A Tale of Two Sarahs: the Cuddly Bishop vs the Terrifying Cardinal

I pray God that His Eminence Robert, Cardinal Sarah (or someone of his stripe) is our next Pope! There is one error. The article implies that Justin Welby, the current Archbishop of Canterbury is appointing 'Bishop Sarah' as his successor. The Queen appoints to Bishoprics but, and this is important, only on the advice of the Prime Minister.

And, it is a bit of a hatchet job on His Eminence, talking about, 'Cardinal Sarah taking rigidity to a new level', and 'if the knowledge drummed into a boy through years in seminaries leads to such frightening religious right-wingery.' All His Eminence believes and teaches is the Catholic Faith of the One, True Church of Christ, as it was believed and taught for almost two millennia, and I say 'Spot on, Your Eminence!'

From The Spectator

If you’re looking for a snapshot of the state of global Christianity today, a good place to start would be by looking at two violently contrasting Sarahs: Bishop Sarah, and Cardinal Sarah. One is Anglican, the other Catholic; one white, the other black; one bland, the other terrifying. Both are tipped to be leaders of their respective churches: Bishop Sarah as a future archbishop of Canterbury; Cardinal Sarah as a possible pope. I wonder which of them Jesus would prefer to be stuck on a desert island with.

Sarah Mullally, the Bishop of London–elect, comes across as about the most upbeat, smiley person you could hope to meet. A happily married, down-to-earth ex-nurse and mother of two, Bishop Sarah wants everyone in the world to be kind and happy and to feel loved by her and to love her. She knows London has a reputation as a polarised diocese full of misogynistic clergy who refuse to be ordained by a woman, and she wants to spread the love and make everyone as nice and accepting as she is. Slightly nervous of her own voice, she’s a retweeter rather than a tweeter, and she only retweets soothing things, such as ‘#TacklingHomelessnessTogether’ and ‘Plant a seed today — in your garden, in a relationship or amongst the pains of the world’. She uses Fairtrade products wherever possible.

Her statements are so well-meaning and wishy-washy that you can neither argue with nor remember them. When obliged to write something on her new appointment, she said: ‘Churches confident in faith, compassionate in action and creative in partnership come about when local ministers are supported to be the best they can and members of their congregations are encouraged to flourish and be ambassadors for their faith.’

She’s really nice and supportive to gay people but can’t go as far as actually saying that they should be allowed church blessings, because that is not yet the party line.

With her background as Chief Nursing Officer, she is the perfect fit for today’s new breed of not-too-intellectual Anglican bishops with experience in the secular world. Justin Welby (who’s becoming increasingly autocratic in the matter of senior appointments) clearly didn’t care that she’d only been a suffragan bishop for two years. He wanted to be seen to appoint a woman — this woman, admirable champion of ‘patient experience’ in the NHS — and he fast-tracked her to stardom. It remains to be seen to what extent she is out of her depth when it comes to preaching memorable sermons at royal funerals.

She’s currently chairing the committee preparing a ‘teaching document’ about human sexuality to be released in 2020, and modernisers are hoping that she’ll bring her medical and biological knowledge to bear on the debate.

Cardinal Sarah — Cardinal Robert Sarah — is so different that it’s hard to believe both Sarahs emerged from having read the same gospel. Born in 1945 in Guinea, West Africa, and now a member of the Roman Curia, Cardinal Sarah has no fear of speaking out and couldn’t care less who hates him. As far as he’s concerned, it’s the Catholic church’s job to be the ultra-strict headmaster of the depraved modern world, the immovable rock against which rule-breaking secularism bangs its head. He’s one of the cardinals who can’t bear Pope Francis’s gently modernising trends.

Far from being upbeat, Cardinal Sarah believes the West is ‘committing suicide’ (as he put it last month) by allowing tolerance of ‘evil’ habits and thereby abandoning God. From his position of priestly celibacy, he pronounces obsessively on the fundamental importance of the family, and by ‘family’ he means one man married to one woman for life: no cohabitation, separation, divorce or remarriage ever. ‘Gender ideology and Isis,’ he says, are ‘the two radicalisations’ that threaten the family, and by ‘gender ideology’ he means divorce, same-sex union and abortion.

His sayings are certainly more memorable than Bishop Sarah’s. Standing at lecterns looking splendid in his cardinal’s robes, he says things like, ‘The rupture of the foundational relationships of someone’s life — through separation or divorce or cohabitation or same-sex unions — is a deep wound that closes the hearts to self-giving love and leads to cynicism and despair.’ He cites the Devil, Lucifer, Satan and Belial, all variations on the name of the Evil One responsible for these developments.

Whatever it is, basically, if it’s modern and makes life easy for anyone, he’s agin it. Even in the matter of whether Holy Communion should be taken kneeling and on the tongue or standing and in the hand, Cardinal Sarah sees a war between Michael and his angels on one side and Lucifer on the other. Communion in the hand, he says, involves a great dispersion of fragments of the host in the form of tiny wafer crumbs — and these crumbs are the body of the Lord. The crumb-spilling is therefore an outrage against the Blessed Sacrament and a tool in the hand of Satan.

When a Pope and an Archbishop of Canterbury kneel down together, as they sometimes do, and we all think, ‘How nice — maybe the two churches will get back together one day’, it’s salutary to think of the two Sarahs and be reminded just how far apart the two churches still are, at their extremes. African Anglican bishops are still resolutely anti-gay and anti-women priests, making things hard enough to nudge along in the Anglican church; but Cardinal Sarah takes rigidity to a new level.

He does have gravitas, though — something I can’t help thinking Bishop Sarah rather lacks. The theological training must be something to do with it. Whereas Bishop Sarah did an evening or two a week at the South East Institute for Theological Education, starting at the age of 36 and still holding down her job as a nurse, Cardinal Sarah was sent off to the Saint Augustine Minor Seminary in the Ivory Coast at the age of 12, from where he proceeded to the Grand Seminary in Nancy, France, and then to five years at the Pontifical Gregorian University, where he obtained a licentiate in theology in the days when lectures were still in Latin.

Bishop Sarah claims to enjoy reading theology, and she has a special soft spot for the writings of Desmond Tutu, but she can’t have Cardinal Sarah’s depth of theological knowledge. And some would say, ‘Damn good thing’, if the knowledge drummed into a boy through years in seminaries leads to such frightening religious right-wingery.

The remarriage of the two divorced churches is as unlikely to happen any time soon as the remarriage of a divorced couple in a church in Cardinal Sarah’s home diocese of Conakry, Guinea.

A Totally Unsolicited Advert

This is a totally unsolicited advertisement for my 'home on the 'net'. I have been a member of the FishEaters Traditional Catholic Forums for over twelve years. It is true that my participation has gone has gone up and down over those years, but as I told the owner of the website and the forum a year or so ago, 'Ya know, this place is like a Certain Organisation that we're both familiar with. No matter how much I try to leave, I keep getting dragged back in!'

The website is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive resource for Traditional Catholics on the web. After twelve years, I know I've only scratched the surface! Every time I go looking for something, I get sidetracked and discover new material. I am reminded of my boyhood adventures with the encyclopædia. I'd start to look up an article I needed, only to find, two or three hours later, that I was reading something totally unconnected to the original subject.

Vox Clamantis (the owner's screen name) has spent 20 years in building the site. It has apologetic materials, traditions and customs of the Liturgical Year, recipes that are traditionally prepared for Holy Days, and much much more! If it has to do with Catholicism as it was practised before the Second Œcumenical Council of the Vatican, you can find it here!

Vox needs financial help to pay for bandwidth and I'm happy to post this. She doesn't know I'm doing it, but I'll tell her after it's done.

If you're Catholic or just a fan of Western civilisation, and aren't familiar with the FishEaters website, please explore it and consider supporting it. I can really use your help.http://www.FishEaters.com

Wacky Weather!

The weather keeps being strange! Here is a current screen shot of one of my weather apps.

Here are the daffodils by the walk two days ago.

Here they were yesterday.

And here they are today.

I think they may have survived, and I hope the last of the unseasonable cold is over.

However, I'm not sure the crocuses will. Here they are today.

Some Thoughts on Modern Technology

This was posted in a Traditional Catholic group to which I belong on Facebook. The author, Mr Oliver J. Olinger, obviously has given some thought to this matter. I can only say that I share his optimism. Posted with the author's gracious permission.

[There is a poignant (I hope) Catholic message at the end of this, so bear with me...]

It occurred to me today that the definition of the phrase "I was present for that" is likely to change considerably over the next 10, 20, 30 years. Several companies are already working on incorporating Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) into social media. One startup is actually making a social network entirely based in a VR environment. It will allow users to sit on a beach together and just chat, face-to-face.

Even employment is happening less and less at an actual workplace. They're calling remote workers, like myself, a "distributed workforce." Employers are jumping on the idea because they are no longer limited to possibly inadequate local laborers. They can search for, and find, exactly who they want and need to fill a position. I predict that this phenomenon will only become more common.

Someday soon, the phrase "I was present for that" might mean, I was holographically there when that event took place. As it stands, social media is somewhat isolating, especially within the Millennial and Gen Z generations. And after the novelty of hanging out with friends in a visual, virtual environment when in reality you're actually all sitting in living rooms hundreds or even thousands of miles apart wears off, I predict that to be physically present, in body, with others will become popular again.

But it will no longer be necessary. Outside of bars and coffee shops, "hanging out" in person will practically go extinct. But people will yearn for it. And there's one place (other than bars and coffee shops) where being physically present will continue to be absolutely necessary... Catholic Mass. You can't transmit a consecrated host via fiber lines. You actually have to be there to receive it.

We're coming back in a big way! Just be patient and hopeful!

To which another member of the group replied,

I have little hope for the future of humanity. American millennials are incapable of conversing in person and Japanese millennial men prefer masturbating to porn than intimate relationships with women.
I think that what I consider technological wonders; cell phones, pc’s, iPads etc are incredibly addictive and have harmful consequences to minds that don’t predate their existence.

Mr Olinger expanded on his thoughts answering the comment. 

Somebody might have said the same thing about cars when they first came out, or radio. Tools can be used well or poorly. Right now, in today's climate, most people are using tools like the internet poorly. But the technology isn't going away. And just look at the traction the trad movement has gained via social media. We're in a transitional phase. But certain concepts and beliefs are suddenly popping up again that have been dormant since probably the WWII era.

I know a super liberal atheist who can't get enough Chesterton... whom he calls his favorite writer of all time. We have extremely influential people like Jordan Peterson drudging up old Catholic concepts that the world has all but forgotten (granted, he is not a Catholic and decidedly subjectivist in many ways, but he's intelligent and he's finding truth in Catholic teachings and sharing it with his followers). The idea of the Latin Mass is growing in popularity in diocese everywhere, especially among the young, who haven't been snowed by the off-target trendiness of the N.O.

We can't be beat. Even the Fatima message spoke of a resurgence of the Church that will be more glorious than anything that came before it. This whole Revolutionary Movement and Modernism thing just had to run its course. We're basically going through some tremendous growing pains right now. About 100 year ago, the world suddenly became much smaller. Suddenly, the next town was 5 minutes away. Then airplanes made a cross-Earth trip possible to accomplish in the span of a week.

Then, just a few decades later, the world suddenly became a lot BIGGER. TV, media, the internet, communications... local problems started to pale next to national and world-wide issues. People who previously only took interest in their local society suddenly started taking an interest in civilization in its entirety.

All this happened in a century. How could we not experience growing pains the likes of which have never been known? It'll all settle and after it settles, the Church will still be standing, just as it always has. All of these trendy political hiccups, like identity politics for example, will just fizzle out.

Chevalier Charles Coulombe on Why is Charlemagne Not Canonised Yet?

The Chevalier discusses why Blessed Charlemagne has not yet been canonised, pointing out that Emperor Frederick Barbarossa had him 'canonised' by anti-Pope Paschal III, which the Papacy refused to confirm. However, his cultus is confirmed. As the Catholic Encyclopedia has it, 

In some parts of the empire popular affection placed him among the saints. For political purposes and to please Frederick Barbarossa he was canonised (1165) by the antipope Paschal III, but this act was never ratified by insertion of his feast in the Roman Breviary or by the Universal Church; his cultus, however, was permitted at Aachen [Acta SS., 28 Jan., 3d ed., II, 490–93, 303–7, 769; his office is in Canisius, "Antiq. Lect.", III (2)]

Here is a prayer in his honour written by Dom Prosper Guéranger  O.S.B., and it is not a prayer to gladden the hearts of liberal 'Catholics' and their left-wing henchmen! I posted this on the Feast Day of Blessed Charlemagne, but I thought it appropriate to repost it.

Prayer to Charlemagne 

"Hail, O Charles, beloved of God, Apostle of Christ, defender of His Church, protector of justice, guardian of good customs, terror of the enemies of the Christian name! 

"The tainted diadem of the Caesars - purified by the hands of Leo - sits on your august forehead; the globe of the Empire rests in your vigorous hand; the ever-victorious sword in your combats for Our Lord is sheathed at your waist, and on your forehead the imperial anointing was added to the royal unction by the hand of the Pontiff who consecrated you and confirmed your authority. As the representative of the figure of Christ in His temporal Royalty, you desired that He would reign in you and through you.

"Now God rewards you for the love you had for Him, for the zeal you displayed for His glory, for the respect and confidence you showed toward His Spouse. In exchange for an earthly kingship, transitory and uncertain, you enjoy now an immortal kingdom where so many million of souls, who by your hands escaped idolatry, today honor you as the instrument of their salvation. 

"During the days of celebration of the birth of Our Lord by Our Lady, you offered to them the gracious temple you built in their honor (the Basilica of Aix-la-Chapelle), and which is still today the object of our admiration. It was in this place that your pious hands placed the newborn garment worn by her Divine Son. As retribution, the Son of God desired that your bones should gloriously rest in the same place to receive the testimony of the veneration of the peoples. 

"O glorious heir to the three Magi Kings of the East, present our souls before the One who wore such a humble garment. Ask Him to give us a part of the profound humility you had as you knelt before the Manger, a part of that great joy that filled your heart at Christmas, a part of that fiery zeal that made you realize so many works for the glory of the Infant Christ, and a part of that great strength that never abandoned you in your conquests for His Kingdom. 

"O mighty Emperor, you who of old was the arbiter of the whole European family assembled under your scepter, have mercy on this society that today is being destroyed in all its parts. After more than a thousand years, the Empire that the Church placed in your hands has collapsed as a chastisement for its infidelity to the Church that founded it. The nations still remain, troubled and afflicted. Only the Church can return life to them through the Faith; only she continues to be the depositary of public law; only she can govern the powerful and bless the obedient. 

"O Charles the Great, we beseech you to make that day arrive soon when society, re-established at its foundations, will cease asking liberty and order from the revolutions. Protect with a special love France, the most splendid flower of your magnificent crown. Show that you are always her king and father. Put an end to the false progress of the faithless empires of the North that have fallen into schism and heresy, and do not permit the peoples of the Holy Empire to fall prisoner to them."

Education and the Rights and Responsibilities of Parents

The author of this essay, Joseph Pearce, is a scholar of Chesterton and Tolkien, and one of the primary distributist writers active today.

From the Imaginative Conservative

he outcome of a recent court case, in which parents had taken a local school to court for refusing to re-enroll their children, signifies a victory for both Catholic schools and for religious freedom.

“The court does not have the authority to meddle in this decision,” Superior Court Judge Donald A. Kessler said in his ruling on the case in which St. Theresa’s School in Kenilworth, New Jersey, denied the parents’ applications for thirteen-year-old Sydney Phillips and her younger sister, Kaitlyn, to return to classes. Judge Kessler said the girls’ father, Scott Phillips, and their mother, Theresa Mullen, who had sought an order compelling the school and the Archdiocese of Newark to accept the girls, had “cited no law that would allow the court to interfere with the ecclesiastical (or religious) decision” denying the girls’ application.

Judge Kessler, reading his three-hour-long decision from the bench, criticized the parents for disrupting the school community and vindicated school administrators for taking steps “to control the atmosphere that Mr. Phillips and Ms. Mullen created.” The daughters were not re-enrolled, Judge Kessler said, because of the parents’ conduct.

Christopher Westrick, the attorney representing the school and the archdiocese, was pleased with the decision, citing that it had “upheld our First Amendment rights.”

It is true that the court’s decision was rooted in the First Amendment, which protects religious institutions from government interference in their internal affairs, but, from a Catholic perspective, it also conforms to the principle of subsidiarity, as enshrined in a series of papal encyclicals, including Rerum Novarum by Leo XIII (1891), Quadragesimo Anno by Pius XI (1931), Centesimus Annus by St. John Paul II (1991), and Caritas in Veritate by Benedict XVI (2009). In essence, and in its broadest applicable sense, the principle of subsidiarity can be said to have originated with the words of Christ that we should render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and render unto God that which is God’s. The key to discerning the role of subsidiarity is, therefore, summed up in the title of a book by Jacques Maritain, published in 1930, entitled The Things That Are Not Caesar’s. If “Caesar” represents worldly power or authority, it is a question of discerning and defining the limits of such power. When the power of the state, or the power of commerce, encroaches upon that which is rightfully God’s, or rightfully Man’s in his true ordered relationship with God, it is a usurpation of political or economic authority that should be condemned and resisted. A Christian is always a subsidiarist to the extent that he insists that there are limits to Caesar’s power and, indeed, that there are areas of life in which Caesar has no rightful power at all. In this sense, it might be said that the First Amendment is an expression of subsidiarity as a central pillar of the Constitution of the United States.

In the context of the rights implicit in the principle of subsidiarity, and in the rights explicit in the First Amendment, it can be seen that the Judge in this recent case was absolutely right in concluding that the law of the state, as an arm of the government, has no right to interfere in the internal affairs of a school which is owned and administered by an Archdiocese of the Catholic Church. He judged that this was a clear case in which Caesar must render unto God the things that are God’s.

But what of the rights of parents? How does the principle of subsidiarity apply to parents seeking the best for their children?

It applies to the right of parents to remove their children from any school and to their right to homeschool their children, should they wish, but it does not apply to the right of parents to compel a school to enroll their children. The reason for this is simple enough and is enshrined in the principle of solidarity, the other great pillar of the Church’s social teaching. This principle is articulated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church in terms of “friendship” or “social charity” and as “a direct demand of human and Christian brotherhood.” In other words, if subsidiarity is rooted in the necessity of rendering unto God the things that are God’s, solidarity is rooted in the commandment that we love our neighbors. This being so, Mr. Phillips and Ms. Mullen had no right as parents to dictate to a school what it must do, thereby riding roughshod over the common good of the rest of the school community, though they had every right to withdraw their children from the school if they disliked the manner in which the school was treating their children. What Mr. Phillips and Ms. Mullen had failed to do was to accept their responsibility as members of the school community to seek the common good of all the students and their parents, as well as the good of the teachers and administrative staff, and the good of the Archdiocese, in addition to the good of their own children. In seeking the enforcement of rights they did not have they were reneging on the responsibility they did have to be loving neighbors. They were responsible as part of this Christian community to seek and foster that spirit of solidarity, beyond self-interest, which the spirit of Christian brotherhood demands. In failing to act in the spirit of “social charity” and in fostering enmity instead of friendship, these parents had failed in their responsibilities and had excommunicated themselves, and sadly their unfortunate children also, from the Christian community they had failed to serve. In this sense, the judgment of the court in New Jersey last month was not only a victory for religious liberty but also a vindication of the principle that parents have responsibilities and not simply rights.

Cardinals Burke and Zen to Address Confusion in the Church This Week

This should be a very interesting conference!

His Eminence Joseph, Cardinal Zen is the Archbishop Emeritus of Hong Kong, and an outspoken critic of Francis' betrayal of the Faithful to the Red Slavemasters in Beijing. 

His Eminence Raymond, Cardinal Burke is a well known American prelate  who served as Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the highest court of appeal in the Church, saving the Pope himself, until he was removed by Francis. Many considered his removal a punishment for questioning Francis' leadership with such statements as, 'There is a strong sense that the church is like a ship without a rudder.' He is now the Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a sinecure usually given to retired Cardinals.

From LifeSiteNews

ROME, April 3, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) —  Cardinal Raymond Burke, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, and Cardinal Joseph Zen are among the key speakers at a conference in Rome this Saturday, April 7, aimed at resolving the great confusion in the Church today.

The conference will be themed “Catholic Church: Where are you heading?,” and is being organized by an Italian association called “The Friends of Cardinal Caffarra.” 

Its subtitle, “Only a blind man can deny that there is great confusion in the Church,” is taken from comments Cardinal Caffarra made in an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Foglio in January 2017.

A list of speakers and full program for the event were released today.

The meeting will open with prayer at 2:30 p.m. in the chapel of ‘The Church Village’ conference center in Rome.  

German Cardinal Walter Brandmüller will open the conference at 3:00 p.m. with a presentation on Blessed John Henry Newman’s 1859 essay ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine.’ 

Cardinal Raymond Burke will then deliver an address on ‘The limits of papal authority in the doctrine of the Church.’ Bishop Athanasius Schneider, one of three Kazakh bishops to issue a Profession of the immutable truths about sacramental marriage in January, will discuss ‘The Apostolic See of Rome as the cathedra veritatis [seat of truth].’ 

Cardinal Joseph Zen, bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, will also deliver a video-message on ‘The Church today in China.’

Lay scholars will also give presentations at the conference. Valerio Gigliotti, a professor of history and of medieval and modern law at the University of Turin, will discuss the limits of the plenitudo potestatis [fullness of power] of the Pope in the history of law and of the Church. 

Former president of the Italian Senate, Marcello Pera, who co-wrote the famous 2005 book Without Roots —The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, will also address conference participants. In a fiery interview last July, the atheist philosopher sharply criticized Pope Francis’ teaching, saying it is “not the Gospel, only politics,” and that Francis is “little or not at all interested in Christianity as doctrine, in its theological aspect.” 

Professor Renzo Puccetti, a physician and professor of bioethics at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Rome, will present the evolution of bioethics taught at the institute, from the time when Cardinal Caffarra was the president, to its current leadership under Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia.

A short video-interview on Humanae Vitae with Cardinal Carlo Caffarra will also be featured during the April 7 event. The former archbishop of Bologna, one of the signatories of the dubia — five questions sent to Pope Francis in 2016 aimed at helping to resolve the prevailing confusion, died last September. He served as the president of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family from its founding in 1981 until 1995.

Shortly before his death, Cardinal Caffarra confirmed that Sr. Lucia’s prophetic words to him — that “the decisive battle” between the Lord and Satan would be over marriage and the family — “is being fulfilled today.”

The conference was one of the Cardinal’s last wishes after he had become deeply disillusioned by the crisis of confusion in the Church, most notably regarding the issue of allowing Catholics engaging in sexual relations outside marriage, such as civilly remarried Catholic divorcees and cohabiting couples, to receive the Holy Eucharist.

It will conclude with a declaration (profession of faith) on several points of doctrine and morality that are most controversial today.

No registration needed. Entrance is free of charge. Participants will be admitted as long as seats last.

The conference will be in Italian; no live English translations will be available.

‘The Church Village’ conference center is located on Via di Torre Rossa 94, 00165 Roma.

Argentinian Nun Says Pope Advocates Contraception... Again

How long, O Lord, how long? Yet another opportunity for the Papal spin doctors to issue a weasel 'clarification' as they did with the 'there is no hell' heresy he spouted to Scalfari. You know, 'Well, the Holy Father didn't exactly say that, but we're not prepared to affirm or deny that he said something quite similar'!

From One Peter Five

A famous Argentinian nun has said that Pope Francis told her that several forms of contraception could be permissible to stop those women who want to avoid pregnancy from choosing abortion.

It wasn’t long ago that the idea of a pope promoting contraceptive use — an intrinsic evil, condemned infallibly by the Church — would have seemed impossible. But in recent years, we have seen multiple indications that for Francis, the existing boundaries on moral teaching are far too rigid for his liking.

In 2016, in the wake of a scare that the Zika virus was causing serious birth defects in the babies of infected women, Francis tipped his hand. Asked by a reporter whether the Church could “take into consideration the concept of ‘the lesser of two evils'” in response to the apparent health crisis, the pope dropped what appeared at the time to be a theological neutron bomb:

Pope Francis: Abortion is not the lesser of two evils. It is a crime. It is to throw someone out in order to save another. That’s what the Mafia does. It is a crime, an absolute evil. On the ‘lesser evil,’ avoiding pregnancy, we are speaking in terms of the conflict between the fifth and sixth commandment. Paul VI, a great man, in a difficult situation in Africa, permitted nuns to use contraceptives in cases of rape.

Don’t confuse the evil of avoiding pregnancy by itself, with abortion. Abortion is not a theological problem, it is a human problem, it is a medical problem. You kill one person to save another, in the best case scenario. Or to live comfortably, no? It’s against the Hippocratic oaths doctors must take. It is an evil in and of itself, but it is not a religious evil in the beginning, no, it’s a human evil. Then obviously, as with every human evil, each killing is condemned.

On the other hand, avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil. In certain cases, as in this one, such as the one I mentioned of Blessed Paul VI, it was clear. I would also urge doctors to do their utmost to find vaccines against these two mosquitoes that carry this disease. This needs to be worked on.

As usual, Catholics around the world sought ways to explain these comments away. But the Vatican immediately followed up with a statement confirming the pope’s meaning, saying that

the Holy Father was indeed speaking of “condoms and contraceptives” when on the flight back from Mexico, Pope Francis said couples could rightly “avoid pregnancy” in the wake of the Zika virus scare.

Fr. Lombardi told Vatican Radio today, “The contraceptive or condom, in particular cases of emergency or gravity, could be the object of discernment in a serious case of conscience. This is what the Pope said.”

According to Lombardi, the pope spoke of “the possibility of taking recourse to contraception or condoms in cases of emergency or special situations. He is not saying that this possibility is accepted without discernment, indeed, he said clearly that it can be considered in cases of special urgency.”

Lombardi reiterated the example that Pope Francis made of Pope Paul VI’s supposed “authorisation of the use of the pill for the religious who were at very serious risk” of rape.  This, said Lombardi, “makes us understand that it is not that it was a normal situation in which this was taken into account.”

At the time, such a statement appeared to be a smoking gun. Adherence to Catholic teaching on contraception has been viewed as one of the single biggest indicators of orthodoxy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

In a piece entitled, The Galatians Two Moment is Now, I argued that this statement — which preceded the release of Amoris Laetitia — was real proof that this papacy was a problem. I pointed out that a Google search for the words “pope Francis Zika contraception” turned up nearly 4 million results just weeks after he made the statement, many of them with headlines indicating that the pope was changing the Church’s position on birth control.  “Just because a papal statement is not infallible,” I argued, does not mean “it is meaningless.” I begged Catholics to stop making excuses for Francis, and for the bishops to do their duty and “defend the faith, and the faithful.”

“If you were waiting for the right moment to emulate Saint Paul in Galatians 2:11,” I encouraged them, “this is it.”

But the reaction dissipated quickly, devolving into fruitless arguments about whether the story about Pope Paul VI and the Congolese nuns was apocryphal, and into arguments between various bioethics camps on the hypothetical moral permissibility of contraceptives in certain instances.

Later, Matthew McCusker of Voice of the Family documented a number of situations where the pope appeared to signal a heterodox position on contraception, including but not limited to his personal intervention in reinstating Albrecht von Boeselager to the Knights of Malta after an internal investigation found that he had overseen Malteser International as it distributed of hundreds of thousands of contraceptives in the developing world.

Still, little to no reaction from the Catholic world, and certainly not from the bishops.

Then, reports surfaced that the theology of Humanae Vitae would be revisited, Amoris Laetitia style — in particular, its condemnation of contraception — during its 50th anniversary year. People scoffed, the Vatican threw out more denials. But it wasn’t long before a prominent Italian moral theologian and priest, Fr. Maurizio Chiodi, was giving a lecture at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, arguing that there are “circumstances — I refer to Amoris Laetitia, Chapter 8 — that precisely for the sake of responsibility, require contraception.”

You could hear the crickets from space.

So now, today, we have the case of 77-year-old Sister Marta Pelloni, a well-known Argentinian nun and self-professed feminist. She is described by Infocatolica as a “professor, rector, and Argentine religious of the Congregation of Teresian Carmelite Missionaries.” Today, Sister Pelloni, who is opposed to abortion, told a radio interviewerthat the pope had talked to her and recommended additional options to help women who do not want to get pregnant avoid choosing to abort a child.

“Pope Francis, speaking on this subject, said three words to me: condom, transitory, irreversible.” Said Sister Pelloni, apparently in reference to three types of contraception he would consider permissible under certain circumstances. The first is a condom. The second, which she said he described as “transitory”, would be “a diaphragm.” “And as a last resort,” she said, “which is what we advise rural women that we serve because I have a foundation for the peasantry, tubal ligation” — the latter being (more or less) “irreversible.”

These methods, Sister Pelloni argued, are not abortive or destructive in the woman — a curious claim, considering that tubal ligation is considered a permanent method, with reversal procedures not always proving successful.

As is so often the case, here we have a recounting of deeply controversial words spoken by the pope candidly and privately to some other person who feels no compunction about sharing them with the world.

The question will therefore be, as it always is: is the source credible?

It is difficult to document the relationship the two have; I could find no pictures of them standing together, smiling for the camera. But the orbits of Pelloni and Bergoglio certainly overlapped in Argentina, where she became well-known for fighting human trafficking — work for which she received a Nobel Prize nomination in 2005. Work which Bergoglio certainly knew of during his time in Argentina.

In the book Pope Francis: Untying the Knots, by Paul Vallely, Bergoglio is said to have been inspired by Pelloni’s efforts to expose the cover-up of the rape and murder of a young Argentinian girl to “write a small book, Corrupción y Pecado (Corruption and Sin), a theme he has returned to on several occasions throughout his career.”

In 2016, this time as pope, Bergoglio referenced Pelloni’s work indirectly her in an address about female missionaries:

“I remember a sister in Argentina, an excellent person, and she still works, she is almost the same age as me and she works against the traffickers of young people.”

Thus the claims that the two might have spoken privately about such matters are not at all implausible.

But at this point, with so many seemingly-uncrossable lines already fading into the distance behind us, one can’t help but wonder what difference it would make if she had gotten him on tape. We reached out to Holy See Press Office director Greg Burke for comment, but have received no response as of this writing.

He says what he says and does what he does without any real consequence, the shepherds apparently content to allow a wolf free roam among the sheep.

Distributism Basics-Distributism vs Socialism

Here is the second article in the seines on Distributism Basics,

From Practical Distributism

In the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, three alternatives were proposed to alleviate the conditions of the working classes under capitalism: distributism, Keynesian capitalism, and socialism. Distributists are sometimes accused of being socialists, or at least quasi-socialists. This article will examine the nature of socialism and how it is completely incompatible with distributism.

Capitalism enabled the owners of corporations to greatly increase their wealth and eliminate any effective competition, making the vast majority of the working classes completely dependent on them. While the owners of these companies lived in luxury, the working class was reduced to a state where even having both parents work did not yield enough income to support a family. The lack of effective competition meant that workers could not simply leave their jobs for a better opportunity – better jobs didn't exist. The workers had to put up with whatever the employers wanted to make them endure, or they would be fired and be quickly replaced by others desperate for any work. It is no wonder that the promises of socialism appealed to many of them.

There are three basic fundamentals to the original idea of socialism, the first is the complete elimination of social classes, the second is the elimination of money, and the third is the elimination of a government run state. From the socialist view, the private ownership of property is what enables the classes to exist. The existence of a private claim to productive property enables some to elevate themselves above others, subjugating the workers to their ends and using their wealth to twist the powers of government to their advantage. Eliminating a private claim to productive property will enable the laborer to claim the benefit of his labor. Those in need will work according to their ability for the good of society – which means that each member of society will be guaranteed the fulfillment of his needs. This means that there is no need for money, which is merely a tool to transfer the private ownership of property. Since each person will act for the good of the whole society, and will do so voluntarily, there will be no need for government.

This original idea became known as utopian socialism. It was quickly supplanted with the idea of a “vanguard party” which, acting on behalf of the people, would secure the powers of the state. This vanguard party would implement “state capitalism” (also known as “state socialism”) where the state would manage industry in much the same way as the capitalist did, but of course for the benefit of the society. This new form of socialism became known as scientific socialism.

Scientific socialism is the form of socialism of societies like the former Soviet Union and present day China. While it is true that there are various strains of socialist thought, this is the main embodiment of socialism as it has actually been implemented in any significant way. While the original utopian socialism would eliminate all private property, many socialist societies allowed some degree of private property which operated at the sufferance of, and sometimes under the direction of the state. While utopian socialism would eliminate all classes, all socialist societies actually replaced the old set of leaders with their own, and transferred the control of the majority of productive property from the hands of the few capitalists into the hands of the few political leaders. While utopian socialism would eliminate the state altogether, the existence of other states necessitated the continued existence of a state government with a capable military.

This last point is very important to understand about socialism. It cannot coexist with other “countries” except in isolation from them. The utopian version of a stateless socialism means that there cannot be a threat from outside of its society. Within its society, everyone is supposed to act according to the needs of society as a whole – they will do this voluntarily. In the socialist view, however, the existence of private property causes the greed and strife that lead to wars of conquest and the impoverishing of the masses. Therefore, a stateless socialist society cannot truly coexist with a capitalist society because the greed and strife of the latter will “obviously” lead it to attack the Utopia of the purely socialist society. While I think there is even a degree to which multiple socialist societies could not coexist, the attempt to create a truly socialist society necessitates either complete economic and military isolation from any capitalist societies, or the elimination of those societies altogether. I am not saying this is something they declared; it is merely the reality.

Unlike socialists, distributists do not consider the existence of privately owned property to be the problem with capitalism. As G. K. Chesterton quipped, the problem with capitalism is not that there are too many capitalists, but that there are too few. The problem is that capitalism allows the ownership of the majority of productive property to become concentrated into the hands of a small minority of the population. The rest must become workers completely dependent on that minority for a wage on which to live.

Instead of seeking the socialist solution of eliminating private property by transferring the ownership of it into the hands of state controllers, distributism proposes the widest possible private ownership of property that can be achieved in a practical way. Unlike utopian socialists, distributists do not expect to establish a perfect society in which all of the people consistently voluntarily act for the good of society as a whole. In other words, distributism does not advocate the stateless society. Unlike the scientific socialists, distributists to not believe in empowering the state to manage potentially all economic activity for the good of the society. Distributism proposes a society structured on the principles of subsidiarity, where the lower foundational levels of society have natural rights which the higher levels cannot usurp. Even when assisting those lower levels, the higher levels cannot usurp the roles and functions which rightfully belong to the lower levels.

As you can see, the form of economic and political society proposed by distributism is fundamentally different than that proposed by socialism. Yes, distributists criticize the instability and injustices of the capitalist system as do the socialists, but the solutions proposed by the distributists are completely incompatible with the solutions proposed by socialism. Indeed, from the distributist perspective, the solutions proposed by socialism are in ways more unjust than the problems of capitalism they propose to solve.

Other articles in this series:

A Brief Introduction

Distributism vs. Christian Socialism

Distributism vs. Capitalism

The Science of Economics

The Nature and Roles of Government

Distributist Economic Society

Here is a comment, by the author of this series, answering an objection to the above article:

David Cooney22 November, 2013

I would like to respond to a comment made by a reader to the Facebook page of The Distributist Review. The comment was about the simplistic description of socialism relying on an unrealistic altruism.

In fact, all economic systems - including distributism - have an "ideal" which includes a certain level of altruism that may be described as unrealistic. The deeper question, which this series will only address in a basic way, is what happens to that economic system when faced with reality?

As stated in this article, the fundamental goal of socialism was to establish a classless, moneyless, and stateless society. This goal can only be established with an extreme level of altruism. When faced with reality, socialism had to modify itself, as Hilaire Belloc predicted in The Servile State, in a way that it actually moved very much away from its ideal. In other words, we may still call it socialism but it was actually something very different. The socialist societies that came to be were anything but classless, moneyless, or stateless. Some socialists may argue that such was a transitional state. I disagree.

When Adam Smith penned the principles of capitalism, he talked of how self interest would prevent the injustices that actually occurred under capitalism. In reality, business interests used their economic power to employe the forces of government in their favor. This will be discussed more in the next article of this series. The point I will make here is that capitalism was modified in a way that moved away from its ideal. It is still called by capitalism by everyone except those who cling to the ideal (who mistakenly call it socialism), but it has become something very different. Again, Hilaire Belloc predicted this in The Servile State.

Distributism has its ideal as well. Ideally, everyone would be a proprietor either independently or cooperatively. The point I'm trying to make is that, from its formulation, distributism never expected this ideal to be reached. I wrote about this in an article titled "Utopia" published at The Distributist Review and which I will eventually post on this site as well. Because of this, the economic structure has always included protections to mitigate the ability of those who will act contrary to the altruistic ideal to ruin the system. In other words, unlike capitalism and socialism, distributism will not need to become something other than its founding principles in order to work.

In other words, what I hope to show in this series is that the ideals of both capitalism and socialism faced obstacles that their economic systems were not designed to overcome. Because of this, they had to be modified to ultimately become something other than what they were truly meant to be. What we call socialism had to abandon the true essence of socialism in order to function. While certain schools of capitalism dispute that we are currently living under capitalism, what is generally known as, and is called capitalism also abandon the true essence of capitalism in order to function.

Distributism, however, is structured so that it does not have to do this. It does, however, require a great change in society to be realized. Just as the introduction of capitalism was preceded by a change in the underlying philosophy of society, I believe that distributism must be preceded by the same sort of philosophical change, and this is why in addition to discussion concrete matters, I believe that an approach to discussing distributism that doesn't include a serious philosophical discussion is simply not practical.

IN LUMINE FIDEI: 4 APRIL – SAINT ISIDORE OF SEVILLE (Bishop and Doc...

IN LUMINE FIDEI: 4 APRIL – SAINT ISIDORE OF SEVILLE (Bishop and Doc...: Isidore, by birth a Spaniard, was an illustrious Doctor of the Church. He was born at Carthagena and his father Severianus was governor...

IN LUMINE FIDEI: 4 APRIL – EASTER WEDNESDAY

IN LUMINE FIDEI: 4 APRIL – EASTER WEDNESDAY: Dom Prosper Gueranger: The Hebrew word Pasch signifies Passage, and we explained yesterday how this great day first became sacred ...

4 April, A Chesterton Calendar

APRIL 4th

The prophet who is stoned is not a brawler or a marplot. He is simply a rejected lover. He suffers from an unrequited attachment to things in general.

‘The Defendant.’

Chesterton, G. K.. The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books] (Kindle Locations 43905-43908). Catholic Way Publishing. Kindle Edition.

5 April, The Roman Martyrology

April 5th anno Domini 2018 The 19th Day of Moon were born into the better life: 

At Vannes, in Brittany, the holy Confessor Vincent, surnamed Ferrer, of the Order of Friars Preachers, who was mighty in work and in word, and brought to Christ many thousands of unbelievers, [in the year 1419.] 
At Thessalonica, the holy Virgin Irene. She hid the holy books contrary to the edict of the Emperor Diocletian, and therefore suffered imprisonment, was smitten with an arrow, and burnt with fire by order of the President Dulcetius, the same judge under whom her sisters Agape and Chionia had suffered already. 
In the island of Lesbos, suffered five holy martyrs. 
On the same day the holy martyr Zeno, who was flayed, daubed over with pitch, and cast into the fire. 
In Africa, [in the year 559 or 570,] suffered the holy martyrs who were massacred in church upon Easter day, in the persecution under the Arian king Genseric. Among them was the Reader, who was shot with an arrow through the neck, as he was in the pulpit singing the Alle​luja.
V. And elsewhere many other holy martyrs, confessors, and holy virgins.
R. Thanks be to God.

Memes of the Day

My Feelings Exactly!