“Pope Francis, who was himself tasked by the last conclave with rooting out abuse and corruption, has tended to surround himself with men who are at the very heart of the scandals rocking the Church throughout the world. His credibility as a reformer who will root out scandal and insist upon accountability is nearly nonexistent; the scandal in the United States has landed firmly on his desk as a result of his own behavior. He has said to American Catholics and to our bishops, in effect, “Let me and the Holy See handle this.”
I am not confident that we will see anything close to a full inquiry or a clear adjudication of this matter in Rome. Too many there are implicated and compromised to be able to carry out a clear and forceful investigation. The testimonies of Archbishop Viganò have substantially withstood scrutiny: former Cardinal McCarrick’s misdeeds were known and ignored despite previous sanctions.”
http://www.ncregister.com/blog/msgr-pope/the-pope-owns-this
3 action items
- Light
- Financial discernment
- Prayer
Msgr. Pope’s comment belongs in action item 1
“This is no way to treat God’s faithful; it makes him seem more of a besieged and angry potentate than a shepherd who ‘has the smell of the sheep,’” added the Monsignor.
After drawing parallels between Pope Francis’ past “stubbornness, dismissiveness, and unkindness” in his treatment of clergy sex abuse survivors, in Chile, Msgr. Pope states: “Americans, both clergy and lay, may well have to learn that it could take strong protest to move this pope to reconsider his seemingly dismissive stance regarding our concerns.”
Age of Apostasy. One of those articles where it is hard to know when to stop quoting.
“To understand the Bergoglian conversion of the papacy we need to understand the larger crisis – many are at last admitting that there is a crisis – to which it belongs. That crisis is a concatenated one that has taken some time to break into the open. It involves, first, a loss of faith in tradition and a failure to stand fast (2 Thess. 2:15); second, widespread sexual immorality among the laity and the clergy; third, malfeasance in high office, including the papal office, regarding doctrine, discipline, appointments, and finances; fourth, a nexus of deceptions and cover-ups in which even the otherwise well-behaved have too often become enmeshed, despite the fact that “no prelate should desire that any good be achieved by a lie” (Aquinas, Super II ad Thess., C2, L1, 32); fifth, in service of those cover-ups a gross and, in some mouths, richly hypocritical distortion of respect for the pontiff, a distortion that does not stop short of substituting a false doctrine of communion such as that which appears in Ouellet’s letter; sixth, abandonment of the Great Commission in favor of a mission of inclusiveness, where “making disciples of all nations” decidedly does not mean “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19f.); seventh, a deliberate plan to use the papacy to dissolve what is left of the centralized, authoritarian Tridentine Church and to overcome the synthesis of Vatican I and II that was attempted, with limited success, by the previous four popes – that is, to generate a decentralized, morally and doctrinally flexible, post-modern Church that is open both to Protestant and to pagan elements, with a vast and welcoming Courtyard of the Gentiles.”
“For “Tradition comes before the Pope and not the Pope before Tradition.” He also supplies a useful analysis of the possibility of a pope falling personally into heresy, and of the situation that must then appertain. Recognizing that possibility, he asserts, “does not mean in any way diminishing the love for and devotion to the Papacy. It means admitting that the Pope is the Vicar, not always impeccable and not always infallible, of Jesus Christ, [the] only Head of the Mystical Body of the Church.”
“The pope is steward of the keys, and this undoubtedly belongs to the visibility of the Church. His use of those keys lends definition to the Church through the regular process of rendering judgments as well as through speaking to and for her. But we must be very cautious in claiming that he concentrates in himself what belongs to the Church, whether evangelically, ontologically, or juridically, for it belongs to Jesus Christ himself to do that (Col. 1:15–20), not to the bishop of Rome or any other bishop.”
“It is by making too much of the papal office that we have ended up making too little of it, even electing a pontiff who gives every appearance of combining these mistakes; that is, who allows communio to be converted into uncritical adulation of his own person while converting his office into that of referee between the orthodox and the heterodox in the looming wars of “synodality.”https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/11/10/the-conversion-of-the-papacy-and-the-present-church-crisis/
Francis the Merciful: Champion of selective silence.
“After having acquired the moral certainty throughout this year that the reception of the apostolic commissioner within our Institute would cause serious and certain harm, both regarding the understanding of the charisma bequeathed by God to Mother Mary of the Cross, our Foundress, and the way of living it, after many times proposing solutions of appeasement without any answer ever having been given to us, after consulting with authorized and competent persons, after having prayed much and always with the desire to remain daughters of the Church, wanting to remain faithful and obedient to the truth, it seemed to us that we had no choice but to renounce our vows,” the sisters wrote in a public statement issued on November 7 (PDF here).” https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/conservative-order-of-nuns-on-verge-of-destruction-following-vatican-interv
“The bishops, who are a namby pamby bunch on traditional church morals and only get excited when the topic turns to ‘justice’ for illegal immigrants to break U.S. law by not having to live in their Catholic democracies back home, are trying to vote on mealy mouthed items such as a ‘code of conduct for bishops’ (You’d think they wouldn’t have to be told if they got to the bishop level, but o.k.), and probably more important, the release of all documents surrounding the Cardinal Theodore McCarrick scandal.” https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/pope_francis_goes_back_to_being_dictator_pope.html
“For many Americans, sad to say, the pope has probably just confirmed what he was forced to admit in Chile: he’s part of the problem. That no one convinced him this move would be a public relations nightmare – and would cause more trouble than a frank discussion and voting (which he could alway massage later anyway) – is a sign of where we are in the Church now.” https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2018/11/14/how-long-lord/
“It was also in September that noted German theologian and editor Benjamin Leven revealed in an article in Herder Korrespondenz that Vatican sources were saying it was Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, close adviser to the pope on canonical matters and alleged to have been present at the “drug-fueled gay orgy” in an apartment of one of his priest-employees last year, who “promoted an attitude of indulgence at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith toward priests who were responsible for sexual abuse.”
Leven believes that it was through Coccopalmerio’s intercession that ” several priests who were working in the disciplinary section responsible for handling cases of abuse were dismissed from the CDF.” These priests, readers will recall, were dismissed without cause over the objections of then-prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Müller. When the cardinal asked the pope why the men were being dismissed, he is claimed to have responded, “I am the pope, I do not need to give reasons for any of my decisions. I have decided that they have to leave and they have to leave.”
https://onepeterfive.com/shock-confusion-as-vatican-orders-american-bishops-not-to-vote-on-abuse-measures/
“He also pointed out that the tendency of this pontificate to be silent in the face of criticism, or refuse to engage the charges of heresy or apostasy, bring to mind St. Pius X’s warning in his 1907 encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis: That never “clearly confessing one’s own heresy” is “typical behaviour of the modernists, because in this way they can hide themselves within the Church.”
Valli and Msgr. Bux then went on to discuss the practical, theological and juridical difficulties of correcting a pope of such errors.”
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