Mind-blowing profundity at the reconstituted John Paul II Institute 2.0

Sometimes I like to post lighter fare on a Friday.  But today, I am so moved, so overwhelmed and thunderstruck with awe, that I must share this quote.  Honestly, folks, I’m gobsmacked.  I’m all at sixes and sevens.

We once thought that the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family was pretty nifty.  HAH!  We had no idea what potential it had.

Then came Francis and Co.

At last they’ve purged of all traces of rigidity and the psychological problems behind traditional things and rules.  They’ve banished John Paul II’s legacy, except part of the name of the place. Gotta be patient.  They are sooo wise.

Now a new staff is in place, including the new President of the JPII 2.o Perangelo Sequeri.

Sequeri has offered some thoughts for the opening of the new academic year.  HERE

Ready?  Put down your drink and get ready to be awestruck.

 “The recomposition of the thought and practice of faith with the global covenant of man and woman is now, with all evidence, a planetary theological space for the epochal remodelling of the Christian form; and for the reconciliation of the human creature with the beauty of faith.  Put in simpler terms, through the overcoming of every intellectualistic division between theology and the pastoral, spirituality and life, consciousness and love, one treats of rendering this evidence persuasive for everyone: knowing the faith bodes well for the men and women of our time.”

Really, amazing.  No?  The profundity of it all.  The sheer depth.  I’m speechless.

It’s even better in Italian.

I’m reminded of the scene in That Hideous Strength when during the banquet the agents of N.I.C.E. wind up speaking in jibber-jabber.

Can someone at JPII 2.0 please release the bear?

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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40 Comments

  1. teomatteo says:

    That man talks like a boy with a paper… diploma from the Deepak Chopra School of nonsense.

  2. Barnacle says:

    I don’t usually drink whisky, but boy, do I need a whisky after reading that! Dear students who find yourselves signed up to this institution – I have a word of advice for you: get out. While you still can.

  3. The Astronomer says:

    Reminds me of a quote by corrupt governor’s aide Hedley Lamarr, played by Harvey Korman, in Blazing Saddles: “My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought, cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives…”

  4. Gab says:

    Fanciest word salad ever.

  5. Sportsfan says:

    It was very nice of him to take the time to “put it in simpler terms.”

    I still didn’t quite grasp it, but at least he made the effort.

  6. Traductora says:

    Very Teilhardian, which means a combination of heretical and insane. And the speaker wasn’t even a Jesuit.

  7. Simon_GNR says:

    In Cockney rhyming slang, “He’s ‘avin a giraffe!” (He’s having a laugh)

    To quote further from Blazing Saddles: “B*** – S***!”

    And this nonsense helps the Church’s work of evangelisation how, exactly?

  8. Kathleen10 says:

    Pure assininity.

  9. Charles E Flynn says:

    It is rare for a paragraph to mean so much less than the meaning of its constituent words.

  10. Midwest St. Michael says:

    Well, I put it into Google translate and all I got back was:

    “We have no idea what the Purgatory that man said!”

  11. Lurker 59 says:

    It reads like a bad Google Translate, but I don’t think heavily finessing the paragraph is going to result in it becoming coherent or orthodox.

    What is interesting is how outdated the thoughts contained therein are. Stale is an understatement. Young progressive people of today have moved way way way beyond such thought and would rightly laugh at such notions as wrongheaded and trapped in outdated paradigms.

  12. MitisVis says:

    He must have exceed his allotted carbon footprint attempting to hide what he’s up to. That first sentence could read:
    “The re-composition and epochal remodeling of the Christian faith.”
    and left it at that

  13. rdb says:

    That is BS even for Italians who require a paragraph to say what Americans can say in a sentence.

  14. Semper Gumby says:

    Hmm…let’s make a few changes…

    The dialectic of the thought and practice of revolution with the global covenant of man and woman is now, with all evidence, a planetary revolutionary space for the epochal remodelling of the Hegelian form; and for the reconciliation of the human creature with the beauty of revolution. Put in simpler terms, through the overcoming of every intellectualistic division between urban and pasture, socialism and life, consciousness and harmony, one treats of rendering this evidence persuasive for everyone: knowing that the inauguration today of People’s Glorious Washing Machine Factory #2 bodes well for the men and women of our time.”

    – Fidel Castro

  15. jaykay says:

    Midwest St. Michael: yes, I thought it had to be Google translate. Or someone channeling Teilhard de Chardin after a particularly strong spliffy.

  16. teomatteo says:

    Who in hades would want a degree from there on their c.v.???

  17. Amerikaner says:

    Dear Lord, send us great saints!

  18. Beltway Catholic says:

    Well done!

  19. Hawkwood says:

    Ok, so….. with the new “paradigm ,” gender, marriage, family, and heck, even truth and faith are, “on a spectrum?”

  20. ChesterFrank says:

    could someone explain what that paragraph really says?

  21. Kerry says:

    Read the words, but hear them in the voice of Homer Simpson’s father!

  22. Lurker 59 says:

    @ChesterFrank

    Sure. Here you go.

    It is evident that, through the encounter with globalization and interconnectivity of diverse groups of people of our present age, the thought and practice of Christianity has been given an epoch marking opportunity to be remodeled; and for the reconciliation of the human species with the beauty of faith. Putting this in simpler terms, it is through the overcoming of the false philosophical dichotomies between idea and practice, spirituality and corporeality, thought and emotion, that we are confronted by evidence that can persuade everyone: Knowing the faith is still fruitful for the men and women of our time.

    Putting it shorter, what is attempting to be said is that there now exists the opportunity to create the Orange Catholic Bible.

  23. John Nelson says:

    Resist.

  24. Fryer Eric says:

    I have a bachelor’s in Theology, and it’s sentences like that which make me glad I didn’t pursue graduation work. There seems to be quite a penchant in many theological circles for saying as much as possible while meaning very little.

  25. TonyO says:

    I strongly urge all previous graduates of the JPII Institute (i.e. before the wreckovation) to immediately start referring to their degree and their alma mater as “from before it was destroyed by Pope Francis.” Uniformly and universally, keep on making the point that there was the old Institute and there is this new thing and there is nothing tie them together. If enough graduates do so, it will have the desirable effect of making people shun the place.

    The above attempts at translating or interpreting, while good enough, suffered from being two nice. Here is the unvarnished version:

    Old-style Catholicism was stupid, and old-style Catholics were jerks. We who have been enlightened by modern psycho-babble (under the sadly mistaken idea that it is science) can now distill the few tidbits of old Catholicism that ever were valid out of all the idiotic doctrines that were foisted upon superstitious idiots, and reconstitute them into a brand new religious concept that partakes of every heresy man has ever invented. We will thus teach everyone to pursue any blind, formless yearning as if it were the very essence of enlightenment, and to worship Satan under the name of “the Other” by rejecting all distinction.

  26. WarriorSpirit says:

    That was such a steaming huge pile of whale excrement. Our Blessed Mother must be weeping at where some of her Son’s Shepherds have taken His Church. What a disgrace to make our Mother weep….

  27. Chris Garton-Zavesky says:

    I have a translator in my house, which is cued to the Dynamic Equivalency Channel.

    It says that the paragraph means, this:

    “Nya, nya. I won.”

  28. threej says:

    Okay, to be fair, at least on the subject of verbosity, JP2 himself wasn’t much better:

    “It seems necessary, then, to speak in the first place of this aspect, rather than of the problem of anthropological complexity in the metaphysical sense. The original description of human consciousness, given by the Yahwist text, comprises also the body in the narrative as a whole. It contains the first testimony of the discovery of one’s corporeality and even, as has been said, the perception of the meaning of one’s own body. All this is revealed not on the basis of any primordial metaphysical analysis, but on the basis of a concrete subjectivity of man that is quite clear.”

    [Verbose, but clear. “Quite clear”.]

  29. HvonBlumenthal says:

    The word epochal is incompatible with Catholicism, whose truths are by definition untouched by the passage of time or by and development which the times may bring.

  30. JabbaPapa says:

    All it’s missing is an “in very real terms”, a couple of “eschatologically”s, and a “kerygma”.

    Maybe close off with a groovy guitar rendering of Kumbaya ?

    threej, JP2’s words actually mean something …

  31. Ms. M-S says:

    C.S. Lewis would have loved it. Screwtape would probably have written “decomposition” rather than “recomposition.”

  32. robtbrown says:

    HvonBlumenthal says:
    14 September 2019
    The word epochal is incompatible with Catholicism, whose truths are by definition untouched by the passage of time or by and development which the times may bring.
    ~~~~~~~
    The exception is Apostolic Times, when the Truths of the Mysteries of Faith were established

  33. robtbrown says:

    Welcome to flight 2013, with services to Omega Point and stops in Hegel and Darwin

  34. TonyO says:

    Ok, so….. with the new “paradigm ,” gender, marriage, family, and heck, even truth and faith are, “on a spectrum?”

    Hawkwood, good question. I think we need a new word here, and I nominate combining the notions of “spurious” and “rectum” to get “spRectum”. In pronouncing it, there is to be a slight pause between the first two letters and the rest, and a slight emphasis on the “rec” part of the first syllable.
    It is to be used in places where people might want to foist a “spectrum” model on us, but where it is clearly spurious. Faith and truth are on a sprectum. So also also, gender is on a sprectum.

  35. Gaetano says:

    It take talent to pack that much BS in a relatively small space.

  36. Bailey Walker says:

    Release the bear? Release the Kraken!

  37. ajf1984 says:

    Never have so few used so much to say so little…to coin a phrase.

  38. maternalView says:

    I, for one, love it when guys like Sequeri publish their comments with their typical agenda-speak. It cuts down on the time I have to read spend reading their junk and discovering whether they are someone worthy of my time. When I chance upon such recomposition of wordsmithing the urge to cover my eyes and fight back the regurgitation of my last meal signals time better spent elsewhere. I know it means I’m stereotyping such nonsense as from a liberal who isn’t going to share anything that builds up the kingdom of God. But is it my fault they all drink from the same fountain of dearth? I do thank God that they haven’t caught on to the fact that if they wrote like normal people they’d likely be more persuasive! As it is now you have to be brainwashed to think what Sequeri wrote had any relevance on this planet or any other…

  39. Joe in Canada says:

    Why would anyone attend this institute now? I can’t imagine that a bishop who actually cares about the subject and is faithful to the Church’s tradition would send someone. Unless it’s bishops who don’t care, who want to fool the people, but surely the pool of agreeable priests and laity is shrinking (coul d it be they’re preparing us for Veterum coetibus?).

  40. dbonneville says:

    Tastes great. Less filling.

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