Found a couple of gems on Twitter. It would appear that Massimo Faggioli and the Vatican Cleaning Service are united in their concern about the redacted letter fiasco. We have some 'interior continuity' here, I think you'll agree! Benedict XVI also had some mediocre and untrustworthy men hovering around him. Interior continuity is go! Once you've lost the support of the cleaners, though, its all downhill from there, especially when they are responsible for polishing floors.
Then there is the Vatican Post Office, but I guess they lost enthusiasm after the Great Book Heist of 2014 at the officially 'trust us on this' unrigged (thanks for that clarification, Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri) Synod on the Family.
Then there's Pope News (not a satirical account apparently, but one does sometimes wonder), who, while having not withdrawn their (whoever 'they' are) vociferous support from Pope Francis the WonderPope TM, have instead just lost it publicly on Twitter.
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| Oh dear! It appears that one of the wheels has come off... |
In all this there's a lesson for the next Pope, if he is watching events unfold. Surround yourself with men of integrity, honesty and moral character and if you must lean on PR at times, as the modern age at times demands, professionalism. It pays dividends in the long run...
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| A bunch of clowns apply for positions in PR positions in the Vatican. 'We're no worse than your present guys!', they say... |
Bones, I have had a second read of your post from late last year, Pope Benedict and the Great Reveal.
ReplyDeleteYour video is of Father Alessandro Maria Minutella reading a statement of his possition, following his nine-month enforced silence.
This got me on to the Novus Ordo Watch blog regarding Father Minutella -
'Facing Excommunication: Italian Novus Ordo priest critical of Francis to be slapped with the harshest possible penalty.'
The comments below the post are most interesting.
One man who signs himself Burning Eagle, said how disgusted his father was with the post-Vatican II church, and how both he and his father attended Ukrainian churches where the true and traditional sacrifice of the Mass was still being said.
I see I shall have to go back and read everything I can find on Vatican II and its critics, for the Council seems to be the source of much of our present confusion, and much of Francis' modernist errors.
I want to look closely at the papacies of the pre-Vatican II popes, from the 19th Century right up to the mid-20th Century; in particular Pope Pius XII, who was never 'Hitler's pope' - John Cornwell (usually a careful writer) got that part wrong.
Reading history is a pleasure, but this is going to be a search for answers.
Ultimately this search will take me back to Luther, the Reformation and Trent.
Any advice from your readers on learned books critical of Vatican II would be appreciated.
It is fruitless to speculate again on the 'Siri hypothesis'.
But who were the church theologians who continued to have the deepest reservations about Vatican II, even as they remained faithful to their church?
I shudder at the anti-semitism of some people who have become associated with the Lefebvre movement; and Holocaust deniers are worse than vermin in my estimation.
But honourable men critical of Vatican II must be worth reading.
A good recent book is "Vatican II A Pastoral Council Hermeneutics of Council Teaching" by Father Serafino M Lanzetta of the Franciscans of the Immaculate based in Gosport. It is published by Gracewing.
ReplyDeleteTo John Haggerty,
ReplyDeleteIf you shudder at anti-semitism instead of anti-Catholicism; and if for you Holocaust deniers instead of Christ deniers are worse than vermin, then you may have a hard time recognizing the the truth about Vatican II when you see it.
Mumu
John Haggerty,
ReplyDeleteEveryone has to start somewhere to understand what happened. For me it was Michael Davies' book, "Pope John's Council". The scales will fall from your eyes - they will be ripped from your eyes. "Pope Paul's New Mass" and "Cranmer's Godly Order" are the other two books in his trilogy. But start with Pope John's Council.
"The Rhine Flows into the Tiber" by Fr. Ralph Wiltgen, and "The Stripping of the Altars" by Eamon Duffy are the other two books that can't be recommend too highly. You will be gutted by what you read in these books (to use a fishing analogy - it applies, trust me). The disaster we're living through is the fruit of a lot of planning.
The whole thing makes me sick. I was a teenager in the '60's but had no idea what was going on. We were lied to, lied to, lied to, all to promote a Protestant/Modernist/Marxist agenda. BTW - I wouldn't have known any of this if I hadn't accidentally stumbled onto Damian Thompson's old Holy Smoke blog, where a number of bloggers a whole lot brighter than me (including Lawrence England) were already up to speed on this.
As another Roman said (at least in the imagination of Shakespeare), 'There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.'
ReplyDeleteI have just 'borrowed' from my own bookshelves a volume of essays by Meriol Trevor, 'Prophets and Guardians - Renewal and Tradition in the Church' (1969 Hollis and Carter).
Meriol Trevor wrote the great two-volume biography of John Henry Newman which is a must read even for those of us who admire Ian Ker's scholarly life of the Cardinal.
'Prophets and Guardians' opens with a Preface on the liberal tradition in the Church.
There follows five sections:
1) The Modernists (1899-1912) which takes in Maude Petre, George Tyrrell and Von Hugel.
2) The Ultramontanes versus the Historians (1859-75).
3) Prophet Disowned: Father Lamennais (1830-34) whose prophetic social vision was disowned by Pope Gregory XV1.
4) The Devil's Advocate (1740-58) Pope Benedict X1V and the influence on European thought of the philosopher Voltaire.
5) Afterthoughts on the Reformation.
The penultimate chapter, Saint as Joker, is devoted to Saint Philip Neri who, as Meriol Trevor writes, 'preferred scripture and history to scholastic philosophy, though he admired the theology of Thomas Aquinas.'
Saint Philip revered the Desert Fathers while holding to a quite modern notion of Christian republicanism.
Meriol Trevor ends in those high spirits which Vatican II aroused in so many naive hearts, though (significantly) there is no real analysis of the shocking changes made to the Mass and Liturgy; and there is one important name missing from her book's Index - that of Alfredo Ottaviani.
The so-called 'little springtime' of Vatican II spelled winter in Cardinal Ottaviani's heavy heart.
(On YouTube watch 'The Ottaviani Intervention' and various online essays on the good Cardinal's deep disquiet at all the Modernists wilfully destroyed.)
Still, Meriol Trevor's book is worth tracking down on the Internet.
I mentioned Ian Ker - do read his book 'The Catholic Revival in English Literature 1845-1961' (Gracewing 2003) with essays on Newman, G.M. Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene and Waugh.
Ian Ker contrasts the Calvinist doctrine of the elect with Belloc's 'mystic Catholic doctrine of equality'.
Why should today's anti-Christian progressives have a monopoly on the idea of equality?
That all men were equal before God was always the Church's teaching.
Historian Larry Siedentop reminds us how much under-informed atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris owe to Christianity.
Read his magisterial work, 'Inventing the Individual - The Origins of Western Liberalism' (Penguin 2015).
Annie, Thank you for recommending the books of Michael Davies, Father Ralph Wiltgen and Eamon Duffy; of these three I have only read Professor Duffy and that was his most evocative memoir of growing up in Catholic Ireland.
ReplyDeleteMy generation tended to get background on Vatican II from writers such as Peter Hebblethwaite, who wrote a fluent but rather too admiring biography of Giovanni Montini - Paul V1.
We tended to see the Vatican II Church through rose-tinted eyeglasses - rather like those early Victorians who had a romantically Peel-ite view of the Conservative Party (after Sir Robert Peel) rather than the more realistic Disraeli-ite view held by late 19th Century Tories.
We Vatican 11 Catholics were at once romantic and realistic; a muddled state. Idealistic, certainly.
So it is still a shock to reflect on all that went wrong in the half century and more since John X111's Council; the priests of my youth, particularly Jesuits, held passionately to the Council's documents, particularly those documents relating to 'culture' - we Catholics were to influence the secular culture through some vague process I never quite understood.
I still remember the irritation of a populist Scottish archbishop (later a Cardinal) who had no patience with 'that lot' who missed the Latin Mass.
We were assured that the Latin rite had not been 'outlawed'; but it was as rare as an osprey until the emergence of SPPX, which has always had a lowish profile in Scotland.
The Novus Ordo, we were assured, had altered nothing of the nature of the Mass; it was still an offering up by the priest-celebrant of Christ's eternal sacrifice on Calvary.
As you say Annie, a lie.
Seldom or never was the liturgical revolution of Paul VI brought up in any general discussion I attended.
In those days we left-wing Catholics were more interested in a discussion on Christian-Marxism or in hearing Father Daniel Berrigan (who came to Scotland) on the subject of Vietnam.
I think I began to reassess the past when I read the Catholic Herald columns of Alice Thomas Ellis; her friend and fellow convert Beryl Bainbridge was saying the same thing - that something had gone badly wrong after Vatican II.
I mentioned Peter Hebblethwaite. Some years ago I had a telephone conversation with Brian Hebblethwaite, who I learned was not at all related to Peter; indeed they had never met.
Brian's background was, I think, Anglican; his essays on theology are worth hunting out as is John Macquarrie's 'On Being a Theologian' (1999 SCM).
In her autobiography 'Trespasses', Julia O'Faolain expresses a debt of gratitude to those Irish teaching sisters who dedicated their lives to their convent pupils; it is too easy to forget the Church's immense contribution to our lives.
I for one only ever encountered good and dedicated priests; I wish everyone had the same experience.
Let me recommend 'More Roman Than Rome' by Derek Holmes (Burns and Oates/Patmos Press 1979) a very readable portrait of the great 19th Century English Catholicism that was somewhat marginalized after Vatican 11.
To Anonymous (Mumu):
ReplyDeleteThe Holocaust or Shoah is a fact of history and a terrible one.
Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew.
Paul was a Jew.
The early church was Jewish.
The Jewish people are central to God's plan for the redemption of the world.
Anti-Semitism has been a very black shadow on Christendom; think of the first Jewish ghetto in Venice or the pogroms in Russia or the pathological hatred of Jewish people in pre-War
Poland and Romania or the cruelty done to the heroic Captain Dreyfus in France.
Think of Anne Frank who with her sister died in Hitler's Auschwitz, two innocent young girls.
Martin Buber said he could not accept Jesus as the Messiah, but he also said that Jewish people would one day accept Jesus as a prophet (see 'Encounter With Buber' by Aubrey Hodes, Penguin 1975).
Surely we can respect Martin Buber's sincerely held opinion while acknowledging the Christian conversion of a growing number of Jewish men and women.
When the film 'The Jewish Cardinal' was shown in the Glasgow Film Theatre, the event was hosted by the Jewish community of my city.
I felt privileged to be seated among them.