Roberto de Mattei

[Bernard]

               The Unknowns at the End of a Pontificate

 

The demission of Benedict XVI will be remembered as one of the most catastrophic events of our century, as it opened the door, not only to a destructive pontificate, but above all to a situation of increasing chaos in the Church.  After seven years since that disastrous February 11, 2013, the life of Benedict XVI and the pontificate of Pope Francis are drawing inexorably to a close. We don’t know which of the two events will precede the other, but in both cases, the “smoke of Satan”” risks enveloping the Mystical Body of Christ as perhaps has never happened in history

The Bergoglian pontificate has reached its end, perhaps not from a chronological point of view, but most certainly from the point of view of its revolutionary impact. The Post -Amazonian Synod has been a failure and the Exhortation Querida Amazonia of last February 2, was the tombstone placed on the many hopes of the progressive world, mainly in the German zone. The Coronavirus, or Covid 19, has definitively brought to an end the ambitious pontifical projects for 2020, presenting us with a historical image of a solitary and defeated Pope, immersed in the emptiness of a spectral St. Peter’s Square. On the other hand, Divine Providence, which always regulates all human events, allowed Benedict XVI to witness the debacle following his abdication.  But the worst is probably still to come.

 

It was logical to envision that with the cohabitation of “two Popes” in the Vatican, a part of the conservative world disgusted with Francis would have looked to Benedict, considering him the “true Pope”, set against “the false prophet”. Whilst convinced of Pope Francis’s errors, these conservatives  didn’t want to follow the open way of the Correctio filialis delivered to Pope Francis on August 11, 2016. The real reason for their reluctance is probably due to the fact that the Correctio accentuates how the roots of the Bergoglian deviations go back to the Papacies of  Benedict XVI and John Paul II, and even before, to  the Second Vatican Council.

 

For many conservatives, instead, the hermeneutic of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, won’t admit any rupture, and since the Bergoglian papacy seems to embody the negation of this hermeneutic, the only solution to the problem is for Francis to be out of the picture.

And Benedict by giving himself the title Pope Emeritus, by continuing to wear white and imparting apostolic blessings, has engaged in gestures which seem to encourage this impervious work of substituting the new Pope with the old one. The princeps argumentation is however the distinction between munus and ministerium, whereby it seemed Benedict wanted to keep for himself a sort of mystical papacy, leaving Francis with the exercise of government. The origin of the thesis goes back to a discourse by Monsignor Georg Gänswein of May 20, 2016 at  the Pontifical Gregorian University, wherein he stated that Pope Benedict had not abandoned his office, but had given it a new collegial dimension, rendering it a quasi-shared ministry(«als einen quasi gemeinsamen Dienst»).

 

It has mattered naught that Monsignor Georg Gänswein, in a declaration to LifeSiteNews on February 14, 2019,  reaffirmed the validity of Benedict XVI’s renunciation of the Petrine Office, by stating that “there is only one Pope legitimately elected  – and it is Francis.”  By then the idea of a possible redefinition of the Petrine munus had been launched. And faced with the objection that the Papacy is one and undivided and cannot countenance any internal divisions, the response of these conservatives is that precisely this fact proves the invalidity of Benedict’s demission. They say that Benedict’s intention was that of maintaining the papacy, assuming the office capable of bifurcating in two; but this is a substantial error, since the monarchal and unitary nature of the Papacy is of divine right. Thus Benedict’s renunciation would be invalid.

 

It is easy to rebut that if it were proven Benedict XVI had the intention of splitting the papacy, by modifying the constitution of the Church, he would have fallen into heresy; and since this heretical conception of the Papacy would certainly be anterior to his election, the election of Benedict should be considered invalid for the same reason  his abdication is considered invalid. He in no way would be Pope. But these are abstract discourses, since God alone judges intentions, whereas Canon Law merely limits itself in evaluating the outward behavior of the baptized.

A well-known sentence of canon law, referred to by both Cardinal Walter Brandmüller and Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, affirms that «De internis non iudicat praetor»; a judge does not judge interior things. On the other hand Canon 1526, § 1 of the new Code of Canon Law points out that: «Onus probandi incumbit ei qui asserit» (the onus of providing the proofs falls to the one alleging). There is a difference between a clue and a proof. The clue suggests the possibility of a fact, the proof demonstrates the certainty. Agatha Christie’s rule whereby three clues are a proof, is fine in literature but not in civil or ecclesiastical courts.   

Furthermore, if Pope Benedict is the legitimate Pope, what would happen if from one day to the next he should die, or instead, before he died, Pope Francis should pass away? Given the fact that many current cardinals were created by Pope Francis and none of the cardinal electors consider him an Anti-Pope, the apostolic succession would be interrupted, jeopardizing the visibility of the Church. The paradox is that to prove the invalidity of Benedict’s renunciation juridical  sophisms are employed, but then to resolve the problem of Benedict’s or Francis’s succession, extra-canonical solutions ought to be used.

The thesis of the French visionary Jean de Roquetaillade (1310-1365), whereby shortly before the end times, an “ angelic Pope” would appear at the head of an invisible Church, is a myth spread by many pseudo-prophets, but never accepted by the Church. Is this the road that a part of the conservative world is embarking on?  It seems more logical to retain that the cardinals gathered together in conclave to elect a new Pope, after the death or the renunciation of the papacy by Pope Francis, would be aided by the Holy Spirit. And if it’s true that the cardinals might refuse the divine influx by electing a Pontiff worse than Pope Francis, it is also true that Providence might reserve unforeseen surprises, like it was for the election of Pius X or other great Popes in history.

What we need is a saintly Pope, even more than a “next Pope”.

With the title, The Next Pope, an excellent book by the English journalist Edward Pentin has just been released, published by Sophia Institute Press (The Next Pope: The Leading Cardinal Candidates). The principal merit of this work of more than 700 pages, is to remind us that there will be a “next Pope” and offer us, all the information necessary to enter the post-Franciscan era, by means of 19 “papal candidate” profiles.

We need to be convinced that the hermeneutic of continuity has failed, since we are going through a crisis which must be measured on facts, and not on the interpretations of facts. «The implausibility of this approach – Peter Kwasniewski correctly notes  – is demonstrated by, among other signs, the infinitesimal success that conservatives have had in reversing the disastrous “reforms,” trends, habits, and institutions established in the wake of and in the name of the last council, with papal approbation or toleration» . *

Pope Francis has never theorized the hermeneutic of “discontinuity”  but has sought to implement Vatican II in praxis and the only winning response to this praxis is in the concrete reality of theological, liturgical, canonical and moral facts, and not in sterile hermeneutic debate. In this regard, the real problem will not be the continuity or the discontinuity of the next pontificate with Pope Francis, but its relationship with the historical knot of the Second Vatican Council. Some conservatives want to eliminate Pope Francis, by means of  canonical loopholes, in the name of the hermeneutic of continuity. But if it’s possible to accuse a Pope for discontinuity with his predecessor, why not admit the possibility of the discontinuity of a Council with its precedents?

In this context, the recent interventions on Vatican II by Archbishop Carol Maria Viganò and Auxiliary Bishop  of Astana, Athanasius Schneider are to be appreciated. They have had the courage to face a theological and cultural debate which cannot be evaded. This work of historical and theological revision of Vatican II is necessary to dissipate the shadows thickening around the end of a papacy, and to avoid a division that might place good Catholics in front of a choice between a bad Pope, but legitimate, and an Anti-Pope of better doctrine, or “mystical” , but unfortunately illegitimate.

*https://onepeterfive.com/vigano-critique-council/

 

 

The Unknowns at the End of a Pontificate - Roberto de Mattei

WWW.ROBERTODEMATTEI.IT

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The demission of Benedict XVI will be remembered as one of the most catastrophic events of our century, as it opened the door, not only to a destructive

 

[Родољуб Лазић]

Тако је, Бернарде! Браво! Десет римокатоличких тема на форумској листи православног сајта. Него, не рече, да ли си плаћен по учинку или овде међу православнима мисионариш из чистог ентузијазма?

Sad se setih, možda ne razumeš ćirilicu.  Pa da ti prevedem:

Tako je, Bernarde! Bravo! Deset rimokatoličkih tema na forumskoj listi pravoslavnog sajta. Nego, nisi rekao da si plaćen po učinku ili ovde među pravoslavnima misionariš iz čistog entuzijazma?

[Родољуб Лазић]

Ujedno ti malo dižem i gledanost teme. Da ne bude da sam zadrti pravoslavni tradicionalista koji neće ni da razgovara sa rimokatolicima.

Mejbi to giv ju a pis ov advajs? Ju šud čejndž samthin in jor eprouč. Ic obvioz det ju mejk a mistejk ven poustin douz teksts. Dec ol aj vil tel ju for nau. 

[Bernard]

Presentation of The Church in the tempests: the first millennium of the history of the Church

by Roberto de Mattei

On Thursday 9 June 2022, at the Brompton Oratory in London, Prof de Mattei presented the following talk for the launch of Calx Mariae Publishing, at which his book The Church in the tempests: the first millennium of the history of the Church was among those presented, notably along with The Christian sense of history by Dom Prosper Guéranger. Picking up in the same century where he left off in his book, Prof de Mattei highlighted Dom Guéranger’s principles for Christian historians and continued to apply them to the phenomenon of Eastern Christianity in the second millennium — unravelling a history which is of greater importance than ever as we enter the third.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends,

One of the volumes published by Calx Mariae is my book The Church in the Tempests: The First Millennium of the History of the Church.

In these pages I try to offer a summary of Church history, from its origins to the First Crusade, taking my inspiration from the teaching of Dom Prosper Guéranger, who — in his book, The Christian Sense of History — writes that the Catholic historian is someone who “judges facts, men, and institutions from the point of view of the Church; he is not free to judge otherwise, and that is his strength”.

I am glad that Calx Mariae has also translated and published the important essay by Dom Guéranger, which confirms for us the importance of history in the battle of ideas. Today, we are witnessing an attempt to erase historical memory, an attempt to rewrite history in an anti-Catholic and anti-Western sense. And the history of the Church helps us to fight these errors.

I will give just one example. Leo XIII, in the encyclical, Quarto Abeunte Saeculo, issued 130 years ago on 16 July 1892 for the fourth centenary of the discovery of America, extolled the enterprise of Christopher Columbus, calling it “in itself the highest and grandest which any age has ever seen accomplished by man”.

But in America, Columbus Day, on 12 October, which celebrates the Italian navigator’s arrival in the Americas, is being equated with the celebration of a genocide. In recent years, many American states have chosen to turn Columbus Day into Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

The message is unmistakable: the supreme evil is the West, its culture, its Christian tradition.

While the West is denying itself, its roots, its tradition, Putin’s Russia is proclaiming an identity opposed to that of the West, it too erasing and rewriting its own history.

I am not going to speak on the merits of the war underway, but I take Vladimir Putin’s vision of history very seriously and would like to draw your attention to an important speech that the president of the Russian Federation gave on 12 July 2021 at the Valdai Club, the best known Russian think tank.¹

In this speech, entitled On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians, Putin sets out to rewrite the history of Russia over the past thousand years, in order to justify the invasion of Ukraine. The basic thesis of the president of the Russian Federation is this: Ukraine has no right to exist, because it is a piece of Russia, part of the Russian state for more than a thousand years. 

“Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus’, which was the largest state in Europe. Slavic and other tribes across the vast territory were bound together by a single language and — after the baptism of Rus’ — by the Orthodox faith.” 

Russians and Ukrainians are one people, bound together by one language, one culture and one faith, that of the Orthodox Church, said to date back to the baptism of Prince Vladimir in the year 988.

Putin continues his historical analysis by stating that, after the devastating Mongol invasion of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, two Russias were formed: Lithuanian Rus’, which absorbed Poland, and the principality of Moscow, which became the Tsarist Empire. The Grand Dukes of Lithuania converted to the Catholic faith, while the princes of Moscow kept the Orthodox faith. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, through Catholicism and Latinisation, allegedly tried to break Russian linguistic and religious unity. This unity was restored thanks to the tsarist conquests and subsequent Soviet domination.

According to Putin, after the fall of the Soviet regime, the Ukrainian state rebelled against Russia, asserting its independence and opening up to the West. In order to stop this process, which threatens Russia’s territorial, linguistic and religious integrity, Ukraine must be Russified. For Putin, the work of Russification is not only political and territorial; it is linguistic and cultural, because it affirms the primacy of Russian language and culture over other national languages and cultures; and above all, it is religious, because it consists in the imposition of Orthodoxy as the only religion of the state.

This ideological project is in reality based on a profound falsification of Russian history.

The first historical falsehood of Putin’s reconstruction lies in attributing a Slavic origin to the kingdom of Kiev, while it was instead the creation of an elite group of Scandinavian warriors, the Normans or Vikings, whom the Byzantines called Varangians. They were the same Normans who, at the dawn of the Middle Ages, conquered the British Isles and Sicily, and reached Greenland and the coasts of America.

The city of Kiev, on the right bank of the Dnieper River, was conquered in the ninth century by the Norman Rurikid dynasty, which takes its name from its founding father, Rurik. The term “Rus’” itself does not belong to the Slavic language, but comes from Balto-Finnic.²

The second historical falsehood is that of disregarding the fact that the State of Kiev, which between the tenth and twelfth centuries extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea, up to the Carpathians, remained part of Western Christian civilisation until the Mongol invasion.

Kiev experienced the apogee of its splendour during the first half of the eleventh century, under the reign of Prince Yaroslav “the Wise” (978–1054), who was the monarch most interrelated by marriage to the ruling families in Europe.³ Yaroslav’s sister, Maria, was married to King Casimir of Poland; while, among his daughters, Elisiv was married to King Harald III of Norway, Anastasia to King Andrew I of Hungary, and Anne to King Henry I of France, with whom she had four children, the eldest of whom was France’s king Philip I — a Greek name which thus came into use by the French royal family. The historian, Christian Raffensperger, has written a book on genealogy and dynastic marriage in Kievan Rus’, which shows how extensive the interweaving of kinship between East and West was, within a selfsame Christendom.⁴

Yaroslav’s last son, Vsevolod I, who reigned from 1073 to 1093, spoke five languages and married a Greek princess. His daughter, Adelaide (1067–1109), was empress of the Holy Roman Empire, because in 1089, in Cologne, she married Henry IV (1050–1106), who later became emperor and the great enemy of St Gregory VII, by whom he was humiliated in Canossa. Adelaide accused her husband of abuse and took refuge with Matilda, Grand Countess of Canossa. Then, in 1095, with uncommon courage, she publicly accused the emperor before Urban II at the Council of Piacenza, where the pope announced the First Crusade. Adelaide at last returned to Kiev, where she died in a convent.

The third historical falsehood is that of attributing to the State of Kiev, or of Rus’, a religious determination deemed Orthodox, meaning by this term the Greek-schismatic religion that was defined in 1054, after the schism with the Church of Rome.

Prince Vladimir received Catholic baptism in 988. The baptism took place in Kherson and was followed soon after by his marriage to Princess Anna, sister of Emperor Basil II. Towards the end of May 989, Vladimir and Anna left Kherson accompanied by many bishops and priests and went to Kiev, where the collective baptism of the people took place in the waters of the Dnieper. This baptism is considered to be the historical origin of Russia.

Kievan Rus’ was born Catholic, because the schism in 1054 that brought about the religious fracture between East and West came more than half a century after Vladimir’s baptism. But even after the schism, Kiev struck its own balance between Constantinople and Rome. What in fact happened after the act of rupture of Constantinople patriarch Cerularius? As the historian Bernard Leib observes, one must distinguish between the metropolitans and the faithful of Kiev. The metropolitans remained tied to Constantinople in administrative terms, but the princes and the population never showed any sentiment of hostility towards Rome.⁵ In Kievan Rus’, two rites coexisted peacefully, the Eastern rite and the Latin rite. Please note: two rites, not two churches. Kievan Rus’ had understood that its mission was to act as a bridge between East and West, to continue to maintain, in addition to the rites, the unity of the universal Church.⁶

The princes of Kiev recognised the Roman Pontiff as the supreme spiritual authority of the Respublica Christiana, into which they were fully integrated. Thus, in 1075 Prince Iziaslav I (1024–1078), whose Christian name was Demetrius, sent his son Yaropolk to pay homage to St Gregory VII, and the pope responded by sending “most benevolent wishes of every heavenly blessing” to “Demetrius, king of the Russians, and to his consort the queen”.⁷

The annus horribilis of the Rus’ was 1236, when the Mongol cavalry crossed the Caucasus, led by Batu, a grandson of Genghis Khan. All the Russian principalities were conquered. Kiev was stormed and razed to the ground in 1240.⁸ The Mongol domination lasted for over 250 years, until the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is to the time of the Mongol domination that the tradition of servility and moral corruption which would characterise Russian history dates back. Alexander Nevsky (1221–1263), the Russian national hero, progenitor of the Muscovy princes, agreed to be a vassal of the Mongols in order to keep the throne, and his grandson Ivan I (1288–1340) became the tax collector of the Great Khan.

They belonged to the Rurikid dynasty, but politically were the descendants not of the princes of Kiev but of the Tartar Khans, from whom they learned how to govern the new state: the Grand Duchy of Moscow which was born in opposition to that of Kiev.

After the liberation from the Mongols, Catholics and schismatic Orthodox competed for religious primacy in Kiev. In 1439, the seventeenth ecumenical council of the Church was convened by Pope Eugene IV in Florence. Isidore (1385–1463), metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus’, signed with his own name the decree by which the Greek Church was solemnly reunited with the Latin Church, recognising the Roman primacy, after the schism of 1054.⁹

The union with the Greeks was not destined to last long. The Byzantine bishops who returned to Constantinople were challenged and reconsidered the agreement and, in 1453, the Turks conquered the capital of the Eastern Empire.

On 18 December 1439, Eugene IV rewarded the work of Archbishop Isidore with the purple and sent him as his legate to Russia to implement the union. Isidore met with no difficulty in Kiev and its nine bishoprics, but in Moscow, where he arrived on 19 March 1441, his mission failed. In fact, Isidore delivered a letter from Eugene IV to the prince of Moscow, Basil (Vasily) II (1415–1462), in which the pope urged him to support the spread of Catholicism in Russian lands. Basil categorically refused and had Isidore arrested, but he managed to escape and make his way Rome, where he died on 27 April 1463. He is now at rest in the Vatican basilica.

Moscow, which at the time of the birth of the State of Kiev was just a small Finnish village, had received Christianity from Ukraine, and its church reported to the metropolitan see of Kiev. But when, in 1453, Constantinople fell under the dominion of the Turks, Moscow proclaimed itself heir to Constantinople’s political and religious role, developing a visceral theological and political hatred against Rome and Latinity.

The sixteenth century was that of the first great Revolution: the Protestant Revolution that followed the era of humanism and the Renaissance. But during the same years in which Luther turned his back on Rome, a second great apostasy took place: that of Muscovite Russia. It was in the years of Martin Luther’s revolt, between 1520 and 1530, that expression was given to the concept of Moscow as the “Third Rome”. The letter of the monk Philotheus of the Pskov monastery (c. 1520) addressed to the Grand Duke of Muscovy, Basil III (Vasily III Ivanovich) is considered as a manifesto of this ideology. According to Philotheus, the true faith that for centuries was held by Constantinople did not collapse along with the fall of the city. “Holy Byzantium did not vanish but was transferred to Moscow” as to “the third Rome, and there will be no fourth”.

The historian Felix Koneczny (1862–1949) states that Philotheus finally defined “the basic canon of Moscow culture: the conviction about their own superiority over the rest of the world, founded on a state religion and temporal despotism, controlling the Orthodox Church”.¹⁰

Orthodox Christianity, with Ivan IV — “Ivan the Terrible” — (1530–1584), became a sort of national religion. Ivan IV reunified the Russian lands under Moscow and was the first to take the title of Tsar of all Rus’, which in 1561, was approved by decree of the patriarch of Constantinople. Russia presented itself as the sanctuary of the true faith, and the Kremlin was the fortress that contained the foundational myth of the Third Rome. The legacy of Genghis Khan merged with that of the Byzantine Empire.

The Moscow Patriarchate was created in 1589. Six years later came the response from Rome and Kiev. On 23 December 1595, in the Hall of Constantine in the Apostolic Palace, Archbishop Michael Rohoza (1540–1599), Metropolitan of Kiev, Galychyna and all Ruthenia, after having presented to the Supreme Pontiff the declaration of all the bishops, made in their name and in his own name a solemn profession of the Catholic faith. The union was solemnly proclaimed in Brest on the Bug River on 16 October 1596. Pope Clement VIII, with the apostolic constitution Magnus Dominus et laudabilis nimis,¹¹ announced this to the whole Church, and with the apostolic letter Benedictus sit Pater, addressed the bishops of the Metropolia, communicating to them that the union had taken place.¹²

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ukraine lost its territorial and state identity and was repeatedly taken apart and put back together between Russia, Austria and Poland, but it did not entirely lose the Catholic identity that it had recovered in the Union of Brest. Brest is the answer to the Third Rome of Muscovy, and it is once again a historical falsehood on Putin’s part to link this religious event to the Latinisation process promoted by Austria and Poland because, in the Union of Brest, the Eastern rites were maintained, and not the Latin ones of the Church called Ruthenian.

The popes of the twentieth century always confirmed that the ancient Greek rites can be preserved, as had already been permitted by the Council of Florence and the apostolic letter Benedictus sit Pater of 1596.¹³ When John Paul II spoke of a Europe that could breathe with two lungs, that of the West and that of the East, he was not referring to the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, but to the method of evangelisation of Saints Cyril and Methodius, who, worked according to the ideal of uniting the new believers in Christ; adapting the liturgical texts to the Slavic language and the Greco-Roman law to the customs of the new peoples.¹⁴ The Eastern rites should not be confused with the Orthodox religion, falsifying history.

Above all, there is a line, not of continuity but of discontinuity, between the state of Kiev in the year 1000 and the principality of Moscow in the sixteenth century. Unlike the state of Kiev, which was integrated into Western Christian civilisation, Muscovite Russia began its existence as an extra-European state, meaning that it was outside the domain of the “Christian Republic”.¹⁵ The Moscow Patriarchate, subordinate to the state, was always characterised by a radical theological hatred of the Rome of Peter. Equally visceral was the Kremlin’s hatred of the Lithuanian-Polish state, which after 1569, became the largest and most powerful country in eastern Europe, within which were found a good nine contemporary nations: Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Russia and Transnistria.

This was also the vision of Peter the Great (1672–1725), who moved the capital from Moscow to St Petersburg (1703), strengthened the centralised and autocratic state and created the Holy Synod, the supreme ecclesiastical council placed at the head of the Russian church and controlled by imperial authority. In the title of “Autocrat of all Rus’” that he adopted in 1721, there was the convergence of Mongolian absolutism, Byzantine Caesaropapism and the Muscovite ideology of the Third Rome. The autocratic character of the Russian state, its Asiatic connotation and its isolation from Europe has never wavered during the entire period from Peter the Great to the Bolshevik Revolution, or up to our own day.

The destruction of historical memory represented a constitutive element of the totalitarianism of the twentieth century and is a characteristic of the new totalitarianism of the twenty-first century. Although totalitarianism can erase and manipulate memory, it must nonetheless resort to it if it wants to survive.

Stalin, to consolidate his regime, invoked the memory of Alexander Nevsky, the victor over the Teutonic knights in the thirteenth century, and not that of Marx; he invoked the memory of Ivan the Terrible, the destroyer of the Tartars in the sixteenth century, and not that of Engels. To justify the invasion of Ukraine, Putin invokes the founder of Kievan Rus’, St Vladimir, seeking to combine his memory with that of Stalin, the patriot who, in the Second World War, restored the territorial unity and moral greatness of Russia.

At the conclusion of these considerations of mine, some may object that I have given a negative image of Putin’s historical reconstruction and question whether a positive value be ascribed to the West, which today sets itself against Russia? Are Putin’s patriotic and religious values not better than those of the depraved West in which we live?

My answer is this: in all my books, my articles, my talks, I have always denounced the cultural and moral degradation of the West, which, for centuries, has been going through a historical process of self-dissolution. I define this historical process as Revolution, with a capital letter, following the analysis that Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira made in his work Revolution and Counter-Revolution. 

But Joseph de Maistre had already said that the Revolution must not be resisted with a Revolution in the opposite direction, but with the opposite of Revolution; or if one prefers, an error has to be counteracted with the truth and not with an error in the opposite direction.

So if it is true that Putin’s Russia cannot be counteracted with Biden’s West, the contrary is equally true, namely that the ideology of Soros and Bill Gates cannot be counteracted with that of Aleksander Dugin and Russkiy Mir. This is precisely the temptation I am trying to combat within the Catholic and conservative world.

I am not afraid of Moscow’s tanks and missiles, but of the ideology that lies behind them. For me, more dangerous than Russia’s political and military expansion is the Kremlin’s ideological propaganda, which consists of presenting the religious and patriotic values of Russia as better than those of the corrupt West and even those of the Catholic Church, which remains its true enemy.

An error is not fought with another error, but with the truth, full and intact. This truth is, for me, the way of thinking and living transmitted by the Catholic Church over the centuries. This is why, in my book, The Church in the Tempests, I sought to follow Dom Guéranger’s teaching, to which I wanted to bear witness in today’s brief contribution as well: “the Catholic historian is someone who judges facts, men, and institutions from the point of view of the Church; he is not free to judge otherwise, and that is his strength.”

 

 

Presentation of The Church in the tempests: the first millennium of the history of the Church - Voice of the Family

VOICEOFTHEFAMILY.COM

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by Roberto de Mattei On Thursday 9 June 2022, at the Brompton Oratory in London, Prof de Mattei presented the following talk for the launch of Calx Mariae

 

[Родољуб Лазић]

Dobro, nema problema ako ne želiš da razgovaraš.  Ali zbilja imaš problem u pristupu postavljanja ovih misionarskih tekstova. To je jedno. A evo ti i još jedan savet: bilo bi ti mnogo korisnije, sa misionarskog aspekta, da uđeš u bilo kakav dijalog sa mnom, jer time pokazuješ i određenu širinu i pristupačnost. Pogotovu što razgovaraš sa, kako me ovde modernisti smatraju, zadrtim pravoslavnim tradicionalistom. U suprotnom, ispadaš neki autista koji samo štancuje teme. Kao da radiš u preduzeću koje se bavi marketingom. To ti nije dobro za imidž. 

  

[Bernard]

The Condemnation of Cardinal Pell the Church and the World

Roberto de Mattei

The condemnation of Cardinal Pell, arriving like a bolt of lightning in the wake of the Vatican summit, draws attention to a truth that there has been a desire to forget for the last fifty years: there is no possible compromise between the Church and the world, because the world hates the Church and wants its destruction. This sentence, furthermore, demonstrates the failure of the strategy of this papacy, which has renounced exercising the sovereignty of the Church, confiding instead in the comprehension of the world.     

The sovereignty of the Church is expressed primarily in Her Canon Law. The Catholic Church, inasmuch as it is a visible society, is endowed by a law, also penal, the law She possesses to sanction the faithful who have committed violations of Her law.  A crime is a violation outside the judicial order of the Church, distinct from sin, which is, instead, a violation of the moral order. Thus the Church, “by sole and exclusive right”, has the right to judge the violation of Church laws and the right to sanction the crimes with penalties according to Canon Law (can. 1402 §2). Among the many canonical crimes specified by the Code, are apostasy, heresy and schism (Can.1364), communicatio in sacris, the profanation of sacred things (can.1376), and also a series of grave violations against the sixth commandment (can. 1395). The distinction between sins and crimes does not appear clear to Pope Francis, who declares “zero tolerance” against civil crimes, such as pedophilia, but calls for “forgiveness” and mercy for the “sins of youth”, such as homosexuality, unmindful of the presence of this crime in the laws of the Church. 

For the laws and a large part of mainstream thinking in Western countries, pedophilia is considered, like rape, an ignominious crime, not however for the immorality of the act in itself, but for the violation that these crimes imply for the rights, in the first case, of children, and in the other, of women.  Following the example of the modern States, the ecclesiastical authorities appear to have reduced some sins from crimes against morality to crimes against the person: sin does not consist in violating the natural law, but consists in preventing with violence, the individual following his personal instincts and tendencies.  Today the Vatican authorities are dealing with crimes such as sodomy as if they were merely private sins, limiting themselves – in full-blown cases – to requesting penitential expiations, without applying the penal sanctions these crimes demand.

The only crimes recognized as such are those sanctioned by the secular States. But even regarding these type of crimes, like pedophilia, the ecclesiastical authorities are today complying with the judgments of guilt or innocence from the civil courts, forgoing investigation and procedure on their own account, except when rendered necessary, in order not to lose “credibility” – as happened in  the “McCarrick case.”  However, the reduction of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick to the lay state, as Sandro Maguister highlighted in a recent article, is fruit of a merely administrative  process, not a judiciary one. (“Settimo Cielo”, 15 February 2019).

The Church however, has the duty to open a proper judicial process against those accused of sexual abuses, without violating their fundamental rights.  Indeed, rights exist not only for those who claim to be victims but also for those who are accused by the victims. They must be judged according to the norms of Canon Law, perhaps first by the State, to establish the veracity of the facts. Once this veracity is established, if identified guilty, they must undergo the correct sanctions; if identified innocent, they must also be defended even against the civil authorities of the State.  The Church, which is endowed with its own penal law and tribunals, must have the courage to challenge the world’s tribunals, being convinced, that it is not up to the world to judge the Church, but the Church to judge the world.

The moral crisis in the Church will not be resolved with the so-called best practices: the practical instructions given by the Organization of Ethics and Health, a secular organism promoting sexual education, which would like to include contraception and abortion in all national programs of family planning; neither by instituting commissions or task forcesof ‘experts’, but [only]through a supernatural vision, which unfortunately is totally absent in Pope Francis’ speech which concluded  the Vatican summit last February 24th.  The consequences being that we hear of greater synodality for the local churches, “open” to  contributions from the secularized world and of the abolition of the papal secrecy, in the interests of “transparency.”  The “culture of secrecy” is the one denounced by Frédéric Martel in his recent booklet aimed at “normalizing” sodomy in the Church.  But what more impenetrable secrecy is there than the secrecy imposed on priests by the Sacrament of confession? This seems to be the next stone the enemies of the Church want to turn over and for which, the sentence of the tribunal in Victoria seems to have paved the way.

In Australia, in the territory of Canberra, a law has been adopted that makes a priest indictable if he does not report cases of abuses against minors, even when the knowledge came  during confession. The law, which applies the recommendations from the Royal Commission (the commission charged by the Australian government to deal with the sexual abuse of minors) was approved last June by the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of the Australian Capital, and extends the mandatory denunciation of the abuse of minors even to the Church and the activities of the Church, including the Confessional.  Among these recommendations, there was, precisely, the idea of making the failure of a priest to denounce molestations and violence against minors, a crime, when he finds out about them during the Sacrament of Confession. (Acistampa, 29 June 2017).

In the meantime, the United Nations has requested Italy to institute an investigating Commission “independent and impartial, to examine all the sexual-abuse cases of children by religious personnel of the Catholic Church”  and are asking  “to make it mandatory for everyone, also for the religious personnel of the Catholic Church, the reporting of any case of presumed violence of minors to the competent authorities of the State.”

The request was made by the UN Committee for the Rights of Children and Adolescents, with their headquarters in Geneva. Lastly, the revision of national Concordats (like the Lateran Treaty with Italy) was requested, in the part where the hierarchy is released from the obligation of denunciation.  In Italy, according to the New Concordat of 1984, “The Italian Republic guarantees that the judiciary authority will give communication to the competent ecclesiastical authorities by  territory of the legal procedures being advanced against churchmen” (Protocollo addizionale n. 2b). This principle would now be overturned, since the UN is asking the Vatican for full cooperation with the civil authorities, who are pursuing abuses in various countries, providing for example, all the information in possession of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.        

The question of mandatory denunciation to the civil authorities, on which Father Lombardi affirmed that  “it is right that it be a theme dealt with at this meeting” (editor’s note – the summit of February 21) opens the door to the request for the violation of the Sacrament of Confession and papal secrecy.

At one time the State was the “secular arm”  of the Church, now the Church would practically become a “secular arm” of the State. But a civil law wanting to impose the violation of the Confessional seal for some crimes, like pedophilia, would be an unjust law, to which priests should oppose with their “non possumus” even unto martyrdom. It is this testimony, and not others, that would render the Church credible, before God, prior to being credible before the world. However, it would be necessary to overturn the relationship the Church has been engaged in with the secularized and anti-Christian world for more than fifty years now.

The Condemnation of Cardinal Pell, the Church and the World - Roberto de Mattei

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The condemnation of Cardinal Pell, arriving like a bolt of lightning in the wake of the Vatican summit, draws attention to a truth that there has been a

 

[Bernard]

Shepherds who deny God sends chastisement are ‘immersed in atheism’

Professor Roberto de Mattei said that top leaders in the Church today who deny the idea of divine punishment is a sure sign that the punishment is already happening.

     

 

Shepherds who deny God sends chastisement are ‘immersed in atheism’: Catholic historian - LifeSite

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Professor Roberto de Mattei said that top leaders in the Church today who deny the idea of divine punishment is a sure sign that the punishment is already happening.

 

[Bernard]

Књига-завет Бенедикта КСВИ. Потврда

                          

 

Папа Бенедикт то овако каже у својој најновијој књизи: «У току развоја филозофске мисли и природних наука, појам супстанције се суштински променио, као и концепција онога што је, у аристотеловској мисли, било означено „случајношћу“. Концепт супстанције, који се раније примењивао на сваку стварност конзистентну по себи, све више се односио на оно што је физички неухватљиво: молекул, атом и елементарне честице, а данас знамо да ни они не представљају крајњу „супстанцу“. “, већ структура односа. Овим се појавио нови задатак за хришћанску философију. Основна категорија целокупне стварности уопште није више супстанција, већ однос. С тим у вези, ми хришћани можемо само рећи да је за нашу веру сам Бог однос,релатио субсистенс“ (стр. 135). Бенедикт је у праву када каже да је „ друштво у којем је Бог одсутан – друштво које га више не познаје и третира га као да не постоји – друштво које губи свој критеријум. (...) Западно друштво је друштво у коме Бог нема у јавној сфери и за које нема више шта да каже » (стр. 154). Али Бог није однос, он је најсавршеније Биће, а самим тим и Врховно Добро и бесконачна Истина. Његово право име је Биће ( Излазак 3, 14). Све долази од Бога и све води назад к Њему. Он, и само Он, Биће по суштини, моћи ће да разреши верску и моралну кризу нашег времена.

 

 

Роберт де Маттеи

 

Il libro-testamento di Benedetto XVI. Una conferma - di Roberto de Mattei | Corrispondenza romana

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(Roberto de Mattei) Un tam-tam mediatico ha accompagnato la pubblicazione di alcuni volumi apparsi dopo la scomparsa di...