Coincidences? I think not.

I recently wrote:

I am convinced that one of the reasons certain bishops and priests seem determined to suppress the TLM and isolate, marginalize the people who want it is because the TLM unsettles, disturbs, annoys, irritates, needles, vexes clerics involved in one of the sins that cries to heaven.

[…]

The first thing you would have to do is change the way people worship.  Change how they pray, and over time over time you change what they believe.    In the Vetus Ordo the changers perceive an obstacle to changing the Church’s doctrines, especially in the sphere of sexual morality.   Therefore, they must restrict access to public celebrations of the TLM and keep as many priests as possible from learning it.   Make sure the liturgy in churches and seminaries emphasizes – on a good day – the Resurrection aspect of the Paschal Mystery and eschatological joy for everyone.  Make sure people don’t hear too much about propitiation, sin, guilt and judgment (concepts consistently stripped out of the orations of the Novus Ordo).

At One Peter Five, Peter Kwasniewski (PK, hereafter) has a piece about remarks made by one of the über-haters of the Traditional Latin Mass, Andrea Grillo (aka Mr. Cricket).  He is a prof at Rome’s main liturgical school, Sant’Anselmo.  Without question he is one of the driving forces in Rome behind the attacks on the Vetus Ordo.

PK looked at one of Mr. Cricket’s recent articles (7 Aug) entitled with a double entendre, “Condoms for Sex and Ecclesiastical Preservation”. The Italian word for “condoms” is “preservativi”. In Italy, don’t ask for “preserves” for your bread and butter. This is the sort of humor Mr. Cricket seems to like. On his blog, Cricket has a photo of himself giving the world the finger.

Someone might say, “But Father!  But Father!  You have an active imagination.  That’s a perfectly innocent picture.  But you are the type who sees insults from every gesture of men like the esteemed professor because YOU HATE VATICAN II!”

Okay… why would anyone have this picture, for years?

Probably for the same reason that one of Francis’ closet advisers, if not the closest, fellow Jesuit Fr. Antonio “2+2=5” Spadaro maintains, under his own name, a website in honor of the late homo-erotic writer Pier Vittorio Tondelli.

There is an Italian proverb: “II diavolo non può nascondere la coda…. The devil can’t hide his tail.”   The idea is this: The Enemy of the soul and his agents will always tell you what they are up to.  Even when they try to fool you through the appearance of beauty, you will find not so well-hidden in it something ugly, twisted and vile. In plain sight.

Back to Mr. Cricket.

He offers an argument for the “reopening” of the question of contraception that is so tangled that it is risible.  PK did the heavy lifting at One Peter Five.   Suffice to say that one of the chief architects of attacks on the Vetus Ordo, because of his own gnostic insights into the ecclesiology blah blah of Vatican II, is arguing for a reinterpretation of the Church’s teaching on sexuality in marriage by the reopening of the question of contraception.

A couple things.

The rapid rise of homosexual advocacy in the Church… the subtle undermining of the integrity of marriage via paths to Communion for the objectively divorced and remarried… the effort to obscure and even chisel out John Paul II’s “theology of the body”, teaching on the family and foundation of moral theology in Veritatis splendor… the push to reinterpret all of the Church’s teachings, law and liturgy through the lens of whatever it is they glean from Vatican II… to unhinge the sexual act from procreation… to suppress the Vetus Ordo and all who want it…  these are all connected.

The Enemy always tells us what he is up to.

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
This entry was posted in "But Father! But Father!", Pò sì jiù, Sin That Cries To Heaven, The Coming Storm, The Drill, The future and our choices and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

19 Comments

  1. ajf1984 says:

    In this day and age of people endlessly finding things “offensive,” as if that very word has some magic power to end debate, quash opposing viewpoints, etc., I hesitate to write these words. But I will write them nonetheless because I think it is important for them to be said. I am offended when theologians, prelates, media-clerics, et al. suggest that contraceptive sex is possible–nay, even desirable–for faithful Catholics, and especially when they have the gall to suggest married couples can have recourse to this. Does the total failure of the rest of Western Christendom following Lambeth 1930 to uphold the dignity of the marital act not even register with these people? I’m offended because my Catholic wife and I for the last 15+ years of marriage have struggled to balance openness to life in the marital act with our wellbeing and that of our six children, and the kind of “accompaniment” we don’t need is for someone to tell us that continence in marriage is an “ideal” but, if we fall short of it, it’s OK to use artificial means to prevent pregnancy.

    Dude (in the parlance of my generation): we’re not faithful to the Church and to Her teachings on the beauty of the union of the spouses because it’s easy or convenient. We haven’t tried to master cycles and calendars (oftentimes giving up and, 9 months later, welcoming with joy another Wee One!) because it’s fun. Please don’t try to tell me, through some soft “pastoral accompaniment,” that our struggles are really meaningless, because all we had to do was pop over to the chemist’s as long as we were using something “in good conscience.”

    Much like our late, beloved Mother Angelica who was “tired of you, Liberal Church in America,” I am tired and offended (said it again) when they try to force this treacle down our throats. Viva Humanae Vitae! Viva Evangelium Vitae!

  2. maternalView says:

    They can’t get the faithful to deny Christ overtly so they try it on the sly……incrementally they offer to loosen the teachings until someday they hope there are none left and the Church is a shell with nothing left.

  3. TheCavalierHatherly says:

    Professors of that type are certainly vocational prophylactics.

    Wickedness aside, these people are lame and not even remotely cool, and also really boring. The allure of the sinful has evaporated since it’s heyday: it used to be “sex, drugs and rock n’ roll” and now its just obviously loneliness, meds, and desperate ennui.

  4. ChrisP says:

    Indeed, quite in the money as usual Fr Z

    The homosexualists, Liturgical barbarians and theological revisionists all have one thing in common: sterility. They hate fecundity in biology, theology and most of all, worship.

    Instead, they wish to deny/destroy this in the Church, whilst at the same time spending all its money on themselves.

  5. Sportsfan says:

    If it were licit for the marital act to be separated from a potential life giving act then anything and everything else is fair game.
    Why else would homosexuals care about contraception?
    This is the linchpin.
    They know it’s the linchpin.
    They will pull with all their might to remove it.
    I think it unwise to sit idly by and hope that it doesn’t budge.

    Thanks for all you do Father Z.

  6. Nicholas78 says:

    afj1984 is completely right.
    For my own part and that of so many others, any “going back” or softening, or contradiction of Humane Vitae would be an unforgivable betrayal of our loyalty, at huge personal sacrifice, to Catholic doctrine – a loyalty in evidence in our big families and counter-cultural lifestyles. To be told we actually had a convenient 2.4 children and a cushier life and still be a good Catholic, and our sacrifices were unnecessary would be a huge stab in the back. It would finally annihilate any remaining trust in the Church’s teaching authority and narrative and self-understanding. There would be no way one could intelligently continue, without either blindness….or frankly opening up the question of a sede vacante. If the Church can officially contradict itself on faith and morals we are done for. It’s bad enough and painful enough being told we are wasting our time on the back of some stupid non-magisterial blather uttered by some useless cleric, be they priest, Bishop, cardinal or Pope.

  7. Nicholas78 says:

    Edit to above: we *could have* had a convenient 2.4 children (thanks to contraception)

  8. grateful says:

    Most PROFOUND statement from above:

    ” Make sure the liturgy in churches and seminaries emphasizes – on a good day – the Resurrection aspect of the Paschal Mystery and eschatological joy for everyone. Make sure people don’t hear too much about propitiation, sin, guilt and judgment (concepts consistently stripped out of the orations of the Novus Ordo).”

    Now it all makes sense.

  9. Not says:

    “Behind those who accuse the Church of Christ of being too rigid there is only the perversion of the false prophets who attempt against the Truth of Christ himself.”
    Pius XII

    Waiting for the day when this Great Pope is declared a Saint

  10. Mike says:

    There is in this thread or tangle of argument as well the infantilizing of all the faithful–married couples, “but of course, they can’t restrain themselves”, priests, “well, they’re not “whole” unless married”, and then, in the liturgy, it’s like a third grade classroom where “if everyone doesn’t have a “job” to do”, WAAAAAHHHH! they feel left out, no part of the thing, “like Eddie over there erasing the board after each class!!!” I am so sick of even good, orthodox clerics who look at laity who don’t want to be Extraordinary [read: daily] Ministers of the Eucharist, or lectors at Mass, or greeters, or some such thing as somehow…weird, not entirely on board. The clericalization of the laity, the desacralization of the priesthood and the Mass are part of the infantilizing of the Church. I want my stern old but beautiful Roman mother back, who doesn’t particularly care how I feel, only that I be happy in this life in the manner that will bring me to Eternal Life.

  11. JesusFreak84 says:

    Lest anyone be eyeing the east, the Greek Orthodox just had a Bishop baptize the child of a sodomite couple, and His Beatitude in Constantinople has made quite clear he will do nothing about it. All of a sudden, we’re at the 11th hour of having to confront what happens if a Pope espouses heresy…

  12. Boanerges says:

    Call it what it is, padre. This guy is knee deep in his own unchaste life and just has to drag everyone else into his misery.

  13. Benedict Joseph says:

    Having accomplished my theological education with Benedictines here in the Midwest it is not doubtful in my mind that their academic lair in Rome is as I found it here during mid-last century. Ego driven, soft-protestants at best, many but not all morally suspect. I was not edified then nor am I now.

  14. norancor says:

    This issue is the driving force behind what will completely invalidate the entire conciliar era of the Church. Masonry beget Liberalism beget Modernism beget Socio-Communism beget those who are utterly motivated by one thing – their own venereal self-gratification.
     
    Saint Peter Damian, pray that Our Lord might purge us of this centuries-long scourge, even though recourse to His Sacred Heart and His Mother’s Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart could have avoided ALL OF THIS.

     

    When the whole of ecclesiastical leadership is utterly corrupt, how does this get fixed? We’re too far gone to GET an actual pope to actually order the collegial consecration of Russia successfully. The last failure only shows the futility of the state of things…

  15. summorumpontificum777 says:

    Sportsfan above nails it. Humanae Vitae is the linchpin. Once you jettison the notion that human sexuality is only properly ordered toward procreation, then the homosexual asks, “Well, if their deliberately non-procreative sexual acts aren’t a sin, why are mine?” We’re in very deep trouble, as high-level prelates already who think this way such as Cardinals Marx and Hollerich are in positions of great influence. Pray hard, as it looks like it will take a miracle for the Church to break out of this death spiral anytime soon.

  16. donato2 says:

    In the photo Mr. Grilli seems to be modelling what under Traditiones Custodes “pastoral care” for those attached to the TLM looks like.

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  18. christopherschaefer says:

    2 months until USA midterm elections. Trump raid, gas prices plummet in USA despite global shortage, CDC suddenly drops all restrictions in USA, Taiwan & Ukraine distractions, senile USA puppet Biden controlled by unelected anonymous committee, Vatican obsessed with exterminating TLM. Coincidences or part of Great Reset of New World Order? https://youtu.be/wgzxDRxbQ_o

  19. Amina says:

    I dont know if this is the same person- however a few years ago there was an online article about an Italian couple of 2 males with children who wanted to become full participating members of the local catholic church in a small italian village.

    One of the two was named “Andrea.”

    They ended up being very active in the parish, with one of the two teaching a class at the parish for parishioners.

    This individual shares a resemblance.

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