It has always amazed me just how wrong EWTN seems to get pretty much every news piece they report about. It's almost impressive.
EWTN is, of course, part of the problem in the Church because it has been a mouthpiece for NOChurch at least for as long as I have been watching them. However, its views on most other issues are also misinformed.
Perhaps I have an inkling for a mild form of broadcast self-flagellation, but I do watch some of their news from time to time. It is not one of my proudest boasts, but I also do subsribe to their YouTube channel where I am constantly bombarded with 'fake news from a NOChurch americanist perspective'.
Their reporting on Church matters misses the mark most often on account of omission, simply ignoring more obvious angles to front some viewpoint only NOChurch agents can find. When it comes to U.S. domestic policies, they are pretty much like Fox News, except they are anti-abortion and they cover more of what has been called the 'life issues', but they will generally hit and miss in roughly the same way. It is when they report on international politics that they miss the mark most, and that their reporting often veers into lies of commision, not unlike any of the mainstream press, it must be stressed.
As most know by now, the arch-warmonger of the Trump administration - John Bolton - was fired, or quit, whatever the case may be. All the same virtually everybody was happy with this because they saw in him a man whose solution to everything seemed to be lobbing a few missiles, or starving a population. Even on Fox News there was jubilation - largely from Tucker Carlson, who is pretty much the only anti-warmonger on mainstream American television, but still. It had not occured to me that there would be mainsream 'Catholics' who would be against his fiering until I turned on EWTN.
There I was treated to this horrible show:
I still remember when he was hired. A lot of the people who voted in Trump saw it as a form of betrayal for Trump to appoint a man who has been directly responsible for much of the decision-making surrounding the 2nd Iraq war, which Trump had in a round-about way complained about while on the campaign trail.
They brought in someone who informed us that Bolton was a "great pick", I believe was the exact phrasing. It was a black woman, I remember. Normally, race would not be an issue, but I found it odd that they chose her to laud the pick of this warmonger, suspecting they did it to ease the optics given that the Trump administration (wrongly) and the neocons (not without justification) have been accused of being racists.
I should, in fairness, not have been surprised by their love-fest for Bolton upon his dismissal given how they covered his appointment, and given that EWTN is pretty much a warmongering neocon station. I normally call it Fox News for people with rosaries, or who don't mind them. They claim to present news "from a Catholic perspective", apart from any news which have anything to do with "just war", the inviolability of human life outside U.S. shores or such issues. Still, I must admit I was not expecting them to leap to his defence.
Now, some might argue that I only saw one piece of possibly many, some of which may have been anti-Bolton, and this may indeed be true. However, how we choose to present ourselves says a lot about us. If they did other critical pieces, they did not want these saved for posterity on the Internet. EWTN purposely chose to upload a piece which lamented that the Trump administration has lost a man who seemingly has never seen a war he didn't like. That says a lot, and frankly, it says all that is relevant on this issue.
If EWTN wants to propagate for war then "who am I to judge"? However, I resent most that they choose to front themselves as "news from a Catholic perspective". Never once , for instance, have I ever heard them discussing the most Catholic concept of the "just war doctrine". Their reporting on Iran is almost always uninformed when it is not outright lies, as can be evidenced in this clip. Iran kept its end of the nuclear agreementt, for instance, something which even the U.S. deep state apparatus confirmed, along with all other international organisations.
They make it clear to me why Catholics in the U.S. are so misinformed about the world at large. For instance, I have seen many reports from then on Syria, and not once have they ever mentioned that the U.S. has been working alongside Islamists to oust Assad - frequently presenting the U.S. as caring for Syrian lives. Even worse, not once have they ever mentioned - in the reports I have seen - that the Catholic and Orthodox bishops of Syria have condemned the Western intervention and are fully behind Assad.
Here we have Catholics going out of their way to stay out of mainstream media lies, only to come to a neocon operation fronting itself as Catholic.
It is profoundly sad that they have chosen to mislead Catholics and the only mitigating factor I can allow for is the possibility that they do this out of extreme ignorance and not out of sheer malice.
Still, it is ignorance which obviously crosses into being sinful. The Roman Catechism is, after all, keen to stress that one lies if one says something false believing it is true, but having been neglegent of finding out the actual truth. In other words, they have an obligation towards justice and truth to find out the actual truth instead of misleading their viewers, even if we accept the charitable notion that they misninform by accident, which I obviously do not.
This will probably be one of the last if not the last of the time-period chronicles. There is simply too much happening too fast for me to write effectively about it. I hope to transition to shorter pieces which cover one topic and I have several in the pipeline, but I have to get through some of the time period stuff, so I shall make this brief...
In "Not Just More Scripture, But Different Scripture — Comparing the Old and New Lectionaries ", Peter Kwasniewski mada a point of pointing out that the Novus Ordo Missae doesn't have what the Roman Rite have plus some add-ons, but that there are significant substractions from the lectionary. Things get even more interesting when we analyse what got left out and realise that many of the 'hard' teachings were left out entirely from the Sunday readings, and some entirely over the whole 3-year cycle. He also had an article on non-reasons for preferring the Novus Ordo, which was written as a response to a famous convert priest who had written a piece with purpoted reasons to prefer the Novus Ordo.
Before we get too praisy on Trump, we should remember that he is quite adept at producing fake news himself, as evidenced with his attempted coup in Venezuela, in which his vice president spoke to a relative nobody in the Venezuelan parliament, assuring him that the U.S. would recognise him president if he swore himself in, which he promply proceeded to do, followed by prompt U.S. recognition of this rouge politician, with Trump following suit with lies about dictator Maduro this-and-that, with Nicolas Maduro being the duly-elected president. This story has lots of legs left on it so I shall not write much on it today, apart from noting that the major event was triggered on the 23rd of January, and that the story being told in the U.S. - which has suddenly decided to back Trump - is the exact opposite of the truth. This was the major story internationally.
As always, fake news is not limited to the secular media, with neo-Catholic sites never far behind. In Christian groups cautious on U.S. troops leaving Syria, EWTN proceeded to tell us about how worried Syrians are about the U.S. withdrawing from its illegal occupation of Syria, without so much as citing one Syrian - not even a fake one.
We all know that modern Western nations do not care one bit about children, so it was amusing when the U.K. used , the chldren excuse to introduce a pornography licence of sorts in which we are told that people will have to register with the government in order to view pornography. When governments pretend to care about children, you know it is not about them. If we accept the premise that the government is setting forth, soon you will need read alternative news.
Much more could be written about U.S. roguery or Bergoglio madness, but I shall conclude with the following...
In a widely-speculated-on move, Bergoglio decided to abolish the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei. His stated argument is that the traditional orders have reached a degree of stability which no longer requires that the Ecclesia Dei commission be kept going and that the SSPX wanted to have negotiations directiely with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This, of course, neglects the fact that the Ecclesia Dei commission was about more than just handling negotiations with the SSPX. It was about preserving and normalising the Tridentine Rite, and issuing clafirications about how the authentic Latin Rite Mass should be celebrated according to the 1962 Missal - including even granting permissions to use other older missals. It saddened me to see the kind of normalism which has become all too common in the Novus Ordo, with people unquestioningly for the most part accepting this pathetic excuse.
It stands to ponder, for example, what will happen to traditional orders or nuns and monks which no longer have Ecclesia Dei protection. Will they be handed over to the wolves at the Congregation for Religious? How about those who wish to switch to authentic Catholicism? Will they find themselves under a Bergoglian commissar who instructs them to use the Novus Ordo, as the Franciscans of the Immaculate were forced to do? We shall soon find out.
This month's Bergoglio victim was the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, which was finally de-commissioned on account of its often-laudable work in re-establising authentic Catholicism.
There is really only one place to start this week and that is with the news that Bergoglio has altered the John Paul II Catechism to read that the death penalty is now "inadmissible" in all circumstances because it violates "human dignity" . That God Himself in the Bible did not realise this, or the various Church fathers, or Doctors of the Church, or all the popes up until Bergoglio ought to get us suspicious.
The one thing I shall note is that the argument that Bergoglio uses is one that is expressly condemned by the Catechism of Trent. Bergoglio argues that using the death penalty deprives the convict of the chance of conversion. The Catechism of Trent tells us, in rather common-sensical terms, that he who knows that his life will end and is granted the grace of knowing when will scarcely convert at a later time if he cannot do it while at the point of oncoming death. So Bergoglio's argument is not even original, and is one which has been put down before as nonsensical.
It is interesting to note that the only person Bergoglio can quote to rationalise his new posture is himself, continuing his now-growing list of novelties by self-quotation.
As usual, the neo-Catholics were mostly out in force proving that they are part of the problem. To watch EWTN reporting that "the pope has changed the Church's teaching on the death penalty" or the "pope has strengthened the Church's opposition to the death penalty" would have been to come away with the conclusion that a pope can change the Church's teaching. The Papal Pose was misex, with Fr. Murray arguing that it was a break, and Robert Royal at his usual neo-Catholic best when responding that canonists will have to determine whether it is 'de fide', when asked that by Arroyo. It's striking that these people are there to respond as experts and they do not even know that catechisms are not in and of themselves infallible, not even the venerable Catechism of Trent. They ought, however, to contain infallible truths.
Some of the Novus Ordites argued that it is a case of the pope implanting his prudential judgement and that we should take it seriously, having been offered this opinion. Excuse me, but the Catechism is there to tell us what the Church teaches explicitly, not to argue for selective enforcement of prudential judgements, regardless of where they hail!
This is nothing short of heresy because the Church has taught definitively about this issue from her beginning, and God has made it clear that the death penalty can be justifiably imposed by legitimate authority. To argue otherwise is to do nothing short of lying, and to pass it off to others it to shirk responsibility.
What is clear is that Bergoglio has gone after low-hanging theological fruit. He knows that even among those who argue for the licitness of the death penalty, many are opposed to it in practice. The death penalty is only available in a few countries and even in these it is rarely used. He knows that people will not die on 'death penalty hill', so to speak, protesting "thus far but no farther!" We can, however, be sure that if Bergoglio gets away with this he will not stop there.
The arguments he puts forward for it, namely that people nowadays have a realisation that the death penalty is opposed to human dignity, can be used to rationalise pretty much every heresy and Church teaching which is not popular with the modernists. It is pretty much what he has attempted to do with divorce and remarriage and you can be sure that he is testing waters by formally changing the Catechism on the death penalty. Next up on the line might just be your favourite teaching.
What if Bergoglio used the McCarrick scandal to introduce formal heresy into the teaching of the Church? What if the McCarrick scandal was itself the distraction? Most of the Catholic and secular media is pre-occupied with other stuff anyway, and there is no better time to poison the Church's already-sub-standard Catechism . If he pulls it back on account of major opposition (yeah, as if Bergoglio listens to anyone!) then it will hardly be headline news. If it sticks, then he can use it as reference for even further heresy, knowing that EWTN and the rest of the neo-Catholic establishment has his back arguing as dishonestly as ever that we need to try and take onboard something which is obviously a heresy simply because the pope has put his weight behind it.
I have often maintained that neo-Catholics, or 'conservative Catholics', will reject every heresy unless it comes from the pope. This incident proves me right, yet again!
All I can say is that I am in total agreement with Christopher Ferrara that The Reversible Magisterium...
There are very many neo-Catholics who look down smugly on traditionalists. They want to claim that they still hold to the Catholic faith but do not soil their hands by mixing with those who question disastrous multiple (im)prudential decisions by the Holy See since Vatican II.
In "An attack on older Traditional Catholics in the Catholic Herald", Joseph Shaw chronicled a new type of Catholic - the "self-hating self-righteous not-really-trad Trad" as evidenced by Michael Davis, writing for the Catholic Herald. In his piece he managed to cobble up just about the most extreme caricatures of traditionalists, while claiming that he is a traditionalist, but of the friendly type. He trashed the older generation of traditionalists while praising the novus traditionalists of whom he obviously counts himself.
My regard for the Catholic Herald went down the drain with the Libyan war, which they cheered as enthusiastically as the war propaganda room of NATO. Things have not improved under Bergoglio but have only gotten worse. Occasionally we have a piece which is provocatively truthful, but for the most part whenever they cover anything remotely political you can count on it being anti-Russian propaganda, and when it comes to Church news, their reporting is often less than stellar, and they often gloss over the most offensive utterances of Bergoglio for nobody-knows-why. I am therefore not surprised that their new American editor found time to write such a vitriolic piece attacking traditionalists.
Sticking to that newspaper, we had a piece by Francis Philips titled "How many of us would truly resist an evil regime?" Its focal point was a woman who died not long ago, but who is best known for serving as a secretary for Goebbels, Nazi Germany's propaganda general. I only bring this up to highlight the lack of self-reflection to which we can all fall victim. As I wrote previously, the Catholic Herald and I have fallen out, so it may well be that Miss/Mrs. Philips has been writing about the diabolical scheming of Bergoglio in the most resistant of ways. I suspect she hasn't. It could also be that she has been shouting from the rooftops and denouncing the British government as it has attacked the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage, the facts of nature, and armed Islamists who have killed hundreds of thousands in the Middle East while driving out millions from their home. I suspect she has done none of that either.
In essentials, modern U.K. is every bit an evil regime as was the Nazis - most visibly with its callous disregard for human life and its incessant attack on the family -, but Francis Philips has done little to resist it. In essentials, the Bergoglio regime is even worse than the Nazis, since the Nazis - we are led to believe - wanted the death of our bodies, whereas Bergoglio seems hell-bent to see our souls damned for eternity. She has done even less to resist that, I suspect. So the question is open as to how many of us would resist an evil regime, but we can be relatively certain that Miss/Mrs. Philip wouldn't recognise one unless it popped up in her schoolbooks.
Without a hint of irony she asks us "How many of us would resist an evil regime?" That one can be so blind as to one's surroundings should concern us all.
I shall stick to the "evil regime" of the U.K. and illustate my point. We had yet another case of a child being pulled off child support by a judge against the wishes of his parents. This is a death sentence with a twist though, as the judge cited Bergoglio as justification for his decision to have the child die. This comes, of course, hot on the heels of the Charlie Gard story in which the judges denied a child the chance for experimental treatment because they wanted the child to die in a U.K. hospital. The diabolical Bergoglio effect on full display.
Moving onto the Church in the U.K., we are told that the number of Catholic weddings falls by two-thirds since 1990. So much for the sprintime of Vatican II. I doubt the quality of marriages is as high as it was before the Council either.
With yet another blasphemous Vatican stamp, this time with a homo-erotic presentation of some approximation of some Christ-like figure, Fr. Ray Blake asks "Where is the Vatican going?"
Finally, to finish of the theme of the United Kingdom, we have some good news, with Graeme Garvey mapping the English Catholic martyrs on a map that is now available online. The map is non-interactive, but I can do nothing but applaud the efforts of this layman and hope to emulate his efforts in one way or another down the road, in paying homage, however unworthily, to our Catholic forebears and the sacrifice they paid.
There is normally enough bad news in BergoglioChurch to leave one depressed for a week, and hardly a week goes by without a paedophilia/pederasty/homosexual scandal from a higly-placed cleric. It's depressing, and it's oftentimes demoralising and I wish I could just ignore it but we have to face NOChurch as it is. This week was no exception, as a former diocesan vocations director priest in the U.S. was arresed for homosexual sex assault on a 17-year old boy/man. I'll spare you the details.
Cardinal Cupich was up to his old Bergoglio-approved sin-promoting ways, and Fr. Gerald Murray took him to task for it.
Since the U.S. does not have the same simoniacal church tax system that the Germans have, and that Sweden has - although to a less nefarious degree - one has the option of refusing to support a bishop who one knows is causing harm to the faith. In " Excellent Idea For Annual Bishop/Cardinal Appeal" , the author argues for withholding money from one's diocese if one has...
