Weak In Mind, Weakest Yet In The Faith
by Thomas A. Droleskey
Every revolution arises as a consequence of Lucifer's rebellion against God in Heaven and as a consequence of the devil's success in convincing our first parents, Adam and Eve, to rebel against God, Who had created Adam out of the dirt of the earth and Eve from Adam's side. Each and every revolution on earth, whether theological or social, is founded on the lie that man can act as he pleases without regard to what God has revealed to us.
Adam and Eve refused to obey a direct Command from God not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
The Hebrews who had been led out of Egypt by a column of cloud during the day and a column of fire at night and who had marched across the dry seabed of the Red Sea, whose waters had been parted miraculously by Moses with a wave of his staff, wound up worshiping the Golden Calf and grumbling at the waters of Marah.
Many of the Chosen People of the Old Covenant, including King David, from whose very lineage the King of Kings would be born of Our Blessed Mother in the cradle in the stable in the cave in Bethlehem, broke the Ten Commandments after they had been given by God to Moses atop Mount Sinai.
King Achab rebelled against God by worshiping Baal atop Mount Carmel.
The Prophet Jeremias warned the pastors of the Jewish people about their infidelities rebellions against God, warning them that they would be replaced by Christ the King:
Woe to the pastors, that destroy and tear the sheep of my pasture, saith the Lord. Therefore thus saith the Lord the God of Israel to the pastors that feed my people: You have scattered my flock, and driven them away, and have not visited them: behold I will visit upon you for the evil of your doings, saith the Lord. And I will gather together the remnant of my flock, out of all the lands into which I have cast them out: and I will make them return to their own fields, and they shall increase and be multiplied. And I will set up pastors over them, and they shall feed them: they shall fear no more, and they shall not be dismayed: and none shall be wanting of their number, saith the Lord. Behold the days come, saith the Lord, and I will raise up to David a just branch: and a king shall reign, and shall be wise, and shall execute judgement and justice in the earth. (Jer. 23: 1-5)
The first of the true modern revolutionaries, Martin Luther, rebelled directly against the Divine Plan that God Himself had instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church, making possible, proximately speaking, each and every subsequent theological and social revolution as there can only be one result when man rebels against the teaching and sanctifying offices of the Catholic Church: the enthronement and the deification of man, a mere creature, in the place of Christ the King. Personal and social chaos must ensue as a result, as we have witnessed only too clearly in the past 492 years.
As our modern revolutionaries, full of the pride of Lucifer when he rebelled against God in Heaven, have rejected the Divinely-instituted authority of the Catholic Church to govern all men and all nations without any exception whatsoever, they come to disagree amongst themselves to which one of them is to be considered "the" authority on the nature and course of whichever revolutions. In other words, everyone considers himself a "pope" of whatever theological or social revolution is his particular cause once he rejects the doctrine of Papal Primacy.
After all, of course, the social revolutions wrought by the aftermath of the Protestant Revolution's overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King, have had engendered divisions and conflict in their bloody wake, resulting frequently in one set of revolutionaries turning on each other. This was true in the French and Bolshevik and Communist Chinese Revolutions. It was even true in the aftermath of the American Revolution as the "sons of 1776" divided ultimately into "Federalist" and "Anti-Federalist" camps.
More to the point of this particular commentary, however, the "mother" of all modern revolutions, the Protestant Revolution, begot various mutations over the centuries. Starting with Martin Luther himself, who attacked both doctrine and worship, the theological revolution against the Faith and Liturgy of the Catholic Church championed the likes of John Calvin and Thomas Cranmer and John Wesley and John Knox and Oliver Cromwell with their variations on the same revolutionary themes, engendering over thirty-three thousand different sects have emerged in the past 492 years as a result.
There are "evangelical" Protestants. There are "fundamentalist" Protestants. There are "liberal" Protestants. There are the "Old Time Bible" Protestants. There are "congregational" Protestants. There are "Pentecostalist" Protestants. There are the "mega-church" (Saddelback) Protestants. There are the "cornerstone" Protestants. There are "liberal" and "evangelical" Lutherans. There are varieties of Calvinists (Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, congregational, restorationist). There are "liberal" Anglicans and "Anglo-Catholic" Anglicans and "conservative" and "liberal" Episcopalians. There are "free" Methodists and "united" Methodists. There are "southern" Baptists and "free will" Baptists and ""Bible" Baptists.
This is a list that could continue indefinitely. The point is a simple one, however: one revolutionary, a drunken and immoral Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, started a process of rebellion that, as Pope Leo XIII noted in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, infected the precincts of philosophy after having rebelled against the true Church and instituted a "faith" and a form of worship that was from the devil himself:
But that harmful and deplorable passion for innovation which was aroused in the sixteenth century threw first of all into confusion the Christian religion, and next, by natural sequence, invaded the precincts of philosophy, whence it spread amongst all classes of society. From this source, as from a fountain-head, burst forth all those later tenets of unbridled license which, in the midst of the terrible upheavals of the last century, were wildly conceived and boldly proclaimed as the principles and foundation of that new conception of law which was not merely previously unknown, but was at variance on many points with not only the Christian, but even the natural law.
That Protestantism is of the devil has been proved by the evil one himself:
As the strange circumstances of Nicola's possession became known everywhere, several Calvinist preachers came with their followers, to "expose this popish cheat," as they said. On their entrance, the devil saluted them mockingly, called them by name, and told them that they had come in obedience to him. One of the preachers took his Protestant prayer book, and began to read it with a very solemn face. The devil laughed at him, and putting on a most comical look, he said: "Ho! Ho! My good friend; do you intend to expel me with your prayers and hymns? Do you think that they will cause me any pain? Don't you know that they are mine? I helped to compose them!"
"I will expel thee in the name of God," said the preacher, solemnly.
"You!" said the devil mockingly. "You will not expel me either in the name of God, or in the name of the devil. Did you ever hear of one devil driving out another?"
"I am not a devil," said the preacher, angrily, "I am a servant of Christ."
"A servant of Christ, indeed!" said Satan, with a sneer. "What! I tell you, you are worse than I am. I believe, and you do not want to believe. Do you suppose that you can expel me from the body of this miserable wretch? Ha! Go first and expel all the devils that are in your own heart!"
The preacher took his leave, somewhat discomfited. On going away, he said, turning up the whites of his eyes, "O Lord, I pray thee, assist this poor creature!"
"And I pray Lucifer," cried the evil spirit, "that he may never leave you, but may always keep you firmly in his power, as he does now. Go about your business, now. You are all mine, and I am your master." (Exorcism of Nicola Aubrey)
Along with the various naturalistic philosophies that were spawned in the wake of its rebellion against the true Faith, Catholicism, including evolutionism itself, a penultimate expression of the rejection of the Catholic Church as the eternal repository and infallible teacher of all that is contained in Divine Revelation (Sacred Scripture and Apostolic or Sacred Tradition), Protestantism was a major contributing factor to the rise of Modernism in the Catholic Church at the end of the Nineteenth Century, helping to spawn the pseudo "liturgical movement" in the Twentieth Century that hijacked the Liturgical Movement begun by Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., in the Nineteenth Century as a means to enshrine false ecumenism and much of the Protestant ethos in a "reformed" Catholic liturgy that would be inspired by Protestantism and thus attractive to its adherents.
This is proved by the words of those who either worked on the Consilium, the committee that planned the demolition of the Roman Rite when they concocted the Novus Ordo service out of Protestant and Masonic principles, and/or the words of those who knew of its true intentions:
We must strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren that is for the Protestants." (Annibale Bugnini, L'Osservatore Romano, March 19, 1965.)
Let it be candidly said: the Roman Rite which we have known hitherto no longer exists. It is destroyed. (Father Joseph Gelineau, who worked with Annibale Bugnini's Consilium, Quoted and footnoted in the work of a Father John Mole, who believed that the Mass of the Roman Rite had been "truncated," not destroyed. Assault on the Roman Rite)
Certainly we will preserve the basic elements, the bread, the wine, but all else will be changed according to local tradition: words, gestures, colors, vestments, chants, architecture, decor. The problem of liturgical reform is immense. (Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, 1965, Quoted and footnoted in Assault on the Roman Rite. This has also been noted on this site in the past, having been provided me by a reader who had access to the 1980 French book in which the quote is found.)
"[T]he intention of Pope Paul VI with regard to what is commonly called the Mass, was to reform the Catholic liturgy in such a way that it should coincide with the Protestant liturgy.... [T]here was with Pope Paul VI an ecumenical intention to remove, or at least to correct, or at least to relax, what was too Catholic in the traditional sense, in the Mass, and I, repeat, to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist mass" (Dec. 19, 1993), Apropos, #17, pp. 8f; quoted in Christian Order, October, 1994. (Jean Guitton, a close friend of Giovanni Montini/Paul VI.)
This evidence is simply ignored or dismissed by defenders of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service, some of whom have contended over the past four decades that the presence of six liberal Protestant "observers" during the work of the Consilium in the planning of the Novus Ordo service had "no influence" over the Consilium's proceedings. Father Romano Tomasi (a pseudonym for a conciliar presbyter who has done extensive research on the work of the Consilium) has researched letters written by some of those Protestant observers, discovering that they, the observers, boasted of having made their "observations" during coffee breaks in the Consilium's official proceedings, "observations" that were then read into the record by the Consilium's bishop-members as their own. So much for the mythology that Protestants had "no influence" over the creation of the synthetic entity known as the Novus Ordo service.
One of the "liturgical experts" who played a major role in bringing the revolutionary Novus Ordo service into being was a Benedictine priest named Father Rembert G. Weakland, O.S.B.:
Rembert G. Weakland was a key confidant of the pope [Giovanni Montini/Paul VI] in January 1968 as one of the most profound changes in Roman Catholic Church history was about to take place. The Second Vatican Council had adopted a document on sacred liturgy, but Paul VI had to implement it — and in doing so, replace the 400-year-old Tridentine Mass.
Resistant Vatican officials were pressuring him. He didn't want a schism. To resolve doubts, the Pope tried three versions of the new Mass. Five people, mainly bishops and cardinals, attended each. Only two were at every session — Weakland, then the abbot primate or worldwide head of the Benedictine order of monks and priests, and the late Annibale Bugnini, then a monsignor and secretary of the Vatican liturgical commission. Weakland termed the sessions "decisive." (Archbishop Weakland's Legacy)
Apart from the misinformation that the Novus Ordo service "replaced the 400-year-old Tridentine Mass, implying that the Immemorial Mass of Tradition was not known prior to Pope Saint Pius V's Papal Bull Quo Primum, July 19, 1570, this brief passage establishes for readers of this commentary the well-documented fact that Weakland, who is weak in mind and weakest yet in the Catholic Faith, had a major hand in creating a "liturgy" whose basic spirit, defined by Paragraph Fifteen of the General Instruction to the Roman Missal (G.I.R.M.), is based on the belief that acts of
"outward penance" belong to another age in the history of the Church." Such a false spirit, of course, is most necessary to reaffirm men such as Weakland who do not understand the horror of personal sin and thus believe that there is no need to do penance for it, a belief that must be expressed in the liturgy itself. A new religion needed its "new order" service as the Mass of the Roman Rite and conciliarism are mutually irreconcilable.
Bugnini and Weakland and the other conciliar revolutionaries understood during the years (1967 to 1969) that the Consilium was doing its dirty and intellectually dishonest work of "reforming" the Mass that most the only contact that most Catholics had with the Faith was by means of their attendance at Sunday Mass. To change the way what purported to be Mass was offered would, they knew, "teach" the faithful who remained in the conciliar structures to accept the conciliar ethos as but a "natural" and entirely "necessary" "progression" to "correct" the "dryness" of the "old liturgy" and the "preconciliar faith."
Pope Pius XI, writing in Quas Primas, December 11, 1925, understood full well that the ceremonies of the Church spoke more forcefully to the people than any of her documents as only the most educated of the faithful read those documents:
For people are instructed in the truths of faith, and brought to appreciate the inner joys of religion far more effectually by the annual celebration of our sacred mysteries than by any official pronouncement of the teaching of the Church. Such pronouncements usually reach only a few and the more learned among the faithful; feasts reach them all; the former speak but once, the latter speak every year - in fact, forever. The church's teaching affects the mind primarily; her feasts affect both mind and heart, and have a salutary effect upon the whole of man's nature. Man is composed of body and soul, and he needs these external festivities so that the sacred rites, in all their beauty and variety, may stimulate him to drink more deeply of the fountain of God's teaching, that he may make it a part of himself, and use it with profit for his spiritual life.
The conciliar revolutionaries knew that most Catholics would not be influenced by the documents of the "Second" Vatican Council or even the "encyclical" letters that might be issued by the conciliar "pontiffs." They did know, however, that most Catholics would, out of a sense of "obedience" to the "pope" and their "bishops" and their "pastors," accept the "fruit" of their liturgical revolution and thus have their sensus Catholicus replaced by an acceptance of the conciliar ethos as a result of being immersed in it week after week, if not day after day, by means of the Novus Ordo service. This is what has led to a situation where most Catholics are so
accustomed to apostasy that they cannot even recognize sacrilege and apostasy when it stares them in the face as the man they believe is the "pope" calls mosques as "sacred" places and refuses to seek the conversion of the Jews (and who lets his own curial official stand uncorrected when they assert publicly that the Catholic Church has "no mission from God to do so).
Rembert G. Weakland has been much in the news in the past few weeks since his "confession," hardly a surprise or a shock, that he identifies himself as one who is "inclined" to the commission of perverse sins against nature and against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, a "confession" to which I made a brief reference in Having No Regard for the Horror of Sin ten days ago now.
There is no need to descend yet again into the sordid details of the now disgraced former conciliar "archbishop"of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who engaged in a mighty reign of terror upon anyone attached to the structures in his archdiocese between 1977 and 2002 and who, whether priest or consecrated religious or a member of the laity, had the "misfortune" of adhering to the Catholic Faith purely without an iota of dissent and who the equal "misfortunate" of daring to criticize, no less reject, his own revolutionary liturgical service, the Novus Ordo.
One of those who felt the wrath of the progressivist pervert Weakland was the late Father Hugh Wish, who offered the Immemorial Mass of Tradition at Saint Lawrence Church in Milwaukee even after the introduction of the Novus Ordo, was "suspended" by Weakland after Father Wish took early retirement, continuing thereafter to offer the true Mass in different venues in Milwaukee, rather than to distribute what he thought to be Holy Communion in the hand in the Novus Ordo when this sacrilege was introduced de jure (after years of its existence de facto in many parishes in conciliar captivity) in the United States of America on November 20, 1977.
Members of the laity across the nation who dared to criticize Weakland's multiple defections from the Faith also felt the wrath of this progressivist pervert, who once called Wanderer reporter Paul Likoudis, whose excellent journalistic work helped to expose a great deal about the nest of pervert-friendly "bishops" in the conciliar "hierarchy," as "evil." That is quite a comment from a man who said the following recently:
“If we say our God is an all-loving god,” he said, “how do you explain that at any given time probably 400 million living on the planet at one time would be gay? Are the religions of the world, as does Catholicism, saying to those hundreds of millions of people, you have to pass your whole life without any physical, genital expression of that love?” (Ex-Archbishop Speaks About Catholic Church and Homosexuality)
As is the case with so many Catholics attached to the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, Rembert G. Weakland has no concept of the horror of personal sin. He does not understand that no one "loves" another when he does or says anything that places the salvation of that other person in jeopardy. Rembert G. Weakland is really a prototype of the average conciliar Catholic, people who mistake "sentimentality" for "love," people who have never been taught that love is an act of the will and that the highest expression of love is will the good of others, the ultimate expression of which is the salvation of their immortal souls. No one can say that he "loves" God when he breaks His Commandments unrepentantly, no less when he portrays himself as a "victim" for not being to act as sees fit even God has made it very clear in Sacred Scripture that his actions are aberrant and actually brought down fire and brimstone from Heaven to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.
It is no accident that Rembert G. Weakland, one of the many perverted "bishops" to appointed by their fellow traveler, Giovanni Montini/Paul VI (see Paul VI's Perversion: Rumor or Reality? and Evidence that Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Paul VI was a pervert; the texts found in these links are not to be read by the young or those who, understandably, want to avoid discussions of such matters), had such a hatred for any version of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, including the modernized version of that Mass promulgated by Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII, as he, as a conciliar revolutionary present at the "creation" of the abomination known as the Novus Ordo, abhorred the traditional liturgy's regular references to sin, heresy, error, and the necessity of men doing their penance for their sins as a means of appeasing a God Who will judge us at the moment of our deaths. As is well known and will be reviewed, if ever so briefly, in this article,Weakland, over and above his own personal corruption, scandalized the Catholic faithful by his words and actions that placed into question "black and white" matters of Faith and Morals that he rejected as being so "black and white."
Weakland's abhorrence for any version of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition as an "impediment" to the "fulfillment" of the conciliar revolution's liturgical goals was made clear on any number of occasions, including when he said the following:
"My hopes, however, were shattered. What totally derailed the liturgical renewal, from the point of view of this bishop in the trenches, was the decision of Pope John Paul II made I am sure, with great anguish to grant in 1984 the indult that allowed the Tridentine usage to flourish again. ... Just at the moment when the situation was beginning to settle down and the deeper and more spiritual aspects of the renewal were becoming possible, a whole new battle began, one in which the renewal itself was called into question or where everyone seemed free to project his or her personal views on how the renewal of the Council should have taken place. As well-meaning as that decision to broaden the Tridentine usage was, one cannot emphasize enough how devastating the results have been." (Rembert Weakland, quoted in America, June 7-14, 1997, as found in Archbishop Weakland's Legacy.)
This hatred of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition transcended the ideological lines that divided many of the supporters of various aspects of the conciliar liturgical revolution. Weakland remains noted in "retirement" (and he remains in perfectly "good standing" as a "retired" "archbishop" in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism) for his questioning "black and white" matters of Faith and Morals. There were some of Weakland's contemporaries, however, who to his "right" in the conciliar structures but nevertheless shared Weakland's profound hatred for the Immemorial Mass of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church.
The late "Bishop" James S. Sullivan, who was born just two years after Weakland, in 1929, and was ordained four years after him, in 1955, was known to be more "conservative" than Weakland. "Bishop" Sullivan, who was the conciliar "ordinary" of the Diocese of Fargo from May 30, 1985, to May 30, 2002 (after having been having served as an auxiliary "bishop" in the Diocese of Lansing from September 21, 1982, to the time of his "installation" as the conciliar "bishop" of Fargo), promoting what he thought to be Eucharistic adoration and Our Lady's Fatima Message. As a true son of the conciliar revolution, however, "Bishop" Sullivan was also very supportive of Cursillo and Focolare and the "Catholic" Charismatic Renewal.
Although I had served as his director of communications between September of 1988 and August of 1989 and continued to draft various matters for him for another ten years or so, we had our break over his hatred for the Immemorial Mass of Tradition. He expressed horror to me in a phone conversation that I had with him in 1999 just before I gave a presentation on the Social Reign of Christ the King and the necessity of restoring the Immemorial Mass of Tradition in the Saint Louis, Missouri, area. Upset that "Bishop" Fabian Bruskewitz, still the conciliar "bishop" of Lincoln, Nebraska, had agreed to the building of what became Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary in Denton, Nebraska, "Bishop" Sullivan said to me with about as much passion as he was able to muster, "That Mass was never meant to come back." As much as "Bishop" James Stephen Sullivan differed from Rembert George Weakland on various aspects of the conciliar revolution, he, "Bishop" Sullivan, was every bit as much an enemy of the Mass of Tradition as was Weakland. That conversation prompted me, then a believer that the "indult" hated by Weakland would help to "restore" the Church, to write "Open Letter to a Good Bishop" in the printed pages of Christ or Chaos.
Rembert George Weakland had a specially vested interest in promoting the Novus Ordo service as he was almost as responsible as Annibale Bugnini in bringing it to fruition. As noted earlier, he said it as the means of changing the way that Catholics saw the Faith, which he viewed as follows in an interview he once gave:
Mark Warren of Channel 2 asked Archbishop Weakland to describe for us his "brand of Catholicism". Weakland's reply was as extreme an expression of subjectivism as one is likely to hear:
"My brand of Catholicism?" he responded, "It's my brand of me."
This is Weakland's position in a nutshell. And therein lies his dilemma and the whole distorted Modernist view of self in which man, as Philip Trower says, becomes the "arbiter of religion". Weakland's problem then, is not merely a matter of "style" as he so frequently pretends. His problem is one of philosophy. It's his subjectivism and individualism which he can't reconcile with the Catholic tradition. From this perspective, as Trower recognizes, man comes first and God plays an ever diminishing role. Religion is not based on objective facts about God known from His creation and by Revelation. It has its origins in man's ever changing "needs". Thus Weakland's "listening sessions" on issues such as abortion, have come to replace the absolutes that emerge from Christ's commands.
Weakland told Paul Wilkes of the New Yorker that the Church still hasn't come to terms with the issue of sexuality - "the Galileo issue of the day". According to Weakland:
"... the Church is reluctant to accept the results of the human sciences; instead it harks back to the days when you could say, "This is black, This is white; This is right, This is wrong'." (Christian Order - Read - Features - August/September & October 1996)
There are countless examples of Rembert George Weakland's Modernist, subjectivist view of the Catholic Faith.
To wit, the then "Archbishop" Weakland held what he called "listening sessions" on abortion in the 1990s, saying that politicians should be given "much latitude as reason permits" in making their judgments on the matter:
A Roman Catholic Archbishop says the perception of the anti-abortion movement as narrow-minded and overly aggressive is driving away many church members who are potential supporters of the movement.
Writing in his local Catholic paper this week, Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee also says politicians facing the issue should be given ''as much latitude as reason permits'' in their efforts ''to be consistent, compassionate and respectful of the dignity of life.''
Archbishop Weakland's statement contrasts with the more confrontational posture of a number of Catholic bishops toward politicians who refuse to support anti-abortion legislation.
The Archbishop's statements are in a personal response to ''listening sessions'' on abortion that he held in March and April with hundreds of Catholic women in his archdiocese. The 5,000-word essay, made available to the press this weekend, will be published in Thursday's issue of The Milwaukee Catholic Herald.
The hearings revealed a need for the church to emphasize the root causes of abortion, the Archbishop said, referring to poverty, permissiveness and the subjection of women and children to violence and abuse. Hundreds of participants, he said, urged the church to ''maintain more consistency between its teaching and its actions,'' especially by helping women with problem pregnancies.
Discomfort over Tactics
Archbishop Weakland did not question Catholic teaching that abortion is an immoral taking of human life, a teaching that he said ''has been clear for decades.'' He also noted that almost all the women who spoke at the hearings, including those who found this teaching ''simplistic,'' treated abortion as a tragedy and a grave evil.
But many of these women, as well as priests who are opposed to abortion, do not want to be identified with the anti-abortion movement, he said. They consider its focus to be narrow, its tactics overly aggressive and some of its rhetoric ''ugly and demeaning,'' he said. Such rhetoric, he said, often presupposes that ''all who have other points of view are insincere and evil people.''
Archbishop Weakland acknowledged that many who had worked with anti-abortion groups found the perception unfounded, and he recognized ''some legitimate frustration on the part of pro-life advocates'' over lack of support from Catholics. But he asked the abortion opponents to engage in ''self-examination in a humble way'' to discover ''the causes of this nonsupport.''
He also asked them to be more forthcoming about the consequences that they imagined would follow a total ban on abortion and to address widespread concerns about the return of illegal and unsafe abortions.
Archbishop Weakland's criticism extended to the abortion rights movement as well. He questioned the language of ''rights over one's body'' and reproductive rights generally as imprecise and reflecting a split between the self and the body.
Although his brief comment about politicians was open to different interpretations, the archbishop's emphasis on reasonable latitude seemed to indicate that public officials should be judged on their overall sensitivity to protecting human life rather than on specific anti-abortion measures alone.
Less Simple Than He Thought
''My ears are still ringing after hearing so many women say bluntly that they are angry about the church's stance on birth control,'' Archbishop Weakland said. ''I did not sense that there was much support'' for the Pope's condemnation of contraception.
The Archbishop said he came away from listening sessions with ''a clearer idea of why some women do not accept in its totality the church's official teaching.'' He also came away ''making a few resolutions,'' he said.
''I would never be so glib in talking about the 'moment of conception,' '' he said, since he had become more aware that ''conception is a long process, not a moment'' and that discussion of ''the first days and weeks of the growth of a fetus'' demand more precision.
''Nor will I talk so glibly about bringing the baby to term and then 'just give it up for adoption,' '' he said. He said he had also gained a new sense of the suffering involved in infertility and miscarriages. (Catholic Archbishop Urges Flexibility on Abortion)
Note the subjectivism in Weakland's approach to the Fifth Commandment.
The "approach" of many in the "anti-abortion" movement is "driving away" many Church members who are "potential" supporters of it. How can a believing Catholic be a "potential" opponent of abortion. He is called by virtue of his Baptism and Confirmation to be a firm and unequivocal opponent of all abortions, whether chemical or surgical, at all times without any exception or qualification or nuancing whatsoever.
Although I will return in a moment to Weakland's concern for "driving away" Catholics from what he believes to the the Catholic Church, suffice it to say for the moment that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ did have just a little bit to say about the fact that fidelity to Him and to His teaching would engender opposition from one's own family members and from the world:
Behold I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and simple as doves. But beware of men. For they will deliver you up in councils, and they will scourge you in their synagogues. And you shall be brought before governors, and before kings for my sake, for a testimony to them and to the Gentiles: But when they shall deliver you up, take no thought how or what to speak: for it shall be given you in that hour what to speak. For it is not you that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you
The brother also shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the son: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and shall put them to death. And you shall be hated by all men for my name's sake: but he that shall persevere unto the end, he shall be saved. And when they shall persecute you in this city, flee into another. Amen I say to you, you shall not finish all the cities of Israel, till the Son of man come. The disciple is not above the master, nor the servant above his lord. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord. If they have called the goodman of the house Beelzebub, how much more them of his household?
Therefore fear them not. For nothing is covered that shall not be revealed: nor hid, that shall not be known. That which I tell you in the dark, speak ye in the light: and that which you hear in the ear, preach ye upon the housetops. And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.
Fear not therefore: better are you than many sparrows. Every one therefore that shall confess me before men, I will also confess him before my Father who is in heaven. But he that shall deny me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven. Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
And a man's enemies shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not up his cross, and followeth me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it. He that receiveth you, receiveth me: and he that receiveth me, receiveth him that sent me. (Matthew 10: 16-40.)
The truths of the Holy Faith must be proclaimed without regard for human respect and without regard for "how well" others might "receive" those truths. We must explain the truths of the Holy Faith clearly in a way that those who listen to us can come to understand that truth of any kind, natural or supernatural, does not depend upon human acceptance for its binding force or validity and that the supernatural truths of the Faith must be accepted out of love for and submission to the authority of One, Christ the King, Who has revealed them to us exclusively through His Catholic Church.
Rembert Weakland's approach to contraception was also based in subjectivism.
"I did not sense that there was much support" for the "pope's" condemnation of contraception.
Contraception is prohibited by the binding precepts of the Sixth Commandment. The procreation and the education of children is the first end of marriage. This is a binding teaching of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law that has been defended and explicated by true popes, such as Pope Pius XI, in Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930,on the grounds of moral absolutism. The teaching did not originate with any pope but with God Himself:
And he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them. And God blessed them, saying: Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth. And God said: Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed upon the earth, and all trees that have in themselves seed of their own kind, to be your meat: And to all beasts of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to all that move upon the earth, and wherein there is life, that they may have to feed upon. And it was so done (Genesis 1: 26-30.)
One of the ironies in Weakland's subjectivist "sensitivity" to the level of "support' for God's law that proscribes the prevention of the conception of children is that the conciliar "popes," while maintaining the teaching of the Catholic Church against contraception, have taken a subjectivist, personalist approach in doing so, emphasizing what is termed the "unitive" end of marriage first and placing the procreation and education of children as a secondary rather than as the primary end of marriage. It is thus no wonder that so many Catholics don't "support" the God's injunction against contraception as they have been taught about it in subjectivist and personalist terms. There is quite a difference in the theology and the terminology of Pope Pius XI's Casti Connubii and Giovanni Montini/Paul VI's Humanae Vitae, July 25, 1968, the latter of which actually accepts the falsehood that there existed a "population" problem that required a "response" from the "Catholic" Church.
"I would never be so glib in talking about the 'moment of conception.'"
What happened at the moment of Our Lady's Immaculate Conception in Saint Anne's womb? What happened at the Annunciation as the very Word, through Whom all things were made, was made Flesh and dwelt amongst us as a helpless embryo in the tabernacle of His Most Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb? Was not Our Lady preserved from all stain of Original Sin and Actual Sin from the first moment of her Immaculate Conception. Was not the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity made Man at the moment His Most Blessed Mother made her Fiat to the will of God the Father and was overshadowed by the power God the Holy Ghost to give God the Son His Sacred Humanity?
Although there are any other number of areas where Rembert G. Weakland's Modernist subjectivism can be documented (Milwaukee Cathedral Plan Draws Ecclesiastical Ire, Priests of the 60's Fear Loss of Their Legacy, Archbishop of Milwaukee Would Ordain Married Man, At Lutheran Assembly, a Pledge To Work Toward Christian Unity, Christian Leaders Searching For Political Middle Ground, Papal Official Regrets 'Wound' to U.S. Prelate, A Catholic Who Found a Harmony in His Apology to Jews, and article in a "conservative" Catholic journal in Australia about Weakland's theological positions, http://www.ad2000.com.au/articles/1992/oct1992p4_773.html), his position on women's ordination, which is supported by almost every conciliar "official" who is either involved in or supportive or dismissive of the moral gravity of perverse acts in violation of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, shows very clearly once again that "faith" is a matter of "support" from the masses, not a matter of objective truth that exists in the nature of things and/or has been revealed positively by God Himself and defended perennially and immutably by His Holy Catholic Church.
Consider this article of Weakland's, "Out of the Kitchen, Into the Vatican, which is full of false, gratuitous assertions about the role of women in the history of the Catholic Church, that appeared in the December 6, 1992, edition of The New York Times after first appearing in his own archdiocesan newspaper nearly six months before, on June 20, 1992:
For much of its history, the Roman Catholic Church has assumed that women are inferior to men. This attitude will not disappear by itself, nor can church leaders make it go away just by saying that it no longer exists. Rather, it is reinforced by the exclusion of women from the priesthood. During their annual meeting in Washington last month, American Catholic bishops failed to make much progress on this issue, which undermines the church's credibility and jeopardizes its ability to attract the next generation of worshipers.
The church has two options. The first is to close the doors to all discussion on the ordination issue and accept the consequences. That means, first of all, preparing to live in a church of reduced size, for many women and men would say goodbye to a church they feel is out of touch with the world. The church also would have to stop telling society to increase signs of respect for women and how to use women's abilities to the fullest: it would be seen as hypocritical.
I also predict that the women and men who stay in church would attempt to redefine ordination, and the priesthood as we have known it would slowly erode. The shortage of priests, the rise of lay ministries and trends toward democratization would create unresolved tensions and pressures that would not go away.
The other option is to keep the doors open to further discussion and continue the important, even if painful, dialogue between the church's tradition and modern insights. This dialogue involves listening to all voices, especially the wisdom of the laity, and, with prayer and reflection, seeing what God wants of the church today. For some of us, too much is unclear and too much is at stake to close the doors now.
Even while this discussion takes shape, however, it is urgent that the church begin to set an example. First, the concept and practice that jurisdiction and power in church law must be tied into priestly ordination has to be altered so that women can take an active role on all levels.
It is not enough to say women should be members of local parish and diocesan councils, as recent Vatican documents suggest. Women must be integrated at the Vatican itself. The top three positions in all 21 Vatican bureaucratic departments (those of prefect, secretary and under secretary) are filled by cardinals, archbishops and monsignors. Women must be given places in those ranks.
The Vatican has diplomatic relations with more than 130 countries. All diplomats are archbishops and their aides are monsignors. There is no reason why women could not serve in these capacities.
In addition, a whole new group of women theologians has arisen in the church, and they and their successors will continue to be significant contributors to all theological dialogue in the future. Openness to their insights and perceptions is imperative.
After the Enlightenment, the church, developed into a cohesive opposition to the "reign of reason." It was not until after World War I that Catholics in Italy were allowed to engage in polities. That model of church life was blown apart by Vatican Council II in the early 1960's with its positive attitude toward this world, toward science and toward religious freedom. It even encouraged laity to see this world as the proper sphere of their calling and vocation.
The Vatican's reinstatement of Galileo in October was a symbol of such new peace treaty. The church is at turning point and the role of women could be its new Galileo. Perhaps we feel the tensions more in America that elsewhere in the world. Here, Catholic women, led by the many orders of sisters and their educational institutions, receive excellent educations and have made their way into all strata of society.
The church could try to fall back on its old romantic medieval model, one that carried it through the last two centuries, and wait for another cultural revolution a few centuries down the road that will be more to its liking (Yes, church hierarchy does think that way - in terms of centuries.)
Or the church could accept and refine the new insights of anthropology, psychology and sociology, embrace the startling discoveries of science and take a growing leadership role equally through its female and male believers - in the new global culture. Such a project must be ecumenical and interfaith.
The church would not have to present itself as having all preconceived answers but rather would seek to collaborate with others toward finding valid, if at times tentative, solutions to world problems, working ward an ever-more just and peace filled world. That was certainly the vision of Vatican Council II. This second road is harder and messier because it is uncharted. But only by embarking on such a course will the church be sure that all members especially women, will truly be partners. (New Catholic Times :: News Articles :: Out of the Kitchen, Into the Vatican)
This article is pure subjectivism, pure Modernism, starting with a false and gratuitous misrepresentation of how the Church has treated women.
After all, isn't one of the reasons that most Protestants are so hostile to the Catholic Faith is because of Holy Mother Church has declared Our Lady to be the Mother of God, the Queen of Heaven and on Earth, the Singular Vessel of Honor who made possible our salvation by her perfect fiat to the will of God the Father at the Annunciation? How many women have been raised to the altars of the Church?
Holy Mother Church recognizes the role of the mother of Saint Constantine, Saint Helena, in finding the True Cross.
Holy Mother Church honors the loving tears shed by Saint Monica for her husband and her son, Saint Augustine, for their conversion to the true Faith.
Holy Mother Church invokes Saint Margaret of Scotland as a heroic peacemaker on the battlefield of war itself.
Holy Mother Church honors Saint Elizabeth of Hungary for her embrace of the Franciscan spirit of Holy Poverty and for her love of and service to the poor and for her embrace of humiliation when she was banished from her castle by her brothers-in-law following the death of her husband, Louis of Thuringia.
Holy Mother Church honors Saint Catherine of Siena for her life of mysticism and for the role that she played in helping priests to live lives of sanctity and in convincing Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome from Avignon.
What about the martyrdom of Saints Agnes, Agatha, Lucy, Perpetua and Felicity, Thecla, Emerentiana, Barbara and countless other women?
What about the prayerful example of Saint Rose of Lima and that of Saint Scholastica, the twin sister of Saint Benedict of Nursia?
What about Saint Louise de Marillac and Saint Jane Frances de Chantal?
What about the loyal daughter of France and of Holy Mother Church, Saint Joan of Arc?
What about Blessed Imelda Lambertini and her love of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour in His Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament?
What about the mystical revelations given to Saint Gertrude the Great and Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque?
As much as you are guilty of equivocation on theological and moral issues, Rembert Weakland, you are an abject apostate when you state such irresponsible bilge as:
For much of its history, the Roman Catholic Church has assumed that women are inferior to men.
Moreover, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, as noted above, did not hold "listening" sessions to determine what He should proclaim as true. He is truth, and He knew that He would be rejected by the multitudes when he preached His Eucharistic Discourse:
For my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me, and I in him. As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father; so he that eateth me, the same also shall live by me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead. He that eateth this bread, shall live for ever. These things he said, teaching in the synagogue, in Capharnaum.
Many therefore of his disciples, hearing it, said: This saying is hard, and who can hear it? But Jesus, knowing in himself, that his disciples murmured at this, said to them: Doth this scandalize you? If then you shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before? It is the spirit that quickeneth: the flesh profiteth nothing. The words that I have spoken to you, are spirit and life. But there are some of you that believe not. For Jesus knew from the beginning, who they were that did not believe, and who he was, that would betray him.
And he said: Therefore did I say to you, that no man can come to me, unless it be given him by my Father. After this many of his disciples went back; and walked no more with him. Then Jesus said to the twelve: Will you also go away? And Simon Peter answered him: Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life. And we have believed and have known, that thou art the Christ, the Son of God.
Jesus answered them: Have not I chosen you twelve; and one of you is a devil? Now he meant Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon: for this same was about to betray him, whereas he was one of the twelve. (John 6: 56-72.)
Our Lord, knowing all things as God, knew that the multitudes would walk away from him when He preached His Eucharistic Discourse. "After this many of his disciples went back; and walked no more with Him." Did He try to "dialogue" with them? No, He let them leave. He asked the Apostles if they would leave, and the first Pope, Saint Peter, gave the only answer that a member of the Catholic Church who knows and loves and wants to serve God as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through her teaching authority can give:
Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life. And we have believed and have known, that thou art the Christ, the Son of God.
Only those filled with the pride of the devil, the pride of Judas Iscariot, dares to make it "complex" or "difficult" to accept with humility and docility everything that is taught by the Catholic Church. Those filled with the pride of ultimate revolutionary, the devil, and the ultimate traitor, Judas Iscariot, can refuse to say these words at the beginning of his day every day of his life until death:
O MY GOD, I firmly believe that Thou art one God in Three Divine Persons, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. I believe that Thy Divine Son became Man, and died for our sins, and that He will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe these and all the truths which the Holy Catholic Church teaches, because Thou hast revealed them, Who canst neither deceive nor be deceived.
Men steeped in the hardness of their own lives of sin and rebellion against the Faith must make it appear as though the mythical entity of "modern" man, who is simply a contemporary version of the rebels who yielded to the devil in the Garden of Eden, cannot be expected to submit with humility and docility to the "dictates" of any one man, including one who is presumed to be the Vicar of Christ on earth.
That having been noted, Rembert G. Weakland, who has made war against the Tradition of the Catholic Church for almost all of his priesthood, found that Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II's reiteration of the the Catholic Church's ban on women's ordination, something that is an ontological impossibility (that is, impossible according to the essence of the nature of things as God has created them and ordained them to be), rang hollow because the terminology that Wojtyla/John Paul II, a personalist and a phenomenologist, used in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, May 22, 1994, was not traditional, and in this Weakland was most correct even though he, Weakland, once again made reference to how those who could not accept this teaching would be "troubled, discouraged and disillusioned:"
In his apostolic letter to the bishops of the world dated May 22, 1994, the Holy Father has declared that the question of the ordination of women is no longer open to debate. In this he has certainly disagreed with my position that the issue should be left open because of the unresolved theological questions involved, and because of the pastoral problems which would result from an untimely closing of the doors on the issue. I certainly will be obedient to this command.
Yet, in a spirit of filial loyalty, I must also express my own inner turmoil at this decision. I know that in the long run my obedience will result in a deepening of my faith, but I state sincerely that it will not be done without much sacrifice and inner searching.
As a a bishop I will have to ponder what the phrase, "this judgment is to be held definitively," means in terms of its demands on the faithful. This terminology is not traditional in the Catholic church.
I note that the Holy Father has avoided the word "infallible." Moreover, it would seem that, in saying that this teaching must be held "definitively," he is declaring that his judgment in this regard must be adhered to with some degree of assent of faith. His intentions, however, are clear: on this issue the debate is closed.
Yet, as a bishop I would not be loyal to the Holy Father if I did not again point out the pastoral problems I now will face in my archdiocese. These have to be the object of my concern because many will be confused and troubled, discouraged and disillusioned.
For example, what effect will this declaration have on so many women and men, especially younger women and vowed religious, who still see this question as one of justice and equality, all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding?
How, as a bishop, am I to deal with the anger and disillusionment which will inevitably result? What can I do to instill hope in so many women who are now living on the margins of the church?
What effects will this declaration have on theologians who are still concerned about the theological underpinnings of the pope's teaching? Will they be able to express honestly their concerns? Will adherence to this judgment of the Holy Father be a requisite for teaching as a Catholic theologian?
What effects will this declaration have on those men and women for whom the issue of the way in which the church exercises its authority is already a problem? Many are still wrestling with Humanae Vitae, and thus have difficulty accepting that a single person alone can decide what they must in faith accept. Are they now to be put against the wall, as it were, over this issue?
Lastly, what effects will this declaration have on ecumenical dialogue? Since full communion among the churches ultimately must include the mutual recognition of ministries, will this declaration mean that full communion is ruled out with all except the Orthodox churches?
The Orthodox churches may agree with the pope on the question at hand, but are usually shocked when the pope teaches the bishops but does not speak in union with them.
The Holy Father has certainly thought of these consequences. Since this document is more dogmatic in tone, his pastoral concern may not be immediately obvious. We must trust that the Holy Father is sensitive to the reactions this declaration will cause. We must also trust that, in his pastoral concern, he will help us face the difficulties which this declaration will pose for the faith of many.
His remarks that the presence and role of women in the life and mission of the church are absolutely necessary and irreplaceable could lead to a fresh and new look at the question of jurisdiction and ministry.
As we all move ahead to ponder and understand this teaching, I realize that it will be a difficult moment for many here in the archdiocese. I hope that those who find it so will let me accompany them on that journey, as painful as it might be. (Statement By "Archbishop" Rembert G. Weakland)
Mind you, Rembert G. Weakland probably would not have accepted an "infallible" declaration on the inadmissibility of women to the priesthood if one had been made. He would have made advertence to the "pain" and "suffering" of those who could not accept such a declaration, stating as well that his own "conscience' was "troubled" by such a declaration.
It is nevertheless supremely ironic that he, of all people, pointed out the dilemma caused by the use of non-traditional terminology by the conciliar "pontiff," Wojtyla/John Paul II, who eschewed what he called "triumphalism" (he specifically rejected "triumphalism" in an address to Catholic educators in the Fieldhouse of the Catholic University of America on Sunday, October 7, 1979, a speech I heard with my own ears in that fieldhouse), leaving open a "debate" about the meaning of the word "definitive" that is as uselessly time-consuming as all of the debates engendered by the use of the word "subsist" in Lumen Gentium.
Such is the hostility to the language and praxis of the Catholic Church prior to the death of Pope Pius XII on October 9, 1958, that the conciliar "pontiffs" have wound up undermining their reiteration of various articles of the Catholic Faith such as contraception and the inadmissibility of women to the priesthood. And the reiteration of the ban of the inadmissibility of women to the priesthood came just a month after Wojtyla/John Paul II gave approval for the of female altar servers, thus creating a disconnect between the fact that the altar serve must be a male because his hands act as the extension of the hands of the alter Christus, the priest, who is a male, and the ban on ordaining women to the priesthood. There are few things that are consistent, stable or logical in the Hegelian world of conciliarism.
Despite all of their various differences, you see, the conciliar revolutionaries cannot speak and act and think as Catholics have acted and spoken and thought from the time God the Holy Ghost descended in tongues of flame upon Our Lady and the Apostles and others in the Upper Room in Jerusalem on Pentecost Sunday to the time of the death of Pope Pius XII, our last true pope thus far.
Although Rembert G. Weakland has his differences with the currently governing conciliar "pontiff," Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, who is the same age as Weakland and was ordained to the priesthood in the same year, 1951, the two share a belief that "modern" "insights" must shape the Church's expression of the Faith.
Weakland states frankly matters of Faith and Morals cannot be viewed as "black and white."
Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, as we know, has invented the logical absurdity of the "hermeneutic of continuity and discontinuity" to justify his dogmatically condemned belief that the expression of dogmatic truth can change from one era to the next as human language is "imprecise" and can never adequately "grasp" all of the varied dimensions of a given truth as a result of the time-bound circumstances in which such expressions of dogmatic truths arise, a view that is, as I have noted frequently, an absolute blasphemy against the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, Who inspired the Fathers of dogmatic councils to express the Faith as they did.
Weakland and Ratzinger express their Modernist subjectivism as the foundation of "religious faith" in different ways. When all is said and done, however, both are Modernists, admitting that they, like other revolutionaries in the past, have their differences on various points of how to interpret and implement their revolutionary principles that are contrary to the Catholic Faith. The relationship between revolutionaries such as Rembert Weakland Joseph Ratzinger was put very well in Si, Si, No, No:
His remarks come across as a fastidious apologia. Cardinal Ratzinger seems to have learned nothing from all that has happened. He is only concerned with showing the continuity of his theology, believing that by so doing he is defending both himself and Vatican II. From this defense a certain image of Cardinal Ratzinger as restorer of the Faith has been created; and it is an image in which many still believe. However, it is only blatant mystification.
The best known work of the Cardinal is the book, Introduction to Christianity, published in 1968 and translated into 17 languages. He speaks of it with satisfaction. Not withstanding, the Christology that he sets forth is scarcely orthodox. Sometimes he only very narrowly avoids the theology of heretics, which has been passively absorbed by the majority of Catholic theologians. He also affirms that Jesus the Messiah is a product of the faith of the primitive community: "He is the One who died on the cross, and Who, to the eyes of faith, rose" (Italian ed., Brescia, 1971, 4th ed., p.171) .The Resurrection is not then an historical fact, but a simple belief of the disciples. Like examples from the book could be multiplied.
The reputation of Ratzinger as restorer of the Church does not rest on his works. It is probably owing to the fact that several times he has quite clearly described certain disorders, and that he has always dissociated himself from the most extreme factions. But this takes away nothing from the modernist foundation of his theological vision: "Ratzinger is always like that: To counter the excesses, from which he keeps his distance, he never proposes Catholic truth, but rather an apparently more moderate error, which, nevertheless, in the logic of error, leads to the same ruinous conclusions" (SISINONO, no.6, 1993, p.6).
Some commentators have compared the Second Vatican Council to the Estates General of the French Revolution. Developing the analogy, one might say that Cardinal Ratzinger is a Girondist. The members of that faction were certainly more politically moderate than were the Jacobins, and especially their left wing (to which, in theology, we could compare the Kungs, Drewermanns, etc.), but they were no less revolutionary. They wanted to accomplish the same objectives, only in a more gradual, pragmatic manner. Their vision of the world, though, was identical: human reason exalted and placed in the center of the universe, democracy, bourgeois individualism; identical, too, was their hatred of Christianity, their desire to confiscate the goods of the Church, etc. (The Memories of a Destructive Mind: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's Milestones, part 2.)
Some might protest that Rembert G. Weakland is an irrelevancy, that he is just trying to gain publicity for his book and sympathy for himself by donating the proceeds from sales of his apologia in behalf of perversity and Modernism to various unnamed "charities."
Weakland is not an irrelevancy. He is a poster boy for how "tolerant" the counterfeit church of conciliarism is of defections from Faith and Morals that go beyond even conciliarism's approved apostasies and defections from the Faith. He is a poster boy for the damage done to the Faith by the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service he helped to create and implement. He is a poster boy for how a conciliar "bishop" can stay in power despite doing and saying things contrary to the Faith until he was publicly exposed for his perverted behavior and the paying out of $450,000 to his partner in sin.
Rembert G. Weakland is quite relevant even though he has not been the conciliar "archbishop" of Milwaukee for the past seven years. He remains in "good standing" in the conciliar structures and he has a whole assortment of brother "bishops" (Roger Mahony, George Niederauer, Howard Hubbard, Tod Brown, Vincent Nichols, the new conciliar "archbishop" of Westminster in England, to name just a few) who have views quite similar, although not entirely identical, with his on many subjects, including a "sensitivity" about the "rights" and "identity" and "dignity" of those steeped in unrepentant acts of perversity against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments and in favor of an ecclesiology that goes beyond the approved apostasy of the "new ecclesiology" of conciliarism.
Rembert G. Weakland is quite relevant as his own auxiliary "bishop," Richard Sklba, remains in "good standing" despite describing five false religions as pleasing to God in the presence of the conciliar "pontiff" on Thursday, April 17, 2008, before that same "pontiff" esteemed symbols of those false religions with his own priestly hands (see
Making Everyone Happy Except God).
Rembert G. Weakland is quite relevant as the man who succeeded him as the conciliar "archbishop" of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Timothy "I am to be a happy 'bishop'" Dolan, continued his revolutionary agenda against the Faith, especially by means of false ecumenism and reaffirming adherents of Talmudic Judaism in their dead, superseded religion that has the power to save no one, and dared to say before the Anti-Defamation league in the City of New York that he, Timothy Dolan,
"long admired the work of the Anti-Defamation League from afar, and now to receive your welcome and your assurances of our hope for future cooperation, which I enthusiastically share, means very much to me" despite the fact that the Anti-Defamation League is one of the most militantly pro-abortion, pro-perversion lobbying and litigation groups in the United States of America (see
Silence).
Rembert G. Weakland is quite relevant as he can maintain his "good standing" in the conciliar structures along with Sean "Cardinal" O'Malley who called the "holocaust" the "worst crime in history" (see
No Crime Is Worse Than Deicide).
Rembert G. Weakland is quite relevant as he can maintain his "good standing" in the conciliar structures after having protected his fellow perverted priests and presbyters, all the while protesting that he did not know that assaults on minor children were crimes against the civil law, making him of one mind and heart with the pervert-friendly Roger Mahony, who said in a legal deposition (Deposition of Roger Mahony (11/23/04), Part 2) that he did not believe that a priest's having an "attraction" to children was a cause to remove him from "ministry."
Rembert G. Weakland is quite relevant as it is now forty-four days since Robert Zollitsch, the conciliar "archbishop"of Freiburg, Germany, and the of the conciliar "bishops'" conference in the Federal Republic of Germany, has denied the dogmatic truth that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ died on the wood of the Holy Cross in atonement for our sins without any "papal" rebuke or admonition whatsoever.
Rembert G. Weakland is quite relevant as the conciliar "pontiff" himself, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict, who, even though Weakland and other ultra-progressivist revolutionaries do not realize, understand or accept the fact, is using Summorum Pontificum as the means to silence criticism about Weakland's misbegotten progeny, the Novus Ordo service, from the ranks of traditionally-minded Catholics yet attached to the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism once and for all.
Ratzinger/Benedict himself told us that this is the case when he wrote a letter to the world's conciliar "bishops" as to why he had "lifted" the "excommunications" on the four bishops of the Society of Saint Pius X who were consecrated by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and the late Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer in Econe, Switzerland, on June 30, 1988:
So if the arduous task of working for faith, hope and love in the world is presently (and, in various ways, always) the Church's real priority, then part of this is also made up of acts of reconciliation, small and not so small. That the quiet gesture of extending a hand gave rise to a huge uproar, and thus became exactly the opposite of a gesture of reconciliation, is a fact which we must accept. But I ask now: Was it, and is it, truly wrong in this case to meet half-way the brother who 'has something against you' and to seek reconciliation? Should not civil society also try to forestall forms of extremism and to incorporate their eventual adherents - to the extent possible - in the great currents shaping social life, and thus avoid their being segregated, with all its consequences? Can it be completely mistaken to work to break down obstinacy and narrowness, and to make space for what is positive and retrievable for the whole? I myself saw, in the years after 1988, how the return of communities which had been separated from Rome changed their interior attitudes; I saw how returning to the bigger and broader Church enabled them to move beyond one-sided positions and broke down rigidity so that positive energies could emerge for the whole. Can we be totally indifferent about a community which has 491 priests, 215 seminarians, 6 seminaries, 88 schools, 2 university-level institutes, 117 religious brothers, 164 religious sisters and thousands of lay faithful? Should we casually let them drift farther from the Church? I think for example of the 491 priests. We cannot know how mixed their motives may be. All the same, I do not think that they would have chosen the priesthood if, alongside various distorted and unhealthy elements, they did not have a love for Christ and a desire to proclaim Him and, with Him, the living God. Can we simply exclude them, as representatives of a radical fringe, from our pursuit of reconciliation and unity? What would then become of them?
"Certainly, for some time now, and once again on this specific occasion, we have heard from some representatives of that community many unpleasant things - arrogance and presumptuousness, an obsession with one-sided positions, etc. Yet to tell the truth, I must add that I have also received a number of touching testimonials of gratitude which clearly showed an openness of heart. But should not the great Church also allow herself to be generous in the knowledge of her great breadth, in the knowledge of the promise made to her? Should not we, as good educators, also be capable of overlooking various faults and making every effort to open up broader vistas? And should we not admit that some unpleasant things have also emerged in Church circles? At times one gets the impression that our society needs to have at least one group to which no tolerance may be shown; which one can easily attack and hate. And should someone dare to approach them - in this case the Pope - he too loses any right to tolerance; he too can be treated hatefully, without misgiving or restraint. (LETTER ON REMISSION OF EXCOMMUNICATION LEFEBVRE BISHOP)
As I noted in
Nothing New Under the Conciliar Sun:
Ratzinger/Benedict lays out his agenda very clearly here. He is telling the conciliar "bishops" that the Society of Saint Pius X is composed of "extremist," "narrow," "one-sided" elements that need to be opened up to "broader vistas" such as those that have been embraced by the priests of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter and the Institute of Christ the King and the Sisters who left the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen. These "bishops" must be willing, as he is, to overlook "various faults" in order to make "every effort to open up broader vistas." In other words, the members of the Society of Saint Pius X need to be "re-educated" so that they do not become more "extreme" and "narrow" and "one-sided" than they have become over the years.
The "unhealthy and distorted elements" in the Society of Saint Pius X must be rooted out, replaced by an acceptance of the Novus Ordo and a spirit of quietism about any perceived contradictions between Catholicism and conciliarism. Ratzinger/Benedict is pleading with the conciliar "bishops" to permit him the chance to make the bishops and priests and laity of the Society of Saint Pius X full members of the One World Church along with "Catholic" Charismatic Renewal, Opus Dei, Focolare, Cursillo, the Sant'Egidio Community, the Shalom Catholic Community, the Chemin Neuf Community, the International Community of Faith and Light, Regnum Christi, Communion and Liberation, the Emmanuel Community, the Seguimi Lay Group of Human-Christian Promotion, and. among many, many others, the Neocatechumenal Way. This may take time and patience. However, it is an "effort" that Ratzinger/Benedict must be made in the name of "ecumenism," in the name of "tolerance," in the name of a "search" for "reconciliation and unity."
It is clear that Joseph Ratzinger really meant it when he wrote the following in Principles of Catholic Theology in 1982:
Among the more obvious phenomena of the last years must be counted the increasing number of integralist groups in which the desire for piety, for the sense of mystery, is finding satisfaction. We must be on our guard against minimizing these movements. Without a doubt, they represent a sectarian zealotry that is the antithesis of Catholicity. We cannot resist them too firmly. (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, pp. 389-390)
No, there is nothing new under the conciliar sun. Ratzinger is now the same as he has been throughout his priesthood. There has been no change whatsoever.
Rembert G. Weakland and Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI may be revolutionaries with different views on some issues. They are, however, whether or not they themselves realize it, united in the institutionalization of the false, apostate ethos of conciliarism by means of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service, a spirit that, as noted before, has caused most Catholics to take such leave of their Catholic senses that it is not within them constitutionally to have outrage for the honor and glory and majesty of God when the conciliar "pope" commits,objectively speaking, one Mortal Sin after another against the First Commandment in broad daylight without ever once seeking the conversion of those who are outside of the true Church when he has been given an opportunity by God's Providence to address them.
A thoughtful reader who writes to me now and again sent the following quotation, translated from Spanish into English, about Pope Saint Pius X's view of end times. Our last canonized pope did have mystical experiences, and I, for one, would not be surprised if was given a vision of the likes of Weakland and Ratzinger and Wojtyla when he wrote Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907. The quote from Pope Saint Pius X that was sent to me from this reader is quite telling:
Watch, O priests, that the doctrine of Christ, not your fault for losing the face of integrity. Always purity and integrity of the doctrine ... Many do not understand the zealous care and caution should be used to preserve the purity of doctrine ... When this doctrine can not be kept longer incorruptible and that the rule of truth is no longer possible in this world, then the Son of God appear a second time. But until that day we must keep intact the sacred tank and repeat the statement of the glorious Saint Hilary: 'Better to die in this century that corrupt the chastity of the truth .” (Pie X, Jérome Dal-Gal OM Conv. 1953, pp. 107-108).
We must preserve the purity of doctrine in our own lives by cleaving exclusively to true bishops and true priests in the catacombs who make no concessions to conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of the conciliar shepherds. We cannot put our souls in jeopardy by making any compromises with the Faith.
Listen to the sermon,
The Roses Help With the Thorns, that was delivered yesterday, Sunday, May 24, 2009, by His Excellency Bishop Daniel L. Dolan in honor of Our Lady, Help of Christians, who was commemorated yesterday, the Sunday within the Octave of the Ascension. Our Lady has crushed all heresies in the past. She will crush the heresies that have given us the likes of Rembert Weakland and Joseph Ratzinger. We must simply remain faithful as we pray our Novena to God the Holy Ghost in preparation for Pentecost Sunday and as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit.
To Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart belongs the triumph that will vanquish the lords of Modernity and Modernism once and for all. May our own efforts to make reparation for our sins, many though they may be, to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary help to plant a few seeds so that more and more Catholics, clergy and laity alike, yet attached to the false structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism will make the break once and for all and receive true Sacraments from true bishops and true priests who make absolutely no concessions to conciliarism or its false shepherds at any time for any reason, men who are never afraid to speak the truth and act with complete integrity in its behalf, knowing that no true pope can do, say or act as the conciliar "pontiffs" and "bishops" have done, said and acted.
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
