I saw this at Voice of the Family. You can find it other places too.
The entire Synod of Bishops (and the fancy people running it) received a marvelously cold slap in the face with the wet towel of real “reality” in a speech by a lay woman from Romania. She didn’t waste time or words, but laid right into them.
My emphases and comments:
The following intervention was made by Dr. Anca-Maria Cernea, President of the Association of Catholic Doctors of Bucharest (Romania), at the Ordinary Synod on the Family on Friday.
Your Holiness, Synod Fathers, Brothers and Sisters, I represent the Association of Catholic Doctors from Bucharest.
I am from the Romanian Greek Catholic Church.
My father was a Christian political leader, who was imprisoned by the communists for 17 years. My parents were engaged to marry, but their wedding took place 17 years later.
My mother waited all those years for my father, although she didn’t even know if he was still alive. They have been heroically faithful to God and to their engagement.
Their example shows that God’s grace can overcome terrible social circumstances and material poverty.
We, as Catholic doctors, defending life and family, [that is, actually doing something] can see this is, first of all, a spiritual battle.
Material poverty and consumerism are not the primary cause of the family crisis. [BAM!]
The primary cause of the sexual and cultural revolution is ideological. [BIF!]
Our Lady of Fatima has said that Russia’s errors would spread all over the world. [Do I hear an “Amen!”?]
It was first done under a violent form, classical Marxism, by killing tens of millions.
Now it’s being done mostly by cultural Marxism. There is continuity from Lenin’s sex revolution, through Gramsci and the Frankfurt school, to the current-day gay-rights and gender ideology. [Naming names, too!]
Classical Marxism pretended to redesign society, through violent take-over of property.
Now the revolution goes deeper; it pretends to redefine family, sex identity and human nature.
This ideology calls itself progressive. But it is nothing else than the ancient serpent’s offer, for man to take control, to replace God, to arrange salvation here, in this world.
It’s an error of religious nature, it’s Gnosticism. [KA-POW!]
It’s the task of the shepherds to recognize it, and warn the flock against this danger. [OORAH! Is that what the Synod Fathers are doing? I’m just asking.]
“Seek ye therefore first the Kingdom of God, and His justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.”
The Church’s mission is to save souls. Evil, in this world, comes from sin. Not from income disparity or “climate change”. [Do I hear an “Amen!”?]
The solution is: Evangelization. Conversion.
Not an ever increasing government control. Not a world government. These are nowadays the main agents imposing cultural Marxism to our nations, under the form of population control, reproductive health, gay rights, gender education, and so on.
What the world needs nowadays is not limitation of freedom, but real freedom, liberation from sin. Salvation.
Our Church was suppressed by the soviet occupation. But none of our 12 bishops betrayed their communion with the Holy Father. Our Church survived thanks to our bishops’ determination and example in resisting prisons and terror. [I guess they were culture warriors.]
Our bishops asked the community not to follow the world. Not to cooperate with the communists. [Can we hand the Synod over to this gal? Please?]
Now we need Rome to tell the world: “Repent of your sins and turn to God for the Kingdom of Heaven is near”. [Is this what you are hearing from your pastors these days? Or are you getting a bunch of half-mumbled, mealy-mouthed temporizing?]
Not only us, the Catholic laity, but also many Christian Orthodox are anxiously praying for this Synod. Because, as they say, if the Catholic Church gives in to the spirit of this world, it is going to be very difficult for all the other Christians to resist it. [THWACK!]
[01738-EN.01] [Original text: English]
Forward this to everyone.
God bless Dr. Cernea!
I have an imagine of some of the bishops, especially those from a certain country, blinking faster and faster as the speech goes on and, perhaps, pawing the ground with one of their feet while their hands work, aimlessly.
Fathers (and others), if you are looking for a source for both hosts and incense, here is a good possibility .You would be doing a large family a good turn. They have 15 children from 19 to 1. They homeschool and have a cottage business.
Custodio, common in military language, means “to watch, protect, keep, defend, guard”. Pietas is complicated, as we have seen many times. Obvious English “piety” comes from this, but the Latin is more involved. Your Lewis & Short Dictionary, oddly cheap considering its usefulness, says pietas is “dutiful conduct toward the gods, one’s parents, relatives, benefactors, country, etc., sense of duty.” The classic application of pietas and the adjective pius is to the figure of Aeneas in the Latin poet Virgil’s Aeneid. As Troy was being destroyed by the Greeks after the incident with the wooden horse, Virgil (+A.D. 19) has Aeneas carry his elderly father Anchises from the wreckage of the burning city while leading his little son along by hand. This image of the man with his father on his back and his son by the hand perfectly expresses the duties Aeneas, future founder of what will become Rome, had toward his family, his pietas. He was also scrupulous in relation to the gods. So he is usually called pius Aeneas, which as you now know is far more complicated than the mere “pious Aeneas”.
