Jorge's Exhortation of Self-Justification Before Men, part six

All right, where was I a few days ago?

Yes, yes, yes. I was commenting on paragraph fifty-four of Amoris Laetitia, March 19, 2016. I remember now

Well, there are a few additional points to make about Paragraph Fifty-four of Amoris Laetitia before providing commentary on some other passages that have been selected for commentary in part six of this continuing series.

To save you the trouble of having refer back to part five of this series, here is the hideous paragraph fifty-four once again:

54. In this brief overview, I would like to stress the fact that, even though significant advances have been made in the recognition of women’s rights and their participation in public life, in some countries much remains to be done to promote these rights. Unacceptable customs still need to be eliminated. I think particularly of the shameful ill-treatment to which women are sometimes subjected, domestic violence and various forms of enslavement which, rather than a show of masculine power, are craven acts of cowardice. The verbal, physical, and sexual violence that women endure in some marriages contradicts the very nature of the conjugal union. I think of the reprehensible genital mutilation of women practiced in some cultures, but also of their lack of equal access to dignified work and roles of decision-making. History is burdened by the excesses of patriarchal cultures that considered women inferior, yet in our own day, we cannot overlook the use of surrogate mothers and “the exploitation and commercialization of the female body in the current media culture”.42 There are those who believe that many of today’s problems have arisen because of feminine emancipation. This argument, however, is not valid, “it is false, untrue, a form of male chauvinism”.43 The equal dignity of men and women makes us rejoice to see old forms of discrimination disappear, and within families there is a growing reciprocity. If certain forms of feminism have arisen which we must consider inadequate, we must nonetheless see in the women’s movement the working of the Spirit for a clearer recognition of the dignity and rights of women. (Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Amoris Laetita, March 19, 2016.)

Brief Additional Comment Number:

The authentic missionary work of the Catholic Church has sought to lead pagan and barbaric peoples to the true Faith by retaining those customs that were not opposed to Faith and Morals and uprooting everything opposed to the sanctification and salvation of souls. Bergoglio’s criticism, for example, of a particular form of mutilation has nothing to do with the Catholic Church as she has she has never sanctioned such a thing. Is it possible that Jorge the Ecumenist is criticizing his partners in “dialogue,” the Mohammendans? This hideous heretic has an endless capacity to attribute to the Catholic Church that which she has never sanctioned. As is the case with the screeds of social revolutionaries, theological revolutionaries such as Jorge Mario Bergoglio must invent straw men in order to justify their hideous schemes before men, schemes that are to the detriment of the salvation of souls and thus also to the good of men and their nations.

What I would like to do next is to cluster six paragraphs that demonstrate Amoris Laetitia’s consistent theme of embracing the sinful in the name of “moving forward” and fulfilling the supposedly “true” meaning of the Gospels prior to calling two of our true popes to eviscerate Bergoglio’s indemnification of sin and those who live in it. Each will be commented upon separately before a few overall observations about them are offered:

57. I thank God that many families, which are far from considering themselves perfect, live in love, fulfil their calling and keep moving forward, even if they fall many times along the way. The Synod’s reflections show us that there is no stereotype of the ideal family, but rather a challenging mosaic made up of many different realities, with all their joys, hopes and problems. The situations that concern us are challenges. We should not be trapped into wasting our energy in doleful laments, but rather seek new forms of missionary creativity. In every situation that presents itself, “the Church is conscious of the need to offer a word of truth and hope… The great values of marriage and the Christian family correspond to a yearning that is part and parcel of human existence”.48 If we see any number of problems, these should be, as the Bishops of Colombia have said, a summons to “revive our hope and to make it the source of prophetic visions, transformative actions and creative forms of charity”.49 (Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Amoris Laetita, March 19, 2016.)

Fatiguing Observation Number One:

Pardon me while I yawn.

All right, I yawned.

Thank you for your patience.

The Catholic Church has never taught there is an “ideal” family.

Immediate families are composed of a father, a mother and their children, each of whom is affected the vestigial aftereffects of Original Sin and of their own Actual Sins, but are to strive for perfection as befits redeemed creatures by cooperating with the graces won for us by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday and that flow into our souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.

“Missionary creativity” is Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s special revolutionary code language for doing whatever it is he wants. Indeed, this was confirmed recently by the octogenarian revolutionary named Walter Kasper, who has been one of Jorge’s chief ideologists (along with Oscar Andres Maradiaga Rodriguez and Victor Manuel Fernandez):

Some analysts are saying that it changes nothing. Some are saying it changes everything. Can both views of Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on family relationships be right?

Now that the text has been pored over line by line, and the analysts and theologians and bishops around the world are pronouncing their judgements, it is becoming clear that Pope Francis’ eagerly anticipated document on the family has sowed the seeds for major changes to Catholic teaching and practice.

His post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia does not explicitly change doctrine – it was never expected that it would – but instead it insists that church teaching be applied case by case to individual situations. With this crucial principle the Pope has re-opened the possibility for Communion to be given to divorced and remarried Catholics in some circumstances. And the same principle also opens up the possibility that there may be a path back to the full practice of their faith for other couples in situations that fall short of Church teaching.

For Francis, it was the desire to “reinstate” those who feel alienated from the Church that led him to convene a Synod of Bishops on the Family in the first place. The synod, which has been as much about the process of how the Church discusses and decides key issues as the issues themselves, unofficially started in February 2014 when the reform-minded German cardinal, Walter Kasper, was asked by Francis to address a meeting of his peers on how remarried divorcees might be given the sacraments. (Walter of Wally's Workshop of Heresy Speaks Again.)

This is hardly a revelation. It was pretty clear two years ago this month that Jorge was cookin’ the books.

Kasper proposed his “case-by-case” solution on February 21, 2014, when speaking before the consistory of “cardinals” prior to the elevation of non-bishops to the conciliar college of apostates-in-scarlet, citing none other than a 1972 article written by a professor of heresy by the name of Father Joseph Alois Ratzinger as his authority for the proposal to circumvent the teaching of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ that has been reiterated countless times by Holy Mother Church and has been defended the blood of countless martyrs, including Saint John the Baptist and, of course, the English Martyrs under Henry VIII:

One notification was given to us by the congregation for the doctrine of the faith in 1994 when it established - and Pope Benedict XVI reiterated this during the world meeting of families in Milan in 2012 - that the divorce and remarried cannot receive sacramental communion but can receive spiritual communion. [. . .]

Many will be grateful for this response, which is an instance of true openness. But it also brings up a number of questions. In fact, someone who receives spiritual communion is one with Jesus Christ. [. . .] Why, then, can he not also receive sacramental communion? [. . .] Some maintain that non-participation in communion is itself a sign of the sanctity of the sacrament. The question that is posed in response is: is it not perhaps an exploitation of the person who is suffering and asking for help if we make him a sign and a warning for others? Are we going to let him die of hunger sacramentally in order that others may live?

The early Church gives us an indication that can serve as a means of escape from the dilemma, to which Professor Joseph Ratzinger referred in 1972. [. . .] In the individual local Churches there existed the customary law on the basis of which Christians who, although their first partner was still alive, were living in a second relationship, after a time of penance had available [. . .] not a second marriage, but rather through participation in communion a table of salvation. [. . .] (Kasper Uses Ratzinger Against Benedict.)

Heretics can be very clever. Walter Kasper was attempting to use an article written by Father Joseph Ratzinger in 1972 against the work of Joseph “Cardinal” Ratzinger in 1994 and “Pope” Benedict XVI in 2012.

Ratzinger, however, has always been unfazed by little things such as intellectual consistency as his “hermeneutic of continuity” can be employed to justify whatever apparent contradictions in his work just as he has used this hermeneutic to dispense with “past” teachings that he believes have become “obsolete” in their “particulars.”

In this instance, though, there is little “inconsistency” in the thought of Ratzinger/Benedict, such as it may be, as he, acting as “Cardinal” Ratzinger, issued a “clarification” on January 1, 1998, in response to his September 14, 1994, “notification” on the inadmissibility of divorced and civilly “remarried” Catholics for the reception of what purports to be “Holy Communion” in the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service. The 1998 “clarification” contained “true elements,” which was republished in L’Osservatore Romano on November 30, 2011, borrowed heavily from a 1972 article of his that has been published recently, albeit with an entirely different conclusion than the one he had been offered originally, in a book of his collected works that has been under the editorial supervision of that other great “defender” of the indissolubility of a ratified and consummated marriage, the heretic named Gerhard Ludwig Muller (see the 2014 post on this matter as found at Novus Ordo Watch Wire).

What continues to miss the eye of Vaticanologists thus far, however, is that the 1998 “clarification” of the 1994 “notification” was revolutionary in its own right as it both defended the ban of the divorced and civilly “remarried” Catholics from the sacraments and undermined that ban at the very same time. It was, in other words, pure, unadulterated Ratzinger.

Two excerpts from the January 1, 1998, “clarification” will be provided below.

The first excerpt demonstrates Ratzinger’s pride in boasting of the overthrow of the primary end of marriage, the propagation and education of children, in favor of the personalist view of marriage that had been condemned by the Holy Office in 1944 and would serve as the basis of Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul the Sick’s Humane Vitae’s endorsement of “natural family planning” as a means to engage in “responsible parenthood” (see Forty-Three Years After Humanae Vitae):

Some theologians claim that at the new magisterial documents having to do with questions of marriage are based on a naturalistic, legalistic concept of marriage. Attention is given to the contract between the spouses and to the ius in corpus. It is claimed that the Council overturned this static understanding and described marriage in a more personalistic way as a covenant of love and life. Thus it would have opened up possibilities for resolving difficult situations more humanely. Thinking further along this line, some scholars pose the question of whether or not one could speak of the death of the marriage, if the personal bond of love between the spouses no longer exists. Others resurrect the old question of whether or not the Pope would have the capability of dissolving marriage in such cases.

Yet anyone who attentively reads the more recent statements of the Church will note that their central assertions are based on Gaudium et spesand that they further develop the teaching contained therein in a thoroughly personalist line, in the direction indicated by the Council. However, it is inappropriate to set up a contradiction between the personalist and juridical views of marriage. The Council did not break with the traditional concept of marriage, but on the contrary developed it further. When, for example, it is continually pointed out that the Council substituted the broader and theologically more profound concept of covenant for the strictly legal concept of contract, one must not forget that within covenant, the element of contract is also contained and indeed placed within a broader perspective. The fact that marriage reaches well beyond the purely juridical realm into the depths of humanity and into the mystery of the divine, has always been indicated by the word “sacrament,” although often it has not been pondered with the same clarity which the Council gave to these aspects. Law is not everything, but it is an indispensable part, one dimension of the whole. Marriage without a juridical dimension which integrates it into the whole fabric of society and the Church simply does not exist. If the post-Conciliar revision of canon law included the realm of marriage, this is not a betrayal of the Council, but the implementation of its mandate.

If the Church were to accept the theory that a marriage is dead when the two spouses no longer love one another, then she would thereby sanction divorce and would uphold the indissolubility of marriage only in word, and no longer in fact. Therefore, the opinion that the Pope could potentially dissolve a consummated sacramental marriage, which has been irrevocably broken, must be considered erroneous. Such a marriage cannot be dissolved by anyone. At their wedding, the spouses promise to be faithful to each other until death. (Joseph “Cardinal” Ratzinger, Reception of Holy Communion by divorced and remarried Catholics.)

Personalism, however, directly leads to the undermining of marriage as it is premised first of all on the spouses and not on the honor and glory of God by bringing forth as many (or as few) children as He chooses them to have, and it was condemned by Pope Pius XII in a decree issued by the Holy Office on April 1, 1944:

Certain publications concerning the purposes of matrimony, and their interrelationship and order, have come forth within these last years which either assert that the primary purpose of matrimony is not the generation of offspring, or that the secondary purposes are not subordinate to the primary purpose, but are independent of it.

In these works, different primary purposes of marriage are designated by other writers, as for example: the complement and personal perfection of the spouses through a complete mutual participation in life and action; mutual love and union of spouses to be nurtured and perfected the psychic and bodily surrender of one’s own person; and many other such things.

In the same writings a sense is sometimes attributed to words in the current documents of the Church (as for example, primary, secondary purpose), which does not agree with these words according to the common usage by theologians.

This revolutionary way of thinking and speaking aims to foster errors and uncertainties, to avoid which the Eminent and Very Fathers of this supreme Sacred Congregation, charged with the guarding of faith and morals, in a plenary session on Wednesday, the 29th of March, 1944, when the question was proposed to them: “Whether the opinion of certain writers can be admitted, who either deny that the primary purpose of matrimony is the generation of children and raising offspring, or teach that the secondary purposes are not essentially subordinate to the primary purpose, but are equally first and independent,” have decreed that the answer must be: In the negative. (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, No. 2295, pp. 624-625.)

Pope Pius XII amplified this condemnation when he delivered his Address to Italian Midwives on the Nature of their Profession, October 29, 1951:

"Personal values" and the need to respect such are a theme which, over the last twenty years or so, has been considered more and more by writers. In many of their works, even the specifically sexual act has its place assigned, that of serving the "person" of the married couple. The proper and most profound sense of the exercise of conjugal rights would consist in this, that the union of bodies is the expression and the realization of personal and affective union.

Articles, chapters, entire books, conferences, especially dealing with the "technique" of love, are composed to spread these ideas, to illustrate them with advice to the newly married as a guide in matrimony, in order that they may not neglect, through stupidity or a false sense of shame or unfounded scruples, that which God, Who also created natural inclinations, offers them. If from their complete reciprocal gift of husband and wife there results a new life, it is a result which remains outside, or, at the most, on the border of "personal values"; a result which is not denied, but neither is it desired as the center of marital relations.

According to these theories, your dedication for the welfare of the still hidden life in the womb of the mother, and your assisting its happy birth, would only have but a minor and secondary importance.

Now, if this relative evaluation were merely to place the emphasis on the personal values of husband and wife rather than on that of the offspring, it would be possible, strictly speaking, to put such a problem aside. But, however, it is a matter of a grave inversion of the order of values and of the ends imposed by the Creator Himself. We find Ourselves faced with the propagation of a number of ideas and sentiments directly opposed to the clarity, profundity, and seriousness of Christian thought. Here, once again, the need for your apostolate. It may happen that you receive the confidences of the mother and wife and are questioned on the more secret desires and intimacies of married life. How, then, will you be able, aware of your mission, to give weight to truth and right order in the appreciation and action of the married couple, if you yourselves are not furnished with the strength of character needed to uphold what you know to be true and just?

The primary end of marriage

Now, the truth is that matrimony, as an institution of nature, in virtue of the Creator's will, has not as a primary and intimate end the personal perfection of the married couple but the procreation and upbringing of a new life. The other ends, inasmuch as they are intended by nature, are not equally primary, much less superior to the primary end, but are essentially subordinated to it. This is true of every marriage, even if no offspring result, just as of every eye it can be said that it is destined and formed to see, even if, in abnormal cases arising from special internal or external conditions, it will never be possible to achieve visual perception.

It was precisely to end the uncertainties and deviations which threatened to diffuse errors regarding the scale of values of the purposes of matrimony and of their reciprocal relations, that a few years ago (March 10, 1944), We Ourselves drew up a declaration on the order of those ends, pointing out what the very internal structure of the natural disposition reveals. We showed what has been handed down by Christian tradition, what the Supreme Pontiffs have repeatedly taught, and what was then in due measure promulgated by the Code of Canon Law. Not long afterwards, to correct opposing opinions, the Holy See, by a public decree, proclaimed that it could not admit the opinion of some recent authors who denied that the primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of the offspring, or teach that the secondary ends are not essentially subordinated to the primary end, but are on an equal footing and independent of it.

Would this lead, perhaps, to Our denying or diminishing what is good and just in personal values resulting from matrimony and its realization? Certainly not, because the Creator has designed that for the procreation of a new life human beings made of flesh and blood, gifted with soul and heart, shall be called upon as men and not as animals deprived of reason to be the authors of their posterity. It is for this end that the Lord desires the union of husband and wife. Indeed, the Holy Scripture says of God that He created man to His image and He created him male and female, and willed—as is repeatedly affirmed in Holy Writ—that "a man shall leave mother and father, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh".

All this is therefore true and desired by God. But, on the other hand, it must not be divorced completely from the primary function of matrimony—the procreation of offspring. Not only the common work of external life, but even all personal enrichment—spiritual and intellectual—all that in married love as such is most spiritual and profound, has been placed by the will of the Creator and of nature at the service of posterity. The perfect married life, of its very nature, also signifies the total devotion of parents to the well-being of their children, and married love in its power and tenderness is itself a condition of the sincerest care of the offspring and the guarantee of its realization.

To reduce the common life of husband and wife and the conjugal act to a mere organic function for the transmission of seed would be but to convert the domestic hearth, the family sanctuary, into a biological laboratory. Therefore, in Our allocution of September 29, 1949, to the International Congress of Catholic Doctors, We expressly excluded artificial insemination in marriage. The conjugal act, in its natural structure, is a personal action, a simultaneous and immediate cooperation of husband and wife, which by the very nature of the agents and the propriety of the act, is the expression of the reciprocal gift, which, according to Holy Writ, effects the union "in one flesh".

That is much more than the union of two genes, which can be effected even by artificial means, that is, without the natural action of husband and wife. The conjugal act, ordained and desired by nature, is a personal cooperation, to which husband and wife, when contracting marriage, exchange the right.

Therefore, when this act in its natural form is from the beginning perpetually impossible, the object of the matrimonial contract is essentially vitiated. This is what we said on that occasion: "Let it not be forgotten: only the procreation of a new life according to the will and the design of the Creator carries with it in a stupendous degree of perfection the intended ends. It is at the same time in conformity with the spiritual and bodily nature and the dignity of the married couple, in conformity with the happy and normal development of the child".

Advise the fiancée or the young married woman who comes to seek your advice about the values of matrimonial life that these personal values, both in the sphere of the body and the senses and in the sphere of the spirit, are truly genuine, but that the Creator has placed them not in the first, but in the second degree of the scale of values. (Pope Pius XII, Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession, October 29, 1951.)

This was a ringing condemnation of the very philosophical and theological foundations of the indiscriminate, institutionalized teaching and practice of "natural family planning" in the lives of Catholic married couples. It is also yet another papal condemnation of conciliarism's view of marriage.

One cannot overemphasize the importance of Pope Pius XII's condemnation of the very personalist ideology that is at the root of what is called today "natural family planning" as it came just a little over seven years and one-half years after the Holy Office's condemnation of the work, which was identical to that of Dietrich von Hildebrand's, of Father Herbert Doms, who had inverted the end of marriage. The condemnation of Father Doms' work was alluded to in a passage from the October 29, 1951, address just cited above. Here it is once again for the sake of emphasis:

Yet is that Joseph “Cardinal” Ratzinger boasted in his “clarification” on January 1, 1998, that his September 14, 1994, “notification” did not reverse the “Second” Vatican Council’s commitment to “personalism,” which he endorsed very enthusiastically. Pope Pius XII’s condemnation of the personalist view of marriage, which he wrote himself, was one of those things that could be dispensed with by means of the “hermeneutic of continuity,” of course. And it is this “personalist” view of marriage that has led to the triumph of the naturalist sentimentality of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Walter Kasper, Bruno Forte, Victor Manuel Fernandez, Reinhard Marx, Ranier Woelki, Godfried Daneels, Vincent Nichols, Lorenzo Baldiserri, Sean O’Malley, et al.

Importantly, though, Ratzinger noted on January 1, 1998, that the definition of what constituted a true indissoluble marriage was “open” to further study and clarification, meaning that the grounds for obtaining a conciliar decree of nullity could be expanded and the process streamlined. There is thus no inconsistency whatsoever between what the revision that Ratzinger made in the conclusion of his 1972 article on the subject and what he had written in 1998:

a. Epikeia and aequitas canonica exist in the sphere of human and purely ecclesiastical norms of great significance, but cannot be applied to those norms over which the Church has no discretionary authority. The indissoluble nature of marriage is one of these norms which goes back to Christ Himself and is thus identified as a norm of divine law. The Church cannot sanction pastoral practices - for example, sacramental pastoral practices - which contradict the clear instruction of the Lord.

In other words, if the prior marriage of two divorced and remarried members of the faithful was valid, under no circumstances can their new union be considered lawful and therefore reception of the sacraments is intrinsically impossible. The conscience of the individual is bound to this norm without exception.[2]

b. However the Church has the authority to clarify those conditions which must be fulfilled for a marriage to be considered indissoluble according to the sense of Jesus' teaching. In line with the Pauline assertion in 1 Cor. 7, she established that only two baptized Christians can enter into a sacramental marriage. She developed the legal concept of the Pauline privilege and the Petrine privilege. With reference to the porneia clauses in Matthew and in Acts 15:20, the impediments to marriage were established. Furthermore, grounds for the nullity of marriage were identified with ever greater clarity, and the procedural system was developed in greater detail. All of this contributed to delineating and articulating more precisely the concept of the indissolubility of marriage. One can say that, in this way, the Western Church also made allowance for the principle of oikonomia, but without touching the indissolubility of marriage as such. The further juridical development of the 1983 Code of Canon Law was in this same direction, granting probative force to the declarations of the parties. Therefore, according to experts in this area, it seems that cases in which an invalid marriage cannot be shown to be such by the procedural are practically excluded.

Since marriage has a fundamental public ecclesial character and the axiom applies that nemo iudex in propria causa (no one is judge in his own case), marital cases must be resolved in the external forum. If divorced and remarried members of the faithful believe that their prior marriage was invalid, they are thereby obligated to appeal to the competent marriage tribunal so that the question will be examined objectively and under all available juridical possibilities.

c. Admittedly, it cannot be excluded that mistakes occur in marriage cases. In some parts of the Church, well-functioning marriage tribunals still do not exist. Occasionally, such cases last an excessive amount of time. Once in a while they conclude with questionable decisions. Here it seems that the application of epikeia in the internal forum is not automatically excluded from the outset. This is implied in the 1994 letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in which it was stated that new canonical ways of demonstrating nullity should exclude “as far as possible” every divergence from the truth verifiable in the judicial process (cf. No. 9). Some theologians are of the opinion that the faithful ought to adhere strictly even in the internal forum to juridical decisions which they believe to be false. Others maintain that exceptions are possible here in the internal forum, because the juridical forum does not deal with norms of divine law, but rather with norms of ecclesiastical law. This question, however, demands further study and clarification. Admittedly, the conditions for asserting an exception would need to be clarified very precisely, in order to avoid arbitrariness and to safeguard the public character of marriage, removing it from subjective decisions. (Joseph “Cardinal” Ratzinger, Reception of Holy Communion by divorced and remarried Catholics.)

The gist of this Ratzingerspeak can be translated as follows: Ratzinger was applying his “hermeneutic of continuity” to the “discovery” of new grounds for conciliar marriage tribunals to issue decrees of nullity, stating that what has been happening in recent years is simply part of a process of “clarification” that has been ongoing through the history of the Catholic Church. If this is so, one wonders if Jorge Mario Bergoglio is going to issue a posthumous decree of nullity to King Henry VIII to “clarify” Pope Urban VII’s firm defense of the validity of the lecherous monarch’s marriage to his devoted wife, Catherine of Aragon, who forgave her husband everything in a letter she wrote to him shortly before her death:

My most dear lord, King and husband,

The hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe you forceth me, my case being such, to commend myself to you, and to put you in remembrance with a few words of the health and safeguard of your soul which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and pampering of your body, for the which you have cast me into many calamities and yourself into many troubles. For my part, I pardon you everything, and I wish to devoutly pray God that He will pardon you also. For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants I solicit the wages due them, and a year more, lest they be unprovided for. Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.

Katharine the Queen (January 7, 1536.) (Letter of Katharine of Aragon to her husband)

Catherine of Aragon did not seek to get “remarried” as her husband had done to his “mistress,” Anne Boleyn. She offered up her suffering for the salvation of the soul of her faithless husband, a concept that is foreign to men such as Ratzinger, the supposed “defender of marriage,” and Bergoglio, the supposed “revolutionary” who is attacking it. The former is just as much a revolutionary as the latter by embracing a personalist view of marriage that was condemned by Pope Pius XII and by stating that “clarifications” can find newer grounds and “reformed” legal processes to help couples while not, significantly, ruling out the use of the “internal forum” solution in some cases.

Indeed, Vaticanologist Sandro Magister reported on the publication of the 1998 article in L’Osservatore Romano on November 30, 2011, to this very same effect:

ROME, December 5, 2011 – During Benedict XVI's recent visit to Germany, many were expecting "openness" from the pope to divorced and remarried Catholics: with the attenuation, if not the revocation, of the ban on receiving communion.

This expectation was expressed by the president of the German federal republic himself, Christian Wulff, Catholic and remarried, in the official welcome he extended to the pope at his arrival in Berlin.

Neither during the four days of his voyage to Germany, however, nor afterward, did pope Joseph Ratzinger say anything on this issue.

But it is well known that this question is very close to his heart. He has spoken of it repeatedly in the past, and has said that "the problem is very difficult and must be explored further."

Last November 30, Benedict XVI returned to the issue in indirect form: with the republication in "L'Osservatore Romano" of a "little-known" essay of his from 1998, supplemented with a footnote presenting his remark on this issue to the clergy of the diocese of Aosta on July 25, 2005.

An important footnote, because it concerns precisely one of the points on which Benedict XVI maintains that an exception could be opened in the general ban on communion. (No Communion for Outlaws. But Benedict Is Studying Two Exceptions.)

In the third part of his essay, Pope Benedict replies to those who demand that the Catholic Church respect the choice of the divorced and remarried when "in conscience" they believe it just to receive communion, in contrast with the juridical norm that bans it.

Benedict XVI begins with a consideration that seems to close any sort of loophole:

"If the prior marriage of two divorced and remarried members of the faithful was valid, under no circumstances can their new union be considered lawful and therefore reception of the sacraments is intrinsically impossible. The conscience of the individual is bound to this norm without exception." A norm, the indissolubility of marriage, that is of "divine law" and "over which the Church has no discretionary authority."

But immediately afterward, he adds:

"However, the Church has the authority to clarify those conditions which must be fulfilled for a marriage to be considered indissoluble according to thesense of Jesus' teaching."

And, he writes, the ecclesiastical tribunals that should ascertain whether or not a marriage is valid do not always function well. Sometimes the processes "last an excessive amount of time." In some cases "they conclude with questionable decisions."In still others "mistakes occur."

In these cases, therefore – the pope recognizes –, "it seems that the application of 'epikeia' in the internal forum is not automatically excluded," meaning a decision of conscience:

"Some theologians are of the opinion that the faithful ought to adhere strictly even in the internal forum to juridical decisions which they believe to be false. Others maintain that exceptions are possible here in the internal forum, because the juridical forum does not deal with norms of divine law, but rather with norms of ecclesiastical law. This question, however, demands further study and clarification. Admittedly, the conditions for asserting an exception would need to be clarified very precisely, in order to avoid arbitrariness and to safeguard the public character of marriage, removing it from subjective decisions". (No Communion for Outlaws. But Benedict Is Studying Two Exceptions.)

As noted before, this was vintage Ratzinger doublespeak.

The false "pontiff emeritus" was trying to appear to maintain the Catholic doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage while at the same time "rediscovering" the "sense" of a teaching that is very clear. This is just another manifestation of Ratzinger/Benedict's lack of understanding of the nature of the immutability of God, Who is immutable. Ratzinger/Benedict must analyze almost every point of Catholic doctrine and pastoral praxis on the basis of the agnosticism critiqued by Pope Saint Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis. That is, Ratzinger/Benedict does not believe that anything about the Catholic Faith is ever truly settled once and for all, something that Pope Saint Pius X noted in Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907:

It remains for Us now to say a few words about the Modernist as reformer. From all that has preceded, it is abundantly clear how great and how eager is the passion of such men for innovation. In all Catholicism there is absolutely nothing on which it does not fasten. They wish philosophy to be reformed, especially in the ecclesiastical seminaries. They wish the scholastic philosophy to be relegated to the history of philosophy and to be classed among absolute systems, and the young men to be taught modern philosophy which alone is true and suited to the times in which we live. They desire the reform of theology: rational theology is to have modern philosophy for its foundation, and positive theology is to be founded on the history of dogma. As for history, it must be written and taught only according to their methods and modern principles. Dogmas and their evolution, they affirm, are to be harmonized with science and history. In the Catechism no dogmas are to be inserted except those that have been reformed and are within the capacity of the people. Regarding worship, they say, the number of external devotions is to be reduced, and steps must be taken to prevent their further increase, though, indeed, some of the admirers of symbolism are disposed to be more indulgent on this head. They cry out that ecclesiastical government requires to be reformed in all its branches, but especially in its disciplinary and dogmatic departments. They insist that both outwardly and inwardly it must be brought into harmony with the modern conscience which now wholly tends towards democracy; a share in ecclesiastical government should therefore be given to the lower ranks of the clergy and even to the laity and authority which is too much concentrated should be decentralized. The Roman Congregations and especially the index and the Holy Office, must be likewise modified The ecclesiastical authority must alter its line of conduct in the social and political world; while keeping outside political organizations it must adapt itself to them in order to penetrate them with its spirit. With regard to morals, they adopt the principle of the Americanists, that the active virtues are more important than the passive, and are to be more encouraged in practice. They ask that the clergy should return to their primitive humility and poverty, and that in their ideas and action they should admit the principles of Modernism; and there are some who, gladly listening to the teaching of their Protestant masters, would desire the suppression of the celibacy of the clergy. What is there left in the Church which is not to be reformed by them and according to their principles? (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Everything must be "discovered" and expressed anew.

What Ratzinger/Benedict has said, therefore, on the issue of giving what he thinks is Holy Communion to those engaged in adulterous marriages is that "we will uphold the teaching on the indissolubility of marriage by changing the meaning of what constitutes an indissoluble marriage, thereby making it possible for those who are divorced and civilly remarried to resort to a 'solution' within the confessional that is pastorally sensitive to their 'difficult' circumstances." This is precisely what Bergoglio himself believes and what has been endorsed in Amoris Laetitia.

This is similar to the conciliar protestations that the Assisi events have not been exercises in religious syncretism when, of course, they have been precisely this. Simply saying that something is not so does nothing to change the reality of what an event actually is in the eyes of God. Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI "prayed" with ministers of false religions. He entered into their places of false worship. He esteemed the symbols of false religions. He extolled the nonexistent ability of false religions to "contribute" to the common good and the building of a just world order and world peace. Masquerading as a "true pope," Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI even gave "joint blessings" with the likes of Rowan Williams, the layman then masquerading as the "archbishop" of Canterbury. None of this is from the Catholic Church. All of this represents efforts to destroy the Catholic Faith.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio has done like things, obviously, which should tell everyone that there is no "space" between the current universal public face of apostasy and the one who preceded him. The "internal forum solution" that is favored by Kasper and is part of Bergoglio's "missionary activity" in paragraph fifty-seven of Amoris Laetitia can be laid right of the doorstep of "Pope Benedict XVI" himself, who took it from the heretical and schismatic Orthodox.

Although much of the text of Amoris Laetitia reads almost like a cut and paste job from Bergoglio’s endless screeds at his Ding Dong School of Apostasy at the Casa Santa Marta and is thus very redundant, the following three paragraphs set the stage for the exhortation’s coup de grace, especially in paragraphs 291-312:

77. “Discernment of the presence of ‘seeds of the Word’ in other cultures (cf. Ad Gentes 11) can also apply to the reality of marriage and the family. In addition to true natural marriage, positive elements exist in the forms of marriage found in other religious traditions”,76 even if, at times, obscurely. We can readily say that “anyone who wants to bring into this world a family which teaches children to be excited by every gesture aimed at overcoming evil – a family which shows that the Spirit is alive and at work – will encounter our gratitude and our appreciation. Whatever the people, religion or region to which they belong!”77 (77 Homily for the Concluding Mass of the Eighth World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia (27 September 2015): L’Osservatore Romano, 28-29 September 2015, p. 7.)

Brief Comment Number Two:

Bergoglio believes that the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, works “is alive and at work” in all people no matter their “religion or region to which they belong.”

In other words, the Argentine Apostate believes that one can be vivified by God the Holy Ghost in any religion in order to live a spiritually enriching life as a practicing member of various false religions. This is blasphemy. It is also the heresy of religious indifferentism has been denounced by true pope after true pope

13. Now We consider another abundant source of the evils with which the Church is afflicted at present: indifferentism. This perverse opinion is spread on all sides by the fraud of the wicked who claim that it is possible to obtain the eternal salvation of the soul by the profession of any kind of religion, as long as morality is maintained. Surely, in so clear a matter, you will drive this deadly error far from the people committed to your care. With the admonition of the apostle that "there is one God, one faith, one baptism"[16] may those fear who contrive the notion that the safe harbor of salvation is open to persons of any religion whatever. They should consider the testimony of Christ Himself that "those who are not with Christ are against Him,"[17] and that they disperse unhappily who do not gather with Him. Therefore "without a doubt, they will perish forever, unless they hold the Catholic faith whole and inviolate."[18] Let them hear Jerome who, while the Church was torn into three parts by schism, tells us that whenever someone tried to persuade him to join his group he always exclaimed: "He who is for the See of Peter is for me."[19] A schismatic flatters himself falsely if he asserts that he, too, has been washed in the waters of regeneration. Indeed Augustine would reply to such a man: "The branch has the same form when it has been cut off from the vine; but of what profit for it is the form, if it does not live from the root?"[20] (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)

One sentence from the passage just above eviscerates Bergoglio’s self-referential contention that God the Holy Ghost is alive in all religions:

With the admonition of the apostle that "there is one God, one faith, one baptism"[16] may those fear who contrive the notion that the safe harbor of salvation is open to persons of any religion whatever. (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)

Jorge Mario Bergoglio thus makes a mockery of the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation.

Additionally, Pope Leo XIII explained that religious indifferentism leads to the triumph of practical atheism wherever it is practiced by civil states:

To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name.Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

The final two paragraphs to be discussed in this segment, which must be briefer than usual because of the exigencies of the time available to me at a very late hour, endorse moral relativism and an acceptance of “good elements” in sinful relationships, endorsements that provide the theoretical foundation for Amoris Laetitia’s adoption of “gradualness” as the means to lead people into the life of what is said to be the Catholic Church rather than to make an “unrealistic” and “caustic” demand upon hardened sinners to quit their lives of sin once and for all:

78. “The light of Christ enlightens every person (cf. Jn 1:9; Gaudium et Spes, 22). Seeing things with the eyes of Christ inspires the Church’s pastoral care for the faithful who are living together, or are only married civilly, or are divorced and remarried. Following this divine pedagogy, the Church turns with love to those who participate in her life in an imperfect manner: she seeks the grace of conversion for them; she encourages them to do good, to take loving care of each other and to serve the community in which they live and work… When a couple in an irregular union attains a noteworthy stability through a public bond – and is characterized by deep affection, responsibility towards the children and the ability to overcome trials – this can be seen as an opportunity, where possible, to lead them to celebrate the sacrament of Matrimony”.78

79. “When faced with difficult situations and wounded families, it is always necessary to recall this general principle: ‘Pastors must know that, for the sake of truth, they are obliged to exercise careful discernment of situations’ (Familiaris Consortio, 84). The degree of responsibility is not equal in all cases and factors may exist which limit the ability to make a decision. Therefore, while clearly stating the Church’s teaching, pastors are to avoid judgements that do not take into account the complexity of various situations, and they are to be attentive, by necessity, to how people experience and endure distress because of their condition”.79 (Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Amoris Laetita, March 19, 2016.)

Closing Comments:

The light of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ does not enlighten every person.

While it is true that the Actual Graces that flow out of every true offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass can inspire non-Catholics to convert to the true Faith, it is not true to say that every person is enlightened by Our Lord. Those who deny the Sacred Divinity of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus are slaves to the devil by means of Original Sin. While such people can be enlightened by Actual Graces to seek after the true Faith, the souls the unbaptized live in the darkness and the shadows of eternal death, which is why so many them work overtime against any public mention of Our Lord and the teaching that He has entrusted exclusively to His true Church for Its infallible explication and eternal safekeeping.

Finally, it is wise to call upon following words of Pope Leo XIII to refute the notion that the Catholic Church looks with favor upon what Bergoglio says is a “noteworthy stability in sinful relationships:

41. In the great confusion of opinions, however, which day by day is spreading more and more widely, it should further be known that no power can dissolve the bond of Christian marriage whenever this has been ratified and consummated; and that, of a consequence, those husbands and wives are guilty of a manifest crime who plan, for whatever reason, to be united in a second marriage before the first one has been ended by death. When, indeed, matters have come to such a pitch that it seems impossible for them to live together any longer, then the Church allows them to live apart, and strives at the same time to soften the evils of this separation by such remedies and helps as are suited to their condition; yet she never ceases to endeavor to bring about a reconciliation, and never despairs of doing so. But these are extreme cases; and they would seldom exist if men and women entered into the married state with proper dispositions, not influenced by passion, but entertaining right ideas of the duties of marriage and of its noble purpose; neither would they anticipate their marriage by a series of sins drawing down upon them the wrath of God.

42. To sum up all in a few words, there would be a calm and quiet constancy in marriage if married people would gather strength and life from the virtue of religion alone, which imparts to us resolution and fortitude; for religion would enable them to bear tranquilly and even gladly the trials of their state, such as, for instance, the faults that they discover in one another, the difference of temper and character, the weight of a mother's cares, the wearing anxiety about the education of children, reverses of fortune, and the sorrows of life.

43. Care also must be taken that they do not easily enter into marriage with those who are not Catholics; for, when minds do not agree as to the observances of religion, it is scarcely possible to hope for agreement in other things. Other reasons also proving that persons should turn with dread from such marriages are chiefly these: that they give occasion to forbidden association and communion in religious matters; endanger the faith of the Catholic partner; are a hindrance to the proper education of the children; and often lead to a mixing up of truth and falsehood, and to the belief that all religions are equally good.

44. Lastly, since We well know that none should be excluded from Our charity, We commend, venerable brothers, to your fidelity and piety those unhappy persons who, carried away by the heat of passion, and being utterly indifferent to their salvation, live wickedly together without the bond of lawful marriage. Let your utmost care be exercised in bringing such persons back to their duty; and, both by your own efforts and by those of good men who will consent to help you, strive by every means that they may see how wrongly they have acted; that they may do penance; and that they may be induced to enter into a lawful marriage according to the Catholic rite. (Pope Leo XIII, Arcanum, February 10, 1880.)

I could do myself a big favor and say that there is really no need to write more segments about Jorge’s exhortation of self-justification before men as the words of Pope Leo XIII in the passages from Arcanum just above condemn the Argentine Apostate and his false teaching in no uncertain terms.

Pope Leo XIII referred to those who “live wickedly together without the bond of lawful marriage. Jorge Mario Bergoglio praises those who are living together without the bond of lawful marriage for having a “noteworthy stability” if the sinful union has lasted for a certain while.

Pope Leo XIII was a true pope.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio is an antipope.

Pope Leo XIII was a Catholic.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio is a heretic,

Yet it is that those attached to the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism must obey their “heretical ‘pope’” without criticizing him, a point made most recently in The Conciliar Chair of Disunity and Division.

Even an unbaptized judge who presided over an 1854 jury trial brought by the trustees of Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, against Bishop John Neumann reprimanded the Jewish attorney representing the trustees for his stating that believing Catholics could do anything other than follow the pope and his bishops. Here is the relevant section that describes how the unbaptized judge dealt with those caught up in the heresy of trusteeism that had plagued many parishes in the United States of America from this nation’s inception, noting that the heresy came into full bloom in the first decade of the Nineteenth Century, until the 1850s:

John Neumann stood up calmly under the fusillade of abuse. He made no angry retort nor did he take to the public prints in warm rebuttal, but he did, literally, have his day in court. The Bishop of Philadelphia based his appeal to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania against the anti-bishop party on the ground that the insurgent trustees of Trinity Church were not Catholics in a true sense and that they could not be trustees of a Catholic church. The final dramatic clash, as related in a newspaper and in the court records, took place before Judge Woodward in March 1854, in the Supreme Court chamber. Woodward was not even baptized and the lawyer for the anti-bishop party was a Jew.

“Tell me,” said the judge to the bishop, “why do you call your church Roman Catholic?”

“Our church is called Roman Catholic because the Pope, who is its head, resides in Rome. According to the laws of the Pope, the bishops administer their dioceses; and according to the laws of the bishops, the pastors govern their congregations. If anyone wants to be a member of our Catholic Church, he must be united through the pastor with the bishop and through the bishop with the Pope. The union is effected through spiritual obedience. Whoever does not render this obedience does not belong to the Catholic Church because this arrangement is its essential unchangeable constitution.”

The judge thereupon asked the anti-bishop party whether this were true.

“Yes,” came back the answer.

The American judge then rebuked then. “Your Germans are a disgrace to our city. For ninety years you have been quarreling with your bishop!” That was a complete overstatement of the case, for the church in the United States had had bishops for only sixty-five years, since John Carroll became its first prelate, but he was right about the quarreling. The judge continued, “You had an Irishman for bishop, and American and now you have a German. You are satisfied with none, obedient to none. If you want to be Catholics you must obey the Pope and the bishop in all ecclesiastical affairs. You cannot expect that the Court will protect your disobedience.”

The Jewish attorney entered a protest. “It is known that the Jesuits want to gather to themselves all the wealth of the world. This bishop too is a Jesuit, at least in secret. He wants to deprive the Germans of their Church.”

“Shut your mouth,” said the Judge, “do not believe that you are going to deceive us with such foolish talk. If the Jesuits come and in a legal manner acquire the whole city of Philadelphia, our laws will protect them. If the Germans are not satisfied with their church and bishop, they can give up their faith anytime; there is freedom of religion with us. But as long as they remain Catholics they must obey the Pope and the bishop in all religious matters . . .”

Turning to the jury, the judge addressed them. “Decide according to justice and not according to passion; the case is important. By their complaints against the bishop the Germans are making an attack on our Constitution, on our freedom, and, what is most sacred, on our religious freedom. If you protect this attempt other will soon follow, and our freedom, our pride and our fortune will be lost.” The jury returned the verdict—victory for the bishop. The anti-bishop trustees were deprived of their office, and a new election was ordered.

John Neumann recovered legal possession of the Holy Trinity Church property. The bishop had sought no personal triumph; he wished merely to vindicate the rights of the church. He was anxious enough to bury the past, but the trustees refused to surrender the church and spoke of calling on the legislature. Judge Woodward had the contumacious men summoned back into court again. On April 8, 1854, several members of the anti-bishop party were declared guilty of contempt of court and ordered taken into custody by the sheriff of Philadelphia. They spent some weeks in Moyemensing jail, a house of detention of forbidding appearance. Later they were released with a warning that any further refusal to abide by the court's decision would bring a sentence of several years in prison. That threat broke the opposition. Neumann had without much fanfare won one of the country's major victories against trusteeism. With loyal trustees in office, Holy Trinity Church was soon reopened and began to thrive. The bishop himself gave confirmation there on several occasions. When the celebrated missionary, Francis X. Weniger, S.J., gave a parish mission there in 1857, such crowds attended that some climbed in the windows to be present. German-speaking priests from St. Peter's and several diocesan priests heard confessions day and night, so great were the numbers desirous of reconciliation in the sacrament of penance.

The bishop was delighted, but his desired went even further. He made long and charitable efforts to win back the disaffected. Thanks to the pacifying work of the new pastor whom the bishop had appointed, Father Peter Carbon, the opportunities for discord because of trustees was settled forever when in 1859 an amendment to the charter of the parish allowed the bishop to name the trustees. A Jesuit contemporary called this move by Neumann “a masterly piece of policy.” The whole sixty-eight-year-old sore spot that had tormented bishops since the days of John Carroll was healed. Holy Trinity parish went on to take an honored place in the Catholic life of Philadelphia. (Father Michael J. Curley, C.SS.R.,Venerable John Neumann. C.SS.R., Fourth Bishop of Philadelphia. New York, New York: The Crusader Press, 1952, pp. 225-228. More of this will appear in volume two of Conversion in Reverse, whose text is being written in spurts as the demands of the work for this website require.)

Leaving aside Judge Woodward's praise of "religious freedom" that has always been a double-edged sword that allowed Catholics to practice their Faith in the United States of America while permitting the conditions to develop whereby even overt satanism must be tolearated, if not celebrated and publicly endorsed, in the name of that "freedom," even this unbaptized judge understood that Catholics must follow and obey the man they believe to be a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter. Catholics are not free to fall into the heresy of Gallicanism in order to justify a theological relativism that makes the triumph of moral relativism inevitable.

Pope Saint Leo the Great made this very point in homily that is included in the readings for Matins in the Divine Office for today, April 26, 2016, the Feast of Pope Saints Cletus and Marcellinus universally and the Feast of Our Lady of Good Counsel in some places:

When the Lord, as we read in the Evangelist, asked His disciples Who did men, amid their divers speculations, believe that He, the Son of Man, was; blessed Peter answered and said Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father, Which is in heaven and I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it; and I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Thus therefore standeth the ordinance of the Truth, and blessed Peter, abiding still that firm rock which God hath made him, hath never lost that right to rule in the Church which God hath given unto him.

In the universal Church it is Peter that doth still say every day, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God, and every tongue which confesseth that Jesus is Lord is taught that confession by the teaching of Peter. This is the faith that overcometh the devil and looseth the bands of his prisoners. This is the faith which maketh men free of the world and bringeth them to heaven, and the gates of hell are impotent to prevail against it. With such ramparts of salvation hath God fortified this rock, that the contagion of heresy will never be able to infect it, nor idolatry and unbelief to overcome it. This teaching it is, my dearly beloved brethren, which maketh the keeping of this Feast to-day to be our reasonable service, even the teaching which maketh you to know and honour in myself, lowly though I be, that Peter who is still entrusted with the care of all other shepherds and of all the flocks to them committed, and whose authority I have, albeit unworthy to be his heir.

When, therefore, we address our exhortations to your godly ears, believe ye that ye are hearing him speak whose office we are discharging. Yea, it is with his love for you that we warn you, and we preach unto you no other thing than that which he taught, entreating you that ye would gird up the loins of your mind and lead pure and sober lives in the fear of God. My disciples dearly beloved, ye are to me, as the disciples of the Apostle Paul were to him, (Phil. iv. 1,) a crown and a joy, if your faith, which, in the first times of the Gospel, was spoken of throughout the whole world, Rom. i. 8, abide still lovely and holy. For, albeit it behoveth the whole Church which is spread throughout all the world, to be strong in righteousness, you it chiefly becometh above all other peoples to excel in worth and godliness, whose house is built upon the very crown of the Rock of the Apostle, and whom not only hath our Lord Jesus Christ, as He hath redeemed all men, but whom also His blessed Apostle Peter hath made the foremost object of his teaching. (Pope Saint Leo the Great, as found in Matins, The Divine Office, Feast of Pope Saint Leo the Great.)

Well, it is all there, isn’t it?

The Catholic Church is incapable of being touched by any kind of error, no less heresy, no, not even in her Universal Ordinary Magisterium.

We must continue to trust in Our Lady during this times when right is called wrong, the existence of objective truth, both supernatural and natural, is said to admit of uncertainty, and a putative “pope” can mouth one Modernist cliché after another with complete impunity as the “people” who are stepped in “evil” see him as the one who can “ratify” their lives of wanton sin and thus shut up anyone who would dare to tell them to reform their lives. Every Rosary we offer up as the consecrated slaves of Christ the King through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary plants a few seeds for the restoration of the papacy and thus of the fulfillment of Our Lady’s Fatima Message and the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Let us remember also to invoke the Mother of God under her title of Our Lady of Good Counsel on this her feast day.

The image of Our Lady of Good Counsel with the Child Jesus appeared miraculously, accompanied by celestial music, on the Feast of Saint Mark, April 25, 1467, in the Church of Santa Maria in Genazaano, Italy, which had been entrusted to the Order of Saint Augustine one hundred eleven years before. Popes Urban VIII, Innocent XI, Benedict XIV, Pius IX, and Leo XIII have had a great devotion to the miraculous image of Our Lady of Good Counsel. Pope Leo XIII inserted the title of Our Lady of Good Counsel into the Litany of Loreto before he died in 1903, and our last true pope thus far, Pope Pius XII, even placed his entire pontificate under her protection.

We are placed to have a copy of the image of Our Lady of Good Counsel in our home. It was given to us by a Catholic woman at a Catholic Family News conference in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2004. What is even more remarkable who gave us that image was blind. However, she had the supernatural vision to see what many Catholics forget: that we need pray more to Our Lady of Good Counsel during these times of apostasy and betrayal. This image has had a prominent place wherever we have lived since then, and we pray every day for the repose of the soul of the good Catholic woman, ever accompanied by her selfless husband and her loyal seeing-eye dog, who enhanced our lives with the image of Our Lady of Good Counsel.

Our Lady of Good Counsel, we need a miracle now! Restore a true pope to the Throne of Saint Peter!

Our Lady of Good Counsel, 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 Beloved, 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.

Popes Saint Cletus and Marcellinus, pray for us.

You are here

Jorge's Exhortation of Self-Justification Before Men, part six

Support Christ or Chaos