August-September 2016
Frexit
THE EDITOR
As I write, Great Distraction #13 — the thirteenth instalment of the week-long travelling circus we call World Youth Day — is approaching. The Francis factor does not inspire much hope of a scandal-free 25-31 July in Poland. Nor an end to the spectacle of pope, prelates and priests getting down with the kids (remember the cringeworthy dancing bishops in Rio?). One thing is certain, though: by the time you receive this edition, they will be waxing lyrical about its success. Given the stupendous amount of time, money, and resources invested in WYDs, civic and ecclesial authorities would hardly talk it down!
Nonetheless, since you can't fool all the people all of the time, at least those Krakovians still possessed of orthodox sensibilities will, by now, comprehend the deflating reality behind the hype and hoopla. Like clergy, religious and laity in Denver, Toronto, Paris, Rome, Rio and all the other host cities before them, they will have found uplifting yet superficial features (the pervasive goodwill and positive vibe of energetic crowds, large numbers of habited nuns and monks) rapidly cancelled out by disturbing attitudes (of the who-am-I-to-judge? variety) and depressing behaviour (of the live-and-let-live stripe). Not to mention liturgical sacrilege, and the sort of flaming Modernist propaganda that righteously angered the late Mother Angelica back in '93.
In other words, far from observing a radical break with the dominant culture, Krakovians will have seen that debased culture mirrored in many ways. For WYD, very sadly and despite the religious veneer and good intentions, is a jamboree much like any other: little more than a periodic free pass for young, and many more not-so-young Catholics to act out the worldliness instilled in them and/or tolerated by complicit parents and teachers, prelates and priests.
Toxic combo
We have documented this ongoing travesty many times (cf. "Godly Rage," June-July 1995; "World Youth Day: From Catholicism to Counterchurch," Oct. 2005; "The Great Distraction," Aug-Sept 2008; "New Year: Old Mantras" and "The Downside of Rio," Jan. 2014). In the process, we have always insisted that the hapless participants are more sinned against than sinning. The primary culpability lies with shepherds (appointed and indulged by popes) who, in a thousand active, indifferent, and negligent ways have leeched the Faith out of the erstwhile faithful. Secularised, like their parents, by the CINO-sausage machine labelled 'Catholic education', the vast majority of the Krakow hordes will have been raised as Dialoguers and Appeasers; trained to be anything but uncompromising Catholic Combatants who give no quarter in a cultural and religious war escalating by the day.
In a Church awash with false charity, where hearts rule heads ever more dangerously, the cry invariably goes up: 'Give the kids a break! Better they attend WYDs than gay pride abominations!'
Minimalist and defeatist, this pathetic plea is even mouthed by those who should know much better. Secular abominations notwithstanding, they need to pause and ask themselves: what is more abominable than leaving Catholic teens and young adults frozen in a CINOism that mimics the world, the flesh and the devil? Forever genuflecting before the 60s cult of "youth," WYD can hardly demand a heroic rejection of dissolute modernity when it adopts a pop festival template synonymous with that very dissolution, and marries it up with the Novus Ordoism synonymous with our 50-year crisis of faith and morals.
That toxic combination is now infantilising/demoralising a second WYD generation. It accounts not only for the high median age of WYD pilgrims, where thirty-five-year-olds can pass for "youth", but also the infantile tripe served up as "faith education." In the end, it serves only to bolster the degenerate pop culture in general, and thereby the sodomitic agenda of the corporations now driving that culture. Indeed, it forms part of an anti-intellectual continuum: a seamless transition from
feel-good catechesis, to emotive WYDs, to young CINOs making hysterical common cause with legislated sins that cry to heaven.
This was graphically captured in the aftermath of Ireland's May 2015 referendum. Young sons and daughters of Eire cavorted joyfully in the streets with the sons and daughters of Sodom, celebrating the majority decision to equate unnatural, promiscuous sexual relations with the natural, life-long union of man and woman sacramentalised by Christ. It was excruciating to watch Holy Mother Church publicly shamed by her progeny. Yet more painful still to realise how banal such faithless displays have become among the generations betrayed (more precisely, groomed) in Ireland as elsewhere.
This year's venue — a beautiful and truly Catholic city — will doubtless provide a degree of blessed relief. But these things are relative. Despite inhabiting one of the final bastions of Catholic culture, even young Poles, though still very devout in comparison with other nationalities, are not untouched by degenerate pop culture. Well informed Polish friends of the present writer insist that were a similar referendum to be held in Poland (namely, on whether buggery should be raised from the sewer to a 'marital' act), they could not be sure that a majority of young Poles would hold the Christian line — the corrosive legacy of aggressive eurocommunist regimes like the one finally voted out last year in landslide.
Poland is indicative. We naturally look to such steadfast countries for example and inspiration, yet we must not do so through rose-coloured glasses. Even nations steeped in Catholic culture face the same youthful predicament: a harsh reality that pricks the inflated WYD balloon, placing the adrenaline rush of one expensive, choreographed week in perspective.
Mexican case-study
Most instructive in this regard is the July 2016 edition of Regina Magazine (freely available online at (www.reginamag.com). Titled, "The Secret Catholic Insider Guide to Mexico," it is dedicated to a realistic assessment of the state of the Faith in the land of the mighty Cristeros and Our Lady of Guadalupe. To that end, a lavish pictorial layout is interspersed with the considered reflections of informed laymen and laywomen, and priests such as Father Jonathan Romanoski, FSSP.
Ordained in 2008, Fr Romanoski confirms that, "In general, there is a Catholic culture that still permeates Mexico." He relates that Jalisco, the state in which he serves his traditional parish, "was a place of great resistance to the Masonic persecution in the Cristeros resistance, and still ordains on average 40 men to the priesthood every year"! Public symbols of the Faith abound; processions are commonplace. And yet, in this most Catholic of the 32 Mexican states, in his city of Guadalajara, where "every door is open to evangelise, as people naturally recognise and respect the priest, ... and will naturally accept his commentaries with a sense of respect toward his authority, " Fr Romanoski states:
Although there are still many youth who practise the faith, and many vocations as I mentioned, there is definitely a more secular spirit spreading through the youth. One priest told me that on a national level the youth receiving catechetical formation is only around 10%. So imagine that in another generation 90% of young adults will generally be pagan in their way of thinking.
Later on, he returns to the desperate vulnerability opened up by this intellectual deficit:
Regarding the younger generations we see the prevalence more and more of secularism and relativism, in which they are inculcated more and more via globalism, namely perceiving via the internet and pop culture that it is the norm already established in cultures like the United States, and that therefore Catholicism is just a cultural tradition of Mexico, and not the truth that God has revealed but rather one truth among many. At the same time they see that there are less and less morals, more and more insecurity and crime, and this inclines them to pray to God.
As for the consequences, the results are well and truly in.
Fr Romanoski refers to one "continental survey" which revealed that even the devout populace of Guadalajara felt "fine with God" but "did not need the Church." This mentality, he adds, "multiplies when there are so many living in fornication or adultery or 'second' marriages who would like to ease their conscience, pretending that they could be in friendship with Christ without observing his law, which Protestantism makes completely relative."
This is why wealthy Evangelical missionaries, and predatory sects like the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, are so attractive to dumbed-down Latin American souls. Waving wads of cash and touting sola scriptura (a relativistic ruse to circumvent the Teaching Church), they appeal both to the impoverished and to empty young vessels happy to be filled with meaning and purpose by a creed they can tailor to their personal disorders.
In Jalisco, says Fr Romanoski, they say that 'ignorant Catholics will surely become Protestants'. And so they have, in Mexico as throughout Latin America, in droves.
Laywoman Maria Albers confirms in Regina that religious observance "has faded away in new generations," presenting "the perfect opportunity for passionate Evangelicals to convert lukewarm Catholics." This flight from the pews has "accelerated in recent times with social media reaching the masses like never before." Meanwhile, a shallow Catholic culture has had its anti-life effect:
Sadly, although most Mexicans are against abortion, it is the younger people, ranging from 18 to 25, who are in favour, which means that the younger generations feel comfortable with the idea of murdering the unborn.
As everywhere, 'Me-Now!' self-absorption, promoted from cradle to grave since the 60s and now turbo-charged by technology, fuels this diabolic indifference to in utero-homicide.
The usual government and corporate-consumerist influences are also at play. "The Mexican government used to make big campaigns on 'sexual education', teaching young people the importance of 'living their lives'," explain a married couple. Though they hasten to add that, "Of course, that is not to say that every young person is for abortion; this is just a very broad overview. Those young people in favour have an educational level (high school, bachelor's degree or above), a median income and measure 'success' according to material or social achievements the way today's society has taught them." They also stress the same familiar regression from Catholic to celebrity culture:
Here is something you may have never heard: Mexicans look up to celebrities and literally do as they say. When the government wants anything done, all it has to do is go through said celebrities to manipulate the masses. All it takes is one amoral celebrity to say that abortion is okay for millions to be convinced of that literally overnight.
Maria Albers concurs.
Personally, I wish the passion that is felt towards sports and soap operas was shown towards God and building a better Mexico.
Secularising pontiff
At this point let us digress momentarily: to consider what Pope Francis offers by way of countering this worldwide defection and debasement of young Catholics, even and especially in those countries where one might expect the greatest resistance.
Exhibit A is Schola Occurrentes, his burgeoning school network. In our April 2016 number, we exposed this papal project for what it is: a thoroughly secular model of education. In this edition, Sandro Magister takes up the case. He documents how Francis, as part of his shameless yearning to deconstruct the Faith of our Fathers, is fostering and promoting with great fervour the amoral stars of sports and entertainment, instead of saints.
In thrall to the zeitgeist, he has emboldened the entire Vatican apparatus, not least L'Osservatore Romano, to embrace pop culture and promote it with him. Doubling down on this heinous strategy, he simultaneously defers to the very Evangelicals stealing away and secularising the Catholic youth of his home continent. Even the personal friend he has just appointed to edit an Argentine edition of L'Osservatore is an Evangelical theologian! [CWN, 12/7/16] Naturally, this Protestant editor says he will include non-Catholic sources, for ecumenical (read secular) appeal.
Let us never forget that it was on his pretext of viewing resistance to secularisation as futile that Archbishop Bugnini, a Mason, protestantised the Mass to accommodate the secular. Likewise, Francis concedes defeat and eagerly hoists the white flag of accommodation on every secular front. In Bugnini-like fashion, he is also blind to the clear contradiction between sitting on the Chair of Peter and accepting honorary membership of Rotary — a notorious Lodge feeder-group known as the White Masons. We should not be surprised, therefore, that he not only pursues the secularisation of Catholic education, but also advises Evangelicals not to convert to Catholicism, lauds them to the skies, and even kneels to receive their 'blessing.'
Perverse and treacherous, his example flies in the face of the conviction and courage required to face down the pagan Culture of Debasement and Death. Instead of cultural confrontation and conversion, all we find is ready capitulation and convergence. How could it be otherwise? The Protestantism taking Latin America by storm is almost indistinguishable from the personal faith, understanding and message of our Latin American Pope! His recent praise for the Father of sola scriptura, Martin Luther, further underlines the sulphurous fact.
"I believe that the intentions of Luther were not wrong," he told reporters on the plane home from Armenia. For Francis, you see, far from the debauched, mendacious, self-serving apostate and violent revolutionary of historical record, Luther was simply a benign "reformer."
The forthcoming papal visit to the Lutheran cathedral in Lund, Sweden, to kick off a twelve month-long eulogy to Martin Luther in the lead up to next year's 500th anniversary of the 'Reformation', will serve to consolidate this revisionist endgame: the result of decades of false ecumenism. Jim Larson explains the magnitude of the Lund scandal herein; setting forth how comprehensively mistaken the Holy Father is to claim, as he did before the same journalists, that "Today we are unified as Protestants and Catholics on the doctrine of justification in agreement, and on this very important point, he [Luther] was not wrong."
Against all this papal compromising, kowtowing, and selling out that has rocketed the Catholic crisis to new stratospheres, Fr Romanoski's traditional remedy is a welcome relief:
I think it is a question of formation and catechesis to start so that they [young Mexicans] recognise the differences and know the reasons for their faith, and avoid falling into habits of sin which makes them want to rid themselves of the Church's infallible voice which communicates Christ's teachings.
These are the words of a true pastor of souls who recognises the primary formative place of doctrine. Would that the current Vicar of Christ proclaimed such Catholic commonsense, with the same understanding, clarity, and conviction. Instead, he muddies everything, then leaves it all up for grabs with his cringing "live and let live" pop-philosophy (effectively mimicking the Mexican government's call for youth to "live their lives"). And he does this because laying dogmatic foundations is not a social gospel priority. Predictably, it came in third on his List of Things To Do to Achieve Unity with the Lutherans.
In the spirit of false ecumenism, Francis set aside the inconvenient fact of sola scriptura disunity that defines Lutheranism, to tell reporters: "After 500 years, I believe that we need to pray together in the first place. Secondly, we need to work for the poor, the refugees, many people suffering, and finally that the theologians may study together." So, social work comes before study. How pastoral. But Cardinal Caffarra disagrees. "A Church which is poorer in doctrine is not more pastoral, but only more ignorant," he stated in Bologna on 17 June, during a public presentation of a book about the late Cardinal Biffi.
Caffarra received, according to the report [on Italian website Italia Oggi], significant spontaneous applause. Caffarra also said that such a weakening of the Church’s doctrine will make one “more subject to the powerful pressure of the moment.” The Italian website characterises these statements of the cardinal as “a challenge to the Church of Bergoglio.” Moreover, with reference to the recently deceased Cardinal Biffi – also formerly the Cardinal-Archbishop of Bologna – Caffarra recounts that it was Biffi’s “principal responsibility” to “proclaim the splendour of truth to all – including Muslims.” The cardinal’s clear statements might also be understood as a polite and manfully indirect comment upon the Francis pontificate. [1Peter5, 5/7/16]
In the same vein, Fr Romanoski laments that Catholic Mexicans, especially but not only the young, "don't often know the reasons for their practices, that they are Catholics by culture but not necessarily by conviction, which is a very precarious state to be in."
This is universally so. Yet we cannot expect the intellectual remedy for this systemic problem of Catholic identity theft to be seriously entertained in a quasi-pop festival atmosphere, never mind one fronted by the patron of Scholas Occurrentes; a pontiffwho also scorns the curial Congregation responsible for maintaining doctrinal purity!
(In this regard, the Pope has clearly sidelined CDF head Cardinal Müller by giving free rein to liberal poster boys, like Cardinals Kasper and Schönborn, to pontificate on his behalf; to draw the deviant meanings intended from fuzzy papal premises, such as those littered throughout Amoris Laetitia. Ever since Francis handed over the launch of that wretched Exhortation to the equally wretched Schönborn, he has repeatedly lauded the Austrian prelate as a "great theologian" for interpretations like this one, voiced by Schönborn in an interview with Civilta Cattolica in early July: "It is therefore possible in certain cases, for those who are in an objective situation of sin to receive the help of the sacraments.")
Traditional remedies
While Francis pursues his subversive course, presenting heterodoxy and heresy as orthodoxy, and failure as success, Father Romanoski addresses the devastating backdrop to a WYD 'franchise' that adds little or nothing of practical value to redress the crisis (— and certainly nothing that cannot be done in a far more focused and frugal manner at the diocesan WYDs, regularly scheduled between the global ones). Just as the sea of smiling faces at WYD is deceptive, so are the relatively healthy numbers of Mexican churchgoers and ordinations:
Although there are 40 new priests ordained here in Guadalajara every year, the ratio is still around one priest for every ten thousand people practically. Which translates to: if the priest were to hear confessions every day for two hours in his church, and if everyone would go to confession during that time, each person would have three minutes a year to go to confession.
In other dioceses it is one priest for every twenty thousand. And likewise the same crisis in society permeates the clerical ambit as well. One priest told me that of his 40 classmates, after ten years ten had already left the priesthood. The Masonic law of the Mexican constitution prohibited the use of the cassock 100 years ago so as to exclude Christ from the public forum, and although it was made legal again after the visit of Pope John Paul II, generally the clergy go about in lay clothes, which only contributes to the confusion as regards their identity and the appropriate manner to interact with each other. In short, the harvest is ripe but the labourers are few, and the good labourers are even fewer.
Nonetheless, compared to our self-fulfilling 'vocations crisis' — contrived to usher in a lay-run Church along Lutheran lines — the number of yearly ordinands is huge. Fr Romanoski's simple explanation for this uplifting state of affairs should not surprise anyone bar the Bergoglianistas:
There are still many altar servers. The previous Archbishop of Guadalajara insisted still that girls not be allowed to serve Mass, as it would naturally deter young boys from participating and thus beginning their first steps towards the altar, and thus he always attributed the large number of vocations in part to the exclusivity of having males as altar servers.
Despite this typically fruitful example of Catholic tradition, it is the feminised Novus Ordo regime, with its insidious, vocations-killing 'serviettes', that rules the WYD roost. Thus, far from challenging (even for one week) an emasculated culture that sucks the virility out of young Catholic males, WYD reinforces it. At Great Distraction #4, in Denver, it was precisely the employment of a female Christ during the Stations of the Cross that triggered Mother Angelica's sound off against the liberal establishment.
The profound impact of a WYD that revolved around the virile traditional liturgy and its attendant piety and devotions, on the other hand, should not be underestimated. Given some basic instruction on its other-worldly, sacrificial nature, one can easily imagine the Old Mass as a living catechetical centrepiece of WYD. It would also give great impetus to Cardinal Sarah's urgent call in London, on 4 July, for bishops and priests to promote ad orientem celebrations of the Novus Ordo, kneeling for Communion, and sacred liturgical music ("not merely religious music, or worse, profane songs"). Doubtless, if he had his way, the African Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship would introduce these practices to WYD with immediate effect, warning one and all, as in London, to "beware of the temptation of liturgical sloth, because it is a temptation of the devil."
How listless NO pew-sitters and slothful NO clergy need to hear all that. But they won't, of course, thanks to hireling NO shepherds like Archbishop Nichols of Westminster, who, within days of Cardinal Sarah's plea, wrote to his priests to discourage them from offering Mass ad orientem. His worldly rationale? Quoting from a 2009 Vatican document, he assured them that facing the people "makes communication easier"! The spiteful haste of this counter-proposal by the 'gay Mass'-sponsoring Nichols reeks of fear: the sort that grips liberals whenever their communicative/man-centred Novus Ordo is threatened by contemplative/God-centred improvements — viewed as the thin edge of a pre-conciliar wedge that would, ultimately, reverse their secularisation of faith and morals; in Church and State.
Fr Romanoski's testimony confirms their worst fears. While half of his more than 300-strong traditional parish are formed of faithful who were already acquainted with the Old Mass,
The other half are people who have discovered this treasure of Catholic tradition, and who fell in love with it at first sight. These people have since become convinced in not only the liturgical cult but the culture that it inspires — namely to not follow the world but to fight to change it, leading with their example of educating their children in their homes, dressing as true Catholic ladies and gentlemen, praying the rosary in their homes, and being valiant in their defence of the Faith in the public forum.
Only social-gospellers like Francis and Vincent Nichols fail to appreciate the fierce irony at play here: that the traditional faith they despise is the most potent facilitator of the social action they idolise! The irony escapes them because all traditional undertakings are disqualified by their Modernist Equation: Catholic = dogma = rigid = judgmental = exclusion = Holy Communion as an unjust "prize for the perfect" — the Pope's derisive caricature of reception in a state of grace. Despite the risk to their souls [1:Cor 11:27], Francis would have unrepentant sodomites, divorced-remarried and others receive the Holy Eucharist in a state of mortal sin. Unspeakable, this proposal, together with the push for inter-Communion with non-Catholics, is the rotten core of the apostasy fuelling the secular epidemic:
"My experience is that it is a very crucial time," says Fr Romanoski. "... But the forces of evil are ever growing, and many once Catholic countries like Spain and cities like Quebec which were super Catholic less than 70 years ago, are now in many ways very hostile to the Faith. So the present moment is crucial, so as not to follow the same path.
If the forces of evil are growing in his diocese — that boasts "two or three times more vocations than any other diocese on the planet"! — how infinitely greater is the threat, especially to vulnerable youth, in our thoroughly secularised milieu, under a pontiff whose determination to compromise the Faith has no shame or limits. A Pope who barely mentions Jesus Christ before the worldlings, when he doesn't omit Him altogether (see "Francis Accepts His Prize," CO, June-July 2016).
Missed opportunity?
None of this is to ignore the traditional and orthodox presence at WYD. From one carnival to the next, opting to evangelise rather than boycott, zealous traditionalist youth groups have sought to act as liturgical Catholic leaven among the misled multitudes. In Sydney, orthodox bishops also offered sessions of remedial catechesis, for those few willing and able to break free from the party atmosphere. One cannot fault the apostolic intent. Yet surely, after 30 years of the same old same old, such valiant but largely vain efforts only highlight the case for scrapping the festival: now little more than an international instrument for reinforcing and furthering the mutual revolutions within and without.
If there is a case to be put for WYD, it is only in hindsight. One could argue, say, that had John Paul II insisted from the start, on 20 December 1985, that WYD operate not as a happy-clappy love-fest but a means of circumventing catechetical claptrap in the provinces, it might, at a stretch, have established a useful place in the Church. Given his great intellect, his special rapport with the young, and his understanding of their need and natural desire to be challenged, a Papal Boot Camp beckoned — a full-on week of training in Catholic faith and apologetics. (Merely instilling the Ten Commandments would've been progress!) Instead, John Paul opted for pop festivity — for 'fun'. It is hard to fathom. Since for all his faults and failings, he certainly would have concurred with T.S. Elliot, who wrote in his essay "Thoughts on Lambeth":
There is no good in making Christianity easy and pleasant; “Youth,” or the better part of it, is more likely to come to a difficult religion than to an easy one. For some, the intellectual way of approach must be emphasised; there is need of a more intellectual laity. For them and for others, the way of discipline and asceticism must be emphasised; for even the humblest Christian layman can and must live what, in the modern world, is comparatively an ascetic life. Discipline of the emotions is even rarer, and in the modern world still more difficult, than discipline of the mind; some eminent lay preachers of “discipline” are men who know only the latter. Thought, study, mortification, sacrifice: it is such notions as these that should be impressed upon the young.... You will never attract the young by making Christianity easy; but a good many can be attracted by finding it difficult: difficult both to the disorderly mind and to the unruly passions.
This prescription, not Woodstock-lite, should have been the WYD template. And St John the Baptist, the embodiment of Elliott's plea, its patron! Imagine if all the hearts and minds that have passed through WYD had been imbued with the spartan spirit of St. John's counter-cultural, sanctifying warfare with the world:
How loudly does his penitential youth condemn those pretended Christians whose life is altogether earthly, and who, instead of curbing their inclinations, and keeping their senses in due subjection, study by softness and pleasure to gratify them almost in everything. They renounce forever the happiness which Christ has promised to his followers who do not take his word and actions for the only rule of their conduct.
St. John by his retirement calls upon us to disengage our hearts from the ties of the world and frequently to imitate in our closet his exercises in the wilderness. ... By holy retirement and by conversing often with heaven, the fascination of its enchantments will fall from before our eyes, and we shall see that it has nothing which ought not to be to a Christian heart an object of contempt, abhorrence, or dread. It is made up of vanity, danger, and sift. Its goods and enjoyments are short-lived and uncertain, and in themselves false and empty; its pains real and grievous and its promises treachery and deceit. [Butler's Lives of the Saints]
Sadly, while the charismatic Polish pontiff revelled in big stage theatrics, beyond geopolitics he never had a grand plan in this or any other field. It was all band-aid treatments and muddling through from day one [see "Pope John Paul the Great! (... or Great Disappointment?)", CO, June/July 2005, available online]. Thus, amid the post-conciliar meltdown, WYD became one more sticking plaster-project that quickly came unstuck, going from bad to worse like all the rest, albeit with minor respite under Benedict.
Which brings us back to Pope Francis. Modernist chameleon that he is, our current Chief Shepherd is perfectly capable of feeding his young lambs the sort of traditional fare offered above in "Butler's Lives". Like the revered Father Butler, Francis could and should impress upon his captive audience that
We must enter [the world] with a holy fear, must converse in it with watchfulness, and continually fortify our souls against the infection of its air by the antidotes of frequent meditation, prayer, and self-denial, according to the excellent advice of St. Francis of Sales. Thus shall we learn to live in the world so as not to be of it, to use it as if we used it not and possess so as not to be possessed or captivated by it.
This is the essential foundation for a youthful Church Militant manifestly conscious of its baptismal obligations and the Four Last Things, conforming its behaviour to the Commandments, seeking the Social Reign of Christ the King as the only hope for a self-indulgent world awash with addictions of every kind.
Far from instilling this spirit of the Baptist with the urgency it warrants, however, at his first outing in Rio the Holy Father told the kids what they wanted to hear, rousing them to "make a mess." Though reckless and ruinous, it would be hard to coin a more appropriate motto encapsulating 30 freewheeling WYD years — wasted decades in which the radical self-absorption of our day was not radically challenged; effectively reinforcing it.
Frexit
As the primal fury unleashed in 1789 continues to mutate and metastasise in 21st century Church and State, a pontiff touting sports, celebrities, selfies, sound bites, and false exegesis, doctrine and morals, completes a perfect revolutionary storm. Yet neither tax-funded baby-killers, nor Washington warmongers, nor Islamic psychopaths portend the End Times as clearly as a Stranger Danger Papacy that imperils Catholic youth. "Some Polish bishops actually are afraid of what Pope Francis will preach during the World Youth Day in Poland," said Professor Stanislaw Obirek of Warsaw University. This would include his 'multicultural' obsession, denounced by Bishop Libera of Płock as "a leftist policy in which all religions and cultures are equally important. But not the one they grew up in. Christian, of Christ."
"The ‘Bergoglian Synthesis’", reprinted herein, confirms the worst Polish fears. A one-stop shop of spurious Bergoglianisms, it presents — at a glance and irrefutably — the naked truth of this pontificate. While tragic and dispiriting, it is also liberating because it frees us from the papolatory exemplified by Bishop Dunn of New Zealand. "I think Pope Francis is doing something good," he recently replied to a papal critic. "I still believe that the approach of Pope Francis is far more nuanced than you suggest."
Before such wilful blindness, and in all charity, we offer the "The ‘Bergoglian Synthesis’" to papolators everywhere: in the forlorn hope that they will finally wake up and smell the coffee! For they continue to defend the indefensible. Even as Francis mocks their misplaced loyalty by adding to his anti-magisterial litany on a daily basis! In a public address at the Basilica of St. John Lateran on 16 June, for instance, he stated that Jesus, in the case of the woman caught in adultery, "played the fool," "sidestepped the moral code," "makes us think that one cannot speak of ‘rigidity’, of ‘certainty’"! Worse still was the Q&A session that followed, during which he infamously declared: "the great majority of sacramental marriages are null."
It can only get worse. Not that he sees it that way himself. Smug beyond words, Francis recently informed journalists that prelates who had reportedly approached the Pope Emeritus complaining that he [Francis] was too liberal, had been sent packing by Benedict. We shouldn't doubt it. The complicit Benedict has repeatedly backed him. But their backslapping does not change the catastrophic reality. "It is futile to close our eyes," writes Mgr Michel Schooyans, an esteemed scholar. "The Church is challenged in its very foundations." In a paper published on 11 July, he describes the Modernist cabal fomenting all the strife as
a powerful, international, well-heeled, organised and disciplined party [with] ready access to the media, [who] frequently appear unmasked, [and] operate with backing from some of the highest authorities in the Church.
This is why the longer Francis sits on the Chair of Peter, and the more liberal cronies he gathers around him, the more entrenched the Revolution will become: thereby increasing the prospect of formal schisms breaking out all over when he is finally replaced by a faithful, dignified, intelligent, and truly humble Catholic.
So, by all means let us persevere with Plan A — our daily prayer for the Vicar of Christ to return to Christ; to abandon his Modernist revolt and embrace Catholicism, pure and simple. At the same time, since he continues to resist the grace of conversion and keeps on forging "alliances that imperil the Church’s very existence" (as Mgr Schooyans warns), we must also ramp up Plan B — viz., Frexit: our corresponding prayer that Francis will soon exit stage right (or left) to Judgment. Barring his instantaneous conversion à la Ratisbonne, or many more cardinals stepping up to challenge him, only Frexit can loosen the iron grip of his "powerful, disciplined party" of infiltrators and turncoats.
Post-Frexit, we can all pause for breath, give thanks for the Providential lifeline, and redouble our other prayerful petition: for a great and saintly replacement to clean up the Bergoglian "mess";
to stand four-square against the secularising anti-spirit of Antichrist, not shoulder to shoulder with it.