Pope Benedict XVI

The Real Benedict option in these desperate NOChurch times

The term "Benedict option" is normarlly used to refer to a course of action which leads people away from the midst of a messy society and into seclusion, from where they can regroup and re-introduce sanity into the society. It refers to St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, who did just that and whose monastic communities would go on to save the cultural inheritance of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire.

There was a book published not too long ago titled "The Benedict Option" in which an apostate - to Orthodoxy and who is said to be a self-promoter so I'll not mention his name or link to his articles- argues for much the same thing. The fact that St. Benedict strove to secure and promote the Catholic faith does not seem to faze the author, and some reviewers of the book have noted that without the authority of the Church, we would still end up with the same situation since a secluded society, even of moralists, would soon run into disputes about what was moral and what was not. Some would counter that by pointing to the fact that the Catholic Church - at least its earthly hierarchy - has been largely responsible for the destruction of morality in much of the world, a charge I do not dispute. Of course, NOChurch does by no means share the soul of the Catholic Church, but that's a topic for another day.

The biggest fallacy of the author seems to be the presupposition that a secluded society which insists on moral grounds would be left alone by the decadent world around it. There seems to be little grounds for that presupposition given that the modern state does not recognise any sphere in human affairs in which it is not entitled to not only interfere but actually dictate. In the future though, after this particularly self-destructive phase of Western civilisation (or what's left of it anyway) has crumbled, out of the ashes we might well end up having a Benedict option similar to the origial one, which rebuilds what's left of former Christendom.

However, I would like to argue that there does exist in these dark times of the Bergoglian papacy a real Benedict option which we cannot simply dismiss. It requires a re-definition of what is commonly known as the "Benedict option" and it refers rather to a pope, and not a monk, not withstanding the fact that this particular pope told us he would like the life of a monk, though he only manages to make a half-decent impression of one.

The pope in question, of course, is Pope Benedict XVI, and the real "Benedict option" is the notion that Bergoglio is not really the pope, but that Pope Benedict XVI is still the rightful pope.

This notion was popularised by Ann Barnhardt, who pursued it with the "tenacity of of a psychopath", to quote a very good moving which uses the those words to describe  a detective who pursues a very far-fetched theory in attempting to solve a murder of one of his colleagues, and manages to find the murderer in doing so,

As Bergoglio's manners have deteriorated towards total open depravity, more and more have bought into the notion that he is not pope. After all, isn't a Pope supposed to be Catholic? How can a Catholic poke fun at the Holy Trinity? How can a Catholic  insult the mother of God  - multiple times? How can a Catholic insult those who attempt to convert others to the one true faith, while praising some of the most immoral apostates in history in the process? How can a decent priest surround himself with sodomites and paedophile-enablers? How can a pope attack the sacred institution of marriage? How can a pope promote sodomy? How can an even half-decent Catholic shower praise at mass murderers and mass abortionists? How can an even moderately sub-intelligent human being advance the notion that youth unemployment is root cause of evil in the world today? How can a pope state that communists are the real Christians? I could go on and on and on, and on...

The simple answer to that is that Bergoglio is not Catholic, and more or less the only people who believe that Bergoglio is Catholic are the neo-Catholics of the see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-or-pretend-it-is-good-if-the-pope-does-it Novus Ordite variety. Most traditionalists, I would argue, have realised that Bergoglio is not pope, and most non-Catholics who follow the man realise that he also is not Catholic, which is why it is popular among modernists and leftists to openly state that Bergoglio is attempting to completely revamp the Church but is being held back by conservatives and resisters (i.e., that he is not Catholic). In fact, Bergoglio has used much the same words, as have a few of his closest collaborators.

In claiming that Bergoglio is not Catholic, I am naturally counting as Catholic someone who actually believes in the Catholic faith, in Holy Mother Church as the Church divinely instituted by Christ, and one who desires to further her divinely-commissioned purpose: the salvation of souls. Strictly speaking, of course, a Catholic is anybody baptised into the Catholic Church by either baptism or blood. That allows us to use a more theological than cultural definition, while also allowing us to rule out as Catholics such as Martin Luther, Adolf Hitler, Arius and the like, who in a strict application of the term are simply bad Catholics and not non-Catholics.

The basic premise is this: The Church is a communion of faith, and those who deviate or reject even a portion of the faith find themselves outside this communion. Our heretic-in-chief has rejected a large chunk of the faith. Truth be told, it would be difficult to point to any aspect of the Catholic faith that he actually accepts. The only thing he seems to embrace papal authority, albeit with a totally faulty conception of it and its duties, because he really only seems to...

The man may not be totally useless after all - Sunday 24th to Saturday 30th of December

The last full week of the year came, and this naturally included the Feast of the Nativity, or Christmas as it is more popularly known.

As one might intimate from my blog, I am not a fan of Bergoglio in the slightest. However, he is not totally useless, as he at least keeps me away from home on Christmas Eves.

To be fair, I had more or less decided to attend the Christmas Midnight Mass even before Bergoglio popped up dressed as pope, but he nudged me over the edge, and now I attend Christmas Mass every time, or the closest approximation we have of it anyway.

I used to enjoy watching Pope Benedict XVI celebrate Midnight Mass, even though I had come more and more to despise the Novus Ordo mass he used for the celebration, so chances are that I would have stopped watching sooner or later. I remember that they had a very beautiful statue of the baby Jesus who they put in the crib after the Midnight Mass.

Then came Bergoglio and the beautiful baby Jesus statue was replaced by something which looked more like what one picks up from one of those cartons they dish out with children's meals at fast food restaurants, except much bigger. Some claimed it looked like something from a Lidl store, but having bought a lot of quality stuff from that store, I can assure my readers that it has far better quality than whatever they made that statue from. It was more or less the most plactic thing I had seen, and the sad thing is I am not even sure it was made from plastic/rubber. It looked like one of those rubbery shapes one fills up with water to float in a bathtub.

As we now know, turning to ugly is part of Bergoglio's main strategy for destroying the Catholic faith and it has gone even more downhill from there.

It was a quiet week in the Church - at least I did not pick up on any scandals or any overly good news. The one thing that made the news was how much Bergoglio's attendance numbers at the Urbi et Orbi speech have dwindled. There is no doubt that he has fewer numbers now than he had during his first speech, and definitely far fewer than Pope Benedixt XVI had at his last.

It was indeed interesting to compare the two images as one can clearly note that Pope Benedict XVI on his final Urbi et Orbi speech had a far larger crowd coming to listen to him in 2013  in less pleasing weather, than Bergoglio had on a sunny day in 2017.

The word is out: If I want to be insulted for being Catholic I can save money and time and avoid the Vatican and simply get my insults from any third-rate raving leftist closer to home, or failing that, on the television.

In other Church news, one of Bergoglio's closest perverts, Cardinal Tobin, says that he is in favour of female cardinals. He says he sees no reason why that should not be the case, and then adds "maybe my theology isn’t sophisticated enough". In other words, he is trying to say that he doesn't get it, surprising nobody, since the list of what Tobin gets would seem to be shorter than the number of times the man has skipped a meal. That we can have lay cardinals is one thing, but of course, cardinals have always been considered part of the Church hierarchy, and the hierarchy in the Church is partriarchal. Maybe he deos have a good - by his standards - intention. It could be that he realises that news of homosexual orgies at the Vatican is extremely negative and he wants to tidy up some headlines by spicing up the orgies at the Vatican or some such thing. One is inclined to conclude something to that effect as we can almost certainly rule out a moral motive.

We were also informed that another of Bergoglio's close associates - perhaps his closest - is suspected of huge financial corrpution in Honduras. He naturally denied it, and Bergoglio even went as far as offering his condolences to him for the trouble that others are causing for him. This is, of course, the cardinal who was revealed - through Wikileaks - of having accepted a large sum of money in order to help Bergoglio's trip to the U.S. have a decidedly leftist bent - as if Bergoglio or his advisors needed any help with that agenda.The Eponymous Flower titled their article "Pope Intimate and Poverty Poser Receives $600,000 a Year to Do Nothing" which, if it were true, I would happily approve - if all it took to get Maradiaga to do nothing was to pay him a small fortune.

Whatever one may think of Bergoglio, one cannot avoid at the very least the fact that he keeps very corrupt and perverted company, and then we ought to recall something about birds of a feather and flocking together.

Over at the Southern Orders Page, Fr. Allan J. McDonald once again proves that celebrating the Tridentine Mass is no guarantee of Catholic sanity as the man argues that Pope Paul VI should be canonised - there are rumours that a secodn miracle has been approved or soon will be in any case. The intersting thing is that he offers Humanae Vitae as the reason why Paul VI should be canonised, and the fact that he put aside Bugnini. So he is asking us to believe that although Pope Paul VI allowed the heretical notion that contraception could be permitted before condemning that notion, although not in any way enforcing that condemnation by means of ecclesiastical penalties, and then tossed Bugnini away from Rome after Bugnini had managed to ruin the Church's liturgies and disciplines he showed "heroic virtue" or can be held up...

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