OPEN

BYPASS BIG TECH CENSORSHIP - SIGN UP FOR mICHAEL mATT'S REGULAR E-BLAST

Invalid Input

Invalid Input

OPEN
Search the Remnant Newspaper

Hilary White

"I spent a long time in the pro-life movement, and I met a lot of good people who have given their lives to the struggle against abortion. But among them, I have met very few who understood how their own acceptance of the new mores of the Sexual Revolution have affected them and the movement." . . . Hilary White

In front of the entrances of many Italian churches, including St. Peter’s Basilica, visitors will find a sign that asks them to remember that the building they are entering is not a museum, not a tourist attraction, but a holy place.

At St. Peter’s the long, serpentine queue is punctuated along its length by signs showing stick figures wearing shorts, short skirts and sleeveless t-shirts covered with a big red slashed circle. Italian churches expect a base-line level of modesty and respect from visitors, even if they are expected to know nothing about the Faith for which they are built.

Editor's Note: Amended Version. Multiple Links Repaired. MJM 

Why the novusordoist “good guys” aren’t ever going to save the Church


October 24, 2015 - So, everyone is talking about what we come away with from the last three astounding weeks at the Synod. We are seeing the first of the wrap-up editorials. What are we to make of it all? The difficulty we are facing in trying to make sense of it all, however, is that we are not starting from true premises. We've got our facts wrong from the get-go, which as Aristotle helpfully told us, will not only make it impossible to come to a true conclusion, it will create larger and larger errors as we go along.

When you were a kid, and went to the pool, did you play the “how low can you go” game? Using keys or any object that would sink to the bottom, you stood at one end of the pool and threw it as far as you could into the deep end, then swam down after it. The game was really about nerve. Most pools are only about 10 feet at the diving end, and the lifeguard was always watching, so our daredevil diving was harmless.

But I get the impression that no matter how far down any bishop goes in the current synodal version of the game, there’s going to be someone ready to follow him a few feet lower. And the lifeguard on duty doesn’t seem to care one way or another. This rivalry among the Synod’s ultra-progressives (“heretics,” in Catholic) to see how outrageous they can get, right in front of the pope, seems to be bringing us to new depths that perhaps most ordinary Mass-going novusordoist Catholics had previously never guessed existed among the episcopate.

“Thou fool... put down thine iPhone, for this night is thy soul required of thee.”

(From last week's print edition of The Remnant. Submitted on the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel)

I’ve decided to stay in Norcia for the Synod.


A few days ago, someone on the Remnant's website asked me whether I left LifeSite on my own, or “was pushed”. I answered simply, “I left. It was time.” I have been thinking of how, or even whether to respond more fully. I didn’t really mean to be cryptic. I suppose people wanted to know if some drama had occurred. But in fact the reasons were personal and I’ve debated whether to share some of it. It took me a while to figure out whether I really understood myself why I left so abruptly, immediately following the Rome March for Life.

"The absurdity of the Synod organisers, including the pope, simply writing final documents for a Synod weeks in advance of the bishops even arriving in Rome, seems to be the final message. They no longer feel any need to hide their intentions..."

The “good bishops” are not going to help us at the Synod. This is something we have to get used to right now, the weekend before the show starts. Every day I see in commboxes around the internet hopeful exclamations like, “Oh, but Archbishop Whosits is going to stand up to them.” Or, “Cardinal Youknowwho,” or “that guy from Africa” won’t stand for that stuff again. Well folks, I hate to tell you, but they stood for it just fine last year.


There have been no demands that the pope guarantee a transparent proceeding, no open objections to the scandalous contents of the working documents, and, most significantly, no demand for the removal of the ringleaders of the affair, the Synod General Secretary, Cardinal Baldisseri, Cardinal Kasper, Archbishop Bruno Forte, the author of the outrageous mid-term relatio… et al. All the same characters of last year’s vaudeville act are back, and no word of objection has come from our “good bishops.”

In examining the appalling list of heretics and vicious, persecuting enemies of Christ specially invited by the pope to participate in the Synod next month, I am slowly coming to understand that the Church is suffering a kind of corporate neurosis, brought about by the same thing that creates neurotic behaviour in individuals; decades of mental and spiritual abuse. How did this situation come about, in which millions of Catholics, faced with a catastrophic pontificate of a modernist pope clearly bent on grinding down the surviving structures of Catholicism, continue to cling so desperately to their determination that the pope is always right? How do we still have, even now with the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith warning of an impending schism, the “papal positivists” continuing to whistle in the dark? Could it be a kind of Stockholm Syndrome that we see manifested by abuse victims?

When I was a teenager, my parents moved us to the Canadian arctic and spent a few winters raising and training sled dogs. This activity taught me one cardinal rule with training a dog: consistency. You will do no more than confuse a dog when you discipline him for unwanted behaviour one day and let it slide the next. My stepfather used to say that there is no such thing as a vicious breed or a naturally vicious dog. A dog is made vicious by mistreatment.

Anyone who wants to understand what we are likely facing next needs to read this book as soon as possible.

I hope I am not too late to recommend Edward Pentin’s detailed and balanced book, “The Rigging of a Vatican Synod: An Investigation of Alleged Manipulation at the Extraordinary Synod on the Family,” because anyone who wants to understand what we are likely facing next needs to read it as soon as possible.

I am writing this on the 14th of September. This leaves us just under three weeks before the opening of the second half of the Synod on the Family, that is looking more and more like a deliberate weapon, or as Pentin himself has suggested, a Trojan Horse – designed and wielded to finally put an end to the Catholic Church’s opposition to the new social paradigm of total sexual license.

The real Catholic religion that has barely subsisted while being systematically suppressed throughout the world for the last 50 years, would not have survived another long “conservative” pontificate. As painful as it is, Francis is really just what we need.

People who know me well know that this whole rabid Traditionalist Catholic polemicist thing is mostly kept confined to my professional life. In real day-to-day life, I’m really an amateur naturalist. No kidding. Check it out on my blog where I write long posts about octopi and whelks.

One of my favourite things is going stomping about the Umbrian countryside in my wellies with a collecting basket to see what sort of things I can bring home to cook or make into booze. This year my elderflower champagne was so good, I’m already collecting more bottles and a bigger bucket for ten gallons next spring. And when the rose hips are ripened, I’m going to see how they do as liqueur.

One of the things I love is wild mushrooms, but, Russian Roulette being forbidden by the Church, I strictly confine my collecting to varieties I can be absolutely sure of. Mushrooms and fungi are among the most interesting objects of the natural world, and fungi are as important as bees to the natural world’s ability to make things grow and feed the rest of us.

Oh, look! You can take a whole course on Laudato si! And it’s being provided by none other than celebrity population controller Jeffrey Sachs, the Pope’s biggest fan.  It’s from Sachs’ NGO, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network:

In this vital year for sustainable development, Pope Francis – spiritual leader to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics – issued an encyclical called Laudato Si’: On Care of our Common Home. Although rooted in the long and deep tradition of Catholic social teaching, this encyclical is addressed not only to Catholics, but to all people of the world. In blunt terms, it draws attention to the nature of the grave ecological crisis that humanity has created, and it issues a moral clarion call for urgent action to protect the earth and its inhabitants from ruin.

The papal nagging, the scolding and often incomprehensible admonishing would not be nearly so offensive if it had any serious, weighty moral or doctrinal content. What is going on here?


Is the world finally tiring of the Francis Show? It seems the shine is coming off the Franciscan penny, at least in the US, where “approval ratings” are a thing. The aftermath of his encyclical, Laudato si, has seen quite a bit of shouting and confusion in the US where the “settled science” on climate change is considerably less settled than it tends to be in Europe. Last month, even the mainstream American press noted a significant drop in Pope Francis’ popularity and there are rumblings even from behind the bastions – increasingly resembling barricades – of the pope’s biggest fan base in the American Catholic blogging world.