Have we not seen this before: A reformer using abuse in the Church as an excuse to attack Her and make a name for himself?

Rod Dreher, another shallow Vatican II convert who never really got the Faith, has carved out a nice gig for himself as a professional ex-Catholic.  Absurdly enough, he is being lauded and feted by still-practicing Catholics around the world for his book The Benedict Option despite his public declarations that the homosexual priest scandal proves that the Catholic Church has deceived her members by claiming to be the Church that Christ founded with a promise of indefectibility.  For example: “I was naive about the Catholic institution, and saw in retrospect that I idolized it to a certain degree. Because I believed what the Catholic Church said about itself, I set myself up for a very big fall.”

At this point in the ever-worsening Bergoglian Debacle, Pope Bergoglio would appear to have no remaining staunch defenders in the neo-Catholic establishment, save a couple of unhinged, vituperative outliers with a penchant for obscene ranting, both of whom finally had to be shown the door by EWTN’s National Catholic Register.   This is a papacy only a nutter can continue to defend as soundly orthodox.

Well, well, well.  It seems even The Washington Post has thought it prudent to publish an Op Ed piece yesterday suggesting that the “MAGA bomber” is not a bomber after all, but a mere hoaxer who wanted to scare people by mailing them fake bombs that are incapable of exploding.

"Sacre bleu! Vee have found zee mailer of zee potential bembs!"

So, the author of the fake bombs mailed in the general direction of various Democrat leaders and celebrities, who had zero chance of actually receiving them, is now in custody.  Cesar Sayoc, a 56-year-old Filipino who claims to be a Seminole and has a voluminous rap sheet, including terroristic threats against judges, appears to be a Trump supporter. The delighted Hate Trump Media Complex (HTMC), swelling with outrage as fake as the bombs, has already dubbed Sayoc “the MAGA bomber” even though his bombs are not really bombs. 

See Part I HERE

Can a Canonization Be Based on Dubiously-Miraculous “Miracles”?

Tomorrow, October 14, Pope Bergoglio, having already authorized Holy Communion for public adulterers and declared the death penalty immoral—flatly contradicting bimillennial Church teaching and practice in both cases—will declare that both Paul VI and Oscar Romero are saints the universal Church must venerate as such. Yet Paul VI unleashed an unprecedented liturgical debacle and the post-conciliar revolution in general, over which he spent the rest of his life weeping and wringing his hands while faith and discipline rapidly collapsed all around him. Whereas Romero, a complex figure one cannot honestly call a Marxist, was not assassinated on account of hatred of the Faith as such, but rather on account of his public agitation against the government of El Salvador, then in the midst of a civil war with Marxist revolutionaries. Nor has it ever been determined with certainty which side of the conflict was responsible for his murder, for which no one has ever been prosecuted or even identified definitively as a suspect.

This one should not be allowed to get away.  Nor should the other lying witnesses against Brett Kavanaugh

The day before Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court by a vote of 50-48, Christine Blasey Ford’s DNC activist attorney, Debra Katz, informed CNN that Ford “absolutely does not want him impeached if Democrats take control of Congress.” In response to the specific question whether Ford wishes to see impeachment proceedings against Justice Kavanaugh, Katz replied: “Professor Ford has not asked for anything of the sort.”  Asked point blank: “She does not want him to be impeached?”, Katz answered with both vocal and bodily emphasis: “No.”

I’m an attorney with decades of experience in sizing up and cross-examining witnesses who are lying or shading the truth in a way that amounts to a lie. And that is why I refuse to watch the circus unfolding on live television as I type these words. It is too painful to endure for someone who knows a witness con job when he sees one.

Although the argument should be clear from a careful reading of my piece on whether and how the Church can defend herself against the onslaught of a wayward Pope such as this one, in order to avoid misrepresentation of my position by certain dishonest commentators I thought it would be wise to stress the following points:

1. The theological writers have not argued, nor have I argued, that a validly elected Pope can be removed from office merely because he is unworthy, as was the case with Benedict IX, described as “a disgrace to the Chair of Peter” by the Catholic Encyclopedia. Popes are not subject to “no confidence” votes.

Rather, the writers (such as Cajetan) address three cases:  (1) a clearly invalidly elected Pope, who is thus an antipope; (2) a Pope whose title to office is unclear and must be resolved in some manner; and (3) a Pope who falls into formal heresy and would thereby lose his office, as even Cardinal Burke has observed.

2. Church history provides numerous examples of the first two cases, ultimately resolved by synods or councils that declared the deposition of the anti-Pope(s) in favor of the one determined to be the true Pope. But even here the result is not always beyond dispute. Sylvester III, for example, is included in the canon of Popes (the 146th Roman Pontiff) even though he was declared deposed at the Synod of Sutri and is considered by many historians to be a usurper of the papal throne. 

Likewise, Benedict IX, also declared deposed at Sutri (having resigned the papacy in 1045 in return for a payment of money from his own godfather, who succeeded him as Pope), nonetheless reigned again twice (in 1045, after reneging on his resignation, and again from 1047-48). He is thus further listed as both the 147th and 150th Roman Pontiff.  As the Catholic Encyclopedia explains in an annotation to its canon of Popes:  “He appears on this list three separate times, because he was twice deposed and restored.”  In fact, Benedict IX (along with Sylvester) appears in every recognized canon of Popes, including the Vatican’s.  That is why Francis is the 266th Pope, not the 264th.

3. As to a Pope who falls into heresy, history provides no case of a deposition. The closest case is the posthumous anathematization of Honorius I for his role in promoting the Monothelite heresy. The absence of historical examples, however, does not mean that should a Pope profess formal heresy he would not lose his office or that the Church, by way of a synod, imperfect council or assembly of cardinals, could not declare him to have fallen from office by his own act, as the theological writers have argued.  Based on this permissible theological opinion, Cardinal Burke (who does not accuse Francis of heresy) explains as follows:

CWR: Back to this question about the Pope committing heresy. What happens then, if the Pope commits heresy and is no longer Pope? Is there a new conclave? Who’s in charge of the Church? Or do we just not even want to go there to start figuring that stuff out?

Cardinal Burke: There is already in place the discipline to be followed when the Pope ceases from his office, even as happened when Pope Benedict XVI abdicated his office. The Church continued to be governed in the interim between the effective date of his abdication and the inauguration of the papal ministry of Pope Francis.

CWR: Who is competent to declare him to be in heresy?

Cardinal Burke: It would have to be members of the College of Cardinals.

Finally, the Cardinals could issue the formal correction long promised by Cardinal Burke, condemning the errors of Francis, including his attempt to overthrow the teaching of Benedict XVI, John Paul II and all their predecessors, going back to Our Lord Himself, on the impossibility of admitting the divorced and “remarried,” who are living in adultery, to Holy Communion under any circumstances, as well as Francis’s truly disastrous introduction of a form of situation ethics into the life of the Church according to which “complex cases” are exempt from application of exceptionless precepts of the divine and natural law. 

The formal correction would at least put “Bergoglianism” out of commission even if Francis remains Pope, which, I stress, we must regard him to be unless the Church (in the manner indicated by Cardinal Burke) were someday to declare otherwise—an outcome that is not theologically impossible, however extraordinary it would be.

In no event, however, can the hierarchy simply do nothing to resist this Pope in his relentless effort to impose his erring opinions on the Church. 

Register to hear Chris Ferrara speak at the Catholic Identity Conference, Nov. 2-4

Some Surprising Answers...

I never thought I’d see the day when a preening, Internet-created neo-Catholic doyenne such as Simcha Fisher, as notorious as Mark Shea for her crude and often unprintable invective against traditionalists, would unload on Pope Bergoglio with the following headline:  “Does Francis know he sounds like an abuser?”

Fisher is rightly incensed by Bergoglio’s cunning response, “I will not say a single word on this,” concerning Archbishop Viganò’s damning indictment of Bergoglio’s rehabilitation of the monster once known as Cardinal McCarrick for some five years before adverse worldwide press coverage forced to him to punish that serial homosexual rapist of whose crimes Viganò had personally informed him back in 2013—information of which Bergoglio was clearly already aware at that time, as Viganò testifies.

Leave the homosexual clerics in place. Fear the young neo-traditionalists. Stop the restoration...

Francis the Silent... for once.

Introduction

This article was first written to address the neo-Catholic commentator Massimo Faggioli’s attempt, following the Pennsylvania grand jury report and the fall of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, to minimize the homosexual crisis in the Church and blunt the correlative rise of what he derides as “neo-traditionalism.” As my piece was about to go to press, however, EWTN’s National Catholic Register broke the explosive story on the written testimony of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former apostolic nuncio to the United States (2011 to 2016).  Faggioli’s propaganda piece now becomes merely illustrative of the points to be made here in light of this astonishing and indeed providential development.

In his eleven-page account, affirmed under oath, the Archbishop, marking a turning point in Church history, declares that senior Vatican officials, including former Secretaries of State Angelo Sodano and Tarcisio Bertone as well as Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, coordinator of Pope Bergoglio’s “Council of Cardinals”, covered up McCarrick’s decades of sexual predation and that Bergoglio himself continued the coverup.