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Christopher A. Ferrara

For the sake of maintaining the neo-Catholic position in defense of the ever-expanding post-conciliar regime of novelty, John Paul must decrease so that Francis may increase.

In The Great Façade (2002)—soon to be republished in a second edition with new chapters covering the past twelve years of the “regime of novelty”—I refuted the accusation of neo-Catholic polemicists that traditionalists are improperly “pitting one Pope against another” when they note the obvious: that the Popes since Vatican II have been saying and doing things every one of their predecessors, including even John XXIII, would have considered unthinkable.

In the neo-Catholic view of our situation this plain fact is inadmissible, for whatever the Pope or his delegates in the Holy See pronounce or approve is, for them, ispso facto consistent with both apostolic and ecclesiastical tradition.

Here is what’s in store for the “conservative Novus Ordo” parish in the midst of what the media are now hailing as “the Francis Revolution.”  It is a sermon by Father Jay Scott Newman, pastor of Saint Mary’s Church in Greenville, SC, considered among the most conservative Novus Ordo parishes in the South. (See October 12, 2014 sermon)

Father Newman (beginning at 12:00) declares that “the same-sex couple, in asking for marriage from our courts, are seeking to make the gift of self to another, a gift that gives meaning to our lives” and that they are “climbing the ladder of love” because they are making a “gift of self, however imperfectly.”   He recommends that as “missionaries” we ask same-sex couples “to climb higher” on this “ladder of love.” To which rung, exactly?

I first met Mike Voris at the 2012 Roman Forum Symposium at Lake Garda and then again at the Catholic Identity Conference in September of that year. On both occasions the other participants and I found him to be a regular fellow, an enjoyable companion and an intelligent observer of the current ecclesial scene who had no problem with the traditionalist position on the crisis in the Church even if, perhaps for prudential reasons, he had not embraced it entirely in public (which I can certainly understand).

Quite simply, I liked the guy. We all did. In fact, I thought I had found a new friend, if only a Nicodemus friend, as well as a valuable ally in the lay movement to restore the devastated vineyard. He even had me on his “Mic’d Up” talk show as a featured guest.

A reply to Karl Keating’s latest attempt to discredit The Remnant, with an explanation of certain basic literary devices

Karl Keating has been paying a lot of attention to The Remnant of late. A lot of attention. Far too much, I would say. His attention has become so minuscule that one would think he is daily parsing its pages, even line by line, in search of a “gotcha” he can publish as evidence that one must not take seriously a traditional Catholic journal of forty years’ standing he is obviously taking quite seriously indeed. What is to account for Keating’s fixation on this newspaper? I have a suggestion. It has to do with what one can only call The Situation with Pope Francis, which is becoming stranger and more alarming by the day. Let me explain.

By The Situation I mean, first and foremost, the unprecedented debacle of a “Synod on the Family” that was shaping up as a frontal attack on the family as expressed in the Synod’s disgraceful midterm report, which the Synod ultimately rejected root and branch, but only after the “revolt” of the conservative Synod Fathers who refused to be railroaded by Francis and his handpicked Synod controllers. Cardinal Burke has rightly noted that there is  “a very serious responsibility to try to correct as quickly and as effectively as possible the scandal caused by the midterm report.” In reply, Francis has said in essence: nothing doing. He has ordered the midterm report to be published and distributed to the world’s bishops in preparation for Synod II, as if Synod I had not rejected it completely.

It has come to my attention that a number of Remnant readers have inquired of Church Militant TV (CMTV) concerning Michael Voris’ mysterious refusal to make any reference whatsoever to the Pope in his endless criticism of priests, bishops, and cardinals who are only following the Pope’s example, including those who participated in the recent Synod on the Family.

The gist of these readers’ concern in the context of the Synod can be stated thus: “Don’t we have a Pope in the Catholic Church? What happened to him during all the raging controversy over events in Rome, including CMTV’s two-week-long coverage of the Synod? I thought the Pope was at the Synod, presiding over it! I did see one CMTV video about the Pope’s role in the Synod, but it was deleted the very next day. It was something about how Cardinal Burke said the Pope’s silence over the Modernist agitation at the Synod had ‘harmed the Church’ and that a statement by the Pope affirming Catholic doctrine and discipline was ‘long overdue.’ And then someone named Voris spent some eight minutes

for having mentioned what Cardinal Burke said about the Pope, stating that he had gone to confession because he had made the ‘mistake’ of reporting what the Cardinal said. Gee whiz. What is up with these people?”

Cardinal Mueller on Secret Synod's Relatio:  "Undignified, shameful, completely wrong."

Cardinal Burke on the Relatio: “Clearly, the response to the document in the discussion which immediately followed its presentation manifested that a great number of the Synod Fathers found it objectionable. The document lacks a solid foundation in the Sacred Scriptures and the Magisterium. In a matter on which the Church has a very rich and clear teaching, it gives the impression of inventing a totally new, what one Synod Father called ‘revolutionary’, teaching on marriage and the family. It invokes repeatedly and in a confused manner principles which are not defined, for example, the law of graduality.”

Mark Shea on the Relatio:  "Hysterical Reactionaries like Christopher Ferrara in my email box are calling it a “catastrophe” ... So what’s all the hysteria about? Well, to put it simply, it’s  a sort of whirlwind of media theological illiteracy and Reactionary panic, all generated by the completely non-volatile mixture of Catholicism, politics and sex being tackled by #Synod14.  Easy peasy… And again, I ask, what is the problem here?….  [A] draft that makes some decent points in surprisingly accessible language."

As if we didn’t know it before, today we learned why the Secret Synod was conducted in secret, with the faithful not being permitted to see the texts of the participants’ addresses or even to know which bishop or cardinal was advancing which position. The Secret Synod was conducted in secret because evil advances in shadows.

Many others, and not just traditionalists, have already expressed outrage over the disastrous “Relatio post disceptationem,” which appeared on the Vatican website today, October 13. This is the anniversary of Pope Leo’s vision of Satan’s attack on the Church (leading to his composition of the Leonine prayer suddenly abandoned after Vatican II), the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, and the derailing of the Second Vatican Council by Cardinal Liénart’s violation of the procedural rules in seizing the microphone in order to demand new drafting committees for the conciliar documents.

WARNING: Mordant Commentary. Reader Discretion Advised.

A shockingly blunt title indeed. But as entirely predictable events unfold in the New Synod Hall—wherein, we are told, all things will be made new—why should we bother with nuance? After all, we have a Pope who is no friend of nuance and whose intentions could not have been more crudely expressed over the past eighteen months of astonishing insults and denigration of practically all the elements of apostolic and ecclesiastical tradition. Francis has clearly been preparing for this moment since the day of his election, if not before, and now it has arrived in all its inglorious splendor.

Let us call this Synod what it is: a secretive, manipulated, progressive-dominated cabal, led by septuagenarian and octogenarian diehards of the conciliar “renewal,” who are rushing to finish their “work”—so rudely interrupted by Pope Benedict—lest death release the Church from their clutches before they are quite done.

There is more that needs to be said about Jimmy Akin’s contorted attempt to demonstrate the complete orthodoxy of Pope Francis’s discussion of the “parable” of the loaves and fishes feeding the multitude.

It is not that the Pope’s words concerning the miracle on different occasions deserve further discussion in themselves, for Francis has made a plenitude of similarly dubious pronouncements, and we can make too much of one in particular as opposed to the general neo-Modernist tenor of his informal homilies, addresses and interviews, none of which are (or could be) part of the authentic and binding papal Magisterium.

What merits further consideration, however, are Akin’s efforts as representative of the ongoing neo-Catholic project of finding a way to conceal all signs that the unparalleled crisis in the Church today—whose existence they deny or minimize at every turn—emanates from acts and omissions of the Roman Pontiff, the dicasteries of the Holy See, and the upper hierarchy.

Someone named Michelle Arnold, a Catholic Answers Staff Apologist, contacted The Remnant today to advise that she wrote the piece at JimmyAkin.com under Jimmy Akin’s byline from which I quoted yesterday. Here is the title and headline of the piece as it appears on Akin’s website:

Overcoming Temptations To RadTradism

by Jimmy Akin

According to Arnold, however, “my original byline was lost and Jimmy's inserted” when the JimmyAkin.com was “globally upgraded.” Arnold suggests that “perhaps you might have called or emailed Jimmy to ask if the blog post [from 2006] still represented his opinion, and found out that he did not write it.”