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Thursday, October 17, 2019

AMAZON SYNOD: What's with the Capital 'N' for Nature?

By:   Helen M. Weir, MI
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AMAZON SYNOD: What's with the Capital 'N' for Nature?

With the Amazon Synod upon us at last, unbiased observers of this fastidiously managed act of political theater are beginning to acknowledge that the earthly leadership of the Catholic Church has embarked upon an adventure so insidiously malevolent, so potentially disastrous, and so overtly diabolical as to defy all hyperbole. 

How is it possible to overstate the magnitude of the threat with which we are faced?  When the Instrumentum laboris (IL) was released last July, incisive analysts immediately set about noting the names of those who ought to appear when the credits finally roll--Rousseau with his Noble Savage, Leonardo Boff of “Liberation Theology” infamy, Teilhard de Chardin of the pseudomystical “Omega Point,” and the various “climate change” champions on center stage at the present moment figuring prominently. 

There remains, nonetheless, an important historical connection which has yet to be investigated.  Its touchstone lies the fact that, when Jorge Bergoglio writes the word nature, he capitalizes it (either literally or in effect).

Based upon this usage, some of the Synod’s critics detect an “implicit pantheism” stemming from pagan superstition.[1] Cardinal Müller, noting that capital-n Nature is also known as Mother Earth, cogently points out, “Our mother is a person, not the earth.  And our mother in faith is Mary.”[2] 

From his self-imposed exile, Archbishop Viganò asks rhetorically, “Where is the Christian message here?”[3] Well within his rights to point out that “the figure of Christ is absent” from the IL and from the worldview of the Synod’s protagonists in general, the courageous anti-McCarrick whistleblower implicitly prompts us to take a much closer look at the resuscitated “goddess” whom the Bergoglians are attempting to usher into the vacuum.

As anyone unwilling to be intellectually bullied by mere political correctness can easily confirm, the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires is far from the first major figure in recent times to turn the word nature into a proper noun, proposing the “person” so contrived as an object of idolatry for all. 

Bergoglio may be many things to many men, but even his most star-struck adulators stop short of crediting him with a notable capacity for original thought.  As Anthony Blanche once observed to Charles Ryder concerning Sebastian Flyte, they can’t claim that for him, can they, much as they love him?  It behooves us all to ask, in other words, where this vaunted notion of capital-N Nature comes from to begin with.

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In a valiant foray into a verboten field, an author named Richard Weikart has recently published a book entitled Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich.[4]  His resoundingly documented thesis is that National Socialism may best be understood as the cult of this selfsame entity. 

On the pages of Hitler’s infamous manifesto, in countless speeches, and by means of many high-profile, mesmerized surrogates, the Führer positively identified capital-n Nature as his worldview’s “cruel Queen of wisdom,” to whom both his person and his cause were dedicated without any reservation whatsoever.[5]  Those who currently suspect, in other words, that the Amazon Synod is secretly motivated by concerns markedly more German than indigenous could well be onto something, after all.

The authors of both Mein Kampf and of the Synod’s IL, first of all, credit capital-N Nature with an inexplicable ability of universal generation which is carried out within the confines of time but not beyond it. 

“In many cases where Hitler referred to a Creator,” Weikart writes (p. 223):

. . . he used it in a context that also referenced “eternal nature” or equated his Creator with nature (or both).  This suggests he was not intending his use of the term to imply that God created nature at a finite point in the past, as a deist or theist would believe.  God or nature was a “Creator,” but it is not clear at all from Hitler’s discourse whether he believed God created through natural or supernatural processes. . . . Hitler often spoke about nature creating organisms, again implying (that) nature is synonymous with the Creator.

A Bergoglian quote from the Instrumentum laboris recycles this attitude rather eerily (no. 121):

It is necessary to grasp what the Spirit of the Lord has taught these peoples throughout the centuries:  faith in the God Father-Mother Creator, communion and harmony with the earth, with one’s companions; striving for ‘good living;’ the wisdom of civilizations going back thousands of years that the elderly possess and which influences health, life together, education, cultivation of the land, the living relationship with nature and “Mother Earth”.

In Christian thought, the living God is not a “Father-Mother Creator,” as Bergoglio himself incoherently affirms in other contexts.  Like Hitler, however, the white-cassocked Argentinian vacillates between orthodox and Gaia-worshipping sentiments by occasionally conflating the two. 

When we read in Laudato si’, then, thatNature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live” (no. 139), and that human beings made in the image and likeness of God are to be accounted instead as merely a “part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it” (no. 139), and that “our very bodies are made up of her elements; we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters” (no. 2), anyone possessing even a passing familiarity with the contours of National Socialist materialism ought to find himself on red alert.

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In the second place, the “cruel Queen” to whom we evidently owe our existence is associated in both cases with the concept of wisdom. This buzzword, by definition temporally restricted, cannot mean to the Brownshirts and the Synod bosses what it signifies in the Sacred Scriptures.  For them, it slyly appropriates the majesty of revealed and therefore objective truth, becoming, for the Creatora’s subjects, the new standard of acceptable conduct. 

In a world where nothing is right or wrong in and of itself, in other words, the only possible sin would consist in offending not God, but her. 

“Hitler’s devotion to nature as a divine being,” writes Weikart, in the Introduction (p. viii):

…had a grim corollary: the laws of nature became his infallible guide to morality.  Whatever conformed to the laws of nature was morally good, and whatever contravened nature and its ways was evil.

We all know the crimes against humanity which ensued when this inversion took place in the middle of the twentieth century.  And yet the Synod proponents are, even now, attempting to foist upon us “a Church called to be ever more synodal by listening to the peoples and to the earth” (IL no. 5; emphasis added).   

Such a “church,” if any society so constituted could be considered worthy of the name, would be one in the process of replacing both the Beatitudes and the Ten Commandments on which they are based with something entirely foreign to Christianity itself (as observers of the Bergoglian onslaught have been pointing out as transpiring from the start, on any number of fronts). 

Simultaneously elucidated is the apparent contradiction found in a world leader ostensibly committed to dialogue and mercy, yet who perpetually excoriates those admitting the existence of the intrinsece malum in the least decorous terms conceivable.

Thirdly, not only does this ersatz “wisdom” become that to which all must offer religious submission of the intellect and will.  In the novus ordo Naturae, the redemptive suffering, death, and Resurrection of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ gives way to the “passion” of the “goddess” herself, for the grievous infliction of which all humanity must instead atone. 

As we read in Laudato Si, Nature now (no. 2):

…cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor. 

On the strength of this worldview, Bergoglio and his climate-change shock troops base their incessant doomsday predictions, lacking or even contradicting existing scientific data.  Theirs is another religion, in other words, to be taken on faith—or else.  Or else, what? 

For Hitler, “or else” the Master Race would not survive.  The Bergoglians have merely upped the ante by alleging that, “or else,” no one is going to.  The hectoring of the Gaia contingent about the dire environmental consequences of failing to honor their demands is too tedious and too widely recognized to catalogue here.  Suffice it to note that the Führer puts the matter much more succinctly by declaring, “Eternal Nature inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands”.[6]

It might be objected, at this stage, that playing the “Hitler Card” against the Amazon Synod is a bridge too far.  After all, Bergoglio is purportedly the Vicar of Christ on earth.  Many quotes could be adduced to show that he is a believer (if those quotes, quite conveniently, happen to escape juxtaposition with their own stark and copious self-contradictions). 

Moreover, many of the loquacious Argentinian’s less palatable statements are typically excused by fans and critics alike with the assertion that they do not represent what Bergoglio really means, or by the insistence--as though the one justification doesn’t abjectly invalidate the other—that they are amenable to realignment within the parameters of perfect orthodoxy.

The problem comes in when we recognize that Adolf Hitler once wrote and spoke in what has come to be known as “word salad,” too.  His habit of presenting himself “publicly as a Christian”[7] was calculated, and took the form not only of being seen and photographed leaving church, but especially of mixing Catholic theology into the lethal ideological cocktail of his overall message.  

The Führer made about as much sense, in other words, as Bergoglio does, and like the latter took predatory advantage of the confusion occasioned by his subversion of Christian-sounding verbiage.  As incredible as it sounds, people at the time believed Hitler when he claimed that, in serving capital-n Nature, he was “fighting for the work of the Lord”.[8]  

The “good Germans” were incapable, evidently, of drawing the distinctions necessary to tell the “vague religiosity”[9] of Mein Kampf’s hijacked theological terminology from the real thing—to borrow the apt phrase by which Cardinal Müller has characterized the verbal smokescreen found specifically in the Instrumentum laboris.  The fact, in other words, that Bergoglio is ambiguous in his statements of belief doesn’t make him less reminiscent of Hitler, but more so.

Another reason to examine the capital-n Nature comparison is that if the Saint Gallen Mafia members, official and unofficial, can dish it out, then they can take it, too.  After all, it was Bergoglio himself who insinuated the subject into the run-up to the Synod, infamously remarking this past August that he is “concerned because we hear speeches that resemble those of Hitler in 1934”.[10] 

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There may be a grain truth in what he says, if the talks to which he is alluding happen to include some of his own.

In the same way Cardinal Cupich of Chicago, arguably Bergoglio’s preeminent water-toter in the United States, made a suspicious trip to Auschwitz over the summer as well—suspicious, because the protagonists of the Synod seem unaccountably eager to claim the high ground where the Holocaust is concerned. 

According to coverage by the National Catholic Reporter, always on hand to amplify the Left’s narrative du jour, Cardinal Cupich contends that “Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the policies that led to the Holocaust all began with words, including words that targeted ‘the other.’”[11]  The full extent of the Chicago prelate’s authoritative scholarship on the matter is revealed in related remarks of his own, offered in response to a question posed by his travelling companion, the Holocaust survivor, Fritzie Fritzshall.  “You are a man of God, you are a religious man.  What are the reasons?” this woman asked Cardinal Cupich.  And Cupich replied:

I have no answer.  I have no explanation.  How can somebody’s humanity be so riven and shredded? . . . There’s no clear answer for, ‘why?’[12]

Au contraire, Your Eminence.  There is a reason as unavoidable as the nose on Pinocchio’s face in his less honorable moments, even if you yourself are doing your level best to direct our attention elsewhere.  The Holocaust happened because the cult of capital-n Nature was successfully insinuated into the mentality of a certain society, under the guise of being an acceptable alternative to Christianity or even, in some attenuated sense, as Christianity itself. 

Heaven help us, if the entire globe should fall victim to this selfsame deception when the “Church-changing”[13] Amazon Synod comes to a cataclysmic close.

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[1] Quoted in “Cardinal Burke and Bishop Schneider Announce Crusade of Prayer and Fasting,” by Edward Pentin, National Catholic Register online, September 12, 2019.

[2] Quoted in “Cardinal Müller:  Amazon Synod is a ‘pretext for changing the Church,’” by Diane Montagna, Lifesite News online, July 15, 2019.

[3] Quoted in “Archbishop Viganò: ‘The figure of Christ is absent’ from Amazon synod working document,” by Martin M. Barillas, Lifesite News online, August 2, 2019.

[4] Weikart, Richard.  Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich.  (Washington, D.C.; Regnery History, 2016).

[5] Hitler, Adolf.  Mein Kampf  (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, copyright renewed 1971; trans. Ralph Manheim), p. 132.

[6] Mein Kampf, p. 65.

[7] Weikart, p. 71.

[8] Mein Kampf, p. 65.

[9] Quoted in “Cardinal Mueller criticizes ‘false teaching’ on revelation in Amazon synod doc,” Catholic News Agency online, July 16, 2019.

[10] Quoted in “Pope Francis again warns against nationalism, says recent speeches sound like ‘Hitler in 1934’” by Siobhán O’Grady, Washington Post online, August 9, 2019.

[11] Quoted in “Cupich: ‘Never Forget’ policies that led to Holocaust began with words,” by the Catholic News Service, in National Catholic Reporter online, July 31, 2019.

[12] Quoted in “Holocaust Survivor Fritzie Fritzschall Returns to Auschwitz with Cardinal Blase Cupich,” by Alan Krashesky and Ross Weidner, ABC7chicago.com, July 19, 2019.

[13] Bishop Franz-Joseph Overbeck of Essen contends that “the Amazon Synod will lead the Catholic Church to a ‘point of no return’ and that, thereafter, ‘nothing will be the same as it was.’”  (Quoted in “Why Amazon summit ‘could change the Church for ever” by Francis McDonagh and agencies, in The Tablet online, May 9, 2019.)

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Last modified on Saturday, October 19, 2019