October 2015
Recycling the Revolution: 2
THE EDITOR
[Gaudium et Spes] serves as a counter syllabus, and, as such,represents, on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789. |
| Cardinal Ratzinger (1982) |
Many decades of being mesmerised by dogma, by a rule-book approach, have had their effect. Today we want to introduce a creative spirit. |
| Mikhail Gorbachev (1988) |
With the upcoming synod, it is clear that the Holy Father is calling the Church to... be open to new avenues and creativity when it comes to accompanying families. ... that we not settle for... ways of working that stifle creativity.... |
Archbishop Cupich (2015) |
There are many words to describe the thrust of the current pontificate, most of them unmentionable. For Modernist prelates like Blaise Cupich of Chicago, on the other hand, "creativity" is the current mot juste. Far from creative ways to "teach all nations" unpopular salvific truths [Matt. 28:19], however, it is all about creatively excusing a multitude of sins. Those papally facilitated at the October 2014 Synod, for instance. There, in bold relief, we saw Bergoglian 'creativity' at work: deceit and manipulation(1) at the service of sealing the Modernist "reconciliation" of the Church "with the new era inaugurated in 1789" — the perverse objective plainly stated by Cardinal Ratzinger (among others).
Spun from the same weasel-worded cloth as 'renewal,' 'creativity' is the latest hard sell of their infidelity to Christ and His Spotless Bride: their cuddling up with dissolute modernity; the atheistic artifice set in train by the Lodge through the genocidal Revolution it fomented, guided, and branded with its Masonic triplet: liberté, égalité, fraternité (— the godless principles informing all modern derivations of 1789, like the Human Rights industry). 'Creativity' is coined to make this treachery sound fresh and refreshing; open-minded; ... modern. Yet it cannot disguise the tired and tedious agenda of the Council document proudly referenced by Cardinal Ratzinger: Gaudium et Spes ("The Church in the Modern World"). An amorphous blueprint for worldly compromise with the secular spawn of Madame Guillotine, its partisans have rehabilitated falsehoods dutifully condemned by Blessed Pius IX in his Syllabus of Errors (1864).
Creative Destruction
Published as an appendix to the encyclical Quanta Cura ("Condemning Current Errors"), the Syllabus appeared just as the Masonic sons of 1789 were setting nineteenth century Italy ablaze with bloody revolution, in the process of annexing the papal states. Listed among its 80 propositions condemned as erroneous were atheism, pantheism, rationalism, indifferentism (one religion is as good as another), socialism and communism, secret societies and the idea that the secular nation-state has authority over the Church. The skewering of these sacred cows of Judeo-Masonry (especially the condemnation of proposition 80, that "The Roman pontiff can and should reconcile himself to progress, liberalism and the modern culture") provoked a secular outcry against 'reactionary' Catholicism; a cry eventually echoed within the Church by the Modernists, until the Council coup that enabled them to write their own "counter syllabus."
Thus was the Bride of Christ press-ganged into "the new era inaugurated in 1789." 'Creative' pontificates (including Ratzinger's) continued the "reconciliation" process: confusing and compromising drop by drop, until Francis arrived to seal the deal in a rush.
If we understand "creative" in the sense of "creative destruction" — of the sort boasted by the Zionist Neocons who engineered the catastrophic Afghanistan and Iraqi wars (CO passim) — then the current pontificate certainly fits the bill.
The 'creative' Neocon project sought to raze traditional Middle Eastern societies to the ground and consign the lucrative management of their secular reconstruction — as consumer markets wrapped in docile democracies — to the "military-industrial complex."
For his part, Francis is seeking to raze the vestigial bastions of Tradition (to include the Syllabus), by consigning the latter stages of that ongoing demolition project — the secularisation of faith and morals — to Kasper, Cupich, Maradiaga, Danneels, Schönborn, Wuerl et. al.; arch-Modernists handpicked by Francis to attend this month's Synod, yet for whom enough "creative destruction" of the Old Faith and its Old Mass is never enough.(2)
We must underline once again, however, that by overseeing the final stages of Hans Urs von Balthasar's revolutionary battle cry to "raze the bastions" of the Faith, Francis is acting in perfect continuity with his immediate predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI; both ardent Balthasarians. Although critical of those who push Vatican II as theological ground zero, Cardinal Ratzinger hypocritically/paradoxically insisted that
...there is no possible return to the Syllabus, which could well have been a first step in the combat against Liberalism and the nascent Marxism, but which cannot be the last word. Neither embraces nor the ghetto can resolve the problem of [relations with] the modern world for the Christian. Hence, the "razing of the bastions" that Hans Urs von Balthasar called for already in 1952 was in effect an urgent duty [Principles of Catholic Theology, 1982].
Neocons refuse to take this "razing" continuum on board. We finished Part I with the belated awakening of Andrea Gagliarducci to the unprecedented papal threat Francis poses to the Faith of Our Fathers. Yet still he asks: "Why does Pope Benedict remain silent? What possible hold could they have over him?" Certainly, in the current climate, anything is possible. But is it really constrained silence? Gagliarducci sees a fracture where there is Balthasarian continuity: at least in broad liberal strokes, if not in every detail.
And so, as post-conciliar papacies rev up through the liberal gears, from illogically moderate to logically extreme, we have reached the final outpouring of the "new era": a septic delta where Masonic, Marxist and Modernist effluent converge and disgorge into a sea of hail-fellow-well-met "reconciliation" with the materialistic fruits of 1789; to include new offshoots like institutionalised sodomy and rapid-fire annulments that Pius IX never saw coming in his worst liberal nightmares.
Rank Modernism
Appropriately, it was a true Socialist son of the Revolution who best framed the convergent mentality. "Many decades of being mesmerised by dogma, by a rule-book approach, have had their effect. Today we want to introduce a creative spirit," Mikhail Gorbachev declared in 1988. The Bergoglians have said as much many times over.
"The Church is not timeless, she lives amid the vicissitudes of history, and the Gospel must be known and experienced by people today," the subversive Secretary of the Synod, Cardinal Baldisseri, informed a Belgian newspaper in May 2014. "The message should be in the present, with all respect for the integrity of the one who receives that message." Clearly intoxicated with Mikhail's "creative spirit" of revolt and just as tired of being "mesmerised by dogma" and "a rule-book approach," he later provoked participants at a January 2015 conference organised by the Pontifical Council for the Family, declaring that Cardinal Kasper’s heretical proposal on Communion for the divorced-remarried "should be welcomed as a contribution."
Like an Angel of Light cooing what St. Pius X categorically condemned in Pascendi, the Cardinal assured his indignant audience that "There’s no reason to be scandalised that there is a cardinal or a theologian saying something that’s different from the so-called 'common doctrine'" (read de fide doctrine: a mere inverted comma-fabrication to Baldiserri!). Emboldened, he went on: "This doesn’t imply a going against," but rather "it means reflecting, because dogma has its own evolution; that is a development, not a change.... Everything that we know today is a mystery, and since we are standing before a mystery and a mystery is not immediately known, we advance in our understanding." (— "Thus," warns Pius X, "the way is open to the intrinsic evolution of dogma. An immense collection of [Modernist] sophisms this, that ruins and destroys all religion.")
Meanwhile, the Holy Father mouths the same revolutionary line in the same slippery way, as in early September, while addressing an international congress held in Argentina to mark the 50th anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican Council.
A shameless litany of Modernist assumptions, suppositions and tenets that reconfirms the liberal wellspring of this pontificate, condemnatory passages from Pascendi could be juxtaposed next to every other problematic line of this address. Suffice to relate here that the Master of False Dichotomies depicted Vatican II as an attempt "to overcome this divorce between theology and pastoral ministry, between faith and life" (read: 'between a rule-book approach and a creative spirit'). Often the two had been set against each other in "a false opposition" as two "separate realities," he claimed. This, he said, creates a false conflict between those who are pastors "on the side of the people" and academics "on the side of doctrine." (Of course the only "false conflict" here is the one the Pope had just set up with his spurious claims!) Any attempt to limit or cut off the relationship and communication between "received tradition and concrete reality puts the faith of the people of God in danger," he added — being careful to omit concrete sodomitic and adulterous realities that actually place souls in danger, yet which he and Comrade Baldisseri will try once more to accommodate within "received tradition" during Synod II.
Aliens in our midst, the egregious likes of Cardinals Baldisseri and Kasper ever recall the infiltration of the Church by nefarious agents of influence. As for the Holy Father, we might hope for his own sake that he is such a perfectly malformed product of his ecclesiastical times that he does not realise the Marxist-cum-Modernist dialectic he is preaching: continually creating conflicts where none exist, in order to separate absolute truth from evolving pastoral situations, and so adapt doctrine to the culture rather than vice versa. (The goal should not be "about adapting the Revelation to the world," Cardinal Müller recently reiterated, in the process of castigating German bishops for their schismatic attitude, "but … about gaining the world for God.")
The Frankfurt School
Although in perfect conformity with Modernism, Gorbachev's 1988 statement was not, of course, a religious one. He was anticipating developments soon to follow and dramatically symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall; namely, the existential collapse of Marxism, as an economic-political structure, and its reconfiguration as a 'creative' cultural entity. Yet he knew full well that that anti-cultural construct was already far advanced, having been first plotted shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution by his demonic predecessor Lenin himself. A short recap of that history will help place in broader context our present pitiful condition: exemplified by the explosive coup at Synod I by a cadre of mitred revolutionaries.
A strategy synonymous with Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, who sought non-violent means to subvert and drag all the formative institutions of the West into the Marxist purview, Cultural Marxism was also on Lenin's mind very early on. By late 1922 he had already organised a meeting at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow to consider why his violent workers' revolution had not taken the rest of the world by storm. From the deliberations emerged the concept of Revolution and Eros: sexual instinct to be used as an instrument of destruction. The proposal of participant Willi Munzenburg was to "organise the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilisation stink... corrupt all its values and make life impossible...." One commentator has said that these Moscow meetings were "perhaps more harmful to Western civilisation than the Bolshevik Revolution itself."
One epochal outcome of subsequent meetings was the so-called Frankfurt School in Germany; a subversive organisation to which we often return in these pages. Consisting predominantly of Jewish Marxist intellectuals, this "School" was established within the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, to put flesh on Lenin's revolutionary programme. In order to create the state of hopelessness and alienation needed to destabilise society and provoke a socialist revolution, they set about undermining the Christian legacy of the West by negative criticism of every facet and sphere of life (known in sum as "Critical Theory"). As we have documented elsewhere, Russian infiltrators were busily complementing this pernicious project of Western deconstruction (cf. "Consecrating Russia to Exorcise the West - Part II," Nov. 2014). After moving to America in the 1930s, however, Frankfurt School members instilled radical autonomy, relativism, disaffection and alienation, like no other group.
They quickly established themselves in prestigious universities and greatly influenced the emerging "entertainment-media" (which expression they typically coined), including Hollywood. Family, education, media, sex and popular culture were their main focus. In particular, its members led the 1960s sexual revolution and shaped popular culture with their toxic political/pansexual mix of Marx and Freud, even coining signature hippy mantras like "make love, not war," and "do your own thing." Wishing to destroy all objectivity and absolutes, they fostered widespread use of "sensitivity training" and "values clarification" techniques, along with child-centred learning, whereby teachers became mere "facilitators," allowing pupils to develop their own subjective knowledge and wisdom.
In this latter regard, while all authority was mocked and undermined, familial authority was especially targeted. "Even a partial breakdown of parental authority in the family might tend to increase the readiness of a coming generation to accept social change," the Frankfurt School determined. Accordingly, the authority of the father was attacked remorselessly, the specific roles of father and mother were denied, as were their rights as primary educators of their children. Pornographic classroom sex education figured hugely in their plans. (Even before he attended the initial Lenin meetings and later set up the Frankfurt School, Georg Lukacs had established his landmark programme of classroom sex education in then-Bolshevist Hungary.)
Out of all this destructive Critical Theory (i.e., Socialist Revolution by other means) emerged the controlling Political Correctness of our day. Its underlying principle of 'no tolerance for the intolerant', preached by Herbert Marcuse, is perhaps the most oppressive and distinctively Jewish legacy of the Frankfurt School (— the 'intolerant' being Christians, whose 'repressive' religion allegedly brought about the Holocaust and so must be cleansed from the pubic square to avoid a repeat).
Revolution as Fast-track Annulments
Ultimately, the atheistic worldview thus imposed has formed, more or less directly, two generations of Western leaders: very many of whom view the Christian roots of their heritage as passé and intolerant at best; hateful and oppressive at worst. As the rebellious state of the Western Church embodied in the Bergoglian cabal testifies, many of our own leaders and their advisers have long shared a similar disaffection, drawing from the same godless source. During the 'shadow synod' held in Rome on 25 May, for instance, the influential Father Schockenhoff (referenced in Part 1) littered his heretical thesis with quotations from two Frankfurt School luminaries: psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, and Marxist sociologist Theodore Adorno.
This meeting of restless, disaffected like-minds — the dovetailing of the Marxist cultural revolution without and the Modernist ecclesiastical revolution within — was in plain view by the time the Frankfurt School returned to Germany in 1953 (its corrosive ideas already percolating within Western institutions (3). For it was in 1952 that Hans Urs von Balthasar published what he called his "programmatic little book": Razing the Bastions. Thirty years later, he was to tell (now Cardinal) Angelo Scola that the Second Vatican Council "adopted" much of this programme and "deepened it and taught it" [see "Broken Cisterns," CO, March 2006].
Since the 'adoptees' comprised both moderate and full-blown Modernists, barring Divine intervention it was only a matter of time before a conclave voted in a papacy of Bergoglian stripe: to apply the "programmatic" evolutionary principles to the hilt, in plain sight.
Even as I write on the eve of Synod II, Francis has formally announced the streamlined annulment process he kicked-started shortly before Synod I. On 13 September 2014, it was announced that the Pope had established a new commission to speed up the annulments of marriages. The fact that this was announced the very day before the multiple marriage ceremony we mentioned last month, to which Pope Francis purposefully invited proudly cohabiting couples and allowed them to receive Holy Communion, showed up the stated intention — "to preserve the principle of the indissolubility of marriage" — as flagrant hypocrisy.
Nonetheless, a year later, the commission's furtive work done, the Holy Father still insists that the provisions of his Mitis Iudex Dominus Iesus ("The Lord Jesus, Clement Judge"), a motu proprio he has bulldozed through and dumped on the Church, "favour not the nullity of marriage but rather the speed of processes, along with the appropriate simplicity." The positive spin being put about by the grossly naive is based on the document's reaffirmation of "the indissolubility of the sacred conjugal bond." Coming from a pontiff who promotes Kasperian conniving against that same "sacred bond," who reportedly believes that the majority of marriages are invalid, who inserted scandalous moral contradictions into his multiple marriage ceremony, whose history of inciting sacrilegious Communions among the divorced-remarried is well known — in light of all that, we might be excused for not putting out the bunting.
More realistically (yet without wishing to cast the slightest shadow over those who seek and obtain annulments in good faith), prioritising the "speed" and "simplicity" of the annulment process smacks of the latest nod to the post-1789 era: one more worldly concession to further undermine Catholic truth; in this case the very conjugal sanctity and indissolubility Francis claims to be upholding.
John Paul II, who inherited the American annulment explosion after the Vatican first monkeyed around with the process in the seventies, did not seek a further relaxation. According to Cardinal Burke he actually rejected similar proposals to those now introduced by Francis. Rather, in a sincere but futile bid to put the nullity genie back in the bottle, his overriding priority was re-instruction: about the Church's teaching on the "indissolubility of marriage — a teaching that comes from Christ himself," as he bluntly reminded a group of American bishops during their October 1998 ad limina visit to Rome.
"The referral of matrimonial cases to the tribunal (to ascertain if conditions for annulment exist) should be a last resort," he told them, further warning the bishops that abuse of the declarations of nullity could cause even the faithful to misunderstand annulment, thinking of it as "divorce under a different name." He stressed that existence of nullity must be a "moral certainty" not just a probability — thereby surely implying longer and deeper, not speedier and simpler consideration. He also insisted that the determination of mental or psychological problems rendering persons incapable of contracting a valid marriage be undertaken by a professional "who shares a Christian anthropology in accordance with the Church’s understanding of the human person."(4)
Would that Francis preferred to give prelates and priests similar pep talks (— not least the priest in charge of an Australian tribunal, who happily confided to the present writer several years ago that, undecided, he had finally granted one annulment based on a dream!) Instead, Mitis Iudex Dominus Iesus appears to tick the Modernist box corresponding to the familial objective on the Frankfurt School list of recommendations. According to Timothy Matthews (Catholic Insight, 2009), these included:
• the creation of racism offences;
• continual change to create confusion;
• the teaching of sex and homosexuality to children;
• the undermining of schools' and teachers' authority;
• mass immigration to destroy identity;
• emptying of churches;
• an unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime;
• dependency on the state, or state benefits;
• control and dumbing down of media;
• encouraging the breakdown of the family.
Although it is too early to say to what (potentially catastrophic) extent the new process will contribute to that final bullet point goal, one thing is beyond doubt: that reducing the time for acquiring an annulment to as little as 45 days, eliminating the need for a second confirming judgment, and leaving annulment decisions to the local bishop rather than canonical judges, will not strengthen the family — one jot!
Convergence with the Cultural Hegemony
Readers will recognise many other items on the above list as reflecting, directly or indirectly, diocesan liturgical, catechetical, educational, and social justice policies. Alone, widespread classroom sex education in Catholic schools qualifies most Western bishops as honorary members of the Frankfurt School: de facto cultural Marxists engaged in "Cultural Terrorism," as the Communist 'Father' of sex ed, Georg Lukacs, described his undertaking.
To underline the veracity of that damning charge, we need only recall the huge Irish youth vote for sodomitic 'marriage,' and the sickening sight of those 'Catholic' products of classroom sex education celebrating their referendum victory.
Before that godless outcome, the insouciance of the Western hierarchy in general was captured in a post-referendum photo of the papal nuncio and a guffawing Bishop McAreavy seated in high spirits with the Northern Ireland Minister for Education, John O'Dowd of Sinn Fein (effectively the cultural Marxist arm of the IRA).
The occasion was the opening of a 'Catholic' Grammar school, just after O'Dowd had released to all primary and secondary schools the latest diabolic Relationships and Sexuality Education Guidance. A social engineering handbook compiled by the usual array of anti-Catholic corrupters — like the Family Planning Association and radical sodomite propagandists Stonewall, whose web contact details are helpfully provided in the "Resources Directory" — it typically asserts among much else: "Recent research reveals that transgender young people become self-aware that their assigned birth sex is different from their gender identity between the ages of 3-5 years old. However, it is between the ages of 6-16 years old that transgender young people begin to understand their feelings, and can start to talk about them."
If the link between Mr O'Dowd's depraved guidelines and the southern referendum result (not to mention the "millstone" in Matthew 18:6) did not occur to Bishop McAreavy and the nuncio; or that being photographed so happily with him might scandalise and disgust many faithful; or that publicly decrying the soul-destroying filth he has mandated was called for instead of a compromising photo-op ... if these kinds of Catholic thoughts do not enter the minds of our shepherds, it is due not only to their manifest loss of faith, but to sheer human respect: their mortal fear of being cast as reactionary — as out of step and unreconciled with the spirit of modernity and its PC tenets.
Indeed, that is why the hellish fusion of Modernist doctrine and the Socialist RSE guidelines occurred in the first place.(5) It is why the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, Dr Eamon Martin, met with representatives from two dissident-sodomitic groups on 22 July, stating he was committed to a continuing “dialogue” with them. And it explains his equally craven namesake, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, Archbishop Nichols of Westminster, Austria’s Cardinal Schönborn (who insists that "under civil law ... we can and we must respect the decision to form a union with a person of the same sex, [and] to seek means to protect their living together"), and the vast majority of the Western hierarchy.
This is all to say that whatever good intentions motivated Cardinal Ratzinger and his restive colleagues (to include Cardinal Schönborn, his former student and favoured son), rather than update and readjust the Syllabus, their counter syllabus has cancelled it out. The former defied the revolutionary zeitgeist. The latter has encouraged bishops to embrace it. In the process, they happily fool themselves by parroting variations on Archbishop Diarmuid Martin's post-referendum theme: that "Dialogue does not mean compromise. It means engagement." Yet if His Grace would only take his own infamous advice to "carry out continuous reality checks... facing the facts," he would have to face: 1. the fact that dialogue has replaced evangelisation and led not to "engagement" but to absorption by cultural Marxism (aka 'popular culture'); and 2. that if his flock sees nothing awry with sodomy, it is because he and his brethren have bought into that dominant Marxist culture.
Rather than standing firm as a unified Catholic bloc against it, they have become indistinguishable from the Cultural Hegemony: "the plutocratic ruling class, who manipulate the culture of the society — the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores" — so that their episcopal worldview reflects to a very great extent "the ruling-class Weltanschauung imposed and accepted as the cultural norm; as the universally valid dominant ideology that justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class."(6)
The Recyclical
That is the convergent fruit of the counter syllabus. It is hardly a great leap from such rank complicity in the systematic Socialist transformation of culture to a cringing PC travesty like the Pope's eco-encyclical Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home. Strewn with global warming alarmism that one might expect to find in the Guardian, New York Times, or a Greenpeace leaflet, it takes Modernist convergence with popular culture and craving for worldly acceptance and recognition to a new low.
To describe the papal recyclical as rubbish sounds like a disrespectful pun. But in all charity and truth, it is so full of humanism, naturalism, Green propaganda, Teilhardian cosmic mumbo-jumbo, hypocrisy and hyperbole; so light on abortion, contraception, and population control; and so guilty of failing to put Christ the King and His Church front and centre of all considerations, that for the sake of "sister earth" and the greater glory of her forests, it is tempting not to waste any paper on it. Alas, it is so revealing of the Bergoglian agenda at so many levels we cannot but enlarge our carbon footprint.
"In my Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, I wrote to all the members of the Church with the aim of encouraging ongoing missionary renewal. In this Encyclical, I would like to enter into dialogue with all people about our common home," states Francis at the outset. How sad is this post-conciliar preference for "Me" over the papal "We." Sad yet understandable and telling: "We" being seen as reactionary; redolent of chafing Tradition and constrictive continuity; signifying a sacred institution, not the personal bully pulpit Francis prefers. As for talk of "ongoing Missionary renewal" — this from a pontiff who warns against seeking out converts! While "our common home" is not 'planet earth' but the Holy Catholic Church; currently polluted by heresy, heterodoxy, complicity, collusion, and impending schism.
Already hyperventilating, I was only at para 3! With an ocean of verbiage still to navigate! Yet rather than subject readers to a detailed log of my painful voyage through that vast Laudato 'Sea', here instead is a quick numerical and linguistic measure of its Modernist gist:
Telling stats
While "nature" is cited upwards of eighty times, amid the 246 paragraphs and 40,859 words (incl. footnotes and concluding prayer) the Church is mentioned only15 times, with less than 3% of the paras referencing Christ. The first of the forty-eight mentions is not until para 83, where the "risen Christ" is presented as a New Age "measure of the maturity of all things," with specific attribution in the accompanying footnote (53) to the heretical pantheist Teilhard de Chardin. We wait till para 98 for the next lone mention of "Christ crucified" (a quote from John Paul II). While "Jesus Christ" appears only three times throughout.
Only John XXIII and the post-conciliar popes are quoted. Unenlightened by the Council's counter syllabus, pre-conciliar popes are ignored in toto.
The globalist/freedom-killing/population-control key words "sustainable" and "unsustainable" appear twenty-four times, not many less than the word "spiritual" which appears in generic form thirty-one times, but only twice as specifically Christian (and once as specifically Muslim! - footnote 159). "Spirituality" is mentioned seventeen times: comprising 8 "Christian spirituality", 4 "ecological spirituality" and 5 generic "spirituality."
The Catholic lexicon is stripped bare. The word "redemption" appears once (a quote from John Paul II), and "sacrifice" only four times (none of which refer to the sacrifice of Christ). One searches in vain for other Catholic terms and phrases like Mass, the Holy Sacrifice, the Real Presence, Confession, the Rosary, Paradise and Purgatory. And although the word "social" appears a whopping 94 times, the Social Kingship of Christ is not mentioned, nor is there a solitary allusion to it.
The soul is mentioned only once, and then only to "find God in all things" (233). Sin is mentioned four times, only in connection with nature, just as the salvation of the soul is ditched in favour of four types of salvation achievable through an appropriate relationship with nature (71, 79, 79, 112). "Ecological conversion" appears three times. "Ecological virtue" is tossed in for good measure.
The Eucharist is mentioned nine times, as a cosmic "source of light and motivation for our concerns for the environment," eight of those in a single paragraph of incomprehensible Teilhardian babble: where "the cosmos thanks God" and the Eucharist is "celebrated on the altar of the world," healing relationships with God and with the world, encouraging us to take care of nature.
Exasperating and embarrassing
Truly, after two years of scandal and double-speak, it was hard to read any section of the recyclical without head-shaking, cheek-blowing exasperation. "It is not easy to promote... healthy humility or happy sobriety when we consider ourselves autonomous,... and think that our subjective feelings can define what is right and what is wrong," Francis truly writes. Yet what is "Who Am I To Judge?" if not the new subjective standard for defining "what is right and wrong"; the Modernist siren call of a pope who refuses to take an objective stand against the singular vice of sodomy, even to adopting the insidious "gay" word to cloak the truth and protect the "subjective feelings" of its practitioners.
To a Catholic mind concentrated on the health of Mother Church over (and infinitely above) that of "sister earth," the para 46 warnings against "social exclusion," "social aggression," "social breakdown," "increased violence," and "the rupture of bonds" only served to call to mind yet again the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate. Their brutal exclusion, splintering, and defaming under Francis — to include stripping them of their right, reaffirmed by Benedict XVI in Summorum Pontificum, to offer the Old Mass without episcopal approval — encapsulates the violent rupturing of spiritual, liturgical and fraternal bonds among Catholics over a forty-five year period, and counting.
It is violence against nature that preoccupies Francis, however. With his garment-renting appeal to hear "the cry of sister earth, pleading that we take another course," he sounds "like a cross between Al Gore and Chicken Little," wrote Chris Jackson in a scathing critique. "The cry of the earth? The earth is fragile and now it’s crying? If we are to believe the pope, we are currently living on the planetary equivalent of a six-month old."
He finds further hyperbole, served up with the usual self-deception/contradiction, in para 61:
There are regions now at high risk and, aside from all doomsday predictions, the present world system is certainly unsustainable from a number of points of view, for we have stopped thinking about the goals of human activity. “If we scan the regions of our planet, we immediately see that humanity has disappointed God’s expectations.”
"First," notes Jackson, "the pope’s own encyclical is full of doomsday predictions. Second, the only 'points of view' represented are those of the climate alarmists. Third, with all of the true moral outrages occurring across the globe, including ISIS beheading and slaughtering Christians, the pope is going to say humanity has disappointed God’s expectations in not turning off their air conditioners? Somehow I believe if Our Lord had a full airing of His grievances against humanity, the accusations in this encyclical would be last on His list, if they were even included at all."(7)
Inverted priorities and ungodly ends
Indeed they are not listed by Christ. But how about Antichrist? Admittedly, the diabolic Frankfurt School did not include on its list of objectives items such as: 'pseudo-scientific scaremongering to foster global centres of power and control'; or 'the fostering of CO2ophobia and environmental phantoms to incite social conflict by emptying government coffers.' But it may as well have done. As evinced by our October 2006 edition on environmentalism and the global-warming scam, the Green movement is the Frankfurt School on steroids: promoting in one way or another just about every anti-Christian error condemned by Pius IX.
Bearing that in mind: amid so many crises raging within and without the Church, that the Supreme Pontiff preferred to release an encyclical incorporating the mendacious Green agenda beggars belief. While words simply fail before such salvific concerns as the danger to "coral reefs, tropical and subtropical seas, fish, crabs, molluscs, sponges, algae"... oh, and "plankton." Not to mention the finger-wagging rebuke over "the increasing use and power of air-conditioning" (— was it switched on or off as he penned his rebuke? I think we should be told.)
The inverted papal priorities are striking because the sound Catholic passages contained in the recyclical could have been uttered or laid out in a dozen other papal ways and formats, without the ballyhoo that distracted attention from matters of genuine life and death.
It all amounted to gifting our enemies yet another Bergoglian social gospel opportunity to be instrumentalised for ungodly ends. We can count on the ungodliness because the Green signature is not a heavenly one marked by a disinterested pursuit of truth. On the contrary, in one scandal or tax-payer funded stitch up after another, its handiwork is repeatedly stamped with mendacity and self-serving of the most heinous kind.
Al Gore immediately springs to mind.
The embodiment of Green dissembling and hypocrisy, he has made a fortune since igniting the man-made global-warming industry with his movie Inconvenient Truth. A film riddled with errors and wild claims, a British High Court judge ruled in October 2007 that it could only be shown in schools if accompanied by fresh guidance notes (read scientific correction sheets) to balance Mr Gore's "one-sided" views. Stating that the "apocalyptic vision" it presented was not an impartial analysis of the science, the judge identified no less than nine significant errors in the film. Among them was Gore's heart-rending reference to a study showing that polar bears were being found that had drowned "swimming long distances to find the ice." The judge said: "The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm." (Perhaps the Supreme Pontiff was moved by a similar fabricated sob story about plankton — its aimless drifting and pitiless CO2-induced demise... alone... unloved... in unicellular agony...?)
Gore is emblematic. Whether scientists on government and corporate payrolls, or UN panels shaping political agendas, you can Google their lies, dissembling, and/or manipulation of data. Yet the mere fact that "man-made global warming" quickly became the indeterminate "climate change" — just as the "safe sex" lie became the ongoing "safer sex" half-lie — speaks to its subversive roots. The greatest sham in history (the world is 1.08 degrees cooler than it was in 1998, by the way), it dwarfs even the Piltdown Man 'missing link' fabrication that ruled the scientific roost for over 40 years — from 1912 to 1953 — before it emerged as the jaw of an orangutan fitted into a human skull.
While that particular fraud was the chief among many others instigated to prop up the evolutionary house of cards on which atheistic modernity rests — to wipe out absolute doctrinal and moral truths by eliminating God from the equation — environmentalism seeks not to wipe out but coopt religion: for pantheistic purposes that serve a global religious/political project many decades in the making. Since a certain priestly pantheist by the name of Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, loomed large in the Piltdown hoax, there is a dark symmetry to his posthumous influence on the Holy Father's contribution to the global warming hoax; a telling aspect of Laudato Si James Larson will explain next month.
Calculated Silence
Slipped in to the alarmist narrative in general are particular bursts of pro-life and anti-population control utterances and allusions. Mere background noise, these kinds of salvos are a sadly familiar papal ploy. As Sandro Magister once noted:
It is not easy to enter into the mind of Pope Bergoglio.... He makes tough and biting remarks, but never at a moment in which they could generate conflict. [Francis repeatedly says] "the view of the Church is known, and I am a son of the Church." Sometimes he recalls this combatively for those who expect him to change doctrine, as in the least-cited passage of his Evangelii Gaudium, where he has the harshest of words against the 'right' to abortion. But he never proclaims Church teaching out loud at a moment when the dispute over an issue has become heated.
Magister cites several examples of the Pope's silence and lack of support before anti-life/anti-family legislation in various countries (to which we could now add the American Supreme Court Obergefell decision, and the Irish referendum). The Pope has also remained silent, says Magister, about a UN report that exalts the current pontiff but "humiliates" the Church, calling on the Vatican to "correct" its teachings on abortion, the family, and sex. He adds: "There is a Jacobin-style attack against the Church, not only in France, that simply wants to exclude it from civil discourse," before which the non-response of Francis contrasts starkly with Benedict XVI who "preferred conflict in the open field, with the courage of the 'yes' that means 'yes' and the 'no' that means 'no'. This is why the world was so ferocious with him," Magister concludes. "With Francis it is different."
Since Benedict was open to genuine environmental concerns yet hated by the worldlings, the secular praise lavished upon Francis for Laudato Si underlines Magister's point. Even more than the Green propaganda he mouths, it is the contradictory si, no, si, no methodology of the Conciliar revolution he personifies that they truly appreciate. The recyclical's intermittent Catholic bits, therefore, pose no serious problem to cultivating the Socialist ties that Francis perversely views as the way forward for the Church — notably by tapping in to the global web of catch-all (political, economic, cultural, social, environmental) "popular movements."
Like the treacherous Ostpolitik appeasement of the former Soviet bloc under Paul VI, this Vatican policy is at odds with all Catholic instinct and tradition. And yet, in view of what we have argued — that Modernist 'creativity' mirrors, by act and acquiescence, Marxist 'creativity' — we should not be at all surprised by this increasingly blatant proximity of post-13/3/13 Rome to the Socialist network; a scandalous relationship long established by 'Catholic' social justice groups.
Counter-revolutionary Sustenance!
We will pursue this theme of ideology-as-religion in our final part. Meanwhile, to bolster flagging spirits, we offer readers some counter-revolutionary fare:
- a sturdy dose of papal conviction, clarity, and strength from St. Pius X, together with a rousing Pius X-like counter-encyclical penned by Randy Engel (both of which speak to the complicity of Laudato Si, and anaemic post-conciliar encyclicals in general);
- Prince Bertrand's masterly expose of the neo-Marxists being feted by Rome, and why their hackneyed rhetoric remains inimical to the restoration of Christian civilisation and order;
- Thomas Belfatto's scholarly review of perennial Church teaching on marriage and morality: Exhibit A in the doctrinal case against proposals by papal-surrogates like Kasper;
- a reminder of the inspirational St Joan (where would we be without the courageous witness of our incomparable Saints!)
- plus a recap of Our Lady's spectacular public ratification of Fatima — which vital devotion and message the Holy Father feigned, initially, to embrace and place at the centre of his pontificate; only to contradict himself (again).
To conclude next month.
FOOTNOTES
(1) The synodical conspiracy was loudly boasted at a private function beforehand, by a high-ranking cardinal — see CO, Dec. 2014, pp. 26-27. In his new book, The Rigging of a Vatican Synod?: An Investigation into Alleged Manipulation at the Extraordinary Synod on the Family, author Edward Pentin has identified this arrogant figure as Cardinal Baldiserri, the General Secretary of both Synods on the Family; the man responsible for removing from the Synod Hall mail box of each Synod Father, a book co-authored by five cardinals in defense of Catholic teaching on marriage and family, in order to avoid the derailing of his subversive plans. Cardinal Napier told Pentin that a few months before the 2014 Synod an official at the Synod Secretariat had come to see him to share serious concerns. The official told Napier that he was "very disturbed" by what he had witnessed and commented that "this thing is being manipulated, it’s being engineered. [They] want a certain result." Cardinal Baldisseri has been at pains to point out that he is merely the Secretary and the Pope, as President of the Synod of Bishops, is his close-controlling boss. "Pay attention, as this is something one really should know" sneered Baldiserri, informing his critics that Francis presides over all the council meetings of the Secretariat, and saw and approved all the (scandalous) documents associated with the 2014 synod, before they were published.
(2) Archbishop Cupich is representative of this favoured heretical band. Before Francis appointed him to Chicago, then-Bishop Cupich even forced a 200-strong Traditional Mass congregation to hold their Good Friday ceremonies on the pavement outside their Rapid City church. He also forbade his Spokane clergy from participating in a major pro-life vigil. Today, he defends the rights of sodomites, and the giving of Holy Communion to pro-abortion politicians.
(3)"The heirs of [Frankfurt School members Herbert] Marcuse and [Theodore] Adorno now completely dominate [US] universities and there are very few books on arts, letters and language published today in the US or Europe which do not openly acknowledge their debt to the Frankfurt School" (— Michael Minnicino, Fidelio Magazine, 1992; quoted by Tim Matthews, in Catholic Insight, 2009).
(4) This psychological evaluation is a very low threshold, however. Under the 1983 revised Code of Canon Law (developed during a notorious era of Masonic activity and influence within Italy and the Vatican - cf. "Chronic Covergence" Part I, CO, Aug-Sept. 2012), annulments have been easy to obtain on the assessment of 'immaturity' as to understanding what was known/believed about entering a marriage contract. The new procedures just make a bad situation worse.
(5) See "Wake up Ireland!"and "Sensual Catechesis: Irish Bishops in Bed with the State" (also other accompanying articles in the February 1999 Christian Order.)
(6) The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, Third Edition, 1999.
(7) "Why I’m Disregarding Laudato Si and You Should Too." The Remnant, 19/6/15.