Christopher A. Ferrara
I put the word “conservative” in scare quotes as to Hannity, Levin and Beck, but the remarkable thing about Mike Church is that he is an authentic conservative, by which I mean a conservative who views political, social and moral questions from a traditional Catholic perspective as reflected in the papal and conciliar Magisterium before the late unpleasantness of the imaginary “renewal” of Vatican II.
Indeed, over the past year or so Mike Church has emerged as the only traditionally Catholic conservative in talk radio today, anywhere in the world. And I mean traditional. Not only during my appearances on the show, but now thematically, Mike has turned the longest running political talk show on Sirius Radio into an unabashed presentation of the Social Kingship of Christ, traditional Catholic moral teaching, and even the traditional Latin liturgy as the solution to what is evidently otherwise a terminal civilizational crisis. I have been invited on the show numerous times to defend all of these things explicitly, to speak of the one true Church, and even to call upon conservative Protestants to enter the Church if they are serious about saving our nation and our civilization.
Pope Francis: “Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain.” Laudato si.
1. Condemn throwaway culture—need more recycling. (¶¶ 20-22)
2. Condemn rise in greenhouse gasses—rising ocean levels. (¶23-26)
3. Condemn water scarcity and inequality of water rights. (¶¶ 27-31).
4. Condemn extinction of plants and animals—be sure to mention children’s loss and God’s glory—we have no right!. (¶¶ 32-42).
5. Lament decline in quality of life. (¶¶ 43-47).
“How could I have missed this?” I thought to myself while driving in my car today (an ecologically sensitive four-cylinder Fiat that can barely get out of its own way). I mean the absolutely glaring fatal defect in Laudato si’ that renders the entire document a mockery of its own professed alarm about “the environment and the need to protect nature,” “what is happening to our planet” and “those questions which are troubling us today and which we can no longer sweep under the carpet.” (LS 11)
It was staring me in the face all along, yet I didn’t quite see it. I wrote around the point and even touched on it here and there in the pieces I have done on this unprecedented papal manifesto to everybody in the world, but I failed to focus on the plainly visible rot—I am sorry, but that is what it is—at its very core.
In keeping with the evolutionary eschatology of Teilhard de Chardin, Pope Francis attempts to fashion yet another post-conciliar novelty in the Church: a call to “ecological conversion,” which requires a subtle demotion of man to merely a part of the natural world.
The final, official, fully corrected, this-is-really-it version of Laudato Si’ (LS) has just been formally presented to the world by the triumvirate of emcees Francis handpicked for the Big Reveal: Cardinal Turkson, hailed by Vatican Insider for “defend[ing] gays against unfavourable Ugandan law,” the climate change Nazi Hans Joachim Schellnhube, just appointed by Francis to the Pontifical Academy of Atheists—I mean, Sciences—and an Orthodox Archbishop by the name of John Zizioulas, representing the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, who—don’t you know?—is very big on environmentalism.
Francis Received Lady “Archbishop,” Head of Insane Lutheran “Church” of Sweden, Calling Her “Esteemed Sister”
As Francis continues to do whatever he pleases and to say whatever he feels like saying, even when he is aware that “it may sound… heretical,” the sense that the Church has “lost its compass” and is now “a rudderless ship,” as noted by Cardinal Burke, continues to spread among the faithful and a growing number of priests, bishops and cardinals.
According to the neo-Catholic view, rejecting the theory of evolution is “denialism,” whereas rejecting the entire traditional understanding of the Genesis account based on the claims of evolutionists merely raises a “problem” to be “mulled over” by theologians. Behold the neo-Catholic mentality at work.
“When we descend to details, we can prove that no one species has changed…”
-Charles Darwin, 1863
“Through use and abuse of hidden postulates, of bold, often ill-founded extrapolations, a pseudoscience has been created. It is taking root in the very heart of biology and is leading astray many biochemists and biologists…”
-Pierre-Paul Grassé, evolutionary zoologist, 1973
Pope Francis declared John XXIII a saint by the unusual means of an “equivalent canonization” without any formal process or additional miracle. The problem, however, is that Francis apparently ignored the requirements for this extraordinary act. As no less than Cardinal Amato, head of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, explained in connection with Francis’s “equivalent canonization” of Peter Faber in 2013:
For such a canonization, according to the teaching of Benedict XIV, three elements are required: an ancient tradition of devotion, the constant and common attestation of trustworthy historians on the virtues or martyrdom, and the uninterrupted fame of miracle.
If these conditions are satisfied—again according to the teaching of pope Prospero Lambertini [Benedict XIV]—the supreme pontiff, by his authority, can proceed with the “canonization equivalent”… without any definitive formal sentence, without any preliminary juridical process, without having carried out the usual ceremonies.
But where is the “ancient tradition of devotion” to John XXIII? He died only 52 years ago and there was no universal cult of devotion to him as of 2014. And where is the “uninterrupted fame of miracle,” seeing that only one confirmed miracle was attributed to his intercession (for purposes of the beatification in 2000)?
By comparison, St. Peter Faber (d. 1546), co-founder of the Jesuits, was revered as a saint from the moment he died nearly 500 years ago, no less than Saint Francis de Sales consistently depicted him as a saint, and he was beatified by Blessed Pius IX in 1872. Other examples of equivalent canonizations are Saint Peter Damian, Saints Cyril and Methodius, Saint Albert the Great, Saint John of Avila, and Saint Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), canonized and declared a Doctor of the Church by Benedict XVI in 2012 after many centuries of veneration as one of the Church’s greatest saints and mystics.
Unless one is willing to maintain that a saint is anyone a Pope says is a saint, without need of following any established canonization procedure or recognized exception thereto, it is hard to see on what basis John XXIII was canonized.
And in view of Francis’s approval of the cause for the “beatification” of the Marxist subversive Helder Camara, just declared a “Servant of God” by Amato’s Congregation despite his having been a defender of Mao and Castro, an opponent of Humanae Vitae and an advocate of women’s ordination and the acceptance of divorce and “remarriage” in the Church, it is hard to see how any act of beatification under this pontificate can be trusted.
Moreover, as the Catholic Encyclopedia notes, canonizations are “commonly and rightly held” to be infallible “whencanonization takes place according to thesolemnprocess that has been followed since the ninth century. Mere beatification, however, as distinguished fromcanonization, is not held to be infallible…”
With Francis now abandoning the solemn process for canonization seemingly at will, and with beatification—never infallible to begin with—now clearly the plaything of the ideologues Francis has let loose upon the Church, prudence, not blind faith, is indicated. For the saint factory put into operation by John Paul II now appears to be operating without a safety manual or even a minimal safety inspection. The common opinion of theologians respecting canonization may well have to be revisited in these unprecedented circumstances, as the Church herself has never declared infallibly that the act of canonization is absolutely immune from error regardless of how it is done.
As one Vatican observer put it concerning Francis’s canonization of John XXIII: “He wanted to make someone he really likes a saint.” That’s about the size of it. And so it goes with the ever-more-alarming rise of what Antonio Socci has so rightly termed “Bergoglianism.”
Want more Chris Ferrara? His contra evolution manifesto, "The Neo-Catholic Planet of the Apes" appears in the new issue of The Remnant. Subscribe to the E-edition and join us in protesting the unscientific, Bible-bashing, outdated theories of Mr. Darwin and his Neo-Catholic apologists:
Sham “Schism” Exposed
"The neo-Catholic establishment really must cease its spiteful calumnies of the Society’s adherents, whose heroic perseverance in the traditions of the Faith will certainly be vindicated by history, as their neo-Catholic hecklers undoubtedly suspect."
I have long argued—here, for example—that the “lack of full communion” attributed to the Society of Saint Pius X, even though its clergy and laity are obviously Catholics under no sentence of excommunication, is nothing but an ad hoc contrivance designed to perpetuate the unjust persecution of this group of the faithful by creating a rather silly special category of “double secret probation” in the Church applicable only to them. I have also argued that the mere issuance of a technical decree regularizing the Society’s canonical status is all that is necessary to eliminate the illusory “lack of full communion.”
My previous article discussed Karl Keating’s latest exercise in traditionalist bashing: his self-published book The New Geocentrists. Herewith some further considerations prompted by the book.
The positions this newspaper has taken on the crisis in the Church since the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, when The Remnant was founded, have been vindicated beyond reasonable dispute by historical events. Only the obtuse or the willfully blind can continue to maintain that the “renewal of Vatican II” has been anything but an unprecedented disaster, leading Paul VI himself to lament very early on that “the smoke of Satan” had entered the Church—which, indeed, it had thanks to the “opening to the world” Pope Paul likewise lamented as “a veritable invasion of the Church by worldly thinking.”