously ask for them and are properly disposed. If there is danger of death or if, in the judgement of the diocesan Bishop or of the Episcopal Conference, there is some other grave and pressing need, Catholic ministers may lawfully administer these same sacraments to other Christians not in full communion with the Catholic Church."
The Vatican II Concept of Democratic Government
The Vatican II document "Lumen Gentium" is explicitly adopted by the new Vatican II Canon 336, a doctrine whereby the college of Bishops together with the Vatican II "pope" equally enjoy supreme power in the Church, habitually and constantly.
Vatican II Canon 336 "This College of Bishops, in which the apostolic body abides in an unbroken manner, is, in union with its head and never without this head, also the subject of supreme and full power over the universal Church."
This doctrine of double supreme power is contrary to the teaching and practice of the true Catholic Church, especially in the First Vatican Council (DZ. 3055) and in Pope Leo XIII's Encyclical "Satis Cognitum." The Pope alone has this supreme power which he communicates as he judges opportune and in extraordinary circumstances.
The Vatican II Concept of The Natural Rights of Man
The Vatican II Council's declaration "Dignitatis Humanae" affirms a false natural human right "in matters of religion" contrary to prior papal teachings, which formally deny such a blasphemy.
Pius IX in his Encyclical "Quanta Cura", Leo XIII in his Encyclicals "Libertas Praestantissimum" and "Immortale Dei", Pius XII in his allocution "Le Riesce", addressed to Italian Catholic jurists, deny that such a right has any basis in reason or revelation.
These doctrines are based on a false concept of human dignity, stemming from the agnostic and materialist pseudo-philosophers of the French Revolution, already condemned by St. Pius X in his pontifical letter "Our Apostolic Mandate."
The Vatican II document "Gaudium et Spes" expresses a false principle when it regards human and Christian dignity as being a consequence of the Incarnation, which restored this dignity for all men. This same error is repeated in John Paul II's Encyclical "Redemptor Hominis."
The Vatican II Concept of the Mass
The new concept of the Church as defined by John Paul II calls for a profound change in the principal act of the Church, which is the Sacrifice of the Mass. The new Vatican II definition is that the Mass is "a service and a collegial, ecumenical communion." A better definition could not be found for the new mass, which, like the new Vatican II Church, is a wide departure from the true Church's Tradition and Magisterium.
It is a concept that is more Protestant than Catholic and explains all that has been unduly exalted and all that has been diminished.
Contrary to the teaching of the Council of Trent in the 22nd Session, and contrary to Pius XII's Encyclical "Mediator Dei", the faithful's part in the Mass has been exaggerated and that of the priest diminished until he is now no more than the president, after the manner of Protestants.
The place of the liturgy of the word has been exaggerated at the expense of the Sacrifice.
The communion meal has been exalted and layicized at the expense of respect for and faith in the real presence through transubstantiation.
Popes St. Pius V and Clement VIII insisted on the necessity of avoiding changes and mutations by perpetually adhering to this Roman rite consecrated by Tradition.
Vatican II's Unimpeded Errors and Heresies
Vatican II introduces the Protestant practice of free judgement, the consequence of many creeds within the V2 church.
Vatican II universities and major seminaries now teach modern philosophies rather than traditional Catholic doctrine.
Vatican II favors "Humanism" which echos the modern world by making man the end of all things.
Vatican II favors "Naturalism" which exalts man and human values, thereby causing the supernatural values of the Redemption and of grace to be forgotten.
Vatican II favors "Evolution" which causes the true Catholic teachings of 20 centuries to be rejected.
Vatican II refuses to condemn the errors of "Socialism and Communism." The attitude of the Vatican II false-popes since the 1960's confirms this, on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Vatican II agreements with "Masonry", the "World Council of Churches" and "Moscow" have reduced the Vatican II sect to the status of prisoner to these organizations.
|
|
|
|
| SSPX: No Problem taking CV Vaccine from Aborted Fetal Lines |
|
Posted by: Stone - 11-23-2020, 08:31 AM - Forum: The New-Conciliar SSPX
- Replies (5)
|
|
Hard to believe it's true but here it is in their own words, citing as an authority, the Conciliar Church's pronouncement from 2005 [under Benedict XVI] that Catholics can take a Covid vaccine that is derived from or contains aborted fetal cells:
sspx.org/en/news-events/news/can-catholic-good-conscience-receive-coronavirus-vaccine-62007
As one reads it- it reads exactly as a modernist hit piece: Believe what we tell you; you have no other choice; our experts tell us its fine to take the vaccine derived from aborted fetal cells; 'the [Conciliar] Church has provided prudent guidance' on this issue, no need to look elsewhere, etc.
Here is Fr. Hewko's excellent reminder that the Church [of Tradition- not the Conciliar Church] does NOT allow for this abomination [beginning at the relevant minute mark]:
|
|
|
|
|
![[Image: saint_clement_i_of_rome.jpg]](https://sanctoral.com/en/saints/images/saint_clement_i_of_rome.jpg)
![[Image: saint_felicity_and_her_seven_sons.jpg]](https://sanctoral.com/en/saints/images/saint_felicity_and_her_seven_sons.jpg)
![[Image: saint_felix_of_valois.jpg]](https://sanctoral.com/en/saints/images/saint_felix_of_valois.jpg)
![[Image: saint_odon_or_eudes_of_cluny.jpg]](https://sanctoral.com/en/saints/images/saint_odon_or_eudes_of_cluny.jpg)
![[Image: saint_gregory_thaumaturge.jpg]](https://sanctoral.com/en/saints/images/saint_gregory_thaumaturge.jpg)
