I, too, wondered about the tone of John Allen's piece. Untypical of him. I think it was Robert Royal of Papal Posse fame who likened the Vatican to a Royal Court of bygone years. Although elected rather than being born into the role, Popes are like kings in that they rely on trusted advisers/ambassadors/friends in strategic positions. Some popes discover very late in the day that their trusted friends/advisers weren't trustworthy at all. I think that Pope Paul V1 is a prime example of one who was betrayed by his friends. What the shenanigans leading up to and surrounding this papacy has taught me is that, more often than not, the selection of a successor of St. Peter comes with the permissive will of God rather than His active will. I read somewhere that an aspect of Papal Infallibility can be described as a negative gift which defines what the Pope cannot do as opposed to what he can do. The God of Surprises could have some more twists and turns in store for us. Hold onto your hat, Rosary at the ready.
I posted a link to this article above but I have decided to post the whole article because I think it is very, very good. Once again, I am reminded of Sister Lucy stating that the last battle with the devil will be centered on marriage and the family and I am also reminded of the prophecy from Garabandal related to communism. Aug. 30, 2019 John Paul II Institute Is Being Destroyed, Says Friend of Late Pope Professor Stanislaw Grygiel warns that the institute is forsaking moral theology and John Paul II’s anthropology for ‘opinion polls’ and ‘sociological and psychological meanderings.’ Edward Pentin | http://www.ncregister.com/blog/edwa...e-is-being-destroyed-says-friend-of-late-pope A close friend of the late Pope St. John Paul II has firmly criticized recent changes at the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences, saying they are not about renewal, expansion or even change but rather about its dissolution and destruction. Professor Stanislaw Grygiel, who was dismissed last month as a lecturer at the institute along with eight other academics, said he was “surprised by such words as the ‘renewal, expansion and deepening’ of this Institute, which are uttered by those who are destroying it together with its foundation. “Destruction doesn’t equate with renewal,” he said. The Polish-born philosophy professor was speaking to Polish journal Teologia Polityczna Aug. 18 in light of new statutes published at the end of July which followed Pope Francis’ “refounding” of the institute in 2017 with his motu proprio Summa Familiae Cura. The new statutes led to the suspension of five master’s degree programs and the dismissal of Grygiel and others’ teaching positions. In particular, two leading professors were removed from tenured positions: Msgr. Livio Melina, a former president of the institute, whose chair of fundamental moral theology was abolished, and Father José Noriega, a moral theologian who was removed on grounds that being a superior general of a religious congregation was incompatible with being a tenured professor in the new institute. None of those let go from their teaching positions were notified in advance of the decision, nor were they given recourse to challenge it, leading to a number of protests, including by its own students and alumni. In his interview, Grygiel said he believes the graduate school is forsaking moral theology and John Paul II’s anthropology for “opinion polls” and “sociological and psychological meanderings.” The academic body, founded by John Paul in 1981 as the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, has been “attacked by theologians and ministers who lacked hope and faith,” he said, adding that they have “substituted the vertical dimension of metaphysics” with the “horizontal plane of sociology, psychology and similar sciences.” Predictable Development But he believes such a development was predictable after the “doctrinal maneuvers” of the 2014 and 2015 synods on the family which “left no doubt that the postmodern tendencies of people’s behavior and thinking beyond good and evil invaded the Church through theologians and pastors, who for reasons known only to them, started twisting the Word of God to fit those tendencies.” Grygiel said he was “convinced” that recent events at the institute are “linked to the changes that might be introduced by the approaching Pan-Amazon Synod.” The synod is meant to be a “pastoral reflection, open to recognizing diversity” in the region, but a working document for the Oct. 6-27 meeting has been widely criticized, with Cardinal Walter Brandmüller describing it as “heretical” and an “attack on the foundations of the faith.” Grygiel noted that some academics removed from the institute had read Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on the family synods, in the light of the Church’s faith and Tradition, but that “according to the imperious voice of today’s followers of situational ethics and pseudo-Ignatian discernment,” others had read it as if “Christ didn’t know what was hidden in every man.” For them, therefore, “Christ wasn’t God.” Using “ambiguous words and oblique statements” during the family synods, they “cleverly created chaos and confusion in the minds and hearts of many people,” Grygiel said. He stressed that what people need today is “painstaking work in which truth liberates the person,” and bishops “courageously professing their faith in Christ and saying a strong ‘No’ to the devil.” As an example, he commended a Polish bishop, Archbishop Marek Jędraszewski, who recently publicly opposed the LGBT symbol and ideology, calling it a “rainbow plague.” The rainbow of the covenant of God has “seven sacramental colors” and are the “life of the Church,” Grygiel said, whereas the “false rainbow brings chaos into human love,” and in such chaos, man becomes “brutalized and enslaved.” He reiterated the importance that bishops and priests’ yes mean yes and their no, no, and that they not “beat about the bush and seek their own private success.” “Maybe it’s comfortable to be in with the Devil but it’s never honorable,” he said, adding that John Paul II “didn’t kneel in front of the Evil One” but rather stressed that freedom meant the liberty to do what one should. “Freedom comes from the Truth not from lawlessness,” Grygiel said. “It has nothing to do with a lack of rules.” Marxist Principle Christ is present in faith, hope and love, he continued, not in “opinions about him, especially those which are created by some theologians and ministers according to the Marxist principle: Praxis determines truth (in this case, the so-called pastoral praxis).” Asking if the family will break down in the face of these attacks, Grygiel said he was “sure it will not” because the “Truth, which a human person is entrusted to, and so marriage and the family as well, will not break down.” God, he said, “cannot be broken by any opinion about him” and the “Truth defends us.” Grygiel said many factors are weakening the Church, but one main one is “this lack of vigilance” which “is a lack of prayer and also a lack of culture” — a means to cultivate humanity through the “liberating and healing truth without which no man can understand himself.” The new name of the institute, he said, shows a new thinking about marriage and the family “which means a different perception of love and freedom.” Instead, he believes they place pragmatism over proclamation of the Gospel (kerygma) due to corruption by “weakness of the flesh,” leading them to believe only in “the power of politics and possession.” It is not therefore surprising, Grygiel believes, that in their “pragmatic mercy” they obscure the “mercy that is the redeeming Word of the Living God.” This is why secular universities “lose their way toward the truth” and “sink into mindlessness,” he said, and he asked if the Church wants its universities to suffer the same fate. Grygiel said he rejects the “horizontal idea of the brave new Church” which he said is a Marxist principle: that “praxis decides what is true at any cost, leading to what is not true.” “The Church is not about politics but about salvation in Christ — in the Word of the Living God,” he stressed, adding that in the Church “there is no place to preach empty words and for mindlessness.” “Christ always speaks the same Word, because He speaks Himself, the Son of the Living God,” Grygiel explained. “Nobody and nothing can drown It out, because nobody and nothing can drown out the Word, which is the center of the universe and of history.” The full English text of Prof. Grygiel's interview can be read here, on the PCh25.pl website.
We can see in real time what was spoken of at Garabandal, and we can see the truth of Sr. Lucy’s words.
https://twitter.com/edwardpentin Pope Francis freed after getting stuck in a lift The Pope asked those gathered for his weekly address to thank the Holy See firefighters who had rescued him from the lift. By David Chipakupaku, news reporter Sunday 1 September 2019 15:38, UK | https://news.sky.com/story/pope-francis-freed-after-getting-stuck-in-a-lift-11799661 The Pope has apologised to the audience at his weekly Sunday address for being late after getting stuck in a Vatican lift. The pontiff had to be rescued by Vatican City firefighters after a "drop in voltage" caused the lift he was in to block. He was trapped in the lift for 25 minutes. The Pope, who turns 83 in December, ended up being seven minutes late to his noon address. "I have to apologise for being late," he said to those gathered in St Peter's Square at the start of the Angelus address. He then asked the crowd to applaud the firefighters: "I thank them so much, and after 25 minutes of work they managed to get it started again." In his address, the Pope announced the names of 10 new Roman Catholic cardinals who will begin work from October.
It gets worse, Carol. If what they're doing to the John Paul 11 Institute isn't enough to keep you awake at night, this from Lifesite News should give you nightmares: https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/...ident-priest-who-helped-engineer-amazon-synod I wonder whether any believing, practising Catholics had an input to Laudate Si. Now, have a read of this: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/t...tion-collapse-is-biggest-problem-facing-world Does it remind you of Fulton Sheen's warning back in the 1970's that the Church is in its fourth great crisis - Bishop Sheen said that, just as we in the Church drop something, the world begins to pick it up? We now have a Pope praising a notorious abortionist and the Vatican giving a platform to population controllers. And the world is realising that killing off future generations isn't such a clever tactic after all. If you haven't time to listen to all of it, the last five minutes of Bishop Sheen's talk (from about the 33.30 mark) is surely relevant to our time. The talk concludes with a reminder that we've already won and that the news just hasn't leaked out yet. It's beginning to look like the news hasn't reached our hierarchy.
I see Pope Francis has just named Archbishop Zuppa of Bologna a Cardinal. Zuppa is crazily Oro homosexualist. The Holy Father keeps naming these awful people Cardinals and to ruling positions Listen to what he does, not what he says. Have you seen pictures of Cardinal Zuppa. Just to look in his face fills me with dread as with Parolin, Cupich, Tobin et Al. To me they have the faces of demon.s
A little background on another soon to be cardinal. https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/p...-priest-to-guide-lent-retreat-who-holds-jesus Pope Francis chooses priest to guide Lent retreat who holds Jesus didn’t ‘establish rules’ ROME, February 5, 2018 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Pope Francis has selected a Portuguese “priest-poet” to preach at his 2018 Lenten retreat who is an open promoter of the “critical theology” of a Spanish nun who defends the legalization of abortion and government recognition of homosexual “marriage” and adoptions. Father José Tolentino Calaça de Mendonça, vice rector of the Catholic University of Lisbon, wrote the introduction to the Portuguese translation of “Feminist Theology in History,” by Teresa Forcades, whom the BBC calls “Europe’s most radical nun.” In the introduction to Forcades’ work, Tolentino de Mendonça tells the reader that Jesus didn’t leave any rules or laws to mankind, an idea that he approvingly applies to Forcades’ “critical theology.” “Teresa Forcades i Vila reminds of that which is essential: that Jesus of Nazareth did not codify, nor did he establish rules,” writes Tolentino de Mendonça. “Jesus lived. That is, he constructed an ethos of relation, somatized the poetry of his message in the visibility of his flesh, expressed his own body as a premise.” When the Portuguese translation of the book was published in 2013 with Tolentino de Mendonça’s introduction, Forcades had well-established herself as an advocate for legalized abortion and the creation of homosexual “marriage.” In the same year she issued a video tribute to the Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who was then dying of cancer. Tolentino de Mendonça compares Forcades to Hildegard of Bingham, and says her theology is expressed in “a form that is symbolic, open, and sensitive about addressing the real” as opposed to the Church’s traditional way of speaking in clear, non-metaphorical terms, which he calls “the triumphal univocal grammars that we know.” “It’s necessary that the doctrinal narrative understands itself to be more of a reading than a writing, more like a voyage than a place, because the memory that transports is not reducible to a legal code, a vision, something automatic,” the priest writes. Such theology is given to us by Forcades, says Tolentino de Mendonça: “It is precisely here that the frightening [provoking] work of Teresa Forcades i Vila, Feminist Theology in History, which the reader has in his hands, comes to our aid.” In a 2016 interview with the Lisbon radio station Renascença, Tolentino de Mendonça blasted Catholics and particularly cardinals who have raised their voices in criticism of Pope Francis, dismissing their views as “traditionalism,” which he contrasted with authentic “tradition.” “Today, we see Pope Francis being contradicted by a more conservative wing of the Church and by some important names, even cardinals, which in a certain way are willing to place traditionalism above the tradition,” he said. Regarding Pope Francis “welcoming” attitude towards those who are stubbornly living in gravely sinful situations of homosexuality and adultery, Tolentino de Mendonça told the interviewer, “No one can be excluded from the love and mercy of Christ. And that experience of mercy has to be taken to everyone, whether they be Christians who are remarried, wounded by disastrous matrimonial experiences, whether it be the reality of new families, whether it be homosexual persons, who in the Church must find a space to be heard, a place of welcome and mercy.” Tolentino de Mendonca will preach and give spiritual guidance to Pope Francis and high curial officials during their retreat from February 18 to February 23 of this year.
And the irony of it is even many leading world personalities are no longer defending this view. It´s like "global warming" - the Vatican and the current pope still use those terms when even the globalists have switched to the more palatable "climate change".
This Boff was silenced by Pope Benedict for his radical Marxist views disguised as Christianity. He is a radical Marxist who is/was a close friend of the worst Marxist leaders of Latin America: the Castro brothers, Brazil´s now emprisoned corrupt Marxist leader Lula da Silva, Venezuela´s Hugo Chavez and Maduro... the list goes on.
Maduro is not very bright. The likes of Boff wouldn't find it hard to influence him. Let's hope the Pope is brighter than Maduro although I have serious doubts that he is. Come to think of it, Boff isn't that bright either if he thinks that promoting an anti-Christian agenda in this life won't have repercussions for him in the next life. That's if he believes in an afterlife. Lord have mercy on them and us.
All this reminds me of those old silent black and white movies were the bad guys wore black hats and the good guys white . I have to say looking at the faces of these dreadful people that they look pure evil. A priest, Bishop or Cardinal cannot live a depraved life, including blasphemous masses without it altering their outwards appearances. To me these monsters l9k like demons walking. We are in a right fix when people like this are giving us Spiritual Advice and telling us how to live our lives Evil with a gentle smile. Wickedness with a Crozier. Hell on Earth
Ah, for the good ole days of "raw", unsophisticated Marxism! They would shout from the rooftops that they would be okay with killing 2/3 of mankind, if the remaining 1/3 became communists; they would say religion is the opiate of the masses; they would openly express their views that churches should be destroyed and that man would never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest! But that didn´t seem to work, right Mr Boff? To infiltrate and destroy from within is what gets the job done - at least this seems to be working... But as Dolours rightly points out at the end of the day there will be a reckoning. We as individuals and societies in general will have to account for our deeds and words. What a terrible thing it must be to betray Our Lord Jesus Christ!
I'm pretty sure that I recall reading about an interview given by Boff a few years ago when he claimed that, despite being laicised and married, he would say Mass in parishes where there was a priest shortage and that the Bishop was aware of it and had no objection. At that time he was adamant that Pope Francis would remove the celibacy rule and the expectation was that he and other laicised priests like him would be brought back into the active priesthood. Looks like Boff and the Pope's atheist friend Scalfari could qualify as modern day prophets.
Don't despair Padraig. Put your trust in Jesus. Here's what Jesus told the monk who wrote In Sinu Jesu: "Great graces are in store for you, but to receive them you must be very little, like children who have a limitless confidence in the love of their papa. When you seek to reason out everything, to know everything ahead of time, to control everything by human means, you keep Me from acting as the God of love that I am. I ask neither for ability nor for great preparations on your part; I ask only for confidence, your confidence in Me, in the love of My open Heart for each one of you". "When nothing is clear, when nothing is foreseeable, it is the moment to make many acts of confidence. You will repeat them as often as necessary and, in them, you will find peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." There is to be what the monk calls a "sacerdotal Pentecost", and he said that it was given to him to understand that the intercession of Pope John Paul 11 will also have played a role in obtaining through Mary this grace of the sacerdotal Pentecost. Priests will be given charisms to vanguish evil and heal those under the sway of the Evil One. They will be priests who spend time in Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and pray the Rosary. And it looks like it will happen during the monk's lifetime.
Boff is of an age where he should be saying his prayers getting ready for the next life. But as a marxist he is deluded by the frivolities of this life & so easily distracted the tinsel and baubles of rank materialism.
