From The Great Roman today:
Why do I keep reading stuff Popes said? Pathetic old Roman Catholic me. I can hear the cobbles in the Piazza screaming at me with the voice of my grandma multiplied by the thousands: “Pray! Fast! We could use some help here!!!”. Maybe I am just going insane.
It seems to me that someone else once said that if the truth would be suppressed, even the stones would cry out.
Would that the following still echoed off the stones of the Piazza San Pietro.
“(…) our doctrine is detached from the errors which circulated and by now flourish in the culture of our time, and which could completely ruin our Christian view of life and history. The Modernism represented the characteristic expression of these errors, and under other terms it is still current. (Cfr. Decr. Lamentabili di S. Pio X, 1907, e la sua Enc. Pascendi; DENZ.- SCH. 3401, ss.) We can therefore comprehend why the Catholic Church, yesterday and today, must give such great importance to the rigorous conservation of authentic Revelation, and considers it inviolable, and must have a conscience so severe about its fundamental duty to defend and to transmit the doctrine of the faith in unequivocal terms; othodoxy is her first concern; the pastoral magisterium is her primary and providential function; in fact the apostolic teaching secures the canons of her preaching; and the instruction of the Apostle Paul: Depositum custodi (1 Tim. 6, 20;2 Tim. 1, 14) constitutes for her such a responsibility that it would be treason to violate it. The Church as teacher does not invent her doctrine; she is the witness, the guard, the interpreter, the vehicle; and, regarding the truths belonging to the Christian message, she can be called conservative, intransigent; and to those who strive to make her faith easier, more relative to the tastes of the changing mentality of the times, she responds with the Apostles: non possumus, we cannot (Act. 4,20).
Paul VI General Audience, 19 Jan 1972
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“The Church as teacher does not invent her doctrine; she is the witness, the guard, the interpreter, the vehicle”.
That is the whole issue today – some of the cardinals and bishops are just raring to go to change, re-invent, make things “more pastoral”, “more understanding…. We have completely lost the sense that bishops are the guardians of fidei depositum and SERVANTS of the Liturgy and of the Church.
As I am reading this, I am wondering wonder if we did not actually need an openly liberal and modernist pope for the Present Crisis to finally come to light. In a perverse way, Francis’ pontificate could actually be a blessing in disguise. That said – I do not believe things will change unless we have a new pope. Which I hope comes sooner rather than later. I am sorry if I come across as harsh, but reading what they have done to Fr. Kalchik, and, I have no doubt, many others, it is hard not to be. Things happening at the moment – priests being forcibly removed from parishes without a grave reason, priests forced to do psych evals because they are not liberal enough – were unheard of under previous popes, at least not within the last several decades.
The Church needs strong, hard-line Catholics at the top. Having faithful, traditional priests “in the field” will just not be enough, I fear. We need faithful, orthodox Cardinals and heads of dicasteries in Rome. We need a traditional, orthodox, conservative pope as soon as possible.
I really don’t understand how Paul VI could have said this and yet be himself personally responsible for violating his very words. That last bolded sentence sums up, in a nutshell, the entire Vatican II project in which he played such a dominant part – yet here he condemns it.