McCarrick scandal

The Tridentine Mass once ruled the world; It will do so again! - Sunday 5th to Saturday 11th of August

It was a relatively slow news week, with now new theme dominating. Furthermore, many of the articles I read seemed to have been written the week before, further underlining my claim.

There were developments and fallouts of the McCarrick scandal, but sadly that is not new in NOChurch as hardly a week goes by without yet another homosexual scandal. It turns out that even in a relatively(by NOChurch standards) good diocese - the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska - there was homosexual harassment in the seminary.

The  Diocese of Harrisburg released the names of over 70 priests accused of sexual abuse, some of it dating from the 1940s. None of them are in active ministry, and the average comes out at about 1 priest per year over 70 years, which is certainly far from an overwhelming number. However, it is still sickening that these priests seem not to have undergone disciplinary measures, and perhaps worse still that it took the McCarrick scandal for this to come out. I am also split regarding the wisdom of releasing names from people accused of sexual abuse, when the men involved are dead and cannot defend themselves. Something about it rings entirely hollow and insincere.

Not tired of current homosexual scandals,  Bergoglio decided to appoint a high-ranking Vatican official who is suspected of being a sodomite himself . As I have mentioned before, we are well within ourselves to ask whether Bergoglio is not himself a sodomite. In fact, I would argue that at this point we are almost duty-bound to assume that he is. Normal decent folks do not surround themselves with sodomites unless they are partial to their lifestype. One of his closest aides, Maradiaga, had to defend himself from accusations of misconduct after it transpired that one of his closest aides had been sexually harassing seminarians. This is the man often referred to as the 'vice pope', on account of being so close to Bergoglio.

In The Moment Before the Storm, Steve Skojec tells us that there is an eerie feeling about the Church, as if something big is about to burst out, and the hierarchy seems utterly oblivious to the anger bubbling up amongst the faithful. There have been indications of this anger coming to the surface, but as I do not hang out with people in the Novus Ordo, I dare not comment on whether he has his finger on the pulse regarding that.

A Bergoglian appointee in  Argentina forbade the faithful in his diocese from receiving Holy Communion kneeling. You see, NOChurch bishops have no qualms stamping their authority upon the faithful when it comes to things which destroy the faith. They just have trouble being authoritative when it comes to protecting the faith.

The Bergoglian attempt to teach that the death penalty is "inadmissible" continued to attract attention. It is difficult to make sense of the piece written by Fr. Allan McDonald, who argued that by stating that there are no exceptions allowed with regards to the death penalty, it will be easier to make the case that there are no exceptions allowed for abortion. He is against the change, and naturally against the killing of unborn children. However, his statement does not seem to me to make much sense, since most of those people care not about what the pope says anyway. Furthermore, he misrepresents the teaching on capital punishment: The Church's teaching is not that the death penalty is an exception to the absolute prohibition of murder, but rather that it is a fulfillment of the command that we should protect life. Mundabor had no problem calling Bergoglio's attempt "formal heresy", or making a coherent case as to why this is necessarily so.

Social media censorship continues to gather pace. I am not on social media, so I care not for what they do. I do remember over 10 years ago saying that the West is much more likely to end up like China than China is likely to end up like 'the West' - whatever 'West' means - and I have largely been proven correct. We now have NATO through the Atlantic Council deciding what is acceptable on facebook, and who deserves censure.

This week the censoring agents came for   Alex Jones, the US's premier conspiracy theorist . I have watched a lot of his stuff, and I like that he is mostly anti-war, although I must admit that he was much better before Trump was president, as he could focus on completely opposing U.S. imperialist murderous policies, as opposed to defending his man against legitimate criticism, or deflecting that criticism to others. After they were done with Alex Jones, they decided to ban a Venezuelan news site. Expect this kind of censorship to continue and widen in scope!

On Alex Jones, I must admit that I still have not figured out whether he is a legitimate opposition figure or false opposition. If he is legitimate, then it is likely that he sold out a while back, as he now never mentions Israel as being the problem in the Middle East, and especially in the Syrian conflict. This he did do earlier in his career. He is very much onboard with the anti-Iraninan propaganda, presumably because Trump spouts it. I can only presume that when he uses the word "globalist" he means "zionist" and that the man is smart enough to know that there are people you are not allowed to criticise, which is why he cannot criticise the zionists head-on. Either way, the man is insincere in not pointing out Israel's complicity in the creation of Islamist groups in the region, and in launching war after war after war. He seems to have no trouble mentioning Saudi Arabia, so at least we can conclude that it's not the Saudis who he fears, and therefore that it's not the Saudis...

Bergoglio goes for low-hanging theological fruit, and neo-Catholics largely let him get away with it - Sunday 29th of July to Saturday 4th of August

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.

I cannot do justice to the arguments against this latest heresy by Bergoglio so I shall simply leave it to you to have a look at the links below, one of which is from OnePeter5 and is titled "Pope Francis Is Wrong about the Death Penalty. Here’s Why." Rorate Caeli ran one under the title "What was black is now white".

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.

Some have argued that Bergoglio only did this to divert attention from the McCarrick scandal - given that it involves one of his closest aides - while others have argued that even with Bergoglio being an idiot, using heresy as deflection is a move too dumb even for him. I am not sure there is anything so dumb that Bergoglio will not do it, so I'll not dismiss the theory entirely.  I too was initially drawn to the theory that he used it as a distraction from the McCarrick scandal. However, I do pride myself in thinking outside the box, and I have wondered: What if the reverse is true?

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...

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