Disquiet in Hell over The Present Crisis

Posted on 29 August 2018 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Take this story with a grain of salt.

From The Onion.

Satan Refuses To Accept Any More Catholic Priests In Hell

NINTH CIRCLE, HELL—Stressing that the situation in the underworld was quickly spiraling out of control, Satan, the Great Tempter and Father of Lies, announced Wednesday that he would not allow any more Catholic priests to enter hell. “This place is completely overrun with those monsters, and frankly, they kind of creep me out,” said the Prince of Darkness, adding that every time he looked up, he saw another recently deceased member of the Roman Catholic clergy being cast down into the fires of hell, where each is expected to be tortured until the end of time by Satan and his minions. “We’re used to having every manner of unrepentant sinner down here, but those guys are beyond messed up. I swear, if I see one more of those sick bastards, I’m going to throw myself into the eternal flames.” In response, God has reportedly instituted a secret policy whereby the priests would no longer face damnation but would instead attend mandatory counseling sessions and then be quietly transferred into heaven.

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ASK FATHER: If Francis resigned… then what?

Posted on 29 August 2018 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

I’ve had a lot – A LOT – of emails about various aspects of the possibility of Pope Francis’ resignation.  There is talk about this, since The Viganò Testimony.  More and more people are calling for Francis to resign.  That’s a popular trend these days, however.  If someone has a bad hair day, they MUST RESIGN!    Seriously, this is a far graver situation than that, but it is hard for me to imagine that Francis would consider abdicating even for 2 full seconds.

Nevertheless, I am getting questions along this line.

From a reader…

QUAERITUR:

Hi Father, If in whatever way, Pope Francis stopped being Pope; Canonically, could Pope Benedict renounce his resignation and return to the Papacy? Mentally, it seems that he is very alert and he could be in office just long enough to remove bad members of the hierarchy and replace them with good ones and then again and then a conclave could be called and a new Pope could be elected?

Let’s think this through.

ASK FATHER: If Francis resigned... then what?If Francis were to resign…

Scenario 1: There would be a conclave, the cardinals would come and elect a successor.  They are free to elect whom they wish.  They could re-elect Benedict!  He could then accept or refuse.  Say he accepts.  He is again, indisputably, the Pope hopefully until the natural end of his days.  Enough of this resignation stuff.

Scenario 2: Francis resigns.  However, enough evidence is produced to prove that there was something wrong with Benedict’s resignation in 2013.  They say Benedict was pressured out of office and his resignation was null.  That means that Benedict is still the Pope now.  He can’t be reelected.   Any conclave that would be called after Francis resignation from an office he never held would be seriously compromised because a) lots of the cardinals in it aren’t really cardinals and b) the man elected would be an anti-Pope.  Benedict would be Pope thereafter until his dying day.  Unless he resigned for real.

Scenario 3: Benedict really did resign, but there were enough shenanigans in the conclave, violations of JP2’s and B16’s regulations, that the electors or the elected were somehow banned from licit participation or holding office.  That would mean that the results of the election were faulty and that there is now an anti-Pope.  But there isn’t a true Pope either because Benedict legitimately resigned.  That would mean that the cardinal electors who were cardinals at the time of Benedict’s resignation in 2013 would have to convince every one that they alone should be in a new conclave and elect Benedict’s successor.  They could re-elect Benedict if they wanted to.  Then, see the end of Scenario 1.

Scenario 4: Francis resigns and two factions of cardinals gather in separate, rival conclaves.   They might elect different guys… or the same guy!  A third party?  Benedict?  Probably different guys.  Then we have a problem that is harder to work through.

Shades of the Council of Constance!

And in that time, there were rival claimants and questionable cardinal electors and saints on both sides and post factum sanations of acts.   Whew.

Anyway, one could write a rip-snorter TV series out of this!

Anyway, I would once again be able to dust off my old “RE-ELECT BENEDICT” Swag in my online shop from before the 2013 conclave and we could reform the “Committee To Re-Elect The Pope“.  I shut that shop down after the 2013 conclave, of course.  But there was some fun stuff in it!   Car-flags, stickers, campaign buttons, yard signs.

ASK FATHER: If Francis resigned... then what?

I have an old button, still.

ASK FATHER: If Francis resigned... then what?

 

 

Posted in SESSIUNCULA, "How To..." - Practical Notes, ASK FATHER Question Box | Tagged , ,
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29 August: What are people chanting at end of Francis’ General Audience? Is it “VIGANO! VIGANO! VIGANO”?

Posted on 29 August 2018 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

UPDATE:

They could be chanting “VIGANO!”. I scrubbed the audio a little and slowed it down. I am hearing “ITALO!” There was a bishop there, Lucca Italo Castellani. Still, it is hard to tell exactly.   Here is some cleaned up audio, full speed and then .7 speed.  You decide.

UPDATE:

There’s a story at Il Foglio that they are chanting “ITALO!”

Here is the video of today’s Wednesday General Audience, 29 August.

You tell me what they are chanting at the end of the audience coverage: 1:04:30

Play video

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29 August – Beheading of John the Baptist: exposing corrupt priests who covered Herod’s pedophile lust

Posted on 29 August 2018 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

I jotted this for the print edition of UK’s best Catholic weekly, the Catholic Herald.  I give them 400 words (exactly) a week.

29 August - Beheading of John the Baptist: exposing corrupt priests who covered Herod's pedophile lustI celebrate as my onomastico or “name day” the Feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist, 29 August.  “He must increase,” said the Baptist, “I must decrease” (John 3:30).  I need that rule of life.  St Augustine of Hippo (d 430) connected John’s sudden, violent “decrease”, his head’s removal from his shoulders, with the autumnal shortening of daylight, while the feast of John’s birth coincided with the vernal lengthening of days.

Speaking of shoulders, as I write I am in the “City of Big Shoulders”, as poet Carl Sandburg described Chicago, in defiance of the world’s other great cities, like London, Rome, and Paris.  As he explained it, “The poem sort of says, ‘Maybe we ain’t got culture, but we’re eatin’ regular.’”  One of the things I regularly eat here is the indigenous hot dog.  I’ve learned to order these like a native speaker by cordially growling, “drag it through da’ garden”, to make sure that all the necessary hot peppers, onions, tomatoes, celery salt and pickles are included. When they weren’t eatin’ so regular here, they loaded up the bun with veggies.  What was once famine fare is now a feast.

Chicago has culture in addition to the hot dog.  Not far from where I am, on the other side of the “Friendly Confines” of Wrigley Field (where the Cubs play The Game God Surely Loves Best) in the Art Institute of Chicago, there is a tempera on panel depiction of the Beheading of the Baptist by the Sienese painter Giovanni di Paolo (d 1482).   You view the instant after the deed.  Seen from outside the prison, John leans out of his window, guillotine like, his headless shoulders and angled arms still in place as a massive gout of blood jets forth the jutting neck.  A servant with a platter stoops for his head.  The executioner sheathes his man-length blade.

John was not only a martyr for the Truth. Miraculous son of the elderly priest Zechariah, he was a priestly martyr.  John stood against Herod and his crony cadre of corrupted priests who backed his violation of the truth of sexuality and marriage. Herod used his power to sin.  John’s blood exposed also priestly corruption in a way that no one could ignore.  By the way, Herod’s command to kill John, the incorruptible priest, came from his lust for a child. Salome was a “little girl” (Greek korásion).

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Italian press in full, spittle-flecked nutty. Malicious idiocy from Beans and Wormtongue.

Posted on 29 August 2018 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

For those of you who read Italian here are a couple of pages of typical reportage.

The images are large if you open them in another tab or window.

First, Wormtongue writes for La Stampa.  Notice that breathy Beans bubbles that those who think Francis should respond or resign are the “conservative fringe” who “seem so desperate that they will accept the risk of damaging the memory of John Paul II and, above all, to involve Benedict XVI”.  Beans even goes this far in his hyperventilation.  After Wormtongue mentions Bishops DiNardo, Chaput, Morlino, Olmsted and Strickland, Beans offers to his co-nationals:

“Some America bishops seem to have a semi-schismatic mentality.  For them the Pope doesn’t exist.  They are under so much pressure from the laity and their priests because of the scandal of abuses that they are afraid of being attacked in the streets.  In this way they now dump all responsibility on the Vatican in order to present themselves as the ones who ask for justice and truth.  They support the Viganò’s request hoping to damage Francis without taking into account that they are damaging John Paul II and Benedict XVI even more.”

What a load of clueless sycophantic crap.

Go home, Beans.

Italian press in full, spittle-flecked nutty. Malicious idiocy from Beans and Wormtongue.

Next in Rodari pellets Card. Burke with questions like “Are you a friend of Steve Bannon?” and “You celebrate the old Rite.  There are videos of you wearing the cappa magna.  Doesn’t that seem outdated?”

Italian press in full, spittle-flecked nutty. Malicious idiocy from Beans and Wormtongue.

And to show you what a nuthouse it is in the Italian press.

Italian press in full, spittle-flecked nutty. Malicious idiocy from Beans and Wormtongue.

A slight respite.  From La Verità, which broke the Testimony.

Italian press in full, spittle-flecked nutty. Malicious idiocy from Beans and Wormtongue.

As the Great Roman put it:

All the people who have done the worst to undermine Benedict are now giving lessons in morality to Viganò.

Posted in Liberals, The Drill, You must be joking! | Tagged ,
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J.R.R. Tolkien to his son in the 60’s about the Church and bad or stupid priests

Posted on 28 August 2018 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

J.R.R. Tolkien to his son in the 60's about the Church and bad or stupid priestsI saw – HERE – an excerpt from a letter of J.R.R. Tolkien to his son in the 60’s, about the time of the Council.  He writes about the Church and bad or stupid priests.

You speak of ‘sagging faith’, however, that is quite another matter. In the last resort faith is an act of will, inspired by love. Our love may be chilled and our will eroded by the spectacle of the shortcomings, folly, and even sins of the Church and its ministers, but I do not think that one who has once had faith goes back over the line for these reasons (least of all anyone with any historical knowledge). ‘Scandal’ at most is an occasion of temptation – as indecency is to lust, which it does not make but arouses. It is convenient because it tends to turn our eyes away from ourselves and our own faults to find a scapegoat. But the act of will of faith is not a single moment of final decision: it is a permanent indefinitely repeated act > state which must go on – so we pray for ‘final perseverance’. The temptation to ‘unbelief’ (which really means rejection of Our Lord and His claims) is always there within us. Part of us longs to find an excuse for it outside us. The stronger the inner temptation the more readily and severely shall we be ‘scandalized’ by others. I think I am as sensitive as you (or any other Christian) to the scandals, both of clergy and laity. I have suffered grievously in my life from stupid, tired, dimmed, and even bad priests; but I now know enough about myself to be aware that I should not leave the church (which for me would mean leaving the allegiance of Our Lord) for any such reasons: I should leave because I did not believe, and should not believe anymore, even if I had never met anyone in orders who was not both wise and saintly. I should deny the Blessed Sacrament, that is: call our Lord a fraud to His face.

If He is a fraud and the Gospels fraudulent – that is: garbled accounts of a demented megalomaniac (which is the only alternative), then of course the spectacle exhibited by the Church (in the sense of clergy) in history and today is simply evidence of a gigantic fraud. If not, however, then this spectacle is alas! only what was to be expected: it began before the first Easter, and it does not affect faith at all – except that we may and should be deeply grieved. But we should grieve on our Lord’s behalf and for Him, associating ourselves with the scandalized heirs not with the saints, not crying out that we cannot ‘take’ Judas Iscariot, or even the absurd & cowardly Simon Peter, or the silly women like James’ mother, trying to push her sons.

It takes a fantastic will to unbelief to suppose that Jesus never really ‘happened’, and more to suppose that he did not say the things recorded all of him – so incapable of being ‘invented’ by anyone in the world at that time: such as ‘before Abraham came to be I am’ (John viii). ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (John ix); or the promulgation of the Blessed Sacrament in John v: ‘He that he eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life.’ We must therefore either believe in Him and in what he said and take the consequences; or reject him and take the consequences. I find it for myself difficult to believe that anyone who has ever been to Communion, even once, with at least a right intention, can ever again reject Him without grave blame. (However, He alone knows each unique soul and its circumstances.)

Tolkien wrote what many think is the greatest English language novel of the 20th century.

Movies have been made, but they are to the books what the vague flicker in of Plato’s cave is to the forms of things.

Have you never read them?  You are in for a treat.   Read them.

US HERE – UK HERE

J.R.R. Tolkien to his son in the 60's about the Church and bad or stupid priests

How I envy a person who gets to read them for the first time.

They played a huge roll in my young life which laid invisible foundations for my conversion years later.

Posted in Hard-Identity Catholicism | Tagged ,
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Card. Cupich: Francis has better things to do. People who resist him a racists. Rabbit hole!

Posted on 28 August 2018 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Okay, that’s it.   I posted this within a different post, but it deserves its own place, for the record.

Chicago’s Card. Cupich, who surely owes his rise to a certain someone, has reacted to The Present Crisis and the Viganò Testimony.  He gave an interview to NBC.    HERE

You won’t believe this.

The Pope has better things to do, like global warming. People are against him because he’s from S. America. Racists!  He calls the whole thing a “rabbit hole”.

You might get a POLITICAL AD before the video story runs. BLECH.

What Archbp. Viganò wrote in his Testimony about Card. Cupich:

The appointments of Blase Cupich to Chicago and Joseph W. Tobin to Newark were orchestrated by McCarrick, Maradiaga and Wuerl, united by a wicked pact of abuses by the first, and at least of coverup of abuses by the other two. Their names were not among those presented by the Nunciature for Chicago and Newark.

Regarding Cupich, one cannot fail to note his ostentatious arrogance, and the insolence with which he denies the evidence that is now obvious to all: that 80% of the abuses found were committed against young adults by homosexuals who were in a relationship of authority over their victims.

You know what we need?

We need, oh please, even more interviews with Card. Cupich, as well as with Cards. Tobin and Farrell and Wuerl….

And does NOBODY in the press know how to pronounce the name properly?

Vi-gah-NOH!

Not vi-GAH-no.

 

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Had Benedict XVI made the sanctions known, then creepy McCarrick wouldn’t have been near the 2013 conclave

Posted on 28 August 2018 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

I know that a lot is coming at you right now.  This made me put my sandwich down and think.

My friend Fr. Gerald Murray, whom you see on the web and on EWTN especially with Prof. Royal, penned a piece for First Things about L’Affaire McCarrick, The Present Crisis, and The Viganò Testimony.

Remember.  McCarrick boasted of having helped, as a non-elector before conclave, Card. Bergoglio into the See of Peter.  He actively campaigned for him before the conclave doors were shut.

Play video

Got it?

Here is the paragraph that Fr Murray wrote which drew me up:

One great lesson of this scandal is that inflicting private and unpublicized penalties for grave offenses against chastity on “important” clerics is a huge mistake. When Benedict found McCarrick to be guilty as charged, the rest of the Church should have been told. McCarrick would not then have been able to pretend he was under no censure. Any violation of the terms of his punishment would have been noted by everyone and thus not allowed to happen. Then Cardinal McCarrick would not have been at the 2013 conclave, just as the Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien was not present due to his sexual abuse of adult males under his authority.

Had Benedict, bless him, made the sanctions known, then McCarrick would not have physically been anywhere near the pre-conclave meetings of the College of Cardinals in 2013. Of course there are phones and email, but he would not have been there, and being there is a huge part of the game.

The fact that, right after the 2013 election McCarrick suddenly returned to high visibility and influence suggests that there is a connection between what he did before the election and the subsequent results of the election.

We can’t know for sure – but we can strongly guess – that had creepy McCarrick not been there, the conclave may have produced a different result.

This is the stuff of future history books, movies, novels.

Posted in The Drill, Canon Law, Mail from priests | Tagged , , ,
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Quis custodiat custodes? About a Jesuit in Francis’ inner circle @AntonioSpadaro and his special interest

Posted on 28 August 2018 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Quis custodiat custodes? About a Jesuit in Francis' inner circle @AntonioSpadaro and his special interestThe Roman writer Juvenal penned in his Satires a line which has become an apophthegm about oversight.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?   Who is keeping an eye on the guards?

This could be a byword today in The Present Crisis.

Who is overseeing the overseers?

Here is an interesting tweet and retweet.

The tweet in question is from homosexualist James Martin, SJ.  You know all about him. Remember, too, that he was chosen to be a Consultor for the Vatican’s office on social communications. In the tweet, below, Martin is pleased that – as he interprets it – the Pope says that parents should leave their “gay” children “as they are”.  That would, of course, please a Jesuit homosexualist activist.

Martin’s tweet was retweeted – I guess with approval, though sometimes we retweet things we don’t agree with – by a member of Francis’ most intimate circle of advisers and surrogates, Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, editor of La Civiltà Cattolica and co-author therein, with a Protestant, of a disparaging article about Americans.

Here’s the Martin tweet Spadaro retweeted.

Quis custodiat custodes? About a Jesuit in Francis' inner circle @AntonioSpadaro and his special interestSo, Martin tweets and fellow Jesuit Spadaro retweets.  That’s not so interesting in itself.  You’ve gotta know that birds of a feather… and all that.

What is also interesting, and what most people don’t know, is that Fr. Spadaro has a special interest.

NB: Spadaro is one of the overseers of the overseers.  Never mind that he isn’t a bishop.  If there is a lofty, papal insider, it is he. He is massively influential.  He doesn’t just report on papal policies and messaging, he  shapes them. Remember that he even traveled to Jesuit-run Boston College to help with the Agitprop Conference that helped to shape what I call the New catholic Red Guards?  HERE

Most people know all that stuff.  Here’s what most people don’t know.

Spadaro created and maintains a site dedicated to the Italian author Pier Antonio Tondelli.  HERE http://www.antoniospadaro.net/tondelli.html

Quis custodiat custodes? About a Jesuit in Francis' inner circle @AntonioSpadaro and his special interest

Yes, it is the same Fr. Antonio Spadaro, SJ. If you go to the top index page of the domain, you see him in all his splendor.

So, who was this Tondelli guy who so fascinates Spadaro?

From wiki:

Pier Vittorio Tondelli (September 14, 1955 – December 16, 1991) was an Italian writer who wrote a small but influential body of work. He was born in Correggio, a small town in the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy and died in nearby Reggio Emilia because of AIDS. Tondelli enjoyed modest success as a writer but often encountered trouble with censors for his use of homosexual themes in his works. […] As Tondelli grew older, his reading tastes would develop and in 1974 he began to write his first narratives, saying: “I have always written, starting at 16 years of age with the usual story about adolescent frustrations”. These adolescent frustrations are conflicts between Tondelli’s religiosity, his desire to express his artistry, and his homosexual desires as well as a change in Tondelli’s belief system, in which he writes: “I find it vulgar to pray to God side by side with people for whom God is different from my God.” Tondelli developed a jealousy towards God, who he describes as unique to himself, developing a mysticism all of his own but admitted to losing something as his belief system matured.

It is interesting that Spadaro maintains this personal site about Tondelli and that he has devoted so much energy to this particular Italian writer.

Anyway, I thought it would be helpful to know more about this extremely influential policy-maker – an overseer of overseers – who is constantly at Francis’ side.

And here is a bonus Spadaro tweet.  Translation: “I found such great such great faith in Ireland.  The Irish people has such great faith.  The Irish people know how to distinguish well between the truth and half-truth.”

And, he retweeted himself… which people sometimes do.

Quis custodiat custodes? About a Jesuit in Francis' inner circle @AntonioSpadaro and his special interest

Meanwhile, since the Irish are so perspicacious when it comes to truth and half-truth, check this out.  HERE

BTW… I am blocked by Spadaro on Twitter.

Quis custodiat custodes? About a Jesuit in Francis' inner circle @AntonioSpadaro and his special interest

Posted in Sin That Cries To Heaven, The Drill | Tagged
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Bottom line: “the criteria for credible allegations are more than fulfilled”

Posted on 28 August 2018 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

The MSM and catholic media are running their feet off carrying water for the homosexual mafia, the “gay lobby” as it is called in Italian with borrow words.  The general lines of attack against The Viganò Testimony and the support that it has received are predictable.

First, they attack Viganò’s character.   That backfires a bit.  I saw a hilarious tweet from the liberal LCWR type nun – who gossiped back to Beans – that, in a talk, Viganò tried to divide them rather than bring them into unity – which is really an admission that they were already divided before he got there.

Also, they repeat – mantra like – that this is all about homophobia and getting even.

B as in B.  S as in S.

Normal people see what is going on.

Fishwrap has a story (above other stories about the sun rising in the East and water being found to be wet) today which blats that:

US cardinals reject Vatican diplomat’s claims of widespread cover-up of abuse

Which Cardnials? Let’s guess. Could they be Cardinals Wuerl, Tobin and Cupich?

On always objective NBC Card. Cupich proclaimed that Francis has better things to do.

‘The Pope Has a Bigger Agenda“: Cardinal Cupich
Cardinal Blase Cupich speaks to NBC 5’s Mary Ann Ahern about the explosive allegations of a former high-ranking church official who claims the Pope knew about charges of sexual misconduct against an American cardinal and says that cardinal was responsible for Cupich’s appointment in Chicago. “The Pope has a bigger agenda,” Cardinal Cupich said. “He’s got to get on with other things, of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the church. We’re not going to go down a rabbit hole on this.”

So, a global scandal about a homosexual network and the global cover up of clerical abuse – scandals which, by the way – are rocking the faithful to their bones – are not really a big deal.   No no… it’s global warming.   Global warming was caused by clericalism, after all!

The story also cites those bishop who are opening to believing Viganò’s claims.

Here’s a good one.

At La Stampa, Andrea “Wormtongue” Tornielli has gone so far as the insist that McCarrick’s sex plaything were of legal age, that he didn’t coerce them and that, therefore its the fault of… wait for it… clericalism.

It is worth remembering: no one has ever spoken, let alone denounced, about child abuse. [Except those who did.] We are talking about harassment of people of full age, which – given that it is the bishop who invites his seminarians or priests to bed, are actually an abuse. There is no such thing as a situation of equality, before it being a sexual abuse, it is an abuse of clerical power. Although no one has ever said that to invite seminarians close to the priesthood and young priests to sleep with him, “Uncle Ted? (as McCarrick called himself) used forms of violence or threats.

No no… nothing queer about what was going on.  It’s clericalism.  THAT’s the problem!

In all of this, it seems to me, facts remain stubborn.

First, contrary to the efforts of the MSM and catholic media, Viganò has clarified with documents what happened about his alleged effort to slow or stop the Neinstedt situation.  HERE

As Bp. Morlino pointed out, and as even Fishwrap had to admit, putting aside questions raised about Viganò’s person:

Viganò has offered a number of concrete, real allegations … Thus, the criteria for credible allegations are more than fulfilled, and an investigation, according to proper canonical procedures, is certainly in order.

Posted in The Drill | Tagged
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