Its interesting that Vatican media has ignored Pope Benedict's statement. Its really revolutionary. He has stayed quiet for so many years...anything he releases would be front page news. It just shows the media is controlled world wide. Br. al
They couldn't ignore him when he was the Pope and treated him horribly. Now, his message finds those who are paying attention.
https://www.africanews.com/2019/04/...ill-a-papal-kiss-truly-reconcile-kiir-machar/ South Sudan’s political leaders including the leaders of the two main warring factions, president Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar on Thursday concluded a two-day retreat in the Vatican, that sought to heal bitter divisions that have fuelled conflict since 2013. The world’s youngest nation is due to set up a unity government next month, after the September 2018 peace deal that was negotiated in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. Sudan, which is predominantly Muslim, and South Sudan, predominately Christian, fought each other for decades before the south became independent in 2011. I am asking you with my heart, let us go forward. Resolve your problems. Oil-rich South Sudan plunged into civil war two years later after Kiir, a Dinka, fired Machar, from the Nuer ethnic group, from the vice presidency. Brutal fighting broke out, characterised by extreme sexual violence, the use of child soldiers and attacks on civilians along ethnic faultlines. About 400,000 people died and more than a third of the country’s 12 million people were uprooted, sparking Africa’s worst refugee crisis since the 1994 Rwandan genocide. 2019: Vatican’s Pope Francis serves diplomacy with prayer Three weeks after the leader of the Catholic church met with president Kiir in the Vatican, Pope Francis organised a retreat for South Sudan’s key political leaders. The retreat, which a Vatican statement called “both ecumenical and diplomatic”, included 24 hours of praying and preaching in the Pope’s Vatican guest house. The leaders lived and ate together during the retreat. Kiir and three of his deputies who attended the retreat are all Christians. The pope on Thursday stunned the leaders and the world, when a video emerged of him kneeling down to kiss the shoes of the two main opposing leaders and several other people in the room. Incredible video of Pope Francis on his knees kissing the feet of the leaders of South Sudan, who have completed a 2 day spiritual retreat at the Vatican, where the Pope has called for peace and reconciliation in the country, and that he wishes to visit South Sudan pic.twitter.com/BEBXj2kLPy — Catholic Sat (@CatholicSat) 11 avril 2019 He appealed to President Salva Kiir, his former deputy turned rebel leader Riek Machar, and three other vice presidents to respect an armistice they signed and commit to forming a unity government next month. “I am asking you as a brother to stay in peace. I am asking you with my heart, let us go forward. There will be many problems but they will not overcome us. Resolve your problems,” Francis said in improvised remarks. The retreat was also attended by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, the spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican communion; members of the South Sudan Council of Churches; and other African Catholic and Presbyterian Church leaders.
12 April 2019, The Tablet Cardinal Sarah says world blighted by Europe's sickness by James Roberts | https://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/11591/cardinal-sarah-says-world-blighted-by-europe-s-sickness In an interview, Cardinal Sarah links the crisis in the Church to a crisis of faith Pope Francis with Cardinal Robert Sarah in Rome, September 2018 Photo: Maria Grazia Picciarella/Ropi/Zuma Press/PA Images Cardinal Robert Sarah has given an interview in which he explains what he believes is at the heart of a sickness that is blighting the whole world. It is a sickness, he says, which has spread across continents but has its roots in Europe. He was speaking ahead of the publication in September this year of the English translation of his third book-length interview with Nicolas Diat – “The Day is Far Spent” – to the French Catholic magazine La Nef. He explores the relationship between truth and freedom in contemporary culture, before dwelling on the crisis in the priesthood, and offering a strong defence of priestly celibacy. He comments on the recent book by Frederic Martel, “In the Closet of the Vatican”, which alleges a pervasive gay network in the heart of the Curia. He links the crisis in the Church to a crisis of faith and explains why, as a “son of Africa”, he feels able to warn the West about the “extreme of self-destructive hate” and the “virulent atheism” that is “a poison from which we are all suffering”. He ends by pointing a way forward, calling on Christians to “open oases of freedom in the midst of the desert”. Cardinal Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, says that the spiritual crisis that currently blights “the whole world” has its roots in Europe, because Europe has rejected God: “Western people are convinced that receiving is contrary to the dignity of human persons. But civilised man is fundamentally an heir, he receives a history, a culture, a language, a name, a family. This is what distinguishes him from the barbarian. To refuse to be inscribed within a network of dependence, heritage, and filiation condemns us to go back naked into the jungle of a competitive economy left to its own devices. Because he refuses to acknowledge himself as an heir, man is condemned to the hell of liberal globalisation.” Cardinal Sarah links this idea of the rejection of humanity's inheritance to another that he says is at the root of current malaise: the rejection, in the West, of the idea of fatherhood. The two rejections, he explains, are intimately bound up with our rejection of God. “From Him we receive our nature as man and woman.. This is intolerable to modern minds. Gender ideology is a Luciferian refusal to receive a sexual nature from God. Thus some rebel against God and pointlessly mutilate themselves in order to change their sex. But in reality they do not fundamentally change anything of their structure as man or woman. The West refuses to receive, and will accept only what it constructs for itself.” He continues: “Because it is a gift from God, human nature itself becomes unbearable for western man... This revolt is spiritual at root. It is the revolt of Satan against the gift of grace.” Sarah takes aim at the UN, with reference to the story of the rich young man who could not bring himself to give his wealth to the poor and follow Christ: “The ‘fundamental values’ promoted by the UN are based on a rejection of God that I compare with the rich young man in the Gospel. God has looked upon the West and has loved it because it has done wonderful things. He invited it to go further, but the West turned back. It preferred the kind of riches that it owed only to itself.” Africa and Asia are not yet contaminated by gender ideology or the hatred of fatherhood, he acknowledges, but “the Western powers’ neo-colonialist spirit and will to dominate pressure countries to adopt these deadly ideologies.” The goal of Christian evangelisation, Cardinal Sarah points out, is very different from this “will to dominate”: “The goal of evangelisation is not world domination, but the service of God. Don’t forget that Christ’s victory over the world is…the Cross! It is not our intention to take over the power of the world. Evangelisation is done through the Cross.” On the question of whether Christianity should “permeate” society, Sarah says that, while “a society permeated by the Faith, the Gospel, and natural law is something desirable”, “the more profound goal of the Church is not to construct a particular model society. The Church has received the mandate to proclaim salvation, which is a supernatural reality. A just society disposes souls to receive the gift of God, but it cannot give salvation.” “A society inspired by the Gospel protects the weak against the consequences of sin,” he adds. “Conversely, a society cut off from God quickly turns into a dictatorship and becomes a structure of sin.” Asked whether we have passed “from a society dominated by the quest for truth to a society dominated by the quest for freedom”, the cardinal says this is a false opposition. “It is not correct to speak of a ‘balance’ between two poles: truth and freedom. In fact, this manner of speaking presupposes that these realities are external to and in opposition to one another. Freedom is essentially a tending toward what is good and true. The truth is meant to be known and freely embraced. A freedom that is not itself oriented and guided by truth is nonsensical … to accept the truth is the most beautiful act of freedom that man can perform.” The crisis in the priesthood, Sarah traces back to the taking away of the priest’s identity. continued...
continued from above... “We have made priests believe that they need to be efficient men. But a priest is fundamentally the continuation of Christ’s presence among us. He should not be defined by what he does, but by what he is: 'ipse Christus', Christ Himself. The discovery of many cases of sexual abuse against minors reveals a profound spiritual crisis, a grave, deep, and tragic rupture between the priest and Christ.” “We, the bishops, bear a large share of responsibility for the crisis of the priesthood,” Sarah admits. “Have we been fathers to them? Have we listened to them, understood and guided them? Have we given them an example? Too often dioceses are transformed into administrative structures.” He says: “Celibacy is a concrete means that permits us to live this mystery of the Cross in our lives. Celibacy inscribes the Cross in our very flesh. That is why celibacy is intolerable for the modern world. Celibacy is a scandal for modern people, because the Cross is a scandal.” Asked about the recently published book “In the Closet of the Vatican”, by Frédéric Martel, that says there are a large number of homosexual prelates in the Vatican, and lends credibility to claims of a powerful gay network there, Sarah says: “Today the Church is living with Christ through the outrages of the Passion. The sins of her members come back to her like strikes on the face. “Yes, there are sinners. Yes, there are unfaithful priests, bishops, and even cardinals who fail to observe chastity,” he accepts. “But also, and this is also very grave, they fail to hold fast to doctrinal truth! They disorient the Christian faithful by their confusing and ambiguous language. They adulterate and falsify the Word of God, willing to twist and bend it to gain the world’s approval. They are the Judas Iscariots of our time.” “Sin should not surprise us,” he says, but “we must have the courage to call it by name. We must not be afraid to rediscover the methods of spiritual combat: prayer, penance, and fasting.” “There is no ‘homosexual problem’ in the Church,” he argues. “There is a problem of sins and infidelity. Let us not perpetuate the vocabulary of LGBT ideology. Homosexuality does not define the identity of persons. It describes certain deviant, sinful, and perverse acts. For these acts, as for other sins, the remedies are known. We must return to Christ, and allow him to convert us.” On the crisis in the Church, he says that some want the Church to “speak the language of the media. They want to make it popular. They urge it not to speak about God, but to throw itself body and soul into social problems: migration, ecology, dialogue, the culture of encounter, the struggle against poverty, for justice and peace”. These are “important and vital questions before which the Church cannot shut her eyes” he acknowledges. But “a Church such as this is of interest to no one. The Church is only of interest because she allows us to encounter Jesus.” What the Church needs, he says, is “a profound, radical reform that must begin by a reform of the life of her priests … Their whole being and all their activities must be put to the service of sanctity.” “I am sure that it is the saints who change history. The structures follow afterwards,” he insists. Western civilisation, he says, “is passing at present through a mortal crisis. It has reached the extreme of self-destructive hate”. “As a bishop, it is my duty to warn the West!” he exclaims, before expressing a cri de coeur, from someone who acknowledges his debt to missionaries who came to Africa from the West: “The West is blinded by science, technology, and the thirst for riches. The lure of riches, which liberalism spreads in hearts, has sedated the peoples. At the same time, the silent tragedy of abortion and euthanasia continue and pornography and gender ideology destroy children and adolescents. We are accustomed to barbarism. It doesn’t even surprise us anymore! I want to raise a cry of alarm, which is also a cry of love. I do so with a heart full of filial gratitude for the Western missionaries who died in my land of Africa and who communicated to me the precious gift of faith in Jesus Christ. I want to follow their lead and receive their inheritance!” Pointing to the “threat posed by Islamism”, he says: “Muslims despise the atheistic West. They take refuge in Islamism as a rejection of the consumer society that is offered to them as a religion. Can the West present them the Faith in a clear way? For that it will have to rediscover its Christian roots and identity.” Sarah paints a vivid picture of near-catastrophe, but he still holds out hope, and shows how it is possible to live the Christian life in these circumstances: “I see families, monasteries, and parishes that are like oases in the middle of a desert. It is from these oases of faith, liturgy, beauty, and silence that the West will be reborn,” he assures us. “I call upon Christians to open oases of freedom in the midst the desert created by rampant profiteering. We must create places where the air is breathable, or simply where the Christian life is possible. Our communities must put God in the centre. Amidst the avalanche of lies, we must be able to find places where truth is not only explained but experienced. In a word, we must live the Gospel: not merely thinking about it as a utopia, but living it in a concrete way. The Faith is like a fire, but it has to be burning in order to be transmitted to others. Watch over this sacred fire! Let it be your warmth in the heart of this winter of the West.” There is a light shining in this darkness, Cardinal Sarah says, waiting for us to find Him: “He who said ‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life’ ” (Jn 14:6). Translation from the French of Cardinal Sarah's words by Zachary Thomas
Google translation: "We must thank Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI for having had the great courage to take the floor. His latest analysis of the church crisis seems to me to be of paramount importance. The erasure of God in the West is terrible. The strength of evil is born out of the refusal of God's love. + RS"
Benedict stated: Faith is a journey and a way of life. In the old Church, the catechumenate was created as a habitat against an increasingly demoralized culture, in which the distinctive and fresh aspects of the Christian way of life were practiced and at the same time protected from the common way of life. I think that even today something like catechumenal communities are necessary so that Christian life can assert itself in its own way. And a summary, in part, of Cardinal Sarah: Sarah paints a vivid picture of near-catastrophe, but he still holds out hope, and shows how it is possible to live the Christian life in these circumstances: “I see families, monasteries, and parishes that are like oases in the middle of a desert. It is from these oases of faith, liturgy, beauty, and silence that the West will be reborn,” he assures us. “I call upon Christians to open oases of freedom in the midst the desert created by rampant profiteering. We must create places where the air is breathable, or simply where the Christian life is possible. Our communities must put God in the centre. Amidst the avalanche of lies, we must be able to find places where truth is not only explained but experienced. The similarity of themes of these two princes of the Church saddens me because what they say is true. We cannot expect a revitalization of the Magisterial Church; we cannot expect to be saved from our renegade bishops. We must build Catholic cells and grow from there. It reminds me of the messages of Our Lady of Zaro urging the formation of Catholic cenacles. By the Grace of God, we must build these cenacles, these habitats, these oases in order to survive and then grow. Back in 2012 on this forum, I wrote, in part: Though the exuberance of my youth is now tempered, I've learned the importance of staying connected with other Catholics who love God and pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." It is not the time for Lone Rangers! So I pray that our new member, Freedom, and all of you seek and find companion souls nearby. May you join together in consecrating your hearts and hopefully your homes to the Two Hearts. May you walk together on the path that will soon lead through the valley of the shadow of death. I hate to think I was so prophetic! Is this truly the point at which we are living? Scary! Safe only in the Hearts of Jesus and Mary!
I suspect Terry this step forward will need a big kick start by the Holy Spirit and this is what Our Lady has been promising in her apparitions. We need a kind of huge heavenly revival. A Second Coming of the Holy Spirt onthe Church. I look forward to this and hope to see it before I die at least.... I hunger for it. This huge awakening of the Holy Spirit. Our Dear Church rising from what is almost its death throes. For she is certainly in the course of dying. At least in the West.
Africa is the Great Hope of the Church. The demographic projections for sub-Saharan Africa over the course of the remainder of this century provide food for thought. I recently saw a projection by the Pew Research Centre to the effect that the population of this region would reach four billion by 2099. Over this time scale, as the population of the Islamic World is predicted to reach stasis, it having already passed its peak of growth and with the apparent greater growth of Christianity in this part of Africa, both as Catholicism and orthodox Anglicanism and Methodism, compared to its Islamic rival, we might be about to see a historic realignment. The meek shall inherit the Earth. Unfortunately, Europe may not avoid becoming a 'Eurabian' backwater. That analysis by Cardinal Sarah is brilliant. He is absolutely bang on the money. The people of the West have become too prideful to admit their debt to God, even to the extent of their very being. Some of them now uphold the illogical and utterly absurd notion of self-creation; really, in its dismissal of material reality, another manifestation of Gnosticism. It is an 'Enlightened' version of Gnosticism, conflated as it is with Rousseau's luciferian idea of man's natural goodness and that 'the first movements of nature are always good'. In other words, the recommended action is to do exactly what you feel like. In this vein, I'd recommend anyone to read Steven Kessler's timely article, 'Roots of the Left's Acceptance of Pedophilia' in today's 'American Thinker' as a companion-piece to these thoughts of Cardinal Sarah-they combine to prophecy the final infernal descent of the West.
I'm happy to see good Cardinals and the rise of Christianity and the Church in Africa, but I've not lost all hope for Europe yet. There are prophesies about England, France and Ireland returning to the Faith - after falling very low and some purification, sadly - but still returning. The Faith owes so much to European Christendom in her glory days. Unfortunately, today, it's the same old story of people thinking they don't need God once they have a few material comforts, easily falling into tragic forgetfulness of Him, and living in sin. I see good Cardinals from Europe like Cardinal Ejik who are strong on Faith and morals, from Netherlands. Poland too has good Cardinals, Archbishops and Bishops. In charity, we are obliged to pray for the Universal Church and for all countries. To pray for our own country and continent should be considered a duty we owe in justice. Pope Benedict XVI, from Germany, was also a great Pope, a very holy man, an outstanding theologian faithful and loyal as Cardinal and Pope to the Church. Now, as regards Pope Benedict XVI's analysis of the sodomy and homosexuality problem, I think it is excellent and spot on. Liberals won't like it but it is correct. I dare say the Holy Father is now more sympathetic than ever to Traditional critiques of conciliar attitudes begininng from the 60s, "Indeed, in many parts of the Church, conciliar attitudes were understood to mean having a critical or negative attitude towards the hitherto existing Tradition, which was now to be replaced by a new, radically open relationship with the world. One bishop, who had previously been seminary rector, had arranged for the seminarians to be shown pornographic films, allegedly with the intention of thus making them resistant to behavior contrary to the faith. There were — not only in the United States of America — individual bishops who rejected the Catholic Tradition as a whole and sought to bring about a kind of new, modern "Catholicity" in their dioceses. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that in not a few seminaries, students caught reading my books were considered unsuitable for the priesthood. My books were hidden away, like bad literature, and only read under the desk. The Visitation that now took place brought no new insights, apparently because various powers had joined forces to conceal the true situation. A second Visitation was ordered and brought considerably more insights, but on the whole failed to achieve any outcomes." https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/benedicts-letter-cites-porn-scandal-at-detroit-seminary1 God bless the Holy Father Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. His analysis on sodomites protecting themselves by relaxing the existing legislation and on liberal moral theology promoting these perversities and preventing them from being diagnosed as always and intrinsically evil is spot on. That prevented what had to be done. The way forward for the Church is to return to Her Traditional and just severity in dealing with the unnatural vice and with criminal perversions. St. Basil, St. Peter Damien, Pope St. Pius V and other Popes and Saints have taught us that severe penance, enforced fasting on bread and water, and so on is prescribed for this sin.
BENEDICT AND THE SCANDAL by Charles J. Chaput4 . 11 . 19 Writing nearly half a century ago (1970), the Italian Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce noted that I often find myself envying unbelievers: Does not contemporary history provide abundant evidence that Catholics are a mentally inferior species? Their rush to conform to the opinion about Catholicism held by rationalist secularists is stunning. Those words from his essay “The Ascendance of Eroticism” open Del Noce’s brilliant reflections—part analysis, part prophecy—on Europe’s then-current sexual revolution. At a time when a young priest named Joseph Ratzinger was predicting a smaller, more hard-pressed, but purer Church of the future in his 1969–70 German and Vatican radio interviews, Del Noce was explaining how it would happen. He foresaw that “the decisive battle against Christianity [can] be fought only at the level of the sexual revolution. And therefore the problem of sexuality and eroticism is today the fundamental problem from the moral point of view.” History has proven him right, and for obvious reasons. Sex is both a powerful bond and a fierce corrosive, which is why, historically, nearly all human cultures have surrounded it with taboos that order its harmonious integration into daily life. The naive eagerness—“stupidity” would not be too strong a word for Del Noce's purposes—of many mid-century Church progressives in accepting, or at least accommodating, sexual license as a form of human liberation, spearheaded the intellectual collapse of an entire generation of Catholic moral theology. Since the 1960s, license has morphed into widespread sexual and social dysfunction, conflict, and suffering—also foreseen by Del Noce. Unfortunately, the lessons of the ’60s are steadfastly ignored today by much of the Church’s own intellectual class: Simply put, sex is tied intimately to anthropology, to human self-understanding and the purpose of the body. Thus, for the Church to remain the Church, there can be no concordat with behaviors fundamentally at odds with the Word of God and the Christian understanding of the human person as imago Dei. All such attempts lead inevitably to what Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI, pope emeritus) once called silent apostasy. The current situation with Germany's bishops’ conference comes to mind; but the problem is wider than a single local Church. In his April 10 essay “The Church and the Scandal of Sexual Abuse,” a much older Joseph Ratzinger looks at the abuse phenomenon through the lens of his own life experience, dividing his text into three parts: origins of the crisis, initial Church responses, and what now needs to be done to heal Catholic life. The essay lacks some of the rigor of his earlier formal writings, and it will not satisfy those critics who see John Paul II and Benedict as slow in addressing the scale and gravity of the problem, but his words are nonetheless as clear and penetrating as ever. Like the laypeople they serve and lead, priests are shaped by the culture from which they emerge. They should be held, rightly, to a higher standard because of their calling. But priests and bishops have no miraculous immunity to the abnormality bubbling around them. Ratzinger locates the seed of the current crisis in the deliberate turn toward sexual anarchy that marked much of Europe in the 1960s, and the complete failure of Catholic moral theologians to counter it—a failure that more often resembled fellow-traveling. He also notes, as did Del Noce, the dirty little secret of the sexual revolution: Relaxing sexual norms does not reduce an appetite for violence, including sexual violence. It does exactly the opposite. Ratzinger acknowledges that “In various seminaries homosexual cliques were established which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the climate in the seminaries.” He also notes a problem that infected leadership: “Above all, a criterion for the appointment of new bishops [became] now their ‘conciliarity,’ which of course could be understood to mean rather different things.” Ratzinger seeks to explain the initially slow and inadequate Church response to the abuse problem. He correctly saw the abuse issue as a crisis impacting the integrity of the faith and not merely as a legal matter grounded in the rights of accused clergy. Thus he successfully forced the transfer of abuse cases from Congregation of the Clergy jurisdiction to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith where dealing with cases could be expedited. But even there, the scope of the problem proved larger than anyone anticipated. He remains silent on what many see as the continuing resistance of Rome to candidly name the core issue of the clergy abuse problem, which is not primarily a matter of clerical privilege but rather a pattern of predatory homosexuality. Throughout his brief text, Ratzinger has moments of insight and genius that fall like rain in a desert, especially today. As in: “There are values which must never be abandoned for a greater value and even surpass the preservation of physical life. There is martyrdom. God is [about] more than physical survival. A life that would be bought by the denial of God, a life that is based on a final lie, is a non-life.” And: “A world without God can only be a world without meaning.” And: “A paramount task, which must result from the upheavals of our time, is that we ourselves once again begin to live by God and unto him.” The words of the pope emeritus are especially piercing when he speaks of the many contemporary Catholics who treat the Eucharist—the Real Presence of God in our midst; the source and summit of Christian life—as “a mere ceremonial gesture . . . that destroys the greatness of the Mystery.” Or when he notes that the Church today “is widely regarded as just some kind of political apparatus,” and even many bishops “formulate their conception of the Church of tomorrow almost exclusively in political terms.” And finally this: Today the accusation against God is, above all, about characterizing his Church as entirely bad, and thus dissuading us from it. The idea of a better Church, created by ourselves, is in fact a proposal of the devil, with which he wants to lead us away from the living God through a deceitful logic by which we are too easily duped. No, even today, the Church is not just made up of bad fish and weeds. The Church of God also exists today, and today it is the very instrument through which God saves us . . .Today’s Church is more than ever a Church of the Martyrs, and thus a witness to the living God. If we look around and listen with an attentive heart, we can find witnesses everywhere today, especially among ordinary people, but also in the high ranks of the Church, who stand up for God with their life and suffering. It is an inertia of the heart that leads us to not wish to recognize them. One of the great and essential tasks of our evangelization is, as far as we can, to establish habitats of faith and, above all, to find and recognize them. Amen. Not much more need be said. Toward the end of his own 1970 essay, Augusto Del Noce noted that “an enormous cultural revision will be necessary in order to really leave behind the philosophical processes that have found expression in today's sexual revolution.” The bad news is that too many of today’s Catholics seem to lack the will and ability to pursue that task. The good news is that some of our leaders still have the courage to speak the truth. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/04/benedict-and-the-scandal
Benedict XVI: Casual attitude to reception of Holy Communion central to moral crisis in Church Diane Montagna | https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/benedict-eucharist pope benedict abuse crisis letter ROME, April 12, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — A casual attitude towards the Holy Eucharist is at the heart of the moral crisis in the Church, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has said. The pope emeritus this week argued that at the center of the moral crisis that has engulfed the Church is an increasingly casual attitude towards reception of Holy Communion, as though it were a mere ritual flourish at the end of Mass rather than an entering into the presence of the infinitely Holy. In an essay for a Bavarian magazine aimed principally at clergy, in which he reflects on the origins of the abuse crisis, Benedict has identified as one of the essential contributing factors to the moral crisis in the Church the loss of faith in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. He also identifies an abandonment of the teaching in institutions that there are some acts which are always and everywhere immoral, as preparing the ground for the abuse crisis. He says that there are values which “must never be abandoned for a greater value and even surpass the preservation of physical life,” and which for a Christian may require “martyrdom” which he calls “a basic category of Christian existence.” This contrasts strikingly with German Cardinal Walter Kasper’s claim that “heroic virtue is not for the ordinary Christian.” Destroying mystery The Catholic Church believes and professes that “the Body and Blood, together with the Soul and Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and therefore the whole Christ, is truly, really and substantially contained in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist” (Council of Trent). Benedict notes in his essay that, since the time of the Second Vatican Council, “our handling of the Eucharist can only arouse concern.” In an apparent reference to the Vatican II Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium (chapter 2), the pope emeritus says: “The Second Vatican Council was rightly focused on returning this sacrament of the Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ, of the Presence of His Person, of His Passion, Death and Resurrection, to the center of Christian life and the very existence of the Church.” “In part,” he said, “this really has come about, and we should be most grateful to the Lord for it.” But, he adds, “what predominates is not a new reverence for the presence of Christ’s death and resurrection, but a way of dealing with Him that destroys the greatness of the Mystery.” “The declining participation in the Sunday Eucharistic celebration shows how little we Christians of today still know about appreciating the greatness of the gift that consists in His Real Presence,” he said. “The Eucharist is devalued into a mere ceremonial gesture when it is taken for granted that courtesy requires Him to be offered at family celebrations or on occasions such as weddings and funerals to all those invited for family reasons.” “The way people simply receive the Blessed Sacrament in many places, as if it were a matter of course, shows that many no longer see anything more in Communion than a purely ceremonial gesture.” “We do not need another Church of our own design,” he writes. “Rather, what is required first and foremost is the renewal of the faith in the reality of Jesus Christ given to us in the Blessed Sacrament.” And while there is not the least hint of criticism in Benedict’s words, one cannot help but notice the contrast with a pontificate which has defined itself by breaking down the moral and doctrinal barriers to the reception of Holy Communion by those who either do not share the Catholic faith or do not seek to conform themselves to Catholic moral teaching in their lives. In 2015, during a visit to a Lutheran community in Rome, Pope Francis told a Lutheran woman that she and her Roman Catholic husband could “talk to the Lord and go forward” in deciding whether to receive the Holy Eucharist. Then, in 2018, less than one month after Archbishop Luis Ladaria, S.J., prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, sent a letter to the German bishops with Pope Francis’ approval, rejecting their pastoral guidelines to allow Protestants in mixed marriages with Catholics to receive the Holy Eucharist in some cases, without needing to convert to Catholicism, Pope Francis told reporters during an inflight press conference that it is up to local bishops to determine whether a Protestant spouse may receive the Eucharist. Also in 2018, Pope Francis departed from a tradition restored by Pope John Paul II and moved the celebration of Corpus Christi — with its candlelit Eucharistic procession — from the heart of Rome. Francis also departed from his predecessors in not accompanying Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament during the candlelit procession through the streets of Rome. In 2017, Pope Francis reportedly sent a letter to the bishops of Malta thanking them for the guidelines on applying the controversial Chapter 8 of his summary document on the Synod on the Family, Amoris Laetitia. In the guidelines, the Maltese bishops invited divorced Catholics living in a second union to come forward for Holy Communion after a period of discernment, with an informed and enlightened conscience, and if they are “at peace with God.” Reverence During an April 11, 2019 episode of The World Over, canon lawyer and priest of the Archdiocese of New York, Fr. Gerald Murray, responded to Benedict XVI’s essay and underlined that, in the Eucharist, Christ gives himself to the Church in sacramental form. This, he said, is why Benedict is so concerned that if we treat the sacrament casually, without due reverence and an “adoring spirit, then reverence for God and His creatures “goes out the door.“ Fr. Murray continued: “What then do we have? We have all the evils of relativism, immorality,” which means that “young people and others get victimized by powerful people who dismiss that morality.” “How do we reform the Church?,” Fr. Murray asked. “The renewal of theology, particularly moral theology, based on metaphysical thinking which identifies that reality is a category not subject to our manipulation.” “We can manipulate our response to reality,” he said, but “that’s where you get into the make-believe world.” “What’s the difference between genuflecting in Church and walking into Disney World?” Fr. Murray asked. “Disney World is all made up. Jesus is really in the Tabernacle.” “People have awe when they see the great castle at Disney World,” he said. “I thought that was fun when I was a kid, but then I learned something more important. God is physically in the Tabernacle in my Church. My duty in life is to live in a way that I’m worthy to receive him so that I’ll see him when I go to my grave.” “That’s a beautiful message,” Fr. Murray said. Catholic author Robert Royal noted that the pope emeritus honed in on “the way we treat the Eucharist on special occasions, weddings, and funerals.” “It is just assumed that all family members or friends who show up — whether they’re even Catholic or whether they are Catholics in good standing, or whether they are Protestants or whatever — are entitled somehow to receive the Eucharist,” Royal said. He also noted that when someone is been denied the Eucharist on such occasions, the Church is often portrayed as “unmerciful.” But he argued that this is “sentimentality.” “It’s often said that sentimentality is the death of truth,” he said. “It’s not surprising that there’s a sentimentality about the Eucharist that spreads, that the very reverence and the fear of God and the fear of how we act toward Him and toward one another begins to disappear.” Personal love for Jesus Over the years, Joseph Ratzinger (and then Benedict XVI) has been consistent in identifying the root causes of the moral crisis in the Church, as well as the remedies. In a 2003 televised interview with Raymond Arroyo, he identified a collapse in faith and the Church’s moral teaching as being at the heart of the crisis. He said: “Only if I am really in a personal confidence with the Lord, if the Lord for me is not an idea but the person of my deepest friendship… If I am really convinced and in personal contact of love with the Lord, the Lord will help me in these temptations.” In his essay this week, Benedict repeatedly refers to the Holy Eucharist as “Him” – not “it” — to highlight that the Eucharist is a Person, not a thing. “We must do all we can,” he writes, “to protect the gift of the Holy Eucharist from abuse.”
Why did Pope Benedict speak of the 60’s? Why now? Today the world is asleep, numb to the culture of immorality. Does Pope Benedict know this era is ending? Is he preparing us for worse times ahead, before the Warning?
The aforementioned E. Michael Jones has a theory that the modern sexual revolution got its initial impetus from the WASP sector in the US, who held the reins of power up to and including the middle decades of the twentieth century, but realised their numbers were declining and feared being eclipsed by the rapidly-rising Catholics. The sexual revolution was their solution-the intention was to corrupt the sexual mores of the Catholics, knowing that such behaviour, as had happened them when Protestants approved contraception in 1930, would inevitably cause demographic collapse. And so it did. Ironically, like an incompetent bomber blown up by his own bomb, the sexual revolution which they wrought further corrupted their own community to an even greater extent than to the Catholics, as has also happened to their allies, the liberal Jewry. Jones also wisely highlights that this policy of sexual corruption as a remedy for demographic eclipse has also been adopted in the deployment of Western 'foreign aid', with the intention that by making contraception and abortion a necessary condition of receiving such aid, the Third World population explosion would be controlled. Again with much irony, the results have backfired: while many, perhaps most, in the Third World have spurned this genocidal imperialism and their numbers have continued to rise, it is the West itself that has been most influenced by its own life-rejecting policies and which, overwhelmed by contraception, abortion, careerism, imposed immaturity, educational inflation and expense, euthanasia even of children, homosexuality and transgenderism and soon to be embraced pedophilia, faces extinction. The inefficiency, incompetence and even financial corruption of the undeveloped countries has perhaps been a blessing in disguise for them, with many of the provided contraceptives simply horded uselessly in warehouses, for example. Likewise, countries without welfare systems mean couples will continue to have more children in order to ensure their own care in old age. As Jones astutely comments, 'the meek shall inherit the Earth', or as Mark Steyn asserts, 'the future will belong to those who are there'. God didn't provide us with a strict set of sexual rules because He is a killjoy. The breaking of His wise commandments leads to death and misery on a civilisation-threatening scale. The mathematics, which are irrefutible, indicate that the consequences quickly become irreversible, yet our progressive elites suicidally press the pedal to the metal with ever-increasing determination.
On the question of whether Christianity should “permeate” society, Sarah says that, while “a society permeated by the Faith, the Gospel, and natural law is something desirable”, “the more profound goal of the Church is not to construct a particular model society. The Church has received the mandate to proclaim salvation, which is a supernatural reality. A just society disposes souls to receive the gift of God, but it cannot give salvation.”
Personally, I find it a bit interesting that the 3rd secret of Fatima was supposed to be released to the world in 1960 given Pope Benedict's statement about the sixties in his recent essay. Further Reflections On BXVI’s Essay By Rod Dreher • April 13, 2019, 12:25 PM There has been a lot of poking fun at Benedict XVI for “blaming the Sixties” for the sex abuse crisis. But at least one progressive Catholic — Pope Francis’s biographer — says that BXVI has a point: ... Please continue reading here, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/further-reflections-on-benedict-xvi-essay/ *** Edited to add:
Advice for our leaders in the Vatican from St. John Chrysostom: "It is simply impossible to lead, without the aid of prayer, a virtuous life." Safe in the Barque of Peter!
Christians 'under siege', says Sydney archbishop following Notre-Dame Cathedral fire Sydney's Catholic leader believes Christians around the world are "under siege" and hopes the fire at Paris' Notre-Dame Cathedral was not a deliberate attack. Investigators believe the blaze, which ... The Sydney Morning Herald 4d Fri Apr 19, 2019 - 10:14 am EST Italian Bishop doubles down on ban of traditional Latin Mass By Diane Montagna *** Pope Francis laments Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka April 21, 2019 Pope Francis laments the Easter Sunday attacks on several churches and hotels in Sri Lanka, which killed at least 207 people and wounded more than 450 others. By Devin Watkins “I wish to express my heartfelt closeness to the Christian community [of Sri Lanka], wounded as it was gathered in prayer, and to all the victims of such cruel violence.” Pope Francis spoke those words of solidarity at the conclusion of his Easter Urbi et Orbi address to the faithful in St. Peter’s Square. The Holy Father said the multiple attacks on churches and hotels around Sri Lanka “have wrought grief and sorrow”. [Please continue reading at the link above.]
