Stop the Synod! (An Online Petition)
Stop the Synod! (An Online Petition)
First they came for the Roman Rite, which they destroyed. Then they came for the Church Militant, which they disarmed and surrendered to the spirit of the age. Now, at the Synod, which threatens to become Vatican II rebooted, progressivist bishops and their apparatchiks will be coming for the moral law itself under the guise of a search for “pastoral solutions” to “challenges facing the family”
The Return of Vatican II Fever
The symptoms are unmistakable: after a period of relative remission during the years of Pope Benedict’s mysteriously self-terminated reign, the postconciliar “process of decay” remarked by the former Cardinal Ratzinger has resumed with a vengeance, like a rebound infection after an incomplete course of antibiotics. The progressivist priests and prelates who are the disease-causing agents of Vatican II Fever are now running amok throughout the ecclesiastical bloodstream. They have been let loose by a Pope who is so fond of publicly staged “surprises,” all tending to the diminution of traditional Roman Catholicism, that Respice in Me (look at me) could serve as the motto of this pontificate. Consider just one small but telling example of the overt insurrection “the Francis effect” has encouraged: an unbearably smug Monsignor in Pennsylvania who, blithely negating the apostolic authorship of the Gospels and ridiculing the corrected translation of the New Mass, exults that, thanks to Francis, the Church will no longer be preoccupied with “silly rules and rubrics, and pulling things out of centuries past that don’t speak to the Church in the modern world,” such as Communion in lingua and “the restoration of the Latin Mass.” Unlike his rule-bound predecessor, Pope Francis is concerned with “the mercy of Jesus Christ” and thus the far more important question whether, concerning the divorced and so-called remarried, “we have the whole thing wrong, are we punishing people who have made a mistake rather than forgiving them?” According to the Monsignor, nothing has been done in fifty years to “bring the Church into the modern world”—I pause here for the reader’s hysterical laughter—but under Francis, “starting today, you and I are going to begin to implement Vatican II.” Unbelievable as it is, we are back on page one of the neo-Modernist/neo-Catholic narrative of the chimerical “true Council” and the need to implement it at last. The conciliar Ground Hog Day has begun anew.
full textversion
First they came for the Roman Rite, which they destroyed. Then they came for the Church Militant, which they disarmed and surrendered to the spirit of the age. Now, at the Synod, which threatens to become Vatican II rebooted, progressivist bishops and their apparatchiks will be coming for the moral law itself under the guise of a search for “pastoral solutions” to “challenges facing the family”
The Return of Vatican II Fever
The symptoms are unmistakable: after a period of relative remission during the years of Pope Benedict’s mysteriously self-terminated reign, the postconciliar “process of decay” remarked by the former Cardinal Ratzinger has resumed with a vengeance, like a rebound infection after an incomplete course of antibiotics. The progressivist priests and prelates who are the disease-causing agents of Vatican II Fever are now running amok throughout the ecclesiastical bloodstream. They have been let loose by a Pope who is so fond of publicly staged “surprises,” all tending to the diminution of traditional Roman Catholicism, that Respice in Me (look at me) could serve as the motto of this pontificate. Consider just one small but telling example of the overt insurrection “the Francis effect” has encouraged: an unbearably smug Monsignor in Pennsylvania who, blithely negating the apostolic authorship of the Gospels and ridiculing the corrected translation of the New Mass, exults that, thanks to Francis, the Church will no longer be preoccupied with “silly rules and rubrics, and pulling things out of centuries past that don’t speak to the Church in the modern world,” such as Communion in lingua and “the restoration of the Latin Mass.” Unlike his rule-bound predecessor, Pope Francis is concerned with “the mercy of Jesus Christ” and thus the far more important question whether, concerning the divorced and so-called remarried, “we have the whole thing wrong, are we punishing people who have made a mistake rather than forgiving them?” According to the Monsignor, nothing has been done in fifty years to “bring the Church into the modern world”—I pause here for the reader’s hysterical laughter—but under Francis, “starting today, you and I are going to begin to implement Vatican II.” Unbelievable as it is, we are back on page one of the neo-Modernist/neo-Catholic narrative of the chimerical “true Council” and the need to implement it at last. The conciliar Ground Hog Day has begun anew.
full textversion