Jorge Appoints More Judases to Attack the Faith and "Redefine" Life Itself

A point that has made rather repeatedly in the past thirteen years since I awoke from the stupor caused by believing that a true pope can be eaten alive when we find his teaching to be harmful to the Catholic Faith, a proposition that, of course, is offensive to God and ontologically impossible, is that the conciliar revolutionaries are pantheists who project onto the concept of God and His Divine Revelation whatever it is they believe suits the “conditions” of the mythical entity called “modern man.” The conciliar revolutionaries are textbook Modernists whose entire false religion is premised upon the dogmatically condemned and philosophically absurd proposition of dogmatic evolutionism.

Indeed, the conciliar revolutionaries believe in all kinds of evolutionism, starting with “theistic” evolutionism, a lie that is meant to deny God’s Special Creation of man and his subsequent fall from grace. It is a logical process of degeneration from this lie to deny the individuality of soul and of rejecting all metaphysics in favor of a group consciousness that is the essence of cosmology of the late Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that has so much in common with atheistic Marxism-Leninism and pantheistic Buddhism and Hinduism.

This commentary will attempt to explain the devastating consequences of dogmatic evolutionism’s degenerative process upon even the definition of such a simple concept of life itself and the rise of a communitarian view of the world that is a denial of the fact that God creates individual souls that He will judge individually at the moment of their deaths based upon their adherence to the immutably binding precepts contained in the Sacred Deposit of Faith that He has entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for their infallible explication and eternal safekeeping.

A “Redefinition” of Life Itself

Even many “conservatives” within the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism have rent their garments and gnashed their teeth over the fact that their “pope,” Jorge Mario Bergoglio, has gone out of his way to praise pro-abortion, pro-sodomite politicians from all over the world, including those here in the United States of America, because of their support for the “poor,” illegal immigrants, economic “justice,” globalism, climate “control” and the protection of “endangered species.” Leaving aside the inconvenient little fact that their “restorer of tradition,” Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI was pretty mute about the chemical and surgical killing of the innocent preborn and sodomy, “conservatives” and even some traditionally-minded practitioners of the conciliar sect have never understood that the dogmatic evolutionism at the root of the conciliar religion can be used not only to embrace propositions condemned by our true popes and anathematized by the Council of Trent and the [First] Vatican Council but to dispense with the teaching, such as it has been, of one conciliar antipope by one of his successors.

Thus it is that the teaching of the “pro-life” “pope,” Karol Josef Wojtyla, who embraced dogmatic evolutionism under the title of “living tradition” and whose opposition to abortion was couched principally in the conciliarspeak of personality and human dignity and not with reference to the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment nor any invocation of Pope Pius XI’s stern words to public officials who support the surgical section of the preborn that were contained in Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930, is being replaced by the aforementioned “group consciousness” under the Jacobin/Bolshevik Bergoglio’s direction. Jorge’s handpicked president of the so-called
“Pontifical Academy for Life,” Vincent Paglia, is in charge of this “re-definition” that is at the heart of the Amazon synod of apostates, scoundrels, perverts and other assorted Modernists next month:

LOS ANGELES, California, September 5, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) ― The president of the Pontifical Academy for Life has declared that the academy must broaden its scope and welcome non-Christian “experts.”

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, 74, presented the speech at Loyola Marymount, a private Jesuit university in Los Angeles, yesterday. After introducing the pontiff’s January 6 letter Humana Communitas, the prelate explained that Francis wishes both the Academy for Life and the John Paul II Institute, of which Paglia is grand chancellor, to work “more broadly.”

“The Academy in particular is to become more and more a place of competent and respectful meeting and dialogue among experts, including those from other religious traditions as well as proponents of world views the Academy needs to know better in order to widen its horizons,” he said.

Paglia promised that both foundations would “protect and promote” human life and assured “friends” and “enemies” that “our dialogue with others who do not share our understanding of God’s fruitful love and of the nature of the human family and its challenges, does not mean that we are abandoning Catholic orthodoxy.”

But Paglia also made it clear that the pope wants them to widen their horizons.

“We must also make it clear that the Pope wants the Academy, and the Institute, to (1) widen its scope of reflection, not limiting itself to addressing ‘specific situations of ethical, social or legal conflict,’ (2) articulate an anthropology that sets the practical and theoretical premises for ‘conduct consistent with the dignity of the human person,’ and (3) make sure it has the tools to critically examine ‘the theory and practice of science and technology as they interact with life, its meaning and its value,’” he said.

One widening Pope Francis and Paglia envision is a rejection of absolute norms regarding human life and a redefinition of what it means.

“[Francis] warns us that it is risky to look at human life in a way that detaches it from experience and reduces it to biology or to an abstract universal, separated from relationships and history,” Paglia said.

“Rather, the term ‘life’ must be redefined, moving from an abstract conception to a ‘personal’ dimension: life is people, men and women, both in the individuality of each person and in the unity of the human family.”

Notably, Paglia referred only to the “family” of the Blessed Trinity and to the “human family” — i.e the human race — but not once to the kinship groups most commonly known as “families.” He also decried a “schism” between the individual and the human community and warned that technology is “becoming” a threat to human life.

The archbishop briefly mentioned the controversies around the changes that have swept the pro-life institutions originally founded by John Paul II. In October 2016, Pope Francis promulgated new statutes for the academy, which included the dismissal of its life members and the inclusion of new members of dubious orthodoxy. Then, in September 2017, Pope Francis refounded and renamed the Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family.

Most recently, the students and faculty of the “John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences” were dismayed to discover that the entire teaching staff had been temporarily suspended, two of its tenured professors dismissed, and advertised courses eliminated.

Paglia’s response was that the “theological basis” of Humana Communitas will inevitably “overcome” concerns.

“In his letter, the Holy Father attempted to give us such a solid and loving theological basis for the work of the Academy that we will be able to address and overcome the concerns and the hesitancies that have greeted the renewed structure of the Academy (and I might add of its sister entity, the John Paul II Institute as well),” the archbishop said.

Paglia’s address closely resembles a speech he gave earlier this year at Sacred Heart Catholic University in Milan. (Vinny Paglia Says the the Term Life must be Redefined.)

In other words, as Bergoglio has told us in so many words and on so many different occasions, there is no “black and white,” there are no moral absolutes, there is nothing except their own projection onto Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ about what He would teach given the conditions in which we find ourselves at this time. It is with this feat of paganism that the conciliar revolutionaries can equate submerge the social and eternal good of individual human beings into a more “inclusive” system of “thought” that places animals, plants and even inanimate matter on a plane of equal plane with them. A community “consciousness” premised upon socialistic and pantheistic prescriptions of one kind or another thus replaces the need for the individual pursuit of sanctity and any thought of a Particular Judgment that will be rendered upon individual persons upon the moment of their deaths. The execution of the preborn by chemical and surgical means thus fades into insignificance when compared to the supposedly “larger” “ecological” questions that demanding a “social” response, and this is why, at least in part, that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has such an affinity for Communists, including the Chicom monsters of Beijing and their Chinese Patriotic “Catholic” Association. No thought is given to the effects of the sins of individual human beings upon the common good and even upon the physical state of the world for reasons that will be explored in the next section of this commentary.

In other words, the conciliar revolutionaries, adhering to textbook Modernism and its affinity with all forms of evolutionism, including Marxism-Leninism, believe in the annihilation of the individual in favor of a “community” that makes no place for immutable truths to which human beings must adhere to save their souls as members of the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order. Anyone within the structures of the false conciliar sect that is hideous in the sight of the Most Blessed Trinity who believes that they are getting this toothpaste back in the tomb is, to put it mildly, delusional, and those who ignore these developments in the very false belief that they do not concern them are both irresponsible and intellectually dishonest.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio is making it clear that the Sisyphuses to his “right” flank in the conciliar structures will never get another “pope” who will restore some semblance of Catholicism. You see, it is impossible for Catholicism to have any association with error, sacrilege, blasphemy, heresy and apostasy. The Argentine Apostate and his comrades, of course, believe that Holy Mother Church has erred for nearly two millennia and that it is their job to make sure that those “errors” can never be repeated, which is why he is stacking the deck and cooking the books in his conciliar “college of cardinals” with like-minded Judases, including a “Father” José Tolentino Calaça de Mendonça, whose “critical theology” is a formal embrace of moral relativism as the foundation of what passes for “moral theology” in a false religious sect:

ROME, February 5, 2018 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Pope Francis has selected a Portuguese “priest-poet” to preach at his 2018 Lenten retreat who is an open promoter of the “critical theology” of a Spanish nun who defends the legalization of abortion and government recognition of homosexual “marriage” and adoptions.

Father José Tolentino Calaça de Mendonça, vice rector of the Catholic University of Lisbon, wrote the introduction to the Portuguese translation of “Feminist Theology in History,” by Teresa Forcades, whom the BBC calls “Europe’s most radical nun.”

n the introduction to Forcades’ work, Tolentino de Mendonça tells the reader that Jesus didn’t leave any rules or laws to mankind, an idea that he approvingly applies to Forcades’ “critical theology.”

“Teresa Forcades i Vila reminds of that which is essential: that Jesus of Nazareth did not codify, nor did he establish rules,” writes Tolentino de Mendonça. “Jesus lived. That is, he constructed an ethos of relation, somatized the poetry of his message in the visibility of his flesh, expressed his own body as a premise.”

When the Portuguese translation of the book was published in 2013 with Tolentino de Mendonça’s introduction, Forcades had well-established herself as an advocate for legalized abortion and the creation of homosexual “marriage.” In the same year she issued a video tribute to the Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who was then dying of cancer.

Tolentino de Mendonça compares Forcades to Hildegard of Bingham, and says her theology is expressed in “a form that is symbolic, open, and sensitive about addressing the real” as opposed to the Church’s traditional way of speaking in clear, non-metaphorical terms, which he calls “the triumphal univocal grammars that we know.”

“It’s necessary that the doctrinal narrative understands itself to be more of a reading than a writing, more like a voyage than a place, because the memory that transports is not reducible to a legal code, a vision, something automatic,” the priest writes.

Such theology is given to us by Forcades, says Tolentino de Mendonça: “It is precisely here that the frightening [provoking] work of Teresa Forcades i Vila, Feminist Theology in History, which the reader has in his hands, comes to our aid.”

In a 2016 interview with the Lisbon radio station Renascença, Tolentino de Mendonça blasted Catholics and particularly cardinals who have raised their voices in criticism of Pope Francis, dismissing their views as “traditionalism,” which he contrasted with authentic “tradition.”

“Today, we see Pope Francis being contradicted by a more conservative wing of the Church and by some important names, even cardinals, which in a certain way are willing to place traditionalism above the tradition,” he said.

Regarding Pope Francis “welcoming” attitude towards those who are stubbornly living in gravely sinful situations of homosexuality and adultery, Tolentino de Mendonça told the interviewer, “No one can be excluded from the love and mercy of Christ. And that experience of mercy has to be taken to everyone, whether they be Christians who are remarried, wounded by disastrous matrimonial experiences, whether it be the reality of new families, whether it be homosexual persons, who in the Church must find a space to be heard, a place of welcome and mercy.”

Tolentino de Mendonca will preach and give spiritual guidance to Pope Francis and high curial officials during their retreat from February 18 to February 23 of this year. (Jorge Chooses Pro-Sodomite Presbyter to Give His Lenten Ideological "Retreat".)

Out, for example, goes the example of Saint Peter Claver, S.J., whose feast was celebrated yesterday, Monday, September 9, 2019, who fought against immorality in New Granada (now Colombia) and sought to bring non-Catholics into the bosom of Holy Mother Church:

But the most illustrious conversion and the one which led to the conversion of many others, was that of an English prelate. To make this circumstance more clear we must revert to an earlier date. For several years, English and Dutch privateers had infested the seas of America. Having long threatened the kingdom of New Grenada, they at length took possession of the islands of St. Christopher and St. Catherine, where they established colonies, and incessantly attack the Spaniards. They captured the vessels laden with Negroes, Mahomedans, and other slaves, whom they employed to cultivate their own lands. His Catholic Majesty was informed of the injuries done to his subjects by their troublesome neighbors, and sent out a fleet against them, with strict orders to Don Frederick of Toledo, to expel them at any cost from those islands. This officer executed his commission so well, that he not only made himself master of the islands, but captured nearly all the English and the Dutch, together with the slaves whom they had carried off. He put them in ships and conveyed them to the Bay of Carthagena. But lest they should ascertain the strength and the fortifications of the palce, or spread their heresies in the country, he obliged them to remain on board. Full of confidence in God, and animated with his usual zeal, Claver asked the permission of his superior and the officer, to visit the fleet, and repaired thither, with the proper requisites for the celebration of holy mass. He entered a ship in which were more than six hundred English, guarded by some Spaniards; the latter received him with great joy, and begged him to say mass for them, which they had not heard since their departure from the islands. No request could have been more agreeable to him. His devotion and modesty while celebrating, and the majesty of the Church ceremonies, struck the heretics, who flocked in crowds to witness a spectacle so novel to them. After mass the Spaniards invited the father to dine with them. He accepted the offer with pleasure, because he hoped to gain souls for God; and he had the example of Jesus Christ, who, in order to win sinners, sat at table even with publicans. At the end of the repast, some of the English, already half gained by his mild and amiable manner, asked him whether he would not like to see their prelate, as they called the Arch-Deacon of London, who was with them. The holy missionary hoping to gain the head, and thus all the rest to the Catholic faith, answered that he would consider it an honor. Thereupon a venerable old man appeared. His beard and hair had grown quite long, and his deportment was serious and modest. The father arising at this entrance, saluted him with much respect, and according to the English custom very politely drank to his health. This evidently pleased the prelate who immediately asked in Latin to have a private interview with Father Claver. While the other Jesuits were conversing with the English on matters of religion, these two remained together until evening, discussing all those points controverted between Catholics and Protestants. The Englishman often saw the truth in spite of himself. He was convinced, but obstacles too difficult to surmount—his wife and his children—would not admit of his conversion. If he changed his religion he would leave them without resources. His courage failed him, and his temporal interests overbalanced those of his religion. All that the father could gain from him was a protest, that for the rest of his life he would be a Catholic in heart, and that at his death he would publicly declare himself, and be reconciled to the Church; but, for the interest of those so dear to him he must exteriorly profess the Anglican creed. Grieved at this obstinate resistance of heart, the father was on the point of quitting him, when he suddenly recollected that the festival of St. Ursula occurred on that day. Immediately he turned to the prelate, and like a man inspired, thus addressed him, “Sir, this day is the feast of an illustrious virgin, the honor of your country; who with her companions sealed with her own blood that Catholic religion the truths of which you yourself acknowledge. St. Lucius, King of Britain, the model of a truly Christian king, sent annually to the Holy See presents worthy of a monarch, as a tribute of gratitude and as a mark of his attachment to the Church. From his time, all your sovereigns followed his example and his piety, up to the unfortunate Henry VIII. And had not this very price written in defence of the Church, and of the primacy of St. Peter’s chair? What then induced him to forsake the ancient religion and establish a new one? What is not to contract a scandalous and adulterous marriage with Anne Boleyn, after he had repudiated his lawful wife, in defiance of all laws, both human and divine? These were the abominations that produced your religion: judge them the effect from the cause. Ah! how can a sensible and conscientious man prefer a law, the offspring of adultery, to that announced by the Apostles, and confirmed by the blood of so many martyrs; defend by your illustrious virgins and honored for so many ages by your noble ancestors? Shall the authority of a king, notorious for vice, outweigh that of so many others, distinguished for their piety? What! can the religion introduced by the piety of a Lucius be false, and the one founded on the adultery of a Henry be true? If this prince could sustain his crimes, only by the support of a new religion, why must you, who are not guilty of the same crimes, adhere to the same religion! You say that on your deathbed you will repent and declare yourself. It may then be with you as it was with him. Are you not terrified at the awful words with which he expired? ‘Omnia perdimus!—We have lost all!’ He sought to be reconciled with the Church, but he had not the opportunity! Who has assured you that the same may not happen to you? Will not your property, your wife and children, present the same difficulties then as now? Blush, that you have not the courage enough to sacrifice such things, while so many young virgins courageously sacrificed their lives. Your first interest, Sir, is yourself. Do not expose yourself to eternal torments for a few transitory goods which you must soon leave to others.” The aged prelate was so moved at these words, that with tearful eyes he begged Father Claver to pray for him—a request which was readily promised—and thus they parted. The holy missioner redoubled his prayers and penances, and the week following the festival of All Saints, as he was entering the hospital of St. Sebastian, he perceived that a sick man was being carried thither in a sedan chair. It was the English prelate! At the sight of Father Claver he exclaimed, “It is time, father, it is time for me to accomplish the promise I made to God and to you. I wish to embrace the religion of my ancestor—the faith of the holy Roman Church.” He begged him at the same time not to abandon him, because he felt very ill. No words could express Father Claver’s joy at a conversion so much desired, yet so little expected. The prelate made a public abjuration of his errors, and became at once a both submissive disciple and an enlightened doctor of truth. In the most lively and moving terms he exhorted all around him to imitate his example, for salvation could be not be hoped for out of the Roman Church. He made his confession with an abundance of tears, received the sacraments with exemplary piety, and died soon after whilst sweetly conversing with his Saviour. The father who assisted him throughout his illness, but performed his funeral obsequies in the most honorable manner possible. (John R. Slattery, The Life of St. Peter Claver, S.J.: The Apostle of the Negroes, published originally by H. L. Kilner & Co., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1893, and republished by Forgotten Books in 2015, pp. 115-121.)

Saint Peter Claver, S.J., sought the conversion of all others with urgency, knowing that death could befall upon a non-Catholic or a Catholic who had apostatized or fallen into Mortal Sin at any time. He did not use conciliarism's language of "encounter" or "dialogue" or "entering into the other." He even warned the Anglican, as he had done with the Dutch Calvinists, what would happen to him if he died outside the bosom of Holy Mother Church. Saint Peter Claver cared about individual souls, not “group consciousness” or “critical theology.”

The “theology” of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Vincent Paglia and José Tolentino Calaça de Mendonça was foreseen and condemned by the prophetic Pope Saint Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907:

For, to begin with symbolism, since symbols are but symbols in regard to their objects and only instruments in regard to the believer, it is necessary first of all, according to the teachings of the Modernists, that the believer does not lay too much stress on the formula, as formula, but avail himself of it only for the purpose of uniting himself to the absolute truth which the formula at once reveals and conceals, that is to say, endeavors to express but without ever succeeding in doing so. They would also have the believer make use of the formulas only in as far as they are helpful to him, for they are given to be a help and not a hindrance; with proper regard, however, for the social respect due to formulas which the public magisterium has deemed suitable for expressing the common consciousness until such time as the same magisterium shall provide otherwise. Concerning immanence it is not easy to determine what Modernists precisely mean by it, for their own opinions on the subject vary. Some understand it in the sense that God working in man is more intimately present in him than man is even in himself; and this conception, if properly understood, is irreproachable. Others hold that the divine action is one with the action of nature, as the action of the first cause is one with the action of the secondary cause; and this would destroy the supernatural order. Others, finally, explain it in a way which savors of pantheism, and this, in truth, is the sense which best fits in with the rest of their doctrines.

20. With this principle of immanence is connected another which may be called the principle of divine permanence. It differs from the first in much the same way as the private experience differs from the experience transmitted by tradition. An example illustrating what is meant will be found in the Church and the sacraments. The Church and the sacraments according to the Modernists, are not to be regarded as having been instituted by Christ Himself. This is barred by agnosticism, which recognizes in Christ nothing more than a man whose religious consciousness has been, like that of all men, formed by degrees; it is also barred by the law of immanence, which rejects what they call external application; it is further barred by the law of evolution, which requires, for the development of the germs, time and a certain series of circumstances; it is finally, barred by history, which shows that such in fact has been the course of things. Still it is to he held that both Church and sacraments have been founded mediately by Christ. But how? In this way: All Christian consciences were, they affirm, in a manner virtually included in the conscience of Christ as the plant is included in the seed. But as the branches live the life of the seed, so, too, all Christians are to be said to live the life of Christ. But the life of Christ, according to faith, is divine, and so, too, is the life of Christians. And if this life produced, in the course of ages, both the Church and the sacraments, it is quite right to say that their origin is from Christ and is divine. In the same way they make out that the Holy Scriptures and the dogmas are divine. And in this, the Modernist theology may be said to reach its completion. A slender provision, in truth, but more than enough for the theologian who professes that the conclusions of science, whatever they may be, must always be accepted! No one will have any difficulty in making the application of these theories to the other points with which We propose to deal.

21. Thus far We have touched upon the origin and nature of faith. But as faith has many branches, and chief among them the Church, dogma, worship, devotions, the Books which we call “sacred,” it concerns us to know what the Modernists teach concerning them. To begin with dogma, We have already indicated its origin and nature. Dogma is born of a sort of impulse or necessity by virtue of which the believer elaborates his thought so as to render it clearer to his own conscience and that of others. This elaboration consists entirely in the process of investigating and refining the primitive mental formula, not indeed in itself and according to any logical explanation, but according to circumstances, or vitally as the Modernists somewhat less intelligibly describe it. Hence it happens that around this primitive formula secondary formulas, as We have already indicated, gradually continue to be formed, and these subsequently grouped into one body, or one doctrinal construction and further sanctioned by the public magisterium as responding to the common consciousness, are called dogma. Dogma is to be carefully distinguished from the speculations of theologians which, although not alive with the life of dogma, are not without their utility as serving both to harmonize religion with science and to remove opposition between them, and to illumine and defend religion from without, and it may be even to prepare the matter for future dogma. Concerning worship there would not be much to be said, were it not that under this head are comprised the sacraments, concerning which the Modernist errors are of the most serious character. For them the sacraments are the resultant of a double impulse or need — for, as we have seen, everything in their system is explained by inner impulses or necessities. The first need is that of giving some sensible manifestation to religion; the second is that of expressing it, which could not be done without some sensible form and consecrating acts, and these are called sacraments. But for the Modernists, sacraments are bare symbols or signs, though not devoid of a certain efficacy — an efficacy, they tell us, like that of certain phrases vulgarly described as having caught the popular ear, inasmuch as they have the power of putting certain leading ideas into circulation, and of making a marked impression upon the mind. What the phrases are to the ideas, that the sacraments are to the religious sense, that and nothing more. The Modernists would express their mind more clearly were they to affirm that the sacraments are instituted solely to foster the faith but this is condemned by the Council of Trent: If anyone says that these sacraments are instituted solely to foster the faith, let him be anathema. (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

We are simply witnessing the “official” unmasking of the great Modernist façade that has been the foundation of the entire conciliar sect since the rotund and crapulous Rosicrucian Mason named Angelo Roncalli stepped out on the balcony of the Basilica of Saint Peter on October 28, 1958, the Feast of Saints Simon and Jude. Everything about the conciliar sect is based upon one false and thus condemned Modernist proposition after another, and the group consciousness that is the foundation of Vincent Paglia’s and redefinition of “life’ is not only textbook Modernism but also another robust reliance upon the condemned principles of The Sillon for the basis of a “reconciliation” with unrepentant sinners on their own terms and an embrace of every error imaginable extant in the world.

Pope Saint Pius X discussed these errors at great length in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910:

We come now to the principal aspect, the moral aspect. Since, as we have seen, authority is much reduced, another force is necessary to supplement it and to provide a permanent counterweight against individual selfishness. This new principle, this force, is the love of professional interest and of public interest, that is to say, the love of the very end of the profession and of society. Visualize a society in which, in the soul of everyone, along with the innate love of personal interest and family welfare, prevails love for one’s occupation and for the welfare of the community. Imagine this society in which, in the conscience of everyone, personal and family interests are so subordinate that a superior interest always takes precedence over them. Could not such a society almost do without any authority? And would it not be the embodiment of the ideal of human dignity, with each citizen having the soul of a king, and each worker the soul of a master? Snatched away from the pettiness of private interests, and raised up to the interests of the profession and, even higher, to those of the whole nation and, higher still, to those of the whole human race (for the Sillon’s field of vision is not bound by the national borders, it encompasses all men even to the ends of the earth), the human heart, enlarged by the love of the common-wealth, would embrace all comrades of the same profession, all compatriots, all men. Such is the ideal of human greatness and nobility to be attained through the famous popular trilogy: LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY.

These three elements, namely political, economic, and moral, are inter-dependent and, as We have said, the moral element is dominant. Indeed, no political Democracy can survive if it is not anchored to an economic Democracy. But neither one nor the other is possible if it is not rooted in awareness by the human conscience of being invested with moral responsibilities and energies mutually commensurate. But granted the existence of that awareness, so created by conscious responsibilities and moral forces, the kind of Democracy arising from it will naturally reflect in deeds the consciousness and moral forces from which it flows. In the same manner, political Democracy will also issue from the trade-guild system. Thus, both political and economic Democracies, the latter bearing the former, will be fastened in the very consciousness of the people to unshakable bases.

To sum up, such is the theory, one could say the dream of the Sillon; and that is what its teaching aims at, what it calls the democratic education of the people, that is, raising to its maximum the conscience and civic responsibility of every one, from which will result economic and political Democracy and the reign of JUSTICE, LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

Well, there you have it.

A collective consciousness.

Open borders.

Globalism.

In a word, a world without Christ the King and His true Church. Such is the world that has been desired by the conciliar revolutionaries for decades now. The only difference under Jorge Mario Bergoglio is that the agenda is being stated clearly for all who have the intellectual honesty to see and the disposition to care that the eternal good of individual souls is being jettisoned in favor of a group consciousness that, at least implicitly, denies the gravity and the horror of personal sin and substitutes a naturalistic religion, pantheism, as the foundation for individuals to forget themselves and serve the collective consciousness.

This is important to understand on a number of levels, especially when one considers the simple fact that all efforts in the United States of America to “chip away” at the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973, the Feast of Saints Vincent and Anastasius, will be met with steely indifference by the conciliar “bishops” and without a word of “papal” support. Jorge Mario Bergoglio knows that the “pro-life” activist crowd is dying out, and it is only a matter of time before his own “cardinals” and “bishops” make sure that younger Catholics are so subsumed into the ethos of a Chardinian cosmology of “group consciousness” that they will have no thought of doing anything other than what their globalist masters dictate.

Moreover, the effort on the part of Vincent Paglia to “redefine” life, however, should really come as no surprise as a Harvard Medical School ad hoc committee redefined in 1968 what constituted the death of a living human being by inventing the myth of “brain death” so as to provide an ex post fact cover for the dirty work of vivisecting living human beings for their vital body organs that had been done by Drs. Christiaan and Marius Barnard in South Africa in 1967 and that was being championed and then undertaken in the United States of America by Drs. Norman Shumway and Adrian Kantrowitz.

Dr. Paul Byrne sent me an e-mail eight years ago after I had written a commentary about the nefarious work of the Drs. Barnard:

The focus on the Doctors Barnard ought to be: 1) Denise Darvall was living when she was taken into the operating room, 2) Denise Darvall became dead (killed) by what the Doctors Barnard did to her.

The doctors in this United States were not going to be outdone by doctors in South Africa. Therefore, three days later the second heart transplantation was done in Brooklyn. New York, famous not only for its baseball team, but also because Dr. Kantrowitz cut the beating heart out of a 3 day old baby (supposedly, mentally retarded), then put the heart into an 18 day old baby (supposedly mentally normal). At the end of all this, both babies were dead. Incidentally, Dr. Kantrowitz never did another heart transplant. Don’t you think he knew what he did?

It was illegal and immoral to take these hearts. So how to make cutting out beating hearts moral and legal? Set up a Committee at a prestigious university. Voila! The Harvard Committee. The report of the Harvard Committee, “A definition of Irreversible Coma” was published in JAMA in 1968. That report has no basic science studies or patient data or references to such; the only reference was to Pope Pius XII, who stated (but not included in JAMA), “But considerations of a general nature allow us to believe that human life continues for as long as its vital functions—distinguished from the simple life of organs—manifest themselves spontaneously or with the help of artificial processes.”

[Vital functions are temperature (not the temperature of the environment that quickly occurs after true death), heart rate, blood pressure (circulation) and respiration.]

Truth will never change. No doctor can make a lie become the truth. (E-mail of Dr. Paul Byrne to this writer, Friday, October 26, 2012.)

Similarly, no apostate in charge of a “pontifical” academy can make his lies become the truth any more than Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his band of conciliar revolutionaries can make the lies of their false religion true.

Mrs. Randy Engel wrote about Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz's act of murder in an article that was published on Tradition in Action in 2010:

The controversy following the Kantrowitz killings was instrumental in the formation of the Harvard Medical School ad hoc Committee to study "brain death" as the new criteria for death.

The obvious conundrum facing transplantation surgeons was that organs taken from cadavers do not recover from the period of ischemia (loss of blood supply to organs) following true death. After circulation and respiration has stopped, within 4 to 5 minutes the heart and liver are not suitable for transplantation. For kidneys the time is about 30 minutes.

Equally clear was the realization that in order to continue unpaired vital organ transplantation it would be necessary to redefine death, that is, to establish a new criterion for death that would legally permit the extraction of vital organs from living human beings. Such a redefinition would permit transplantation surgeons to kill with legal immunity.

In August 1968, the Journal of the American Medical Association published "A Definition of Irreversible Coma: Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death." (3) No authors were listed. (4)

The Harvard Committee cited two reasons for establishing "brain death" as the new criteria for death. The first was the problems surrounding the use of resuscitation and other supportive measures to extend the life of severely injured persons. The second reason was "obsolete criteria for the definition of death can lead to controversy in obtaining organs for transplantation."

It should also be noted that the criteria of "brain death" did not originate or develop by way of application of the scientific method of observation and hypothesis followed by verification. The Committee presented no substantiating data either from scientific research or case studies of individual patients. The Committee did not determine if irreversible coma was an appropriate criterion for death. Rather, its mission was to see that it was established as a new criterion for death. In short, the report was made to fit the already arrived at conclusions. (Don't Give Your Vital Organs - Part I.)

Wanna sign up to be an "organ donor"? You are signing your own death warrant, which will be executed when you least expect it.

Truth is what it is, and it does not depend upon human acceptance for its binding force or validity.

It is, therefore, no accident that the merchants of lies within the walls of the Occupied Vatican on the West Bank of the Tiber River have endorsed the lie of “brain death” and “vital organ donation” and have also endorsed the lie “palliative care” that is premised upon a “quality of life” standard, made by that “team of professionals,” to determine when and how to hasten the death of an innocent human being. There have even been “conservative” heavylifters, such as the late Dr. German Grisez, a professor of moral theology at Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary, Emittsburg, Maryland, from 1979 to 2009, who wrote about a supposed “new natural law” that could be used to justify the hastening of the deaths of innocent human beings.

Thus, you see, even “conservatives” have been about the business of “redefining” physical life and death just as the Jacobin/Bolshevik conciliar revolutionaries have been about the business of killing souls and, now, making a moral equivalence between human life and the physical matter of the earth that God created and that He will destroy by fire at the time He has appointed for its destruction.

Mario Matthew Cuomo and Joseph Bernardin: Harbingers of Teilhard de Chardin’s Cosmology and “Critical Theology”

Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Vincent Paglia’s open efforts to “redefine” what “life” is and how to protect it had many harbingers, including two nefariously wicked men who were allied with each other in the 1980s and 1990s, New York Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo and Joseph Bernardin, whose contempt of President Ronald Wilson Reagan and of efforts to restore legal protection to the innocent preborn was legendarily bold and served as the basis of a split between some of the false opposites in the conciliar hierarchy that served to distract “pro-life” Catholics, including this writer, at the time.

Bishop Joseph Bernardin, who was a true bishop but not a member of the Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals, gave his infamous “consistent ethic of speech” address at Fordham University, Borough of The Bronx, City of New York, New York, on December 6, 1983, the Feast of Saint Nicholas of Myra, that was designed to make it possible for a pro-abortion Catholic such as Cuomo to receive the electoral support of Catholics because he took “correct” positions on “economic and social justice” and matters of war and peace in spite of his support for the surgical execution of the innocent preborn:

The issue of consistency is tested in a different way when we examine the relationship between the “right to life” and “quality of life” issues. I must confess that I think the relationship of these categories is inadequately understood in the Catholic community itself. My point is that the Catholic position on abortion demands of us and of society that we seek to influence an heroic social ethic. If one contends, as we do, that the right of every fetus to be born should be protected by civil law and supported by civil consensus, then our moral, political and economic responsibilities do not stop at the moment of birth. Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visible in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker. Such a quality of life posture translates into specific political and economic positions on tax policy, employment generation, welfare policy, nutrition and feeding programs, and health care. Consistency means we cannot have it both ways. We cannot urge a compassionate society and vigorous public policy to protect the rights of the unborn and then argue that compassion and significant public programs on behalf of the needy undermine the moral fiber of the society or are beyond the proper scope of governmental responsibility. Right to life and quality of life complement each other in domestic social policy. They are also complementary in foreign policy. The Challenge of Peace joined the question of how we prevent nuclear war to the question of how we build peace in an interdependent world. Today those who are admirably concerned with reversing the nuclear arms race must also be those who stand for a positive U.S. policy of building the peace. It is this linkage which has led the U.S. bishops not only to oppose the drive of the nuclear arms race, but to stand against the dynamic of a Central American policy which relies predominantly on the threat and the use of force, which is increasingly distancing itself from a concern for human rights in El Salvador and which fails to grasp the opportunity of a diplomatic solution to the Central American conflict. The relationship of the spectrum of life issues is far more intricate than I can even sketch here. I have made the case in the broad strokes of a lecturer; the detailed balancing, distinguishing and connecting of different aspects of a consistent ethic of life is precisely what this address calls the university community to investigate. Even as I leave this challenge before you, let me add to it some reflections on the task of communicating a consistent ethic of life in a pluralistic society.. (Bishop Joseph Bernardin, https://wwA Conistent Ethic of Life, Fordham University, December 6, 1983.)

Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his pals are merely filling out Bernardin’s sketch to eradicate all talk of opposing abortion as they believe that it does no good to talk about “moral issues” that can never be reduce to matters of “black and white” given the subjective considerations that “informed consciences” must make without “interference” by others, including Holy Mother Church, when the earth itself is, they believe, in such imminent peril of extinction.

For his part, Mario Matthew Cuomo explained in a September 13, 1984 speech delivered at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, how he, a firm disciple of Teilhard de Chardin (see, for example, Cuomo Ruminates on God and Talks of Politics), could oppose abortion privately while supporting a women’s “right” to “choose” to have one. Having found his justification from Bernardin’s aforementioned “consistent ethic of life,” Cuomo emphasized that what it is to “pro-life” involves more than opposition to abortion and is even consonant with respecting the law as it is in a pluralistic society:

Let me make another point.

Abortion has a unique significance but not a preemptive significance.

Apart from the question of the efficacy of using legal weapons to make people stop having abortions, we know our Christian responsibility doesn't end with any one law or amendment. That it doesn't end with abortion. Because it involves life and death, abortion will always be a central concern of Catholics. But so will nuclear weapons. And hunger and homelessness and joblessness, all the forces diminishing human life and threatening to destroy it. The "seamless garment" that Cardinal Bernardin has spoken of is a challenge to all Catholics in public office, conservatives as well as liberals.

We cannot justify our aspiration to goodness simply on the basis of the vigor of our demand for an elusive and questionable civil law declaring what we already know, that abortion is wrong.

Approval or rejection of legal restrictions on abortion should not be the exclusive litmus test of Catholic loyalty. We should understand that whether abortion is outlawed or not, our work has barely begun: the work of creating a society where the right to life doesn't end at the moment of birth; where an infant isn't helped into a world that doesn't care if it's fed properly, housed decently, educated adequately; where the blind or retarded child isn't condemned to exist rather than empowered to live.

# # #

The bishops stated this duty clearly in 1974, in their statement to the Senate Sub-Committee considering a proposed amendment to restrict abortions. They maintained such an amendment could not be seen as an end in itself. "We do not see a constitutional amendment as the final product of our commitment or of our legislative activity," they said. "It is instead the constitutional base on which to provide suport and assistance to pregnant women and their unborn children. This would include nutritional, prenatal, child birth and postnatal care for the mother, and also nutritional and pediatric care for the child through the first year of life . . . . We believe that all of these should be available as a matter of right to all pregnant women and their children.

The bishops reaffirmed that view in 1976, in 1980, and again this year when the United States Catholic Committee asked Catholics to judge candidates on a wide range of issues -- on abortion, yes; but also on food policy, the arms race, human rights, education, social justice and military expenditures.

The bishops have been consistently "pro-life" in the full meaning of that term, and I respect them for that. (Religious Belief and Public Policy, University of Notre Dame, September 13, 1984.)

Mario Pilate/Pontius Cuomo was just a little less nuanced when he said the following as he delivered the nominating speech for Arkansas Governor William Jefferson Blythe Clinton at the Democratic Party National Convention, Madison Square Garden, Borough of Manhattan, City of New York, New York, on July 15, 1992, the Feast of Saint Henry the Emperor:

America needs Bill Clinton for still another reason. We need a leader who will stop the Republican attempt, through laws and through the courts, to tell us what god to believe in, and how to apply that god's judgment to our schoolrooms, our bedrooms and our bodies. (Nominating Speech by Mario M. Cuomo)

Mario Matthew Cuomo was a demagogue.

As it takes one to praise one, this is what Figlio di Sfachim, Andrew Mark Cuomo, said that Jorge Mario Bergoglio said about his father during Bergoglio’s visit to the Cathedral of Saint Patrick, Borough of Manhattan, City of New York, New York, on Thursday, September 24, 2015, the Feast of Our Lady of Ransom:

Pope Francis’ warm and forgiving nature was on display again Thursday when he said he would pray for Gov. Cuomo’s late father, Mario, sources told The Post.

The pontiff told Cuomo that Mario — who himself led New York state from 1983 to 1994 — was a great man despite Mario’s support of abortion rights.

Francis also blessed the governor’s gal pal, Sandra Lee — a cancer survivor — when the couple met the pontiff outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral before a service.

“The pope gave Sandra a special blessing for her health and her recovery and Cuomo asked the pope to say a prayer for his father,” the source said.

“The pope told him . . . that his father was a great man and he would keep him in his prayers.” (Jorge "blesses" Andrew Cuomo's Live-in Girlfriend and Praises Mario Cuomo.)

The Argentine Apostate’s definition of a “great man” is broad enough to include one who was described by Pope Pius XI in Casti Connubii a little over four decades before the formerly pro-life attorney named Mario Matthew Cuomo took the “I’m personally opposed to abortion—but” position that evolved to the point of his address, quoted above, in 1992:

Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority by appropriate laws and sanctions to defend the lives of the innocent, and this all the more so since those whose lives are endangered and assailed cannot defend themselves. Among whom we must mention in the first place infants hidden in the mother's womb. And if the public magistrates not only do not defend them, but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors or of others, let them remember that God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 30, 1930. For more on the life and wretched work of Mario Matthew Cuomo, please see It Is Still A Terrible Thing to Fall into the Hands of the Living God).

Writing a full forty-five years beforehand, Pope Leo XIII had made it clear in Immortale Dei that no one can take one position in private yet advance another position in public life:

Hence, lest concord be broken by rash charges, let this be understood by all, that the integrity of Catholic faith cannot be reconciled with opinions verging on naturalism or rationalism, the essence of which is utterly to do away with Christian institutions and to install in society the supremacy of man to the exclusion of God. Further, it is unlawful to follow one line of conduct in private life and another in public, respecting privately the authority of the Church, but publicly rejecting it; for this would amount to joining together good and evil, and to putting man in conflict with himself; whereas he ought always to be consistent, and never in the least point nor in any condition of life to swerve from Christian virtue. (Pope Pius XI, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

Mario Matthew Cuomo, preceded by the likes of a certain Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., Edward Moore Kennedy and his own mentor, Hugh Leo Carey, did indeed publicly reject the authority of the Church and thus joined together good and evil. The conciliar revolutionaries believe that the only thing that is “evil” is to disagree with them and their embrace of one Modernist proposition after another.

As we have seen, Pope Pius XI understood that the lives of individual human beings who are guilty of no crime can never be taken deliberately, and he was warning those who dared to support the surgical dismemberment of the innocent preborn that God is the “Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven.” Jorge Mario Bergoglio and company do not believe that this is so, which is why they are so sanguine in support of a communitarian approach to “life” that is part and parcel of the dogmatic evolutionism that guided the cosmologist Teilhard de Chardin and that Pope Pius XI reminded us in Divini Redemptoris, March 19, 1937, is at the root of Marxist-Leninist thought and praxis:

9. The doctrine of modern Communism, which is often concealed under the most seductive trappings, is in substance based on the principles of dialectical and historical materialism previously advocated by Marx, of which the theoricians of bolshevism claim to possess the only genuine interpretation. According to this doctrine there is in the world only one reality, matter, the blind forces of which evolve into plant, animal and man. Even human society is nothing but a phenomenon and form of matter, evolving in the same way. By a law of inexorable necessity and through a perpetual conflict of forces, matter moves towards the final synthesis of a classless society. In such a doctrine, as is evident, there is no room for the idea of God; there is no difference between matter and spirit, between soul and body; there is neither survival of the soul after death nor any hope in a future life. Insisting on the dialectical aspect of their materialism, the Communists claim that the conflict which carries the world towards its final synthesis can be accelerated by man. Hence they endeavor to sharpen the antagonisms which arise between the various classes of society. Thus the class struggle with its consequent violent hate and destruction takes on the aspects of a crusade for the progress of humanity. On the other hand, all other forces whatever, as long as they resist such systematic violence, must be annihilated as hostile to the human race.

10. Communism, moreover, strips man of his liberty, robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse. There is no recognition of any right of the individual in his relations to the collectivity; no natural right is accorded to human personality, which is a mere cog-wheel in the Communist system. In man’s relations with other individuals, besides, Communists hold the principle of absolute equality, rejecting all hierarchy and divinely-constituted authority, including the authority of parents. What men call authority and subordination is derived from the community as its first and only font. Nor is the individual granted any property rights over material goods or the means of production, for inasmuch as these are the source of further wealth, their possession would give one man power over another. Precisely on this score, all forms of private property must be eradicated, for they are at the origin of all economic enslavement.

11. Refusing to human life any sacred or spiritual character, such a doctrine logically makes of marriage and the family a purely artificial and civil institution, the outcome of a specific economic system. There exists no matrimonial bond of a juridico-moral nature that is not subject to the whim of the individual or of the collectivity. Naturally, therefore, the notion of an indissoluble marriage-tie is scouted. Communism is particularly characterized by the rejection of any link that binds woman to the family and the home, and her emancipation is proclaimed as a basic principle. She is withdrawn from the family and the care of her children, to be thrust instead into public life and collective production under the same conditions as man. The care of home and children then devolves upon the collectivity. Finally, the right of education is denied to parents, for it is conceived as the exclusive prerogative of the community, in whose name and by whose mandate alone parents may exercise this right.

12. What would be the condition of a human society based on such materialistic tenets? It would be a collectivity with no other hierarchy than that of the economic system. It would have only one mission: the production of material things by means of collective labor, so that the goods of this world might be enjoyed in a paradise where each would “give according to his powers” and would “receive according to his needs.” Communism recognizes in the collectivity the right, or rather, unlimited discretion, to draft individuals for the labor of the collectivity with no regard for their personal welfare; so that even violence could be legitimately exercised to dragoon the recalcitrant against their wills. In the Communistic commonwealth morality and law would be nothing but a derivation of the existing economic order, purely earthly in origin and unstable in character. In a word. the Communists claim to inaugurate a new era and a new civilization which is the result of blind evolutionary forces culminating in a humanity without God.

13. When all men have finally acquired the collectivist mentality in this Utopia of a really classless society, the political State, which is now conceived by Communists merely as the instrument by which the proletariat is oppressed by the capitalists, will have lost all reason for its existence and will “wither away.” However, until that happy consummation is realized, the State and the powers of the State furnish Communism with the most efficacious and most extensive means for the achievement of its goal.

14. Such, Venerable Brethren, is the new gospel which bolshevistic and atheistic Communism offers the world as the glad tidings of deliverance and salvation! It is a system full of errors and sophisms. It is in opposition both to reason and to Divine Revelation. It subverts the social order, because it means the destruction of its foundations; because it ignores the true origin and purpose of the State; because it denies the rights, dignity and liberty of human personality. (Pope Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, March 19, 1937.)

Marxism-Leninism’s denial of individual personality and the submergence of individual men into a spirit of collectivism is premised upon an outright denial of the existence of God and the existence of the human soul, which is meant to lead only to oppression and slavery in the name of “building the better world.”

Conciliarism’s embrace of a “critical theology” and its leaders’ efforts to “redefine” life are thus meant to lead inexorably to the spirit of the Communist spirit in fact if not in name. The conciliar revolutionaries know precisely what they are doing, and it is not for nothing that photograph of “Father” Jorge Mario Bergoglio has emerged with a group of other Jesuits in the company of an infamous progenitor of “liberation theology,” Father Leonardo Boff (see Bergoglio & Boff: Old acquaintances.) The goal is to annihilate the individual in favor of a collectivist concept of “Man” that has no room for Christ the King and His true Church.

Pope Pius XI elaborated on the truth that the individual can never be made subservient to the civil state under any pretext although he lives within one according to the economy of God’s created order. God has ordained man to live within society to cooperate with other individuals in the the pursuit of the common temporal good that must be undertaken with respect to the advancement of his Last End:

29. But God has likewise destined man for civil society according to the dictates of his very nature. In the plan of the Creator, society is a natural means which man can and must use to reach his destined end. Society is for man and not vice versa. This must not be understood in the sense of liberalistic individualism, which subordinates society to the selfish use of the individual; but only in the sense that by means of an organic union with society and by mutual collaboration the attainment of earthly happiness is placed within the reach of all. In a further sense, it is society which affords the opportunities for the development of all the individual and social gifts bestowed on human nature. These natural gifts have a value surpassing the immediate interests of the moment, for in society they reflect the divine perfection, which would not be true were man to live alone. But on final analysis, even in this latter function, society is made for man, that he may recognize this reflection of God’s perfection, and refer it in praise and adoration to the Creator. Only man, the human person, and not society in any form is endowed with reason and a morally free will.

30. Man cannot be exempted from his divinely-imposed obligations toward civil society, and the representatives of authority have the right to coerce him when he refuses without reason to do his duty. Society, on the other hand, cannot defraud man of his God-granted rights, the most important of which We have indicated above. Nor can society systematically void these rights by making their use impossible. It is therefore according to the dictates of reason that ultimately all material things should be ordained to man as a person, that through his mediation they may find their way to the Creator. In this wise we can apply to man, the human person, the words of the Apostle of the Gentiles, who writes to the Corinthians on the Christian economy of salvation: “All things are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.”[12] While Communism impoverishes human personality by inverting the terms of the relation of man to society, to what lofty heights is man not elevated by reason and Revelation! (Pope Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, March 19, 1937.)

The conciliar revolutionaries do not believe in Divine Revelation and they have little regard for reason. Some, including Bergoglio himself, have even disparaged the Natural Law, which is knowable, although imperfectly, by reason alone unaided by Divine Revelation. Jorge’s new fellow Judases have been chosen because they share his own embrace of Modernism’s evolutionist concepts that borrow at one and the same time from Hegelianism, Darwinism and Marxism-Leninism. Chardinianism is just a supposed “theological” expression of this evolutionism in the context of a cosmology that makes of the Second Person made Man in Our Lady’s Sorrowful and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation an allegorical figure whose teaching, such as they believe it to be, springs up from the inner consciousness of believers at any given moment.

Pope Saint Pius X summarized Modernism as the synthesis of heresies, explaining as well that nothing is ever fixed or stable in a system built upon such a fabric of falsehoods:

It is thus, Venerable Brethren, that for the Modernists, whether as authors or propagandists, there is to be nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church. Nor, indeed, are they without forerunners in their doctrines, for it was of these that Our predecessor Pius IX wrote: 'These enemies of divine revelation extol human progress to the skies, and with rash and sacrilegious daring would have it introduced into the Catholic religion as if this religion were not the work of God but of man, or some kind of philosophical discovery susceptible of perfection by human efforts.' On the subject of revelation and dogma in particular, the doctrine of the Modernists offers nothing new. We find it condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX, where it is enunciated in these terms: ''Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the progress of human reason'; and condemned still more solemnly in the Vatican Council: ''The doctrine of the faith which God has revealed has not been proposed to human intelligences to be perfected by them as if it were a philosophical system, but as a divine deposit entrusted to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence also that sense of the sacred dogmas is to be perpetually retained which our Holy Mother the Church has once declared, nor is this sense ever to be abandoned on plea or pretext of a more profound comprehension of the truth.' Nor is the development of our knowledge, even concerning the faith, barred by this pronouncement; on the contrary, it is supported and maintained. For the same Council continues: 'Let intelligence and science and wisdom, therefore, increase and progress abundantly and vigorously in individuals, and in the mass, in the believer and in the whole Church, throughout the ages and the centuries -- but only in its own kind, that is, according to the same dogma, the same sense, the same acceptation.' (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Conciliarism’s “end game,” if you will, of annihilating the individual in favor of collectivism could not reached its historic “coming out party” next month at the so-called “Amazon synod” if the spade work for its rotten fruit had done been by the likes of the “new theologians,” including Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, to attack the nature of dogmatic truth and to replace it with dogmatic evolutionism. This particular line of attack denies the immutability of God, and to deny God’s immutability is to deny that He even exists, no less has revealed truths to man to which he must adhere in order to save his immortal soul. It is thus a relatively easy thing to deny Special Creation and Original Sin as one builds a false religious sect that is the work of Antichrist in preparation for his One World Governance and that entity’s submissive One World Ecumenical Religion.

The Path to “Redefining” Life Starts with Attacking Dogmatic Truth

Although they may differ on the margins on some matters of form and expression, Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI and Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who is believed to have been in Mozambique over the weekend (I do not bother myself any longer with the travels of the head of a false religious sect), are as one when it comes a denial, albeit in different ways and by use of different expressions, of Special Creation and of Original Sin. No matter their different methodologies (Ratzinger’s disdain for “crystal clear logic” and reasoning, Bergoglio’s disdain for everything pertaining to the Catholic Faith as it interferes with his emphasis on protecting the environment and his objection to exhorting hardened sinners to reform), the two-headed antipope monster’s false beliefs about the nature of dogmatic truth and about Special Creation and Original Sin wind up at the same destination: an annihilation of God and of the human need to be holy, and this leads in turn to the triumph of Antichrist’s collectivism under a variety of different names and banners, none of them proclaiming Christ the King, Mary our Queen or the Catholic Faith.

In this regard, therefore, it must be remembered that it was Joseph “Cardinal” Ratzinger who “rehabilitated” the errors of Father Antonio Rosmini-Serbati that had been condemned by the Holy Office and confirmed personally by Pope Leo XIII on December 14, 1887. The Holy Office’s condemnation of the Rosmini-Serbati errors can be found on pages 475 to 480 of Monsignor Henry Denziger’s The Sources of Catholic Dogma (Thirteenth Edition of Henry Denizger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum) that was published in the United States of America by B. Herder Books in 1957.

Yesterday’s condemned propositions can be rehabilitated very simply by rejecting Thomism and claiming that it is “impossible” to express dogmatic truth adequately at any particular time because of the influences of historical circumstances and the vagaries of human language.

Rosmini’s rehabilitation in 2001 was merely a prelude to his “beatification,” which occurred on November 18, 2007, after his cause had been approved by the man who rehabilitated him, Ratzinger/Benedict:

The events following Rosmini's death required a certain distancing of the Church from his system of thought and, in particular, from some of its propositions. It is necessary to consider the principal historical-cultural factors that influenced this distancing which culminated in the condemnation of the "40 Propositions" of the Decree Post obitum of 1887.

The first factor is the renewal of ecclesiastical studies promoted by the Encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) of Leo XIII, in the development of fidelity to the thought of St Thomas Aquinas. The Papal Magisterium saw the need to foster Thomism as a philosophical and theoretical instrument, aimed at offering a unifying synthesis of ecclesiastical studies, above all in the formation of priests in seminaries and theological faculties, in order to oppose the risk of an eclectic philosophical approach. The adoption of Thomism created the premises for a negative judgement of a philosophical and speculative position, like that of Rosmini, because it differed in its language and conceptual framework from the philosophical and theological elaboration of St Thomas Aquinas.

A second factor to keep in mind is the fact that the condemned propositions were mostly extracted from posthumous works of the author. These works were published without a critical apparatus capable of defining the precise meaning of the expressions and concepts used. This favoured a heterodox interpretation of Rosminian thought, as did the objective difficulty of interpreting Rosmini's categories, especially, when they were read in a neo-Thomistic perspective. (Note on the Force of the Doctrinal Decrees Concerning the Thought and Work of Fr Antonio Rosmini Serbati; please see the Appendix below for the view of a ultra-progressive conciliar revolution on the revolutionary meaning of this "note.")

There are two things that stand out in this passage of the "note" reversing Pope Leo XIII's condemnation of the propositions of Father Antonio Rosmini.

First, "Cardinal Ratzinger," with the full approval and "papal" benediction of John Paul II, essentially said that Pope Leo XIII was too stupid to understand the complexity of Rosmini's admittedly ambiguous work, leading to that pontiff's misunderstanding of that work. Ratzinger's contention was that the "misunderstanding" served the Church well at the time as, in essence, most other people would have come to the same conclusions as they lacked the "tools" to unlock the "true" meaning hidden deep within Rosmini's words. Ratzinger, of course, had those "tools" at his disposal, most fortunately for the cause of conciliar "truth," you understand.

The path to Father Rosmini’s “beatification” was cleared on July 1, 2001, by the then Joseph “Cardinal” Ratzinger, who was determined to overturn the Holy Office of the Inquistion’s December 14, 1887, condemnation of forty of Rosmini’s propositions under the pontificate of Pope Leo XIII. Thus it was that Ratzinger, acting under the authority of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II, said the following about Pope Leo XIII’s condemnation of forty of Father Antonio Rosmini’s propositions as he based his “reversal” on the grounds that Pope Leo XIII was, in essence, a “prisoner” of the circumstances in which he lived:

The events following Rosmini’s death required a certain distancing of the Church from his system of thought and, in particular, from some of its propositions. It is necessary to consider the principal historical-cultural factors that influenced this distancing which culminated in the condemnation of the “40 Propositions” of the Decree Post obitum of 1887.

A second factor to keep in mind is the fact that the condemned propositions were mostly extracted from posthumous works of the author. These works were published without a critical apparatus capable of defining the precise meaning of the expressions and concepts used. This favoured a heterodox interpretation of Rosminian thought, as did the objective difficulty of interpreting Rosmini’s categories, especially, when they were read in a neo-Thomistic perspective. (Joseph “Cardinal” Ratzinger, Note on the Force of the Doctrinal Decrees Concerning the Thought and the Work of Father Antonio Rosmi Serbati, July 1, 2001.)

In other words, Father Rosmini’s posthumously published works that were condemned by the Holy Office under the authority of Pope Leo XIII on December 14, 1887, were “victimized” by the very Thomism that Ratzinger himself had long believed was to “crystal clear” and “too logical” to be of any real use to examine such a “profound” thinker as Father Antonio Rosmini Serbati. Pope Leo XIII was wrong, Ratzinger believed, to have place such an emphasis on what he, Ratzinger, dismissed as the “school of thought” of Saint Thomas Aquinas. (For an antidote to Ratznger’s rejection of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Scholasticism, please see Pillar and Champion of Catholic Truth.)

A review of Rosmini’s propositions as condemned by Pope Leo XIII in 1887 leads one to recognize very readily that the likes of Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI and his own predecessor, “Saint John Paul the Great,” who praised Rosmini as a “great thinker” in Fides et Ratio, September 14, 1998, had a profound kinship with a fellow traveler in the belief that religious faith just kind of “springs up” from within one’s inner consciousness. Indeed, the very first through fourth of Rosmini’s proposition condemned by the Holy Office in 1887 contain germs, if you will, of this cornerstone of Modernism:

1. In the order of created things there is immediately manifested to the human intellect something of the divine in its very self, namely, such as pertains to divine nature.

2. When we speak of the divine in nature, we do not use the word divine to signify a nondivine effect of a divine cause; nor, is it our mind to speak of a certain thing as divine because it is such through participation.

3. In the nature of the universe, then, that is in the intelligences that are in it, there is something to which the term of divine not in a figurative but in a real sense is fitting.–The actuality is not distinct from the est of divine actuality.

4. Indeterminate being, which without doubt is known to all intelligences, is that divine thing which is manifest to man in nature.

5. Being, which man observes, must be something of the necessary and eternal being, the creating cause, the determining and final cause of all contingent beings: and this is God.

6. In the being which prescinds from creatures and from God, which is indeterminate being, and in God, not indeterminate but absolute being, the essence is the same.

7. The indeterminate being of intuition, initial being, is something of the Word, which the mind of the Father distinguishes, not really, but according to reason from the Word. (As found in Henry Denzinger, Enchirdion Symbolorum, thirteenth edition, translated into English by Roy Deferrari and published in 1955 as The Sources of Catholic Dogma–referred to as “Denziger,” by B. Herder Book Company of St. Louis, Missouri, and London, England, Nos. 2183-2185, pp. 475-476. A very good analysis of Rosmini’s propositions was written well over a decade over now by an antisedevacantist writer, Mr. James Larson: The Rosmini Rehabilitation – When To Be is Not To Be. Those who believe that a true pope can be in error and is need of “correction” from members of the laity, however, have to realize that such a position is false. Pope Leo XIII made this very clear in EPISTOLA TUA, June 17, 1885, and EST SANE MOLESTUM, December 17, 1888. To “be” a true pope one must be a Catholic, and to be a Catholic means that one cannot defect from even a single tenet of the Holy Faith. Not one. See also Bishop Sanborn’s response to Bp. Williamson on Sedevacantism.)

Conciliarism’s embrace of propositions condemned by Holy Mother Church as the circumstances of time required was noted by an “ultra-progessive” conciliar revolutinonary, “Father” Gregory Baum, S.J., shortly after “Cardinal” Ratzinger’s “rehabilitation” of Father Antonio Rosmini-Serbati’s propositions was promulgated on July 1, 2001:

Today the situation is different. First, according to Ratzinger, serious research has shown that if Rosmini’s ambiguous and obscure passages are interpreted in the light of his own philosophical work, which is, of course, the only honest way of reading a philosophical text, then their meaning is not contrary to the Catholic tradition. Second, in his encyclical Faith and Reason of 1998, John Paul II has welcomed philosophical pluralism in the church and, in fact, mentioned with great respect Antonio Rosmini among several Catholic thinkers of the 19th century. That is why, at the present time, lifting the condemnations decreed in 1887 is justified.

The nota of July 2001 is an important ecclesiastical document because it applies the historical-critical method to the understanding of the magisterium. Yet has Ratzinger’s “attentive reading” demonstrated that lifting the condemnation does not involve the magisterium in an internal contradiction? I do not think so.

He has shown that the condemnation of Rosmini’s propositions in 1887 was justified in terms of the church’s pastoral policy and hence could be lifted without inconsistency later. Yet he does not raise the truth question. The readers of the condemnation of 1886 were made to believe that these propositions were erroneous: They were not told that they were erroneous only when read from a neo-Thomist perspective and that their true meaning should not be pursued at that time because Pope Leo XIII wanted neo-Thomism to become the church’s official philosophy.

The nota demonstrates that the condemnation of 1886 exercised a useful ecclesiastical function, not that it was true. Ratzinger’s explanation reveals that the Holy Office showed no respect for the truth at all. Its intentions were tactical and political. The Holy Office at that time saw itself as a servant of the church’s central government and judged ideas in terms of their ecclesiastical implications, not their truth.

Still, the nota is an important document since it is the first time an ecclesiastical statement wrestles with a question that has troubled Catholics for a long time. How are we to interpret apparent contradictions in the magisterium?

Here is a famous example. In the bull Unam Sanctam of 1302, Pope Boniface VIII wrote these words: “We declare, we set forth, we define that submission to the Roman pontiff is necessary for the salvation of any human creature.” And the Council of Florence solemnly declared in 1442 that outside the Catholic church there is no salvation, neither for heretics nor schismatics, even if they should live holy lives or shed their blood in the name of Christ. Vatican Council II appeared to proclaim an entirely different doctrine. We read in Gaudium et Spes that since Christ has died for all humans and since the destiny of humanity is one, we are to hold that, in a manner known to God, participation in the mystery of redemption is offered to every human being.

We are bound to ask with Ratzinger whether there is an internal contradiction in the magisterium. Were the solemn declarations of Boniface VIII and the Council of Florence wrong? The words of Boniface were so emphatic, “we declare, we set forth, we define,” that the reader may wonder whether Vatican Council II has made a mistake. At the same time, the declarations of Boniface and the cardinals in attendance at the Council of Florence were hard to reconcile with the teaching of the Church Fathers of the second and third centuries who believed that God’s redemptive Word, incarnate in Christ, was operative wherever people sought the truth. There may have been good church-political reasons for Boniface and the cardinals of the Council of Florence to make these harsh declarations, yet — I would argue — these declarations were wrong. The magisterium has made mistakes. The church, guided by the Spirit, is forever learning.

Ratzinger’s document has sent theologians off into a new area of research. (Ratzinger explains how condemnation was right then, wrong now)

Left unaddressed by Baum’s analysis is the simple fact that the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, cannot contradict Himself. Alas, those impressed with Georg Hegel and Teilhard de Chardin and Hans Urs von Balthasar believe, at least minimally, that the “Spirit” can contradict Himself as men grasp to understand “Him” better over time. Pure Modernism, of course.

Baum’s “analysis,” although supportive of conciliarism, is nevertheless interesting because it does raise the issue of contradiction. Yes, those of us who have come to realize that the conciliar church is not the Catholic Church and that its “magisterium” has no authority to contradict anything taught by the Catholic Church realize that the “overturning” of Pope Leo XIII’s 1887 condemnation of forty of Antonio Rosmini’s propositions by Joseph Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on July 1, 2001, has no binding force whatsoever. It is always useful, however, when true conciliar revolutionaries such as Gregory Baum point out the plain truth that “contradiction” can be part of the Faith, an important component element of the Modernist mind.

Then again, you see, Father Antonio Rosmini-Serbati was, apart from providing a useful justification of the conciliar revolutionaries’ embrace of Modernism, an apostle to the poor, and that, according to the likes of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his comrades is all that is needed to save one’s soul. They really do believe that “outside the poor there is no salvation” just as much as they reject the Catholic doctrine of outside the Church there is no salvation (Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus).

To attack the nature of dogmatic truth is to attack the nature of God, and to do that is to attack His very existence and that He has revealed anything so definitive that cannot be understood differently by different generations as befits supposedly different “circumstances” in which men live, and this is how the conciliar revolutionaries can “redefine” Original Sin and Special Creation and thus come to put the lower species, plants and inert matter on the plane of equality with the human being. To “redefine” life is to debase man as the zenith of God’s creative work and thus to debase Our Lord, the Incarnate Word, and His Redemptive Act on the wood of the Holy Cross as being nothing other than an expression of “love” that had nothing to do with paying back the debt of Adam’s sin. (A detailed examination of Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI’s careerlong obscuring of the doctrine of Original Sin is appended below.)

“Redefine” Life, Do Away with the General Judgment

One of the numberless lies that have been propagated by the conciliar revolutionaries is that of “universal salvation,” which was the brainchild of the Hegelian named Father Hans Urs von Balthsar, the mentor of Joseph Alois Ratzinger, and received antipapal approbation by Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul II in his “private” book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope. Although the conciliar revolutionaries have been careful about how they state their support for “universal salvation,” the plain fact of the matter is that their actions and words demonstrate that they do not believe that many, if any, people, whether Catholic or non-Catholic, will be lost for all eternity.

As is demonstrated in the appendix below, the “unofficial” Hope for Infants Who Die Without Baptism, which was issued by the International Theological Commission during the anti-pontificate of Ratzinger/Benedict on April 17, 2007, was an endorsement of Ratzinger’s own “private” views. Von Balthasar himself did not believe in the eternity of hell and, as he wrote in Dare We Hope, that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and satan would be “reconciled” in the end. Remember also that none of the conciliar “popes” has exhorted a single non-Catholic to convert, which indicates that they believe these people are not in danger of losing their souls for all eternity in hell.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, for his part, has been mocking of the terrors of both the Particular Judgment and the General Judgment. Consider Bergoglio's remarks he made at his "general audience" address on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, on the Last Judgment:

“When we think of Christ's return and of His final judgement, which will show, up to the very last consequences, the good that each person will have done or omitted to do during his or her earthly life, we realise that we find ourselves before a mystery that overwhelms us, that we cannot even imagine. A mystery that almost instinctively arouses in us a sense of fear, and perhaps even trepidation. However, if we reflect closely on this fact, it cannot but enlarge the heart of a Christian, and constitutes a great reason for consolation and trust”.

Pope Francis explained that “in this respect, the witness of the first Christian communities is very interesting, since their celebrations and prayers were generally accompanied by the exclamation 'Maranatha', an acclamation made up of two Aramaic words which may be understood either as an entreaty: 'Come, Lord!', or as a certainty nurtured by faith: 'Yes, the Lord is coming, the Lord is near'. It is the exclamation in which all of Christian revelation culminates, at the end of the marvellous contemplation offered in the Apocalypse of St. John … in which the Church, bride in the name of all humanity, turns to Christ, her spouse, in the hope of receiving His embrace, full of life and love. If we think of the judgement in this way, all fear and hesitation makes way for expectation and profound joy. It will be the moment in which we will be judged as finally ready to be clothed in the glory of Christ”.

A second reason for trust is offered to us by “the realisation that, at the moment of judgement, we are not left alone. … How good it is to know that, in that situation, we can count on Christ, our advocate before the father, and upon the intercession and benevolence of many of our brothers and sisters who have preceded us on the path of faith ... and who continue to to love us in an indescribable way! The saints already live in the presence of God, in the splendour of His glory, praying for us, for those who still live on earth”.

A third element is offered to us by the Gospel of St. John, when he states that “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him”. “This means, then, that the judgement is already in process, throughout our existence. This judgement is pronounced in every instant in our lives, as reflected in our acceptance in faith of salvation, present and through the work of Christ, or in our incredulity and our consequent self-centredness. Salvation means opening oneself to Jesus. If we are sinners, the Lord forgives us, but we must open ourselves to Jesus' love, which is greater than all things; and opening up means repenting”.

“The Lord Jesus gave Himself, and continues to give Himself for us”, concluded the Holy Father, “to fill us with the grace and the mercy of the Father. We can become in a certain sense our own judges, condemning ourselves to exclusion from communion with God and with our brethren. … therefore, let us never tire of keeping watch over our thoughts and attitudes, so that we might have right now a foretaste of the warmth and splendour of the face of God, which in eternal life we will contemplate in all its fullness”. (We will not be alone at the final judgement.)

One will note here that Jorge Mario Bergoglio believes that God the Father judges us the Last Judgment when it is Christ the King, the Just Judge of the Universe, Who will do so.

Secondly, one will note that Jorge Mario Bergoglio said that the Last Judgment would be based on the good that we had done and the good that we had omitted to do in our life without ever mentioning that one of the reasons for the General Judgment of the living and the dead on the Last Day is for there to be a public manifestation of the justice and mercy in the life of each person, meaning that each one of his sins will be made manifest to see if the good that he done during his live outlived the evil. It is not simply a matter of the "good omitted" but of the evil done.

Longtime readers will indulge me if I refer to Saint Alphonsus de Liguori's Sermon the Last Judgment that has been used on this site on a number of occasions as this great Doctor of the Church and Patron of Moral Theology explained it as follows:

7. "The judgment sat, and the books were opened. ”(Dan. vii. 10.) The books of conscience are opened, and the judgment commences. The Apostle says, that the Lord”will bring to light the hidden things of darkness." (1 Cor. iv. 5.) And, by the mouth of his prophet, Jesus Christ has said: ”I will search Jerusalem with lamps." (Soph. i. 12.) The light of the lamp reveals all that is hidden.

8. ”A judgment," says St. Chrysostom, ”terrible to sinners, but desirable and sweet to the just." (Hom. iii. de Dav.) The last judgment shall fill sinners with terror, but will be a source of joy and sweetness to the elect; for God will then give praise to each one according to his works. (1 Cor. iv. 5.) The Apostle tells us that on that day the just will be raised above the clouds to be united to the angels, and to increase the number of those who pay homage to the Lord. ”We shall be taken up together with them in the clouds to meet Christ, into the air." (I Thess. iv. 16.)

9. Worldlings now regard as fools the saints who led mortified and humble lives; but then they shall confess their own folly, and say: "We fools esteemed their life madness, and their end without honour. Behold how they are numbered among the children of God, and their lot is among the saints." (Wis. v. 4, 5.) In this world, the rich and the noble are called happy; but true happiness consists in a life of sanctity. Rejoice, ye souls who live in tribulation;”our sorrow shall be turned into joy." (John xvi. 20.) In the valley of Josaphat you shall be seated on thrones of glory.

10. But the reprobate, like goats destined for the slaughter, shall be placed on the left, to await their last condemnation. ”Judicii tempus," says St. Chrysostom, ”misericordiam non recipit." On the day of judgment there is no hope of mercy for poor sinners. “Magna," says St. Augustine, "jam est poena peccati, metum et memoriam divini perdidisse judicii." (Serm. xx. de Temp.) The greatest punishment of sin in those who live in enmity with God, is to lose the fear and remembrance of the divine judgment. Continue, continue, says the Apostle, to live obstinately in sin; but in proportion to your obstinacy, you shall have accumulated for the day of judgment a treasure of the wrath of God “But according to thy hardness and impenitent heart , thou treasurest up to thyself wrath against the day of wrath” (Rom ii. 5)

11. Then sinners will not be able to hide themselves but, with insufferable pain, they shall be compelled to appear in judgment. "To lie hid” says St. Anselm, “will be impossible to appear will be intolerable." The devils will perform their office of accusers, and as St. Augustine says, will say to the Judge: “Most just God, declare him to be mine, who was unwilling to be yours. ” The witnesses against the wicked shall be first, their own conscience. "Their conscience bearing witness to them, ”(Rom. ii. 15); secondly, the very walls of the house in which they sinned shall cry out against them”The stone shall cry out of the wall," (Hab. ii 11); thirdly, the Judge himself will say "I am the judge and the witness, saith the Lord." (Jer. xxix 23 ) Hence, according to St. Augustine, "He who is now the witness of .your life, shall be the judge of your cause. ” (Lib. x. de Chord., c. ii.) To Christians particularly he will say: "Woe to thee, Corozain, woe to thee, Bethsaida; for if in Tyre and Sidon had been wrought the miracles that have been wrought in you, they had long ago done penance in sackcloth and ashes”(Matt. xi. 21.) Christians, he will say, if the graces which I have bestowed on you had been given to the Turks or to the Pagans, they would have done penance for their sins; but you have ceased to sin only with your death. He shall then manifest to all men their most hidden crimes. "I will discover thy shame to thy face. ” (Nahum iii. 5.) He will expose to view all their secret impurities, injustices, and cruelties. ”I will set all thy abominations against thee”(Ezech. vii. 3.) Each of the damned shall carry his sins written on his forehead.

12. What excuses can save the wicked on that day? Ah! they can offer no excuses. ”All iniquity shall stop her mouth." (Ps. cvi. 42.) Their very sins shall close the mouth of the reprobate, so that they will not have courage to excuse themselves. They shall pronounce their own condemnation.

Third Point. Sentence of the elect, and of the reprobate

13. St. Bernard says, that the sentence of the elect, and their destiny to eternal glory, shall be first declared, that the pains of the reprobate may be increased by the sight of what they lost. ”Prius pronunciabitur sententia electis ut acrius (reprobi) doleant videntes quid amiserunt." (Ser. viii., in Ps. xc.) Jesus Christ, then, shall first turn to the elect, and with a serene countenance shall say: "Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. ”(Matt. xxv. 34.) He will then bless all the tears shed through sorrow for their sins, and all their good works, their prayers, mortifications, and communions; above all, he will bless for them the pains of his passion and the blood shed for their salvation. And, after these benedictions, the elect, singing alleluias, shall enter Paradise to praise and love God eternity.

14. The Judge shall then turn to the reprobate, and shall pronounce the sentence of their condemnation in these words . ”Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire." (Matt. xxv. 41 ) They shall then be forever accursed, separated from God, and sent to burn for ever in the fire of hell. “And these shall go into everlasting punishment: but the just into life everlasting. ” (Matt. xxv. 46.)

15. After this sentence, the wicked shall, according to St. Ephrem, be compelled to take leave for ever of their relatives, of Paradise, of the saints, and of Mary the divine Mother. "Farewell, ye just! Farewell, O cross I Farewell, Paradise! Farewell, fathers and brothers: we shall never see you again! Farewell, O Mary, mother of God!”(St. Eph. de variis serm. inf.) Then a great pit shall open in the middle of the valley: the unhappy damned shall be cast into it, and shall see those doors shut which shall never again be opened. O accursed sin! to what a miserable end will you one day conduct so many souls redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ. O unhappy souls! for whom is prepared such a melancholy end. But, brethren, have confidence. Jesus Christ is now a Father, and not judge. He is ready to pardon all who repent. Let us then instantly ask pardon from him. (On the General Judgment: Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent, Saint Alphonsus de Liguori. There was also a useful commentary, replete with other quotations, that was posted at Novus Ordo Watch.)

Jorge Mario Bergoglio does not believe this, which is why he has no fear of his own Particular Judgment and its public manifestation on the Last Day at the General Judgment of the living the dead, and it is why he can let fellow Judases such as Vincent Paglia go about the Orwellian business of “re-defining” life. These men do not believe in God, no less the true God of Divine Revelation, and they do not believe that men must suffer in this life or in eternity for their sins. It is well past time for anyone who knows better to pretend that this is anything other than the manifestations of Antichrist’s One World Ecumenical Religion that has nothing do with Catholicism to stop burying their heads in the sands or waiting for some “clear sign” that the state of General Apostasy prophesied by Saint Paul the Apostle is here. How much clearer can it get?

Father Charles Arminjon explained that Protestants and unbelievers (and I count the Modernists among the ranks of unbelievers) reject the Catholic teaching that a personal Antichrist will arise, and hence it is that we see figures of Antichrist at work in the world and the counterfeit church of conciliarism preparing the way for his arrival at this time. Here is a brief snippet of what Father Arminjon wrote in this regard in End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life, the book that helped inspire Therese Martin to apply for entrance into the Carmel of Lisieux:

The world must have an end, and that end will not take place until the Antichrist has appeared.

Protestantism and unbelief reject the individuality of the Antichrist. They consider him to be a mere myth, an allegorical, imaginary person; or else they see this man of sin, foretold by St. Paul, as nothing more than the leader of the anti-christian fight, the chief and messiah of Freemasonry and the sects, raised up in order to bring civilization to its zenith, by liberating it forever from the darkness of superstition – in other words, eliminating all positive religion and every revealed truth from the whole surface of the earth.

Among the truths relating to the end of our destiny in time, there is one that is particularly repugnant to human passions, one that rationalism and free-thinking assail ceaslessly and remorselessly, making it the target of their most astute sophistry and of their most audacious denials. That doctrine – the most glorious and most consoling of all doctrines for our human nature – is the future resurrection of our bodies. Sometimes, as St. Paul found at Athens, unbelieving science seeks to crush the doctrine beneath the weight of its derision and sarcasm; at to her times, as happened at the tribunal of the preator Felix, it turns pale on hearing it mentioned, and feels terror-stricken: Disputante autem ill0 . . . . de judicio futuro, tremfectus Felix respondit . . . . .Vade: tempore autem opportuno accersam te. 9CF. Acts 24-25)

It is clear from this passage, and from many others recurring at various points in the letters of St. Paul, that the dogma of the resurrection of the dead was the favorite and popular subject of the apostle's preaching.

He expounded it boldly in the praetoria, in the synagougues, and in the aeropagus, of the wise men and philosophers of Greece. In the eyes of St. Paul, this doctrine of the future resurrection is the foundation of our hopes, the solution to the mystery of life, the principle, crux, and conclusion of the whole Christian system. Without it, divine and human laws would be devoid of all sanction and spiritual doctrines would be an absurdity. Wisdom would consist solely in living and enjoying like the animals; for, if man is not to live again after death, the just man who fights against his own feelings and checks his passion would be senseless. The martyrs, who suffered for the honor of Christ and let themselves be torn apart by lions in the amphitheater would have been only trouble-makers and freaks.

Once it is taken for granted that the destinies of man are limited within the bounds of the present life, there is no happiness in this world except in the crassest and most brazen materialism. The only true Gospel, the only sound, rational philosophy is that of Epicurus, summed up in the words, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die.” (Father Charles Arminjon, The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life, translated by Susan Conroy and Peter McEnerny. Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 2008, pp. 75-76.)

Behold the crassest and most bold forms of materialism passing out of the mouths of the conciliar revolutionaries.

Behold also the utter indifference on the part of most Catholics who are attached as of yet to the structures of the counter church of conciliarism in the very sadly mistaken believe that they are inside the Barque of Saint Peter when they are in the Synagogue of Antichrist himself.

Today, September 10, 2019, is the Feast of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, a member of the Order of Saint Augustine, who lived most of his life in the Thirteenth Century and died in the year 1305. The readings in Matins in today’s Divine Office describe how Saint Nicholas of Tolentino was so impressed with a sermon on contempt of the world given by an Augstinian monk that he joined the order himself immediately thereafter:

This Nicholas is called Nicholas of Tolentino, because he lived in that town for most part of his life. He was born at St. Angelo, a place near Fermo, in the March of Ancona, about the year 1245. His parents were godly people, and in their desire to have children, vowed and made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Nicholas at Bari, where they were assured of their wish, and therefore gave the name of Nicholas to the son whom they received. From his childhood the lad gave many good signs, but especially as regarded abstinence. In his seventh year, in imitation of his blessed name-sake, he began to fast upon several days in the week, which custom he always kept, and was content with only bread and water.

After he reached man's estate, he enlisted himself in the army of the clergy, and was preferred to a Canonry. One day he chanced to hear a sermon upon contempt of the world delivered by a preacher of the Order of Hermits of St. Augustine, and was so moved by it that he forthwith entered that Order. As a Friar he was most strictly observant of that way of life. He subdued his body with rough clothing, stripes, and an iron chain. He never ate meat, and seldom any relish to his meals. And he was a burning and shining light of love, lowliness, long-suffering, and all other graces.

He persisted in constant and earnest prayer, notwithstanding many troubles from the assaults of Satan, who sometimes even flogged him. Every night for six months before his death he heard Angels singing with such sweetness, that it was a fore-taste of the happiness of heaven, and he would often repeat the words of the Apostle I have a desire to depart and to be with Christ Phil. i. 23. Lastly, he foretold to his brethren the day of his death, which was the 10th day of September 1306. After his death also he was famous for miracles, and when due investigation had been made thereof, Pope Eugene IV enrolled his name among those of the Saints. (Matins, Divine Office, Feast of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, September 10.)

I don’t know about you, but I know I fall far from the spirit of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, and I am very much aware of how much I have offended God by means of my sins and thus of the need to make even more reparation for them than I am doing. To advance in sanctity, however, we must do more than we are doing, and the example of austerity and mortification practiced by Saint Nicholas of Tolentino should inspire us to increase our voluntary sacrifices and to accept the penances of the present moment with peace, tranquility, joy and thanksgiving.

Mindful that this is the third day of the Octave of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., wrote the following prayer in honor of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino:

Good and faithful servant, thou hast entered into the joy of the Lord. He has broken thy bonds; and from heaven, where thou art now reigning, thou repeatest to us those worlds which determined the sanctity of thy life on earth: ‘Love not the world, nor the things that are in the world. For the world passeth away, and the concupiscence thereof.’ How much a man thus forgetful of earth can do for his fellow-men is evinced by the gift thou didst receive of solacing all the miseries around thee, and succouring the souls in purgatory. The successor of St. Peter was not deceived, when, in ranking thee among the saints, he counted on thy power in heaven to bring back society from its long continued state of disturbance to the paths of peace. May that word of thy beloved disciple which thou has just echoed to us, sink into our souls as a seed of salvation, and there yield the fruits that it produced in thee: detachment from all temporal things and a longing for eternal realities; that humble simplicity of the soul’s eye which makes life a peaceful journey towards God; and lastly, that purity, which made thee the friend of angels and the favourite of Mary. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Volume 14, Time after Pentecost, Book V, pp. 186-187.)

As I note so frequently, we cannot permit ourselves to live in states of agitation caused by the prevalence of error in the world and in a false church whose officials dress up as Catholic “bishops” and “priests” while evangelizing a false gospel of pantheistic globalism.

The final victory belongs to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and we simply need to lift high the Holy Cross of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, in this time of apostasy and betrayal as we seek to render unto Him through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart whatever good we do and the evil that we must endure to be counted with Saint Nicholas of Tolentino as among the saints in Heaven.

Pray the Rosary daily!

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, pray for us.

Appendix

Orthodox Heterodoxy

December 18, 2008

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has demonstrated throughout the nearly fifty-seven and one-half years of his priestly life that he has no true sense of the honor and glory and majesty of the Most Holy Trinity. Lacking such a sense of the honor and majesty and glory of God, Ratzinger/Benedict has no true sense of the horror of personal sin. As has been noted on this site many times in the past, Ratzinger/Benedict cannot have this sense of horror for personal sin as he, objectively speaking, commits Mortal Sin after Mortal Sin by violating the First Commandment as he enters into mosques and synagogues and treats these dens of the devil as "holy" places and as he has esteemed the symbols of false religions with his own priestly hands and praised their nonexistent ability to "contribute" to the common good within nations and to "peace" among them.

In addition to the passages from Joseph Ratzinger's 1995 book, Understanding the Story of the Creation and the Fall, quoted by James Larson in The Point of Departure, that demonstrate his belief in the condemned Modernist proposition of the "essentialization of the faith," there are the following telling answers provided by then Joseph "Cardinal" Ratzinger upon the release of his 2001 book, God and the World, wherein the prefect of the conciliar Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith expresses a benign, if not blase, attitude about the Mortal Sins committed by those who go to Mass only once a year or so, and where he once again expresses his support for the heterodox formula whereby various dogmatic pronouncements, each of which was written under the infallible guidance of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, are considered according to their "essential" and "non-essential" elements.

The interview will be presented here, interspersed with my own comments:

1 October-2001 -- ZENIT.org News Agency

"Above All, We Should Be Missionaries"

VATICAN CITY, (ZENIT.org-Avvenire).- Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has a blunt message for Catholics today. "We cannot calmly accept the rest of humanity falling back again into paganism," says the prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in "God and the World," the new book-interview he granted German journalist Peter Seewald. St. Paul´s in Italy recently published the book. Following are some of the book´s questions and answers that were highlighted by the Italian newspaper Avvenire.

Q: Many years ago, you spoke in prophetic terms about the Church of the future. At the time you said, "it will be reduced in its dimensions, it will be necessary to start again. However, from this test a Church would emerge that will have been strengthened by the process of simplification it experienced, by its renewed capacity to look within itself." What are the prospects that await us in Europe?

Cardinal Ratzinger: To begin with, the Church "will be numerically reduced." When I made this affirmation, I was overwhelmed with reproaches of pessimism.

And today, when all prohibitions seem obsolete, among them those that refer to what has been called pessimism and which, often, is nothing other than healthy realism, increasingly more [people] admit the decrease in the percentage of baptized Christians in today´s Europe: in a city like Magdeburg, Christians are only 8% of the total population, including all Christian denominations. Statistical data shows irrefutable tendencies. In this connection, in certain cultural areas, there is a reduction in the possibility of identification between people and Church. We must take note, with simplicity and realism. The mass Church may be something lovely, but it is not necessarily the Church´s only way of being. The Church of the first three centuries was small, without being, by this fact, a sectarian community. On the contrary, it was not closed in on itself, but felt a great responsibility in regard to the poor, the sick-in regard to all. There was room in its heart for all those nourished by a monotheist faith, in search of a promise. This awareness of not being a closed club, but of being open to the totality of the community, has always been a constant component of the Church. The process of numerical reduction, which we are experiencing today, will also have to be addressed precisely by exploring new ways of openness to the outside, of new ways of participation by those who are outside the community of believers. I have nothing against people who, though they never enter a church during the year, go to Christmas midnight Mass, or go on the occasion of some other celebration, because this is also a way of coming close to the light. Therefore, there must be different forms of involvement and participation. (On the Future of Christianity - Cardinal Ratzinger)

This first answer is a mass of contradiction, historical disinformation and an abject refusal to understand the horror of each Mortal Sin committed by baptized Catholics who deliberately absent themselves from Holy Mass on Sundays, leaving aside for present purposes the simple fact that the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism is not an offering of Holy Mass.

The then "Cardinal" Ratzinger extolled the reduction of numbers of Catholics, a phenomenon that is the direct result of the conciliar revolution he helped to engineer as a peritus at the "Second" Vatican Council, and compared the current situation with that of the first centuries of the Church when the Faith was practiced more frequently than not in the catacombs. The analogy is a false one, however, as the Church was in her infancy then. She was growing. The conciliarists have put the Mystical Body of Christ that is the Church Militant on earth through her Passion, Death and Burial.

They, the conciliar revolutionaries, have driven large numbers of people out of the Church and into the waiting arms of evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant sects by means of the Novus Ordo and by means of its own revolutionary "reconciliation" with the errors of Modernity that have permitted, at least a on de facto basis, wholesale denials of dogmas contained in the Deposit of Faith to be the norm in conciliar "educational" institutions and all too frequently from the pulpits in Catholic parishes now under conciliar control. The syncretism practiced by the conciliar "pontiffs" and their "bishops have bewildered many Catholics to the point that some of them have become full-time practitioners of false religions, including those of "Eastern mysticism," while others have quit the practice of the Faith altogether. It is thus a little cheeky for a principal architect of the conciliar revolution to consider a "reduction" in the number of Catholics who practice the Faith to be a sign of needing "different forms of involvement and participation."

Furthermore, God does indeed want large numbers of people practicing the Catholic Faith. He wants everyone on the face of this earth to be a member in good standing of the Catholic Church. He has created each person to know, love and serve Him through the Catholic Church so that they can die in a state of Sanctifying Grace and thus be happy with Him for all eternity in Heaven. Numbers matter to God. They matter very much, as I discussed in an article fifty-two months ago (about fifteen months before I began to take the steps that would lead me to the logical conclusion that I had been avoiding for so long: that those who defect from the Faith cannot hold ecclesiastical office in the Catholic Church legitimately), By the Numbers and by God's Book: Cardinal Ratzinger is Just Dead Wrong. God is not pleased when apostates who claim to be acting in His Holy Name drive large numbers of Catholics out of the Church and as they engage in a "new evangelization" that is content to leave the lost sheep in false religions lost to the points of their dying breaths.

Worse yet, to have "nothing against people who, though they never enter a church during the year, go to Christmas midnight Mass, or go on the occasion of some other celebration" is to denigrate the seriousness of the sins committed against the Third Commandment by these Catholics. Joseph Ratzinger cannot seem to muster any sense of horror for what human sins caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer during His Passion and Death and how they caused those Seven Swords of Sorrow to be thrust through and through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. As noted above, he has absolutely no sense of horror at the sins he commits as he esteems the symbols of false religions. He has projected onto God his own sanguine acceptance of these false religions as being pleasing to God simply because they exist, thereby signifying, Ratzinger believes, God's expressed, ordained Will for them to exist. This is how he, Ratzinger, views those who choose to violate the Third Commandment. Such people are still "loved" by God, Who is "happy" that they make the "effort" to get to Mass once a year or so.

Such a lack of the sensus Catholicus is itself a sign of an apostate mind and heart. At the heart of Ratzinger/Benedict's many apostasies is his rejection of the nature of dogmatic truth as defined by the authority of the Catholic Church, starting with his Modernist belief that the particular expressions of dogmatic formulae are conditioned by the historical circumstances in which they were made, thus blaspheming the infallible work of God the Holy Ghost. This Modernist view of dogmatic truth, which has been critiqued on this site endlessly in the past few years, was on display in the interview that was published on Zenit on October 1, 2001:

Q: However, can the Church really renounce its aspiration to be a Church of the majority?

Cardinal Ratzinger: We must take note of the decrease in our lines but, likewise, we must continue to be an open Church. The Church cannot be a closed, self-sufficient group.

Above all, we should be missionaries, in the sense of proposing again to society those values that are the foundation of the constitutive form that society has given itself, and which are at the base of the possibility to build a really human social community. The Church will continue to propose the great universal human values. Because, if law no longer has common moral foundations, it collapses insofar as it is law. From this point of view, the Church has a universal responsibility. As the Pope says, missionary responsibility means, precisely, to really attempt a new evangelization. We cannot calmly accept the rest of humanity falling back again into paganism. We must find the way to take the Gospel, also, to nonbelievers. The Church must tap all her creativity so that the living force of the Gospel will not be extinguished.

Q: What changes will the Church undergo?

Cardinal Ratzinger: I think we will have to be very cautious when it comes to the risk of forecasts, because historical development has always produced many surprises. Futurology often crashes.

For example, no one risked forecasting the fall of the Communist regimes. World society will change profoundly, but we are still not in a position to predict what the numerical decrease of the Western world will imply, which is still dominant, what Europe´s new face will be like, given the migratory currents, what civilization, and what social forms will be imposed. What is clear, in any event, is the different composition of the potential on which the Western Church will be sustained. What is most important, in my opinion, is to look at the "essence," to use an expression of Romano Guardini. It is necessary to avoid elaborating fantastic pre-constructions of something that could manifest itself very differently and that we cannot prefabricate in the meanderings of our brain, but to concentrate on the essential, which later might find new ways of incarnating itself. A process of simplification is important, which will enable us to distinguish between what is the master beam of our doctrine, of our faith, what is of perennial value in it. It is important to propose again the great underlying constants in their fundamental components, the questions on God, salvation, hope, life, especially what has a basic ethical value. (On the Future of Christianity - Cardinal Ratzinger)

There is, as I noted in Spotless Blessed Mother, Spotless Mother Church, no distinction between "essential" or "fundamental" parts and "non-essential" or "non-fundamental" parts of doctrine. Pope Leo XIII made it clear in Satis Cognitum that one either accepts the Catholic Faith in its entirety or one is not a Catholic. It is that simple:

The Church, founded on these principles and mindful of her office, has done nothing with greater zeal and endeavour than she has displayed in guarding the integrity of the faith. Hence she regarded as rebels and expelled from the ranks of her children all who held beliefs on any point of doctrine different from her own. The Arians, the Montanists, the Novatians, the Quartodecimans, the Eutychians, did not certainly reject all Catholic doctrine: they abandoned only a certain portion of it. Still who does not know that they were declared heretics and banished from the bosom of the Church? In like manner were condemned all authors of heretical tenets who followed them in subsequent ages. "There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by our Lord and handed down by Apostolic tradition" (Auctor Tract. de Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos).

The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium. Epiphanius, Augustine, Theodore :, drew up a long list of the heresies of their times. St. Augustine notes that other heresies may spring up, to a single one of which, should any one give his assent, he is by the very fact cut off from Catholic unity. "No one who merely disbelieves in all (these heresies) can for that reason regard himself as a Catholic or call himself one. For there may be or may arise some other heresies, which are not set out in this work of ours, and, if any one holds to one single one of these he is not a Catholic" (S. Augustinus, De Haeresibus, n. 88). (Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896.)

There is no distinction between "fundamental/essential" and "non-fundamental/non-essential" "truths," as Pope Pius XI noted quite explicitly in Mortalium Animos, January 6, 1928:

For this reason it is that all who are truly Christ's believe, for example, the Conception of the Mother of God without stain of original sin with the same faith as they believe the mystery of the August Trinity, and the Incarnation of our Lord just as they do the infallible teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff, according to the sense in which it was defined by the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. Are these truths not equally certain, or not equally to be believed, because the Church has solemnly sanctioned and defined them, some in one age and some in another, even in those times immediately before our own? Has not God revealed them all? For the teaching authority of the Church, which in the divine wisdom was constituted on earth in order that revealed doctrines might remain intact for ever, and that they might be brought with ease and security to the knowledge of men, and which is daily exercised through the Roman Pontiff and the Bishops who are in communion with him, has also the office of defining, when it sees fit, any truth with solemn rites and decrees, whenever this is necessary either to oppose the errors or the attacks of heretics, or more clearly and in greater detail to stamp the minds of the faithful with the articles of sacred doctrine which have been explained. But in the use of this extraordinary teaching authority no newly invented matter is brought in, nor is anything new added to the number of those truths which are at least implicitly contained in the deposit of Revelation, divinely handed down to the Church: only those which are made clear which perhaps may still seem obscure to some, or that which some have previously called into question is declared to be of faith. (Pope Pius XI, Mortalium Animos, January 6, 1928.)

A Catholic must hold to each and every dogmatic pronouncement made by the authority of the Catholic Church in exactly the same language and with the exact sense by which that pronouncement was made:

Hence, that meaning of the sacred dogmata is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by Holy Mother Church, and there must never be an abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.... If anyone says that it is possible that at some given time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmata propounded by the Church which is different from that which the Church has always understood and understands: let him be anathema. [Vatican Council, April 24, 1870.]

Hence it is quite impossible [the Modernists assert] to maintain that they [dogmatic statements] absolutely contain the truth: for, in so far as they are symbols, they are the images of truth, and so must be adapted to the religious sense in its relation to man; and as instruments, they are the vehicles of truth, and must therefore in their turn be adapted to man in his relation to the religious sense. But the object of the religious sense, as something contained in the absolute, possesses an infinite variety of aspects, of which now one, now another, may present itself. In like manner he who believes can avail himself of varying conditions. Consequently, the formulas which we call dogma must be subject to these vicissitudes, and are, therefore, liable to change. Thus the way is open to the intrinsic evolution of dogma. Here we have an immense structure of sophisms which ruin and wreck all religion.

It is thus, Venerable Brethren, that for the Modernists, whether as authors or propagandists, there is to be nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church. Nor, indeed, are they without forerunners in their doctrines, for it was of these that Our predecessor Pius IX wrote: "These enemies of divine revelation extol human progress to the skies, and with rash and sacrilegious daring would have it introduced into the Catholic religion as if this religion were not the work of God but of man, or some kind of philosophical discovery susceptible of perfection by human efforts." On the subject of revelation and dogma in particular, the doctrine of the Modernists offers nothing new. We find it condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX, where it is enunciated in these terms: ''Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the progress of human reason"; and condemned still more solemnly in the Vatican Council: ''The doctrine of the faith which God has revealed has not been proposed to human intelligences to be perfected by them as if it were a philosophical system, but as a divine deposit entrusted to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence also that sense of the sacred dogmas is to be perpetually retained which our Holy Mother the Church has once declared, nor is this sense ever to be abandoned on plea or pretext of a more profound comprehension of the truth." Nor is the development of our knowledge, even concerning the faith, barred by this pronouncement; on the contrary, it is supported and maintained. For the same Council continues: "Let intelligence and science and wisdom, therefore, increase and progress abundantly and vigorously in individuals, and in the mass, in the believer and in the whole Church, throughout the ages and the centuries -- but only in its own kind, that is, according to the same dogma, the same sense, the same acceptation." (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Fourthly, I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the orthodox Fathers in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport. Therefore, I entirely reject the heretical' misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously. . . .

Finally, I declare that I am completely opposed to the error of the modernists who hold that there is nothing divine in sacred tradition; or what is far worse, say that there is, but in a pantheistic sense, with the result that there would remain nothing but this plain simple fact-one to be put on a par with the ordinary facts of history-the fact, namely, that a group of men by their own labor, skill, and talent have continued through subsequent ages a school begun by Christ and his apostles. I firmly hold, then, and shall hold to my dying breath the belief of the Fathers in the charism of truth, which certainly is, was, and always will be in the succession of the episcopacy from the apostles. The purpose of this is, then, not that dogma may be tailored according to what seems better and more suited to the culture of each age; rather, that the absolute and immutable truth preached by the apostles from the beginning may never be believed to be different, may never be understood in any other way.

I promise that I shall keep all these articles faithfully, entirely, and sincerely, and guard them inviolate, in no way deviating from them in teaching or in any way in word or in writing. Thus I promise, this I swear, so help me God. (Pope Saint Pius X, The Oath Against Modernism, September 1, 1910.)

Rejecting the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, Scholasticism, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, a disciple of and apologist for the neo-Modernism called the "New Theology," must "re-think" those dogmatic formulations which he believes have "outlived their usefulness," especially insofar as the goals of false ecumenism are concerned. Of particular interest to Ratzinger/Benedict is to "strip away," if you will, the filter of Scholasticism that has "corrupted" a "true" understanding of Sacred Scripture and of the Fathers of the Church and produced a "one-sided," "narrow" and "rigid" view of dogmas pronounced at various councils in the Second Millennium at which the "fathers" from the heretical and schismatic Orthodox Church did not participate. He is now, as Benedict XVI, feverishly attempting to give his "papal" imprimatur to all of his past defections from the Catholic Faith.

Ratzinger/Benedict has given his "papal" imprimatur to his heterodox view of Original Sin. Here is the text of the "general audience" talk he gave on Wednesday, December 3, 2008:

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

In today's catechesis we reflect on the relationship between Adam and Christ, delineated by St. Paul in the well-known page of the Letter to the Romans (5:12-21), in which he instructs the Church on the essential lines of the doctrine of original sin. In fact, already in the First Letter to the Corinthians, referring to faith in the resurrection, Paul introduced the encounter between our forefather and Christ: "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive ... The first man Adam became a living being"; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit" (1 Corinthians 15:22.45). With Romans 5:12-21, the encounter between Christ and Adam is more articulated and illuminating: Paul reviews the history of salvation from Adam to the Law and from the latter to Christ. Adam is not at the center of the scene with the consequences of sin on humanity, but Jesus Christ and grace that, through him, was poured in abundance on humanity. The repetition of "all the more" in regard to Christ underlines how the gift received in Him surpasses by far Adam's sin and the consequences brought on mankind, so that Paul can add at the end: "But where sin increased, grace abounded all the more" (Romans 5:20). Hence, the encounter Paul traces between Adam and Christ brings to light the inferiority of the first man vis-à-vis the prevalence of the second.

On the other hand, it is appropriate to make evident the incommensurable gift of grace in Christ that Paul attributes to Adam's sin: It could be said that if it were not to demonstrate the centrality of grace, he would not have hesitated to discuss sin that "came into the world through one man and death through sin" (Romans 5:12). Because of this if, in the faith of the Church the awareness matured of the dogma of original sin it is because it is indissolubly connected with the other dogma, that of salvation and freedom in Christ. The consequence of this is that we must never treat the sin of Adam and of humanity in a way that is detached from the salvific context, namely, without understanding it on the horizon of justification in Christ.

However, as men of today we must ask ourselves: What is this original sin? What does St. Paul teach, what does the Church teach? Is this doctrine still tenable today? Many think that, in the light of the history of evolution, there is no longer a place for the doctrine of a first sin, which then spread to the whole history of humanity. And, consequently, the question of the Resurrection and of the Redeemer would also lose its foundation. So, does original sin exist or not? To be able to respond we must distinguish two aspects of the doctrine on original sin. There is an empirical aspect, namely, a concrete, visible, I would say tangible reality for all, and a mysterious aspect, regarding the ontological foundation of this fact. The empirical fact is that there is a contradiction in our being. On one hand, every man knows that he must do good and he profoundly wants to do so. However, at the same time, he also feels the other impulse to do the contrary, to follow the path of egoism, violence, of doing only what pleases him even while knowing that he is acting against the good, against God and against his neighbor. In his Letter to the Romans Saint Paul expressed this contradiction in our being thus: "I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do" (7:18-19). This interior contradiction of our being is not a theory. Each one of us experiences it every day. And above all we always see around us the prevalence of this second will. Suffice it to think of the daily news on injustice, violence, falsehood, lust. We see it every day: It is a fact.

As a consequence of this power of evil in our souls, a filthy river has developed in history, which poisons the geography of human history. The great French thinker Blaise Pascal spoke of a "second nature," which is superimposed on our original good nature. This "second nature" makes evil appear as normal for man. Thus even the usual expression: "this is human" has a double meaning. "This is human" might mean: This man is good, he really acts as a man should act. However, "this is human" might also mean falsehood: Evil is normal, it is human. Evil seems to have become a second nature. This contradiction of the human being, of our history should provoke, and provokes even today, the desire for redemption. And, in fact, the desire that the world be changed and the promise that a world be created of justice, peace, goodness is present everywhere: In politics, for example, all speak of this need to change the world, to create a more just world. It is precisely this expression of the desire that there be a liberation from the contradiction we experience in ourselves.

Hence, the fact of the power of evil in the human heart and in human history is undeniable. The question is: How is this evil explained? In the history of thought, except for the Christian faith, there is a principal model of explanation, with several variations. This model says: being itself is contradictory, it bears within it good and evil. In ancient times this idea implied the opinion that two equally original principles existed: a good principle and an evil principle. This dualism was insurmountable; the two principles are on the same level, hence there will always be, from the origin of being, this contradiction. The contradiction of our being, therefore, reflects only the contrariety of two divine principles, so to speak. In the evolutionist, atheist version of the world the same vision returns in a new way. Even if, in such a concession, the vision of being is monistic, it is implied that being as such from the beginning bears in itself evil and good. Being itself is not simply good, but open to good and evil. Evil is equally original as good, and human history would develop only the model already present in the whole of the preceding evolution. That which we Christians call original sin is in reality only the mixed character of being, a mixture of good and evil, according to this theory, it belonged to the very fabric of being. Deep down, it is a despairing vision: If it is so, evil is invincible. In the end, only self-interest matters. And every progress would necessarily have to be paid for with a river of evil and whoever wishes to serve progress must accept to pay this price. Politics, deep down, is based precisely on these premises: And we see the effects. This modern thought can, in the end, only create sadness and cynicism.

And so we ask again: What does faith say, as witnessed by St. Paul? As a first point, it confirms the fact of the competition between the two natures, the fact of this evil whose shadow weighs on the whole of creation. We heard Chapter 7 of the Letter to the Romans, we can add Chapter 8. Evil simply exists. As explanation, in contrast with the dualisms and monisms that we considered briefly and found desolating, faith tells us: There are two mysteries of light and one mystery of night, which is, however, shrouded by the mysteries of light. The first mystery of light is this: Faith tells us that there are not two principles, one good and one evil, but only one principle, the creator God, and this principle is good, only good, without a shadow of evil. As well, being is not a mixture of good and evil; being as such is good and because of this it is good to be, it is good to live. This is the happy proclamation of faith: there is only one good source, the Creator. And because of this, to live is good, it is a good thing to be a man, a woman, life is good. Then a mystery of darkness, of night follows. Evil does not come from the source of being itself, it is not equally original. Evil comes from a created liberty, from an abused liberty.

How was this possible, how did it happen? This remains obscure. Evil is not logical. Only God and the good are logical, are light. Evil remains mysterious. It has been presented in great images, as does chapter 3 of Genesis, with the vision of two trees, of the serpent, of sinful man. A great image that makes us guess, but it cannot explain how much in itself is illogical. We can guess, not explain; nor can we recount it as a fact next to another, because it is a more profound reality. It remains a mystery of darkness, of night. However, a mystery of light is immediately added. Evil comes from a subordinate source. With his light, God is stronger and, because of this, evil can be overcome. Therefore, the creature, man, is curable.; but if evil comes only from a subordinate source, it remains true that man is curable. And the Book of Wisdom says: "the creatures of the world are wholesome" (1:14).

And finally, the last point, man is not only curable, he is in fact cured. God has introduced healing. He entered in person into history. To the permanent source of evil he has opposed a source of pure good. Christ crucified and risen, the new Adam, opposed the filthy river of evil with a river of light. And this river is present in history: We see the saints, the great saints but also the humble saints, the simple faithful. We see that the river of light that comes from Christ is present, is strong.

Brothers and sisters, it is the time of Advent. In the language of the Church the word Advent has two meanings: presence and expectation. Presence: The light is present, Christ is the new Adam, he is with us and in our midst. The light already shines and we must open the eyes of the heart to see the light and to enter the river of light. Above all to be grateful for the fact that God himself has entered history as new source of goodness. But Advent also means expectation. The dark night of evil is still strong. And that is why we pray in Advent with the ancient people of God: "Rorate caeli desuper." And we pray with insistence: Come Jesus; come, give force to light and goodness; come where falsehood, ignorance of God, violence and injustice dominate; come, Lord Jesus, give force to the good of the world and help us to be bearers of your light, agents of peace, witnesses of truth. Come Lord Jesus! (On Christ, the New Adam.)

Once again, good readers, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI makes complex what is most straight-forward: the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin. Ratzinger/Benedict has spent a good deal of his priestly life making murky and imprecise what has been defined very precisely by the teaching authority of the Catholic Church. One can see that his discussion of Original Sin on December 3, 2008, is almost identical to what he wrote in Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall in 1995:

“In the story that we are considering [Ch. 3 of Genesis], still a further characteristic of sin is described. Sin is not spoken of in general as an abstract possibility but as a deed, as the sin of a particular person, Adam, who stands at the origin of humankind and with whom the history of sin begins. The account tells us that sin begets sin, and that therefore all the sins of history are interlinked. Theology refers to this state of affairs by the certainly misleading and imprecise term ‘original sin’. What does this mean? Nothing seems to us today to be stranger or, indeed, more absurd than to insist upon original sin, since, according to our way of thinking, guilt can only be something very personal, and since God does not run a concentration camp, in which one’s relatives are imprisoned because he is a liberating God of love, who calls each one by name. What does original sin mean, then, when we interpret it correctly?

"Finding an answer to this requires nothing less than trying to understand the human person better. It must once again be stressed that no human being is closed in upon himself or herself and that no one can live of or for himself or herself alone. We receive our life not only at the moment of birth but every day from without – from others who are not ourselves but who nonetheless somehow pertain to us. Human beings have their selves not only in themselves but also outside of themselves: they live in those whom they love and in those who love them and to whom they are ‘present.’ Human beings are relational, and they possess their lives – themselves – only by way of relationship. I alone am not myself, but only in and with you am I myself. To be truly a human being means to be related in love, to be of and for. But sin means the damaging or the destruction of relationality. Sin is a rejection of relationality because it wants to make the human being a god. Sin is loss of relationship, disturbance of relationship, and therefore it is not restricted to the individual. When I destroy a relationship, then this event – sin – touches the other person involved in the relationship. Consequently sin is always an offense that touches others, that alters the world and damages it. To the extent that this is true, when the network of human relationships is damaged from the very beginning, then every human being enters into a world that is marked by relational damage. At the very moment that a person begins human existence, which is a good, he or she is confronted by a sin- damaged world. Each of us enters into a situation in which relationality has been hurt. Consequently each person is, from the very start, damaged in relationships and does not engage in them as he or she ought. Sin pursues the human being, and he or she capitulates to it.” (Joseph Ratzinger, Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall, pp. 71-73, quoted in James Larson's The Point of Departure).

First of all, I would suggest that we might search 2,000 years of history and never find another statement so clearly and profoundly heretical made by a member of the Church in as high a position as that occupied by Cardinal Ratzinger. What Cardinal Ratzinger here denies, of course, is the dogma of the faith that original sin is passed down from Adam to all men through generation. Cardinal Ratzinger considers such a view of sin misleading and imprecise and, in fact, ridicules it as stemming from a view of God which sees Him as the Commandant of a Consecration Camp Who imprisons one’s relatives just because of the fact that they share a common descent. In so doing, of course, he is directly contradicting Scripture and the clearly defined teaching of the Church. (James Larson, The Point of Departure; please do read Mr. Larson's superb article in its entirety as it focuses on Ratzinger's view that " since our Faith is one of ongoing relationship, and not fundamentally a matter of God’s Immutable Being (and the truth of our nature created in the image of God), virtually everything else must also be subject to re-interpretation and change.")

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has never repudiated this. Indeed, he is reasserting this in his capacity as the head of the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

Misleading?

Imprecise?

What is misleading or imprecise about the term "Original Sin"?

Did the Fathers of the Council of Trent have any difficulty defining this term precisely?

Ratzinger/Benedict's December 3, 2008, "general audience" address makes of the Creation account recorded in Chapter Three of The Book of Genesis nothing more than "images" containing a "vision" of two trees. This is pretty standard fare for a Modernist. It couldn't possibly have been the case that Eve, the first woman, actually was tempted by a serpent and then ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil from which she and her husband had been forbidden to eat by God Himself. It couldn't possibly have been the case that Adam, in order to please his wife rather than God, also ate of the the same fruit and incurred the penalty upon his immortal soul that has been transmitted to every individual human being save Our Blessed Mother herself ever since: Original Sin. The Creation account, according to Ratzinger/Benedict, is merely one of "images" that contain a "vision."

A Catholic discoursing on the doctrine of Original Sin would have mentioned that Saint Paul's Epistle to the Romans was understood perfectly by the Council of Trent, which did, after all, meet under the infallible guidance of God the Holy Ghost, when it pronounced the following:

That our Catholic faith, without which it is impossible to please God, may, errors being purged away, continue in its own perfect and spotless integrity, and that the Christian people may not be carried about with every wind of doctrine; whereas that old serpent, the perpetual enemy of mankind, amongst the very many evils with which the Church of God is in these our times troubled, has also stirred up not only new, but even old, dissensions touching original sin, and the remedy thereof; the sacred and holy, ecumenical and general Synod of Trent,--lawfully assembled in the Holy Ghost, the three same legates of the Apostolic See presiding therein,--wishing now to come to the reclaiming of the erring, and the confirming of the wavering,--following the testimonies of the sacred Scriptures, of the holy Fathers, of the most approved councils, and the judgment and consent of the Church itself, ordains, confesses, and declares these things touching the said original sin:

If any one does not confess that the first man, Adam, when he had transgressed the commandment of God in Paradise, immediately lost the holiness and justice wherein he had been constituted; and that he incurred, through the offence of that prevarication, the wrath and indignation of God, and consequently death, with which God had previously threatened him, and, together with death, captivity under his power who thenceforth had the empire of death, that is to say, the devil, and that the entire Adam, through that offence of prevarication, was changed, in body and soul, for the worse; let him be anathema.
If any one asserts, that the prevarication of Adam injured himself alone, and not his posterity; and that the holiness and justice, received of God, which he lost, he lost for himself alone, and not for us also; or that he, being defiled by the sin of disobedience, has only transfused death, and pains of the body, into the whole human race, but not sin also, which is the death of the soul; let him be anathema:--whereas he contradicts the apostle who says; By one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death, and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned.
If any one asserts, that this sin of Adam,--which in its origin is one, and being transfused into all by propagation, not by imitation, is in each one as his own, --is taken away either by the powers of human nature, or by any other remedy than the merit of the one mediator, our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath reconciled us to God in his own blood, made unto us justice, sanctification, and redemption; or if he denies that the said merit of Jesus Christ is applied, both to adults and to infants, by the sacrament of baptism rightly administered in the form of the church; let him be anathema: For there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved. Whence that voice; Behold the lamb of God behold him who taketh away the sins of the world; and that other; As many as have been baptized, have put on Christ.
If any one denies, that infants, newly born from their mothers' wombs, even though they be sprung from baptized parents, are to be baptized; or says that they are baptized indeed for the remission of sins, but that they derive nothing of original sin from Adam, which has need of being expiated by the laver of regeneration for the obtaining life everlasting,--whence it follows as a consequence, that in them the form of baptism, for the remission of sins, is understood to be not true, but false, --let him be anathema. For that which the apostle has said, By one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death, and so death passed upon all men in whom all have sinned, is not to be understood otherwise than as the Catholic Church spread everywhere hath always understood it. For, by reason of this rule of faith, from a tradition of the apostles, even infants, who could not as yet commit any sin of themselves, are for this cause truly baptized for the remission of sins, that in them that may be cleansed away by regeneration, which they have contracted by generation. For, unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.
If any one denies, that, by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is conferred in baptism, the guilt of original sin is remitted; or even asserts that the whole of that which has the true and proper nature of sin is not taken away; but says that it is only raised, or not imputed; let him be anathema. For, in those who are born again, there is nothing that God hates; because, There is no condemnation to those who are truly buried together with Christ by baptism into death; who walk not according to the flesh, but, putting off the old man, and putting on the new who is created according to God, are made innocent, immaculate, pure, harmless, and beloved of God, heirs indeed of God, but joint heirs with Christ; so that there is nothing whatever to retard their entrance into heaven. But this holy synod confesses and is sensible, that in the baptized there remains concupiscence, or an incentive (to sin); which, whereas it is left for our exercise, cannot injure those who consent not, but resist manfully by the grace of Jesus Christ; yea, he who shall have striven lawfully shall be crowned. This concupiscence, which the apostle sometimes calls sin, the holy Synod declares that the Catholic Church has never understood it to be called sin, as being truly and properly sin in those born again, but because it is of sin, and inclines to sin.

This same holy Synod doth nevertheless declare, that it is not its intention to include in this decree, where original sin is treated of, the blessed and immaculate Virgin Mary, the mother of God; but that the constitutions of Pope Sixtus IV., of happy memory, are to be observed, under the pains contained in the said constitutions, which it renews. (Council of Trent, The Fifth Session, June 17, 1546.)

What need is there to make confusing what has been made clear by the Council of Trent? As will be shown below, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is doing this for a very specific reason, one that has nothing whatsoever to do with a defense of the Catholic Faith.

Ratzinger/Benedict never once mentioned any of the specific, defined consequences that human beings suffer as a result of Original Sin: the darkened intellect, the weakened will and the overthrow of the delicate balance between man's higher, rational faculties and his lower, sensual passions. He never once mentioned Baptism administered by the Catholic Church as the normal and ordinary means by which Original Sin is flooded out of our souls and Baptismal Innocence enters into them with the very inner life of the Most Blessed Trinity by means of Sanctifying Grace. Ratzinger/Benedict spoke in vague terms about Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as the New Adam, which He most certainly is, course, but without explaining that Original Sin and its guilt exists in every soul prior to Baptism, although he discussed Baptism in his December 10, 2008, "general audience" address without discussing the effects of Original Sin on the soul.

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI does not believe in that men by their nature have fallen as a result of Original Sin. He believes in the corruption of "history" and "relationships," not the fallen nature of individual men. He is most clever in how he discusses this subject, which is why he speaks in vague generalities without mentioning specific doctrinal pronouncements that he rejects.

One does not need to be a latter day Perry Mason or Chief Robert T. Ironside, however, to understand that consistent refusal to speak in the clear and precise language of the Catholic Church is no accident. It is part and parcel of Ratzinger/Benedict's New Theology and his rejection of the "clarity" of Scholasticism. And he has given us clues, such as those contained in one of those "unofficial" conciliar documents that "bind" no one, of course, but wind up convincing large numbers of Catholics attached to the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism that the "unofficial" document is indeed most "official" and represents the mind of the Catholic Church, that he does not believe that children who die before receiving the Sacrament of Baptism suffer because of the guilt of Adam's sin.

Apart from his own books, one of the documents that provides a key to Ratzinger/Benedict's heretical views on Original Sin is The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised, which was issued by the International Theological Commission, a subsidiary of the conciliar Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and thus headed by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's hand-picked successor as perfect of that congregation and president of the International Theological Commission, William "Cardinal" Levada. One will see in this passage from The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized an exact replica of the views expressed by Ratzinger/Benedict on December 3, 2008, and thus a denial of the Decree on Original Sin issued by the Fifth Session of the Council of Trent on June 17, 1546:

Where sin abounded, grace superabounded! That is the emphatic teaching of Scripture, but the idea of Limbo seems to constrain that superabundance. “[T]he free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many”; “as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man's act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men”; “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Rom 5:15, 18, 20). “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor 15:22). Scripture teaches of our sinful solidarity in Adam, yes, but it does so as the backdrop to teaching our salvific solidarity in Christ. 'The doctrine of original sin is, so to speak, the “reverse side” of the Good News that Jesus is the saviour of all men, that all need salvation and that salvation is offered to all through Christ.' Many traditional accounts of sin and salvation (and of Limbo) have stressed solidarity with Adam more than solidarity with Christ or at least such accounts have had a restrictive conception of the ways by which human beings benefit from solidarity with Christ. This would seem to have been a characteristic of Augustine’s thought in particular. Christ saves a select few from the mass who are damned in Adam. The teaching of St Paul would urge us to redress the balance and to centre humanity on Christ the saviour, to whom all, in some way, are united.“He who is the ‘image of the invisible God is himself the perfect man who has restored in the children of Adam that likeness to God which had been disfigured ever since the first sin. Human nature, by the very fact that it was assumed, not absorbed, in him, has been raised in us also to a dignity beyond compare” (GS 22). We wish to stress that humanity’s solidarity with Christ (or, more properly, Christ’s solidarity with all of humanity) must have priority over the solidarity of human beings with Adam, and that the question of the destiny of unbaptised infants who die must be addressed in that light. (The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised.)

This is false. It is a falsehood that is subscribed to by Ratzinger/Benedict, who personally approved this "unofficial" "official" document of the counterfeit church of conciliarism that has already convince some women to kill their preborn babies as in doing so they have the "hope" that their babies have gone to Heaven after they had paid to have their murdered inside of their own wombs. One is a son of Adam, not the New Adam, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, until he is regenerated in the Baptismal font or justified by Baptism of Blood or Desire.

I mentioned earlier that Ratzinger/Benedict has a reason for treating Original Sin in the imprecise terms of the New Theology. The reason is simple: he, along with the schismatic and heretical Orthodox, believes that the Catholic Church's formulation of various dogmas, including those issued by the Council of Trent, suffer from the "corruption" of Scholasticism in general and the "views" of Saint Thomas Aquinas in particular. As Pope Pius XII noted in Humani Generis, August 12, 1950, the disciples of the New Theology:

...want to reduce to a minimum the meaning of dogmas; and to free dogma itself from terminology long established in the Church and from philosophical concepts held by Catholic teachers, to bring about a return in the explanation of Catholic doctrine to the way of speaking used in Holy Scripture and by the Fathers of the Church. They cherish the hope that when dogma is stripped of the elements which they hold to be extrinsic to divine revelation, it will compare advantageously with the dogmatic opinions of those who are separated from the unity of the Church and that in this way they will gradually arrive at a mutual assimilation of Catholic dogma with the tenets of the dissidents.

Moreover they assert that when Catholic doctrine has been reduced to this condition, a way will be found to satisfy modern needs, that will permit of dogma being expressed also by the concepts of modern philosophy, whether of immanentism or idealism or existentialism or any other system. Some more audacious affirm that this can and must be done, because they hold that the mysteries of faith are never expressed by truly adequate concepts but only by approximate and ever changeable notions, in which the truth is to some extent expressed, but is necessarily distorted. Wherefore they do not consider it absurd, but altogether necessary, that theology should substitute new concepts in place of the old ones in keeping with the various philosophies which in the course of time it uses as its instruments, so that it should give human expression to divine truths in various ways which are even somewhat opposed, but still equivalent, as they say. They add that the history of dogmas consists in the reporting of the various forms in which revealed truth has been clothed, forms that have succeeded one another in accordance with the different teachings and opinions that have arisen over the course of the centuries.

It is evident from what We have already said, that such tentatives not only lead to what they call dogmatic relativism, but that they actually contain it. The contempt of doctrine commonly taught and of the terms in which it is expressed strongly favor it. Everyone is aware that the terminology employed in the schools and even that used by the Teaching Authority of the Church itself is capable of being perfected and polished; and we know also that the Church itself has not always used the same terms in the same way. It is also manifest that the Church cannot be bound to every system of philosophy that has existed for a short space of time. Nevertheless, the things that have been composed through common effort by Catholic teachers over the course of the centuries to bring about some understanding of dogma are certainly not based on any such weak foundation. These things are based on principles and notions deduced from a true knowledge of created things. In the process of deducing, this knowledge, like a star, gave enlightenment to the human mind through the Church. Hence it is not astonishing that some of these notions have not only been used by the Oecumenical Councils, but even sanctioned by them, so that it is wrong to depart from them.

Hence to neglect, or to reject, or to devalue so many and such great resources which have been conceived, expressed and perfected so often by the age-old work of men endowed with no common talent and holiness, working under the vigilant supervision of the holy magisterium and with the light and leadership of the Holy Ghost in order to state the truths of the faith ever more accurately, to do this so that these things may be replaced by conjectural notions and by some formless and unstable tenets of a new philosophy, tenets which, like the flowers of the field, are in existence today and die tomorrow; this is supreme imprudence and something that would make dogma itself a reed shaken by the wind. The contempt for terms and notions habitually used by scholastic theologians leads of itself to the weakening of what they call speculative theology, a discipline which these men consider devoid of true certitude because it is based on theological reasoning.

Unfortunately these advocates of novelty easily pass from despising scholastic theology to the neglect of and even contempt for the Teaching Authority of the Church itself, which gives such authoritative approval to scholastic theology. This Teaching Authority is represented by them as a hindrance to progress and an obstacle in the way of science. Some non Catholics consider it as an unjust restraint preventing some more qualified theologians from reforming their subject. And although this sacred Office of Teacher in matters of faith and morals must be the proximate and universal criterion of truth for all theologians, since to it has been entrusted by Christ Our Lord the whole deposit of faith -- Sacred Scripture and divine Tradition -- to be preserved, guarded and interpreted, still the duty that is incumbent on the faithful to flee also those errors which more or less approach heresy, and accordingly "to keep also the constitutions and decrees by which such evil opinions are proscribed and forbidden by the Holy See," is sometimes as little known as if it did not exist. What is expounded in the Encyclical Letters of the Roman Pontiffs concerning the nature and constitution of the Church, is deliberately and habitually neglected by some with the idea of giving force to a certain vague notion which they profess to have found in the ancient Fathers, especially the Greeks. The Popes, they assert, do not wish to pass judgment on what is a matter of dispute among theologians, so recourse must be had to the early sources, and the recent constitutions and decrees of the Teaching Church must be explained from the writings of the ancients. (Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.)

These passages from Pope Pius XII's Humani Generis describe--and condemn--the entirety of the intellectual work of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is using his "vague notions" and outright heresies to appeal for "unity" with the schismatic and heretical Orthodox churches without forcing them to accept the dogmatic pronouncements of the Second Millennium that were made without their "participation" and that were "distorted" by Scholasticism as a result.

What foundation do I have for such a statement?

Well, apart from the use of simple reason, the text of The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized denigrate the Catholic teaching on Limbo as enunciated by Pope Pius VI in Auctorem Fidei, August 28, 1794, and at the same time makes an appeal, by way of providing "background" leading up to the document's conclusion, to the heretical "Greek" view of Original Sin:

Very few Greek Fathers dealt with the destiny of infants who die without Baptism because there was no controversy about this issue in the East. Furthermore, they had a different view of the present condition of humanity. For the Greek Fathers, as the consequence of Adam's sin, human beings inherited corruption, possibility, and mortality, from which they could be restored by a process of deification made possible through the redemptive work of Christ. The idea of an inheritance of sin or guilt - common in Western tradition - was foreign to this perspective, since in their view sin could only be a free, personal act. (The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised.)

This is what the Orthodox still believe, which makes them fit "partners" for "ecumenical dialogue" with Ratzinger/Benedict, who has told us in his own murky way that he is of one mind with them on the matter of Original Sin, which he called in 1995 an "imprecise" term (!):

With regard to original sin, the difference between Orthodox Christianity and the West may be outlined as follows:

In the Orthodox Faith, the term "original sin" refers to the "first" sin of Adam and Eve. As a result of this sin, humanity bears the "consequences" of sin, the chief of which is death. Here the word "original" may be seen as synonymous with "first." Hence, the "original sin" refers to the "first sin" in much the same way as "original chair" refers to the "first chair."

In the West, humanity likewise bears the "consequences" of the "original sin" of Adam and Eve. However, the West also understands that humanity is likewise "guilty" of the sin of Adam and Eve. The term "Original Sin" here refers to the condition into which humanity is born, a condition in which guilt as well as consequence is involved.
In the Orthodox Christian understanding, while humanity does bear the consequences of the original, or first, sin, humanity does not bear the personal guilt associated with this sin. Adam and Eve are guilty of their willful action; we bear the consequences, chief of which is death.

One might look at all of this in a completely different light. Imagine, if you will, that one of your close relatives was a mass murderer. He committed many serious crimes for which he was found guilty and perhaps even admitted his guilt publicly. You, as his or her son or brother or cousin, may very well bear the consequences of his action - people may shy away from you or say, "Watch out for him - he comes from a family of mass murderers." Your name may be tainted, or you may face some other forms of discrimination as a consequence of your relative’s sin. You, however, are not personally guilty of his or her sin.

There are some within Orthodoxy who approach a westernized view of sin, primarily after the 17th and 18th centuries due to a variety of westernizing influences particularly in Ukraine and Russia after the time of Peter Mohyla. These influences have from time to time colored explanations of the Orthodox Faith which are in many respects lacking. (Orthodox Church in America, Questions and Answers on Original Sin)

Those who want to project Thomism and doctrinal exactitude into the mind of a Modernist apostle of the condemned New Theology that colors everything he says and does will continue to use their glossy websites with links to all manner of Motu "priests" to clothe the naked emperor with their dirty rags. No matter how few people see or accept the truth, however, those who are interested in the truth must realize that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI rejects the Council of Trent's Decree on Original Sin just as he rejects the Council of Trent's Decree on Justification.

Ratzinger/Benedict has told us over and over and over again that he rejects Scholasticism,, which is the official philosophy of the Catholic Church. How can any sane or intellectually honest human being attempt to project Thomism and/or a Thomist understanding of the Faith into his words? Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is an unapologetic, unbent disciple of the New Theology who believes that Catholic scholars must reject what he calls "a sterile intellectual exercise," which is how he has always viewed Thomism, in favor a new "approach" to meet "man" in the "concrete situation of humanity," a view which is nothing other than pure Modernism and a slap in the face to the popes who defended Thomism and condemned anyone and everyone who departed from it.

Consider this address that Ratzinger/Benedict gave to university professors on June 7, 2008:

The understanding of Christianity as a real transformation of human existence, if on the one hand it impels theological reflection to a new approach in regard to religion, on the other, it encourages it not to lose confidence in being able to know reality. The proposal to "widen the horizons of rationality", therefore, must not simply be counted among the new lines of theological and philosophical thought, but it must be understood as the requisite for a new opening onto the reality that the human person in his uni-totality is, rising above ancient prejudices and reductionisms, to open itself also to the way toward a true understanding of modernity. Humanity's desire for fullness cannot be disregarded. The Christian faith is called to take on this historical emergency by involving the men and women of good will in a simple task. The new dialogue between faith and reason, required today, cannot happen in the terms and in the ways in which it happened in the past. If it does not want to be reduced to a sterile intellectual exercise, it must begin from the present concrete situation of humanity and upon this develop a reflection that draws from the ontological-metaphysical truth.

Dear friends, you have before you a very exacting journey. First of all, it is necessary to promote high-level academic centres in which philosophy can dialogue with other disciplines, in particular with theology, favouring new, suitable cultural syntheses to orient society's journey. (To participants at the Sixth European Symposium for University Professors, June 7, 2008.)

As I noted in last month:

The Scholasticism of Saint Thomas Aquinas has been a major protection against the imprecise expression of the doctrines of the Church and a sure guide to their definitive explication. One true pope after another has recognized this to be the case. Pope Saint Pius X did so in a tribute to Saint Thomas Aquinas, Doctoris Angelici:

For just as the opinion of certain ancients is to be rejected which maintains that it makes no difference to the truth of the Faith what any man thinks about the nature of creation, provided his opinions on the nature of God be sound, because error with regard to the nature of creation begets a false knowledge of God; so the principles of philosophy laid down by St. Thomas Aquinas are to be religiously and inviolably observed, because they are the means of acquiring such a knowledge of creation as is most congruent with the Faith; of refuting all the errors of all the ages, and of enabling man to distinguish clearly what things are to be attributed to God and to God alone….
St. Thomas perfected and augmented still further by the almost angelic quality of his intellect all this superb patrimony of wisdom which he inherited from his predecessors and applied it to prepare, illustrate and protect sacred doctrine in the minds of men. Sound reason suggests that it would be foolish to neglect it and religion will not suffer it to be in any way attenuated. And rightly, because, if Catholic doctrine is once deprived of this strong bulwark, it is useless to seek the slightest assistance for its defense in a philosophy whose principles are either common to the errors of materialism, monism, pantheism, socialism and modernism, or certainly not opposed to such systems. The reason is that the capital theses in the philosophy of St Thomas are not to be placed in the category of opinions capable of being debated one way or another, but are to be considered as the foundations upon which the science of natural and divine things is based; if such principles are once removed or in any way impaired, it must necessarily follow that students of the sacred sciences will ultimately fail to perceive so much as the meaning of the words in which the dogmas of divine revelation are proposed by the magistracy of the Church. . . . (Pope Saint Pius X, Doctoris Angelici, quoted in James Larson's Article 11: A Confusion of Loves.)

Anyone who believes that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI believes this is, to put things charitably, not seeing the truth of the matter clearly.

Anyone who believes that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is correct and Pope Saint Pius X (and the other popes quoted in Attempting to Coerce Perjury) is wrong is seeking to carry water for a man who has contempt for the Angelic Doctor and for the men who have been true popes who have defended Saint Thomas Aquinas and Scholasticism.

Anyone who thinks that Pope Saint Pius X was correct in his day and that Ratzinger/Benedict is correct today is insane and must do all manner of intellectually dishonest somersaults to defy the principle of non-contradiction.

As Pope Leo XIII noted in Aeterni Patris, August 4, 1879, the Fathers of Council of Trent relied upon Saint Thomas Aquinas in their deliberations, which were, after all, guided infallibly by God the Holy Ghost, Who cannot contradict Himself by leading the Catholic Church to speak in a different way now than she has spoken throughout her history prior to 1958:

The ecumenical councils, also, where blossoms the flower of all earthly wisdom, have always been careful to hold Thomas Aquinas in singular honor. In the Councils of Lyons, Vienna, Florence, and the Vatican one might almost say that Thomas took part and presided over the deliberations and decrees of the Fathers, contending against the errors of the Greeks, of heretics and rationalists, with invincible force and with the happiest results. But the chief and special glory of Thomas, one which he has shared with none of the Catholic Doctors, is that the Fathers of Trent made it part of the order of conclave to lay upon the altar, together with sacred Scripture and the decrees of the supreme Pontiffs, the "Summa" of Thomas Aquinas, whence to seek counsel, reason, and inspiration. (Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris, August 4, 1879.)

This is why, good readers, that Ratzinger/Benedict does not make advertence to the Council of Trent in his "general audience" addresses or his other allocutions. He believes that the Council of Trent, a dogmatic council that met under the inspiration and infallible protection of God the Holy Ghost, was "corrupted" by the influence of Scholasticism in general and the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas in particular, thus driving an "unnecessary" wedge between the Catholic Church and Protestants and the Orthodox that he, Ratzinger/Benedict, is seeking to remedy by means of his relentless re-definition of the Faith in terms of the "New Theology."

Ratzinger/Benedict's relentless efforts to re-define the Faith were on view again in his "general audience" address of December 10, 2008, On St. Paul and the Sacraments, in which he distorted the meaning of Original Sin and hence the very nature of the Sacrament of Baptism:

However, the question now arises: How can we enter into this new beginning, into this new history? How does this history touch me? With the first contaminated history we are inevitably united by our biological descent, all of us belonging to the one body of humanity. But how is communion with Jesus, the new birth to become part of the new humanity, realized? How does Jesus come into my life, my being? St. Paul's fundamental response, and that of the whole New Testament, is: He comes by the power of the Holy Spirit. If the first history got under way, so to speak, with biology, the second does so in the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Risen Christ. In Pentecost, this Spirit created the beginning of a new humanity, of the new community, the Church, the Body of Christ. (On St. Paul and the Sacraments.)

As Mr. Larson wrote to me on this point:

Yes, this [the December 10, 2008, general audience address] is just the kind of thing that most traditionalists would cite as evidence that Joseph Ratzinger does indeed believe in original sin. They have become dulled to the language. They cannot see that to say that "history is contaminated" is not the same as saying that "nature has fallen." The former is perfectly compatible with the belief that original sin is the product of damaged relationships experienced after conception and birth rather than something received through generation; the latter, of course, is totally incompatible with this Modernist explanation. (E-mail of Mr. James Larson.)

Ratzinger/Benedict's views are pure Modernism, reflecting a consistency from the time of his earliest years of scholarly work, which is why it is essential to read him in light of the roadmap that he has provided in his own books and not by projecting, most delusionally and positivistically, a Thomism that is not only not there but which he rejects as having "corrupted" the Faith as It meets "modern man" in each "new" historical circumstance.

Mr. James Larson (who remains opposed to sedevacantism but is kind enough to send me notes now and again) shared with me a few nights ago a reflection that he had written to a friend concerning then Father Joseph Ratzinger's views of Advent in his book, Being Christian:

In order to render understandable what Joseph Ratzinger has done in his writings to the whole idea of the Catholic concepts of original sin, the absolute uniqueness of Christ's Incarnation, the consequences of Christ's redemptive act, the necessity of baptism, the ontological difference between nature and grace, and the absolute distinction which we must draw between Old and New Covenant, etc., I quote below the very first words of his little book Being Christian:

"This week we celebrate with the Church the beginning of Advent. If we think back to what we learned as children about Advent and its significance, we will remember being told that the Advent wreath, with its candles, is a reminder of the thousands of years (perhaps thousands of centuries) of the history of mankind before Christ. It reminds all of us of the time when an unredeemed mankind awaited salvation. It brings to our minds the darkness of an as yet unredeemed history in which the light of hope was only slowly kindled until, in the end, Christ, the light of the world, came and freed mankind from the darkness of condemnation. We learned also that those thousands of years before Christ were a time of condemnation because of original sin, while the centuries after the birth of our Lord are 'anni salutis reparatae,' years of restored salvation. And finally, we will remember being told that, in Advent, besides thinking back on the past to the period of condemnation and expectation of mankind, the Church also fixes her attention on the multitude of people who have not yet been baptized, and for whom it is still Advent, since they wait and live in the darkness of the absence of salvation.

"If we look at the ideas we learned as children through the eyes of contemporary man and with the experiences of our age, we will see that we can hardly accept them. The idea that the years after Christ, compared with those before, are years of salvation will seem to be a cruel irony if we remember such dates as 1914, 1918, 1933, 1939, 1945; dates which mark periods of world war in which millions of men lost their lives, often in terrifying circumstances; dates which bring back the memory of atrocities such as humanity has never before experienced. One date (1933) reminds us of the beginning of a regime which achieved the most cruel perfection in the practice of mass murder; and finally, we remember that year in which the first atomic bomb exploded on an inhabited city, hiding in its dazzling brilliance a new possibility of darkness for the world.
"If we think about these things, we will have difficulty in distinguishing between a period of salvation and one of condemnation. And, extending our vision even further, if we contemplate the works of destruction and barbarity perpetrated in this and the preceding centuries by Christians (that is to say by us who call ourselves 'redeemed'), we will be unable to divide the nations of the world into the redeemed and the condemned.

"If we are sincere, we will no longer build up a theory which divides history and geography into zones of redeemed and zones of condemned. Rather, we will see the whole of history as a gray mass in which it is always possible to perceive the shining of a goodness which has not completely disappeared, in which there can always be found in men the desire to do good, but also in which breakdowns occur which lead to the atrocities of evil."

All of this, of course, is a profound denial of Catholic truths concerning Christ's Redemption (especially as found in Galatians 3) and the meaning of baptism. Joseph Ratzinger's words here are simply a spelled-out version of the words of Chesterton's opponent who said that "Christianity has been tried, and found wanting." Chesterton's reply, of course, was that "Christianity has never been tried." This does not mean that it has not been tried and lived by saints and ordinary people faithful to their baptismal grace and vows, but that it has not been tried on a universal or even over-all social scale. It is also, of course, a reflection of that duplicity and constant compromise which comes "natural" to the fallen man who believes that he can "possess" the faith without living these baptismal graces in all their integrity. The Catholic who went along with Hitler, or who condoned the dropping of the Bomb on Hiroshima or the fire-storm bombing of Dresden, was not a Catholic living his baptismal graces in integrity. As St. Paul said, "But God is true, and every man a liar…" (Rom 3:4).

The extraordinary thing is that Joseph Ratzinger could not see these elementary truths. Because most men are liars and practiced at self-deception, Joseph Ratzinger has, in effect, also made God into a liar by undermining or denying infallible and unchangeable doctrinal formulations and meanings. And consequently, out goes the whole array of dogmatic teachings which are necessary to understand and believe in the ontological "New Creation" ("New Man") accomplished through Christ's redemption. It is my view, of course, that this blindness on his part (and a whole host of other "thinkers") is a consequence of his surrender to reductive analytical science and rejection of St. Thomas.

In Being Christian, Joseph Ratzinger goes on to tell us that the real meaning of Advent is the continual process of understanding the lack of grace (nebulous use of the term) that exists in our lives, and the continual effort that must be made to make it operative. All this, in itself, is true. But if this grace is not given an ontological basis and reality through the Church's teaching on Original Sin and the nature of the "New Man" created in Sanctifying Grace, then, as St. Paul states, our faith and efforts are in vain.

It should also be noted that the above passage from Being Christian provides the basis for ecumenism and what might be called "qualified indifferentism". If salvation is not an ontological event effected through Catholic baptism, then Christ’s salvation is operative through an evolving gray mass. This is why, in his discussion of Christ's Real Presence, Joseph Ratzinger always speaks in terms of "history" and "historical presence." Grace then becomes a presence that is always there working through man's evolving intellect and will, and through all religions and philosophies of "good will." – through the soup of spiritual evolution and evolving revelation. (James Larson, "Joseph Ratzinger's Advent")

Relatively very few people, obviously, pay any attention to the conciliar "popes'" "general audience" addresses. God pays attention, however. He has been and continues to be blasphemed as His Sacred Truths have been and continued to be distorted and misrepresented by the conciliar "pontiffs." This is why these matters should concern us as we seek to make reparation for how God has been and continues to be offended by men who claim, albeit falsely, to be His Vicar on earth as these men give voice to Orthodox heterodoxy.

Those who are inclined to try to "read" Catholicism into Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's efforts to re-define the epistles of Saint Paul and various dogmas of the Church in order to place them within the parameters of his "New Theology" of and thus of conciliarism must overlook as "unimportant" the fact that the current conciliar "pontiff" has absolutely no regard for solemn dogmatic pronouncements and papal encyclical letters that he believes have become "obsolete" in their particulars because of the historical circumstances in which they were written. Such an intentional overlooking of Ratzinger/Benedict's endorsement of propositions condemned by pope after pope--and/or proclaimed with papal approval by the Pontifical Biblical Commission during the pontificate of Pope Saint Pius X--makes the work of Holy Mother Church unstable and insecure.

As noted in yesterday's commentary, No Ambiguity Here, Ratzinger/Benedict's use of a neo-Hegelian denial of the nature of dogmatic truth, which is in and of itself an attack upon the very nature of God Himself, can be used by some future conciliar "pontiff" to undo his own work. Why should a future conciliar "pontiff" accord Ratzinger/Benedict any more respect than he, Ratzinger/Benedict, accords Popes Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII or Saint Pius X? While it is true that presidential administrations frequently undo the work of each other, the Catholic Church is not a presidential administration. The meaning of the teaching of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, remains the same one century after another.

It is furthermore the case that those who want to indemnify Ratzinger/Benedict at almost every turn must overlook his various blasphemies against the honor and glory and majesty of God and his blasphemies against the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, when he writes, as he did in his book, Jesus of Nazareth, that the Gospels were written by the "community of believers" who were "remembering back" to what Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ might have done in their circumstances. Although this Modernist blasphemy has been condemned by the authority of the Catholic Church, the aftermath of the "Second" Vatican Council has given it currency in conciliar academic circles without hardly a word of correction from conciliar officials (many of whom believe in this blasphemy and have expressed their support for it quite openly).

The aforementioned Mr. James Larson wrote an article that appeared in the November 2008 edition of Christian Order that dealt with Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's denial that Saint John the Evangelist is the author of the Gospel and the Epistles bearing his name:

In reading the above [passage quoted by Mr. Larson from Jesus of Nazareth in which Benedict ascribes the authorship of the Fourth Gospel to "Presbyter John"], we are faced with one inescapable fact. Despite any qualifications Benedict XVI makes about Presbyter John being a “faithful mouthpiece” and transmitter of the Apostle John’s thoughts, there is absolutely no denying that the Pope “entirely concurs” with the position that the actual writer of the Gospel of John was not the Apostle John but rather “Presbyter John.” As an aside, I would assert that he appears to do so based on extraordinarily flimsy evidence. The major point to be made here, however, is that his statement is in direct contradiction to magisterial decisions and teachings of the Pontificate of Pope St. Pius X.

To begin with, we must understand that under Pope Pius X the decisions of the Pontifical Biblical Commission were a part of the Magisterium (it ceased to be so after Vatican II). Thus, in his Motu proprio Praestantia Sacrae Scripturae, he writes:

“We find it necessary to declare and prescribe, as We do now declare and expressly prescribe, that all are bound in conscience to submit to the decisions of the Biblical Commission, which have been given in the past and which shall be given in the future, in the same way as to the Decrees which appertain to doctrine issued by the Sacred Congregations and approved by the Sovereign Pontiff. Nor can they escape the stigma both of disobedience and temerity nor be free from grave guilt as often as they impugn these decisions either in word or writing; and this, over and above the scandal which they give and the sins of which they may be the cause before God by making other statements on these matters which are very frequently both rash and false.”

On May 29, 1907, the Pontifical Biblical Commission under the authority of Pope Pius X, published the following decision Concerning the Author and Historical Truth of the Fourth Gospel:

I: Does the constant, universal, and solemn tradition of the Church dating back to the second century and witnessed to principally: (a) by the holy Fathers, by ecclesiastical writers, and even by heretics, whose testimonies and allusions must have been derived from the disciples or first successors of the Apostles and so be linked with the very origin of the book; (b) by the name of the author of the fourth Gospel having been at all times and places in the canon and lists of the sacred books; (c) by the most ancient manuscripts of those books and the various versions; (d) by public liturgical use in the whole world from the very beginnings of the Church; prove that John the Apostle and no other [emphasis mine, James Larson ] is to be acknowledged as the author of the fourth Gospel, and that by an historical argument so firmly established (without reference to theological considerations) that the reasons adduced by critics to the contrary in no way weaken this tradition? Answer: In the affirmative.”

It is very important to realize the continuity between what Benedict XVI writes concerning the authorship of the Gospel of John and his past statements in regard to “essentializing” the previous magisterium. In his 1990 statement regarding the structure and purpose of the CDF document titled Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote:

“The text also presents the various forms of binding authority which correspond to the grades of the Magisterium. It states – perhaps for the first time – that there are magisterial decisions which cannot be the final word on a given matter as such but, despite the permanent value of their principles, are chiefly also a signal for pastoral prudence, a sort of provisional policy. Their kernel remains valid, but the particulars determined by circumstances can stand in need of correction. In this connection, one will probably call to mind both the pontifical statements of the last century regarding freedom of religion and the anti-Modernists decisions of the beginning of this century, especially the decisions of the then Biblical Commission.” [emphasis mine, that is, James Larson]

Let us be quite clear what we have here. Pope Benedict’s teaching concerning the authorship of the Gospel of John is in flat-out contradiction to the decision of the Biblical Commission under Pope Pius X, a decision which the latter declared to be binding upon the consciences of all the faithful “in the same way as to the Decrees which appertain to doctrines issued by the Sacred Congregations and approved by the Sovereign Pontiff.”

The problem, however, does not end here. Benedict writes: “After the death of the Apostle, he was identified wholly as the bearer of the latter’s heritage.” John was the last Apostle to die. In attributing the writing (redaction) of the actual Gospel of John to “Presbyter John,” Benedict XVI therefore appears to extend public Revelation beyond the death of the last Apostle. What is more, since “inspiration” and Revelation now become a matter of “remembering” rather than actual witnessing or direct inspiration from God, then this involves a view of Revelation which makes it to be an evolving phenomena. Thus, Benedict writes:

“This also has some fundamental implications for the concept of inspiration. The Gospel emerges from human remembering [emphasis mine] and presupposes the communion of those who remember, in this case very concretely the school of John and, before that, the community of the disciples. But because the author thinks and writes with the memory of the Church, the ‘we’ to which he belongs opens beyond the personal and is guided in its depths by the Spirit of God, who is the Spirit of truth. In this sense, the Gospel itself opens up a path of understanding, which always remains bound to the scriptural word, and yet from generation to generation can lead, and is meant to lead, ever anew into the depth of all the truth.”

Again, Pope Benedict’s non-infallible, non-binding teaching, is in direct contradiction to the constant teaching of the Catholic Church, and to the specific teaching of Pope Pius X. In his Syllabus Condemning the Errors of Modernism, Pope Pius X condemned the following proposition (#21):

“Revelation, constituting the object of Catholic faith, was not completed with the apostles.”

What is possibly most astounding about all this is that Benedict XVI’s “entirely concurs” with a position based on extraordinarily flimsy and indirect evidence, and one which is in direct contradiction to 2,000 years of overwhelming historical evidence and precedent (as enumerated by the Pontifical Biblical Commission as quoted above). Such a position speaks of something more than mere personal ignorance or error. In the words of Pope St. Gelasius quoted at the beginning of this article, it speaks of “an example of rising against ourselves” which, despite Pope Gelasius’ statement that the Church would never allow such a thing, has now indeed been allowed. And it has been “allowed” not only in this one relatively small area of Catholic doctrine but, as detailed in other articles, in other doctrines much more central to the very life-blood of the Church – the doctrines of transubstantiation, original sin, or the Social Kingship of Christ for instance.

The extraordinary thing is that, blinded by a view promoted by a few influential traditionalist leaders that Pope Benedict XVI is somehow a “friend of tradition,” very few are willing to look at the extent of his “rising against ourselves.” And even less are they willing to seriously question themselves as to why a God, Who so ardently desires the salvation of all men, is “allowing” this to happen to His Bride the Mystical Body of Christ. It certainly testifies to a sickness within the Church so virulent and so deceptive as to demand, in the words of St. Paul, a “delivering over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor 5:5). It is up to us, therefore, to identify precisely wherein lies our betrayal of the Gospel that requires so great a chastisement. It is my belief that this infidelity consists primarily in our virtual total abandonment of the life of simplicity which is enumerated in the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, and which I have examined in my series The Return to God. What is more, it is an abandonment which appears to apply equally to traditional Catholics and Modernists. (James Larson, "A New Form of Blindness," Christian Order, November 2008.)

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI believes that things that have been defined by the Church must remain "open" for "academic" re-evaluation and analysis. This is of the essence of the pride of Modernism, which considers the task of the theologian to "re-evaluate" the Faith "scientifically rather than explicating the truths of the Faith as they have been defined and taught by Holy Mother Church under the infallible guidance and protection of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost. The authorship of the Fourth Gospel is not an "open" question. Period. No amount of "orthodox" allocutions or "homilies" on certain subjects of the Faith can redeem unrepentant acts and words that betray the Catholic Faith and thus blaspheme God, Who hast revealed the Faith and protected the integrity of Its transmission without stain or spot of "misinterpretation."

Those who cannot see for themselves that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is not a reliable "source" about the Catholic Faith must be willing to stand truth and logic on their respective heads in order to content themselves that the issuer of Summorum Pontificum, which is based on the absolute, abject lie that the Immemorial Mass of Tradition and the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service are but two "forms" of the "one" Roman Rite, is a "friend" of Tradition. Ratzinger/Benedict is an enemy of the First Commandment, an enemy of the Social Reign of Christ the King, an enemy of the true popes of the Catholic Church who have condemned his own Modernist views of the Faith, and thus a mortal enemy of the souls for whom Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross. Or has it become the case since Summorum Pontificum that God is no longer offended by public esteem given to the symbols of false religions and public praise being offered in behalf of the "separation of Church and State" that denies His Social Kingship over men and their nations?

While thanking Mr. Larson for his superb scholarship and his unswerving devotion to a pursuit of the truth concerning the apostasies of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict, I must, most respectfully, note that Pope Saint Gelasius remains correct, that the Catholic Church could indeed never permit a "rising against ourselves." No one who subscribes to Modernist notions concerning Divine Revelation is faithful disciple of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. It does not matter for one nanosecond that the views expressed by Ratzinger/Benedict are "private" and thus "non-binding." No member of the Catholic Church is permitted to hold privately views that have been condemned by the authority of the Church and thus represent a defection from the Catholic Faith.

While it is indeed true that the "views" of Ratzinger/Benedict are "non-binding" upon the Catholic faithful, this is so not because his "views" are "private" or "unofficial" but because he has by holding them cast himself out of the Catholic Church, thereby disqualifying himself from the holding of ecclesiastical office legitimately. He, Ratzinger/Benedict, must be the beneficiary of our prayers. Praying for his conversion to the Faith, however, does not mean that we suspend our reason and consider a man who has dropped various poisons repeatedly into the well of the Faith has done anything other than to expel himself from the Church according to the simple truths reiterated by Pope Leo XIII in Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896, that, although cited earlier in this article, need to be repeated once again to demonstrate that no one can hold "private" views contrary to the Catholic Faith and be a member of the Catholic Church:

The Church, founded on these principles and mindful of her office, has done nothing with greater zeal and endeavour than she has displayed in guarding the integrity of the faith. Hence she regarded as rebels and expelled from the ranks of her children all who held beliefs on any point of doctrine different from her own. The Arians, the Montanists, the Novatians, the Quartodecimans, the Eutychians, did not certainly reject all Catholic doctrine: they abandoned only a certain portion of it. Still who does not know that they were declared heretics and banished from the bosom of the Church? In like manner were condemned all authors of heretical tenets who followed them in subsequent ages. "There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by our Lord and handed down by Apostolic tradition" (Auctor Tract. de Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos).

The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium. Epiphanius, Augustine, Theodore :, drew up a long list of the heresies of their times. St. Augustine notes that other heresies may spring up, to a single one of which, should any one give his assent, he is by the very fact cut off from Catholic unity. "No one who merely disbelieves in all (these heresies) can for that reason regard himself as a Catholic or call himself one. For there may be or may arise some other heresies, which are not set out in this work of ours, and, if any one holds to one single one of these he is not a Catholic" (S. Augustinus, De Haeresibus, n. 88). (Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896.)

The need of this divinely instituted means for the preservation of unity, about which we speak is urged by St. Paul in his epistle to the Ephesians. In this he first admonishes them to preserve with every care concord of minds: "Solicitous to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" (Eph. iv., 3, et seq.). And as souls cannot be perfectly united in charity unless minds agree in faith, he wishes all to hold the same faith: "One Lord, one faith," and this so perfectly one as to prevent all danger of error: "that henceforth we be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the wickedness of men, by cunning craftiness, by which they lie in wait to deceive" (Eph. iv., 14): and this he teaches is to be observed, not for a time only - "but until we all meet in the unity of faith...unto the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ" (13). But, in what has Christ placed the primary principle, and the means of preserving this unity? In that - "He gave some Apostles - and other some pastors and doctors, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ" (11-12). (Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896.)

Defect knowingly from the Catholic Faith in just one thing and persist in this defection, my friends, you defect from the Faith in Its entirety. Joseph Ratzinger knows what he teaches deviates from "past" teachings in many areas, which is why he goes to such great lengths to justify his "novelties" by such linguistic gymnastics as "the hermeneutics of continuity in discontinuity" and by claiming that past "decisions" cannot be a "last word" on things as we "progress" in our understanding of the "historically-conditioned" nature of various expressions of dogma that contain "subjective contingencies" that do not bind future generations. Even this exercise in prideful rationalization has been condemned repeatedly by the Catholic Church, and those who ignore Joseph Ratzinger's warfare against the nature of Divine Truth show themselves to be just as much opposed to the honor and glory and majesty of God as the man, Ratzinger/Benedict, they enable by their silence or by their own exercises of positivism.

Dom Prosper Gueranger's reflection on the "O Antiphon" for today, December 18, speaks volumes about being delivered from pride, which is one of the chief characteristics of the Modernists:

"O Adonai, and leader of the house of Israel, who appearest to Moses in the fire of the flaming bush, and gavest him the law on Sinai; come and redeem us by thy outstretched arm."

O Sovereign Lord! O Adonai! come and redeem us, not Thy power, but Thy humility. Heretofore, Thou didst show Thyself to Moses Thy servant in the midst of a mysterious flame; Thou didst give Thy law to Thy people amidst thunder and lightning; now, on the contrary, Thou comest not to terrify, but to save us. They chaste Mother having heard the emperor's edict, which obliges her and Joseph her spouse to repair to Bethlehem, prepares everything needed for Thy divine Birth. She prepares for Thee, O Sun of justice! the humble swathing-bands, wherewith to cover Thy nakedness, and protect Thee, the Creator of the world, from the cold of that midnight hour of Thy Nativity! Thus it is that Thou willest to deliver us from the slavery of our pride, and show man that Thy divine arm is never stronger than when he thinks it powerless and still. Everything is prepared, then, dear Jesus! Thy swathing-bands are read for Thy infant limbs! Come to Bethlehem, and redeem us from the hands of our enemies. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year.)

As Pope Saint Pius X noted in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907, Modernists, full of pride, seek to infect the totality of Catholic teaching with their monstrous errors:

Although they express their astonishment that We should number them amongst the enemies of the Church, no one will be reasonably surprised that We should do so, if, leaving out of account the internal disposition of the soul, of which God alone is the Judge, he considers their tenets, their manner of speech, and their action. Nor indeed would he be wrong in regarding them as the most pernicious of all the adversaries of the Church. For, as We have said, they put into operation their designs for her undoing, not from without but from within. Hence, the danger is present almost in the very veins and heart of the Church, whose injury is the more certain from the very fact that their knowledge of her is more intimate. Moreover, they lay the ax not to the branches and shoots, but to the very root, that is, to the faith and its deepest fibers. And once having struck at this root of immortality, they proceed to diffuse poison through the whole tree, so that there is no part of Catholic truth which they leave untouched, none that they do not strive to corrupt. Further, none is more skillful, none more astute than they, in the employment of a thousand noxious devices; for they play the double part of rationalist and Catholic, and this so craftily that they easily lead the unwary into error; and as audacity is their chief characteristic, there is no conclusion of any kind from which they shrink or which they do not thrust forward with pertinacity and assurance To this must be added the fact, which indeed is well calculated to deceive souls, that they lead a life of the greatest activity, of assiduous and ardent application to every branch of learning, and that they possess, as a rule, a reputation for irreproachable morality. Finally, there is the fact which is all hut fatal to the hope of cure that their very doctrines have given such a bent to their minds, that they disdain all authority and brook no restraint; and relying upon a false conscience, they attempt to ascribe to a love of truth that which is in reality the result of pride and obstinacy.. . .

To penetrate still deeper into the meaning of Modernism and to find a suitable remedy for so deep a sore, it behooves Us, Venerable Brethren, to investigate the causes which have engendered it and which foster its growth. That the proximate and immediate cause consists in an error of the mind cannot be open to doubt. We recognize that the remote causes may be reduced to two: curiosity and pride. Curiosity by itself, if not prudently regulated, suffices to account for all errors. Such is the opinion of Our predecessor, Gregory XVI, who wrote: "A lamentable spectacle is that presented by the aberrations of human reason when it yields to the spirit of novelty, when against the warning of the Apostle it seeks to know beyond what it is meant to know, and when relying too much on itself it thinks it can find the truth outside the Catholic Church wherein truth is found without the slightest shadow of error."

But it is pride which exercises an incomparably greater sway over the soul to blind it and lead it into error, and pride sits in Modernism as in its own house, finding sustenance everywhere in its doctrines and lurking in its every aspect. It is pride which fills Modernists with that self-assurance by which they consider themselves and pose as the rule for all. It is pride which puffs them up with that vainglory which allows them to regard themselves as the sole possessors of knowledge, and makes them say, elated and inflated with presumption, "We are not as the rest of men," and which, lest they should seem as other men, leads them to embrace and to devise novelties even of the most absurd kind. It is pride which rouses in them the spirit of disobedience and causes them to demand a compromise between authority and liberty. It is owing to their pride that they seek to be the reformers of others while they forget to reform themselves, and that they are found to be utterly wanting in respect for authority, even for the supreme authority. Truly there is no road which leads so directly and so quickly to Modernism as pride. When a Catholic layman or a priest forgets the precept of the Christian life which obliges us to renounce ourselves if we would follow Christ and neglects to tear pride from his heart, then it is he who most of all is a fully ripe subject for the errors of Modernism. For this reason, Venerable Brethren, it will be your first duty to resist such victims of pride, to employ them only in the lowest and obscurest offices. The higher they try to rise, the lower let them be placed, so that the lowliness of their position may limit their power of causing damage. Examine most carefully your young clerics by yourselves and by the directors of your seminaries, and when you find the spirit of pride among them reject them without compunction from the priesthood. Would to God that this had always been done with the vigilance and constancy which were required! (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Leaving aside, as Pope Saint Pius X noted in Pascendi Dominci Gregis, the subjective state of the souls of the conciliarists, including that of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, it is nevertheless most just to conclude that it takes a good deal of stubborn pride to endorse anathematized propositions and to show contempt for the work of true popes who were simply reiterating perennial truths that are contained in the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church. We must have nothing to do with these apostates who blaspheme God and thus deceive souls. We must cleave to true bishops and true priests in the catacombs who make no concessions to conciliarism whatsoever.

Today is the Feast of the Expectation of Our Lady. Coming exactly seven days before Christmas Day itself, today's feast reminds us to be ever mindful of the fact that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Nativity in Bethlehem on the first Christmas Day gives us hope in the midst of the chill and the snow and the ice of our ecclesiastical winter, a time when so many people have been deceived by the false church of conciliarism and have deprived of Sanctifying Grace on a daily basis in most instances. We must be as patient now as Our Lady was during his period of Expectation of the Birth of her Divine Son. We must rely upon her maternal intercession to help us, making reparation to her Divine Son's Most Sacred Heart through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart for our sins and those of the whole world, especially by praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit.

Dom Prosper Gueranger wrote a beautiful prayer, ending with the great antiphon to Our Lady, for this feast day today:

Most just indeed it is, O holy Mother of God, that we should unite in that ardent desire thou hadst to see Him, who had been concealed for nine months in thy chaste womb; to know the features of this Son of the heavenly Father, who is also thine; to come to that blissful hour of His brith, which will give glory to God in the highest, and, on earth, peace to men of good-will. Yes, dear Mother, the time is fast approaching, though not fast enough to satisfy thy desires and ours. Make us redouble our attention to the great mystery; complete our preparation by the powerful prayers for us, that when the solemn hour has come, our Jesus may find no obstacle to His entrance into our hearts.

The Great Antiphon to Our Lady

"O Virgin of virgins! how shall this be? for never was there one like thee, nor will there ever be. Ye daughters of Jerusalem, why look yet wondering at me? What ye behold, is a divine mystery." (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year.)

Although the Church Militant on earth has undergone her Mystical Passion, Death and Burial as a result of the crimes of the Modernists and the apostasies of conciliarism, we know that she will have her Mystical Resurrection, a Mystical Resurrection that will occur as a result of the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. As we prepare for Christmas Day in seven days, may we prepare for the day of the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a time in which there will indeed be a true "springtime of the Church" as each member of the true Church subscribes totally only to the teaching that has been entrusted to her by her Divine Founder and Invisible Head without any dissent whatsoever.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

Vivat Christus Rex! Vivat Maria Regina Immaculata!.