SPECIAL 2016 EDITION

Neil McCaffrey 

is Against Papolatry 

SPECIAL 2016 EDITION 

Martin Mosebachexplores 

The Mass and the Meaning of Tradition 

Maureen Mullarkey 

Dislikes Laudato Si’ 

Raymond Arroyo’sEWTN 

Q & A with Patrick J. Buchanan 

Jack Tollers from Argentina 

on the Bergoglio Tragedy 

Joseph Sobranhas 

Zero Praise for Sodomy 

The Electric Interviews Cardinal 

Raymond Burke & Bishop 

Athanasius Schneider 

Unsermon-like Sermons by 

Rev. Richard Cipolla 

Paul VI &Archbishop 

Lefebvre At Last, An 

Honest Appraisal 

The Abbot Who Switched Masses 

Michael Davies 

Rehabilitates Savonarola 

George Neumayr 

The Pope They’ve Been Waiting For 

Roger A. McCaffrey 

on Power Politics, Synods, & Conclaves 

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© 2016, Catholic Media Apostolate. ISSN 2152-8748

table of contents 

3 Against Papolatry 

by Neil McCaffrey 

Criticizing a pope is sometimes a duty. 

Case in point, from the 1970s. 

5 Questions for the 

Boots Brigade 

by Victor Gold 

Airhead warhawks want to send other 

people’s kids to the Middle East (again). 

7 Climate Claptrap 

by Maureen Mullarkey 

Laudato Si’ makes the Church an instrument 

of leftist, pagan and anti-life propaganda. 

11 Buchanan on Politics 

and the Issues 

EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo interviewed 

the Catholic political commentator 

and ex-presidential candidate. Here 

is the text of the exchange. 

18 Who Is Pope Francis? 

by Jack Tollers 

The humble façade conceals a very different 

man inside, says this fellow-Argentinian 

who has observed him for years. 

SPECIAL THANKS 

TO RORATE CAELI 

rorate-caeli.blogspot.com graciously 

gave us permission to run 

its articles in this special print 

edition of The Traditionalist. This 

invaluable website has become the 

go-to Web place for timely analysis 

and significant news for all 

Catholics concerned about where 

the Church is headed. Checking 

Rorate daily is the single best way 

to keep up with the real news of 

importance not only for “traditionalists,” 

but for the rest of the 

thinking Catholic world. 

21 Sodomy and the 

Constitution 

by Joseph Sobran 

The judicial usurpations that made this 

year’s same-sex “marriage” ruling possible. 

24 A Back Door to 

Communion for the 

Divorced and “Remarried” 

by Bishop Athanasius Schneider 

Make no mistake, he says: Final Report 

of the Synod on the Family is a disaster. 

31 In Defense of Tradition 

Cardinal Raymond Burke speaks out 

on a host of controversial Church 

topics. No papal pats on the back are 

likely to follow for His Eminence. 

37 The Silent Action 

of the Heart 

by Cardinal Robert Sarah 

Present thinking about the Mass, 

and Vatican II’s role. 

40 Archbishop Lefebvre, 

Pope Paul VI, and 

Catholic Tradition 

by Neil McCaffrey 

Not every papal or conciliar utterance 

is infallible, or even wise. The 

Lefebvre case presents a textbook 

illustration of that truism. 

43 Remembering the Ember 

Days: A Casualty of “Reform” 

by Fr. Richard G. Cipolla 

Their disappearance is one of the 

tragedies of the post-Conciliar era. 

46 The Celebration of the 

Traditional Roman Mass 

Is a Prophetic Statement 

by Fr. Richard G. Cipolla 

And a prophet is never welcome 

in his own house. 

Cover Photo: L'Osservatore Romano 

1 

49 The Glory of the Low Mass 

by J.K. Huysmans 

It evokes the early Christians 

in the catacombs. 

51 Switching to the 

Traditional Mass 

Young abbot explains how the Rule 

of St. Benedict and the traditional 

Latin liturgy are symbiotic. 

54 Girolamo Savonarola 

by Michael Davies 

Time for a reconsideration? 

63 The Pope in the United 

States: An Evaluation 

by Augustinus 

Anonymous American priest thinks 

the pope’s trip was a monumental 

failure to defend Church teaching 

where it is under the greatest threat. 

65 The “Spirit of Satan” at 

the Synod on the Family 

Interview with Bishop Athanasius Schneider. 

74 The Truth About 

Pope Francis 

by George Neumayr 

Why he so appeals to the hard Left. Three 

searing critiques by the outspoken former 

editor of Catholic World Report. 

78 The Liturgy As a Window 

To Another World 

by Martin Mosebach 

The traditional liturgy cannot go out of 

date because it does not belong to time. 

86 Political Theater 

by Roger A. McCaffrey 

An inside look at Machiavellian 

maneuvers in the Vatican and how 

the Synod fits into the power-plays. 

92 Burning What They Adored 

by Father X

Publisher’s Page 

A Strange One 

A 

priest from a religious 

order known for its corruption 

was made ordinary 

of a major diocese 

and proceeded to say, 

and do, so much to shock and scandalize 

my family that I asked my wife if 

we should look for another place to go. 

For example: He had himself photographed 

with a transvestite couple. 

In fact, he invited them to his place. 

No bishop, no matter how vulgar 

and callous, in my 40+ years of observing 

them, has done anything like this, 

I told my wife. “Should we even show 

the kids?” 

But he was not done yet. The prelate 

soon called in cameras to film an 

encounter with two men—one an old 

friend of his—who called themselves 

married to each other. 

“Who am I to judge?” he said, 

when asked about the morality of 

homosexuality. 

“Should we discuss this with the 

kids?” I asked my wife. 

On many occasions our new prelate 

attacked in the bitterest terms priests 

who stress “doctrine” and “teachings” 

and contrasted them to others more 

caring (who, he implied, paid no attention 

to formalities and “definitions” 

and were, consequently, much more 

like Christ). “He has us in mind too,” 

my wife and I agreed. We only help 

poor mothers of unborn babies come to 

2 ■ the traditionalist 

term, maybe give a few hundred bucks 

to the Salvation Army and to church 

food banks.. 

Lots of folks in the media loved the 

prelate. He upped the ante weeks later. 

He called such priests “pharisees” 

and said they usually have “psychological 

problems.” He “avoids them,” he 

added, “because they scare me.” They 

are “hiding behind” Catholic doctrine 

and pious practices, he declared. 

I even saw him take an altar boy’s 

hands, pressed carefully in prayer, 

and pry them apart, making a crack 

about the stiffness of the boy’s manner. 

The cameras were rolling for that 

one too. 

A lot of Catholics really appreciate 

him because he has made their lives 

much easier. 

To the divorced he sent many signals 

that they should go ahead and 

receive Communion even though 

they’re in second marriages. As long 

as those marriages are loving and the 

first ones were disastrous, his chief 

theologian said, Communion is not 

only okay but laudatory. 

To Catholics who pay no attention 

to abortion and, matter of fact, vote for 

aggressively pro-abortion politicians, 

the prelate signaled his approval, counseling 

others who make anti-abortion 

work their primary political activity not 

to be “obsessed.” In this context he said 

to a reporter: “Youth unemployment 

and loneliness among the elderly are 

the biggest problems of our time.” 

He said to a huge crowd, with TV 

cameras rolling, that half the Catholic 

schools were “elitist” and should 

close down—in fact, he said that within 

Catholic schools there should be “no 

proselytizing.” 

No bishop, no matter his prestige or 

popularity, can teach or suggest wicked 

concepts or practices without consequence. 

Nor can he have himself photographed 

with deviants, even if he’s 

happy to have them over to his place, 

because that might confuse or shock 

the little ones who might see the photos 

and think it’s okay. 

The bishop might well consider— 

next time he singles out for attack his 

fellow bishops who cling to “doctrine” 

and “piety”—the millstone Christ 

promised for those who give scandal 

to the defenseless. To the hungry 

sheep. 

As for my family, we can wait him 

out, with prayer. “Lord, to whom shall 

we go?” The Church, Christ assured us, 

will survive the assaults of the devil. 

His scathing depictions of the Pharisees 

are consoling. Many of our prelates 

are duplicates of the men who persecuted 

the Savior and played with His 

words for their own strange ends. 

—Roger A. McCaffrey

Getting Real 

Against Papolatry 

February 25, 1976 

Memo 

to: 

Fr. Berbusse | Fr. Bradley | Fr. Miceli 

Dr. and Mrs. von Hildebrand | Dr. and Mrs. Marra 

from: 

Neil McCaffrey 

Is it always wrong to criticize 

the Pope? In a 1976 memo 

to friends, a prominent 

Catholic layman argued 

that sometimes it’s a duty 

BY NEIL MCCAFFREY 

Bill asked us to contribute 

a memo about our discussion. 

I’d like to offer mine 

on the subject on which we 

seemed to show the least 

consensus, criticism of the papacy. 

1. Scripture makes no bones about the 

weaknesses of the Apostles and especially 

of Peter; which in any case were 

well known to the early Christians, 

whose faith survived the knowledge. 

Catholic history, from the age of the 

Fathers on down, provides us with the 

model. It was only in the 19th century 

that some Catholics found it necessary 

to refine the policies of the Holy Spirit. 

2. The papacy is given primacy from 

the earliest years, yet there is little evidence 

of papolatry until we get to the 

last century. The papolaters of our day 

would have been regarded with astonishment 

by the Fathers, by Dante, by St. 

Catherine, by Bellarmine, by Suarez, 

by just about anyone you can name. 

3. We can see papolatry in perspective 

when we put it beside its kin; and 

we can do that with a flying visit to 

Moscow or Peking. There too we are 

allowed to criticize underlings. Pravda 

does it every day. But the Leader, never. 

4. Those orthodox Catholics who feel 

most comfortable with the spirit of 

Vatican II are least comfortable with 

its encouragement of free speech. John 

[XXIII] and Paul [VI] told us to relax 

and speak our minds. Perhaps they 

meant us to make an exception about 

speaking of themselves, but in fact they 

didn’t say so. So their admirers hasten 

to protect the Popes from themselves. 

(It seems, then, that popes can make 

mistakes; but only a privileged few are 

allowed to notice them.) 

5. In this connection, the favored few 

allow themselves, and even an occasional 

unwashed Catholic, one indulgence. 

We are permitted to disagree 

with Paul’s Ostpolitik. I haven’t yet been 

able to divine why the Pope can be criticized 

about this but not about Church 

discipline or the liturgy or ecumania. 

So paradox piles upon paradox. It is 

3

Publisher’s Page ■ by Neil McCaffrey 

possible to make a plausible (though 

far from compelling) case for papal 

policy toward Communism. We might 

argue that the Church expects to outlast 

today’s tyrants; that she is trying 

to make life a bit easier for Catholics 

behind the Curtain; that she no longer 

has any confidence that the West will 

defend itself; even that life in Eastern 

Europe is less lethal to souls than life in 

the West. Whereas I have never heard 

a good argument for the new liturgy or 

for the new laxity in discipline. Even 

the papal cheerleaders can’t muster an 

argument, for the excellent reason that 

there is no argument that would commend 

itself to the orthodox. All the 

arguments, such as they are, come from 

the infidels. The papal cheerleaders can 

only repeat their incantation: obedience, 

obedience, obedience. By which, 

ironically, they don’t really mean obedience. 

They mean something else. 

They mean: shut up. Is it necessary, in 

this circle, to spell out the distinction 

between obedience and calling black 

white? (By way of underscoring the 

bankruptcy of papal policy, have you 

noticed that nobody ever talks these 

days about devotion to the Mass? There 

are no more courses on the Mass, no 

more books, no more private studies 

so that we might assist more knowledgeably 

and devoutly. In fact, if you 

so much as call it the Mass, you are a 

reactionary. There is a message here for 

the apologists of the new liturgy. But 

they don’t want to hear it. That would 

be “disloyal.” As long as we polish up 

the reputation of the present Pope, it 

would seem, we can forget about what 

happens to the Mass.) 

6. Which leads us ineluctably to the 

question of charity. I suggest that the 

papal cheerleaders are pursuing a policy 

that has the effect of destroying 

souls, but that masquerades as charity. 

They want to deny this Pope, or any 

living pope, the blessing of constructive 

criticism; and never mind what its 

absence may do to his soul. Never mind 

what the spiritual writers tell us about 

the duty of fraternal correction. Above 

all, never mind what its absence will 

do to the Church, and to the souls of 

the faithful. The caricatures that pass 

for charity in the Church today may be 

Satan’s most spectacular recent victory. 

7. We heard a lot of talk Sunday about 

the importance of faith when authority 

misbehaves, all of it sound. I think faith 

involves a corresponding devotion to 

truth, even unpalatable truth. What 

does a Catholic have to fear from truth? 

Shrinking from the truth is an indecent 

posture for a Catholic. Granted, tender 

souls need not concern themselves with 

high policy, and with the blunders of 

those in authority. That does not exonerate 

the mature Catholic. Moreover, 

if nobody concerns himself with these 

blunders, nobody will criticize them; 

and evil will flourish, unopposed. 

Not only that, but the papal cheerleaders 

are naive if they suppose they 

can silence criticism. All they succeed 

in doing is suppressing it among the 

orthodox. So the only criticism the 

Pope hears (except for coarse abuse 

from the unbalanced Right) is from the 

enemies of the papacy. When we reflect 

that this Pope is obsessed with public 

opinion (‘‘human respect,” the spiritual 

writers used to call it), it becomes 

double folly to choke off constructive 

criticism from the loyal orthodox. 

What makes the papal cheerleaders 

that way? Partly, as we have seen, a counterfeit 

charity. Partly, I think, an unappetizing 

elitism that makes them think 

even mature Catholics can be affected 

in their faith if they admit to themselves 

that popes can suffer from the worst 

human weaknesses. And partly, it is 

fair to suspect, their own faith may not 

be seasoned enough to cope with this. 

Neurotics make lousy parents. 

Sometimes they try to make their child 

healthy by giving him a germ-free environment. 

Which only makes him prey 

to the first disease he encounters. Do 

the papal cheerleaders really suppose 

that stomping out every whisper of 

criticism is going to fortify the faith 

of the people they presume to speak 

for? It only leaves them vulnerable. 

They have built up no antibodies. The 

intelligent and charitable policy is to 

show innocent souls that true devotion 

to the Church, and to the papacy, 

is not incompatible with constructive 

criticism; indeed, demands it. 

The answer to immaturity is not 

perpetual childhood. A better cure is 

to grow up. 

P.S. What the cheerleaders are really 

telling us is that this Pope (any Pope?) 

is too vain, too irascible to accept even 

constructive criticism; that he is incapable 

of growth; that he is a crippled 

human being; and that he must be 

treated not like a father but like an 

Oriental despot. Q.E.D. 

Neil McCaffrey was founding president 

of Conservative Book Club and Arlington 

House Publishers. Prior to their launch, 

he worked at Doubleday-Image Books 

under its founder, John Delaney, 

and in Doubleday’s secular division. 

He was an executive at Macmillan 

Publishing Company and shepherded 

a number of national bestsellers and 

major magazines into prominence. 

A graduate of Fordham University’s 

journalism program, he was a product 

of the Archdiocese of New York’s 

educational system and a respected 

behind-the-scenes political activist (cf. 

Buchanan, The Great Comeback, 2014). 

4 ■ the traditionalist

War Talk 

Questions for the 

Boots Brigade 

“We will look for you, we will find you, and we will kill you.” — Sen. Marco Rubio, 

who never saw a day in combat, borrowing from the movie Taken to describe how he 

would deal with the Islamic State. 

It’s lines like that that make 

you wonder what Marco Rubio 

is going to do in life when he 

grows old enough to get a driver’s 

license. For sheer fatuity in 

a presidential candidate, it beats even 

Lindsey Graham’s offering, “I am running 

because the world is falling apart.” 

Graham, best known for his role 

playing Sancho Panza to John McCain’s 

Don Quixote, also sees the Islamic 

State as “a threat to the homeland.” 

But where Rubio sees Liam Neeson as 

the answer, the South Carolina senator 

prefers more American boots-onthe-ground. 

And not just a handful, 

but—direct quote here—“thousands.” 

All right, let’s suppose—to take a 

real-life rather than video-game perspective 

of our national interest—we 

had those “thousands” on the ground 

a few weeks back, during the ISIS siege 

of the city of Palmyra, Syria: Whose 

side would Graham have them aligned 

with? ISIS or the government troops of 

the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad? 

You know, the Assad who gasses civilians 

rather than, like ISIS, beheading 

or burying them alive? 

Obviously the answer to our 

national security needs in the Middle 

East isn’t as obvious as the boots-onthe-ground 

brigade would have us 

believe. Remember their calls a few 

years back for a more “muscular” U.S. 

approach to getting rid of the dictator 

Muammar Gaddafi? That Mission 

Accomplished gave us tribal warfare 

in Libya and, out of that, the attack on 

the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. 

Not that the lessons of Benghazi or 

Palmyra register on Rubio, Lindsey and 

their warhawk allies. When drum-beating 

demagogues run up against outcomes 

that belie their rhetoric, they 

simply turn up the volume. Another 

setback? That’s because we don’t have 

enough boots-on-the-ground. 

Question to be asked at the first 

Republican presidential debate (if not 

before): Where are those “thousands” 

of boots going to come from? A decadeand-a-half 

fighting in the Middle East 

has brought us 7,000 dead, 52,000 

wounded, and a volunteer army so 

stretched that soldiers are being sent 

into war zones for four, five, and in 

some cases as many as 10 tours of duty. 

It’s a war, in other words, that calls 

for sacrifice on the part of only 1 percent 

of the American people, while 99 

percent—you, me, and the comfortably 

insulated warhawks on Capitol 

Hill— live peacetime lives, expressing 

our “support” for the troops with ribbon 

stickers on our cars and stand-up 

applause for combat veterans at sports 

events. 

5 

BY VICTOR GOLD 

Obviously the answer 

to our national security 

needs in the Middle 

East isn’t as obvious 

as the boots-on-theground 

brigade would 

have us believe.

War Talk ■ by Victor Gold 

But wait: On further review, it turns 

out there is one member, out of 537 in 

the U.S. Senate and House, who has 

a real rather than rhetorical answer 

to the “thousands of boots” question. 

Not that we’ll be hearing from him in 

any of those Republican presidential 

debates since he’s a Democrat—and a 

liberal one at that. 

Say what you will about Congressman 

Charles Rangel’s fundraising 

ethics, when the issue is American 

lives on the battlefield, he speaks with 

authority—the authority lacking in 

all but a few of his Capitol Hill colleagues. 

A decorated veteran of the 

Korean War, he’s introduced a bill 

in the House to restore the military 

draft—actually reintroduced, since 

he’s put it before the Congress every 

session for the past decade—arguing, 

“If war is truly necessary, we must all 

come together to support and defend 

our nation. The 3.3 million military 

households have become a virtual 

military class, unfairly shouldering 

the brunt of war.” 

You haven’t heard of Rangel’s draft 

bill? No mystery there. It’s because the 

chief warhawk of the House, Speaker 

John Boehner, hasn’t deigned to push it 

through committee and bring it to the 

floor for a vote. Why not? Because, for 

those millennials too young to remember, 

the draft was ended in 1973 because 

of demonstrations against an unpopular 

war—just as our current war in 

the Middle East, according to public 

opinion polls, is unpopular. 

“It would take a lot of courage for 

people (in Congress) to vote on this,” 

said Rangel on introducing his latest 

draft bill. “We wouldn’t be in this mess 

we’re in if people knew their kids might 

be drafted.” 

No we wouldn’t. But don’t expect 

the boots-on-the-ground brigade— 

would-be commanders-in-chief like 

Marco Rubio or Lindsey Graham— 

to admit it. They’re too busy, between 

campaign fundraisers, picking up on 

Liam Neeson lines or chasing down 

Super Glue to hold the world together. 

THIS ARTICLE WAS POSTED 

ON VICTOR GOLD’S BLOG, 

WAYWARDLEMMING.COM. 

Mr. Gold was press secretary to candidate 

Barry Goldwater and Vice 

President Spiro Agnew, the author 

of numerous political books, and an 

aide to President George H.W. Bush. 


Church Leftism 

Climate Claptrap 

Subversion of Christianity by 

the spirit of the age has been 

a hazard down the centuries. 

The significance of Laudato 

Si’ lies beyond its stated concern 

for the climate. Discount obfuscating 

religious language. The encyclical 

lays ground to legitimize global 

government and makes the Church an 

instrument of propaganda—a herald 

for the upcoming United Nations (UN) 

Climate Change Conference in Paris. 

Accommodation by Church hierarchy 

to green dogma has been metastasizing 

since the UN proclaimed Earth 

Day in 1970. Two decades later, Kevin 

Costner went dancing with wolves while 

the Fraser Institute prefaced “Religion, 

Wealth, and Poverty” (1990) by Jesuit 

scholar James V. Schall with this: 

. . . the relatively sudden appearance 

of religion not primarily as worship 

or doctrine, but as social activism, 

has been not a little perplexing. Numerous 

sympathetic critics, many of 

the faithful, and interested observers 

sense that something is occurring 

with vast and unsettling implications 

for the well-being of the public order 

and for religion itself. They are not at 

all sure, however, that what is happening 

is itself in the best interests 

of religion or of the poor and outcast 

for whom it is said to be occurring. 

Propelled by the cult of feeling and 

Golden Age nostalgia—enshrined in 

the myth of indigenous peoples as 

peaceable ecologists—that elusive 

something picked up a tincture of Teilhardian 

gnosticism as it grew. It bursts 

on us now as Laudato Si’, a malignant 

jumble of dubious science, policy prescriptions, 

doomsday rhetoric, and 

what students of Wordsworthian poetics 

call, in Keats’ derisive phrase, “the 

egotistical sublime.” 

Eco-Activists Thrive 

on Distortions 

The document’s catalogue of distortions 

and factual errors are those of 

the climate-change establishment 

swallowed whole. There is no scientific 

consensus on man-made global 

warming, no consensus on the role of 

human activity in any of the environmental 

phenomena cited. 

Greenpeace co-founder Patrick 

Moore abandoned the organization 

in 1986, highlighting its abandonment 

of scientific objectivity in favor of political 

agendas: 

By around the mid-1980s, when I left 

Greenpeace, the public had accepted 

most of the reasonable things we had 

been fighting for: stop the bomb, save 

the whales, stop toxic waste dumping 

into the earth, water, and air. 

Some, like myself, realized the job 

7 

In Laudato Si’, Pope 

Francis makes common 

cause with socialists, 

earth-worshippers and 

population-controllers— 

and raises concerns about 

the ecclesial climate that 

yielded this extravagant rant 

BY MAUREEN MULLARKEY

Church Leftism ■ By Maureen Mullarkey 

The Pope is neither 

a public intellectual, 

theologian, nor a 

man of science. Yet he 

impersonates all three. 

of creating mass awareness of the 

importance of the environment had 

been accomplished and it was time to 

move on from confrontation to sustainable 

development, seeking solutions. 

But others seemed bent on lifelong 

confrontation, “up against the 

man,” “smash capitalism.” . . . . 

In order to remain confrontational 

as society adopted all the reasonable 

demands, it was necessary for these 

anti-establishment lifers to adopt ever 

more extreme positions, eventually 

abandoning science and logic altogether 

in zero-tolerance policies. 

That was 30 years ago. Since then, “the 

‘green’ movement has not only become 

more hard line, they have also become 

irrational and fanatical.” 

Climate has fluctuated since the 

planet formed. Sea levels have been 

rising for thousands of years with 

no current increase in the rate. Catastrophic 

extinctions occurred millions 

of years before industrialization. Not 

so long ago in geological time, Arctic 

islands were covered in sub-tropical 

forests and no ice covered either pole. 

Climate temperature has been flat for 

nearly two decades despite a rise in 

CO2. On it goes. 


Enter Jorge Bergoglio. Informed 

objection to the Pope’s roster of pending 

disasters is widely available—but 

also, at this point, moot. Reducing 

greenhouse gases has just been deemed 

a religious obligation. What should 

concern us now is the ecclesial climate 

that yielded this extravagant rant. 

Left-Wing Boilerplate 

There is nothing to admire in its assault 

on market economies, technological 

progress, and—worse—on rationality 

itself. Bergoglio, whom we know now 

as Pope Francis, is a limited man. His 

grasp of economics is straitjacketed by 

the Peronist culture in which he was 

raised. Laudato Si’ descends to garish, 

left-wing boilerplate. The Pope is neither 

a public intellectual, theologian, 

nor a man of science. Yet he impersonates 

all three. 

The encyclical tells us much about 

the man who delivers it. Straightaway, 

it certifies the depth and span of this 

pope’s megalomania. A breathtaking 

strut into absolutism, it is addressed 

not simply to Catholics but, like the 

“Communist Manifesto,” to the whole 

world. Tout le monde. 

The document is steeped in Third 

Worldism. The imagined plight of the 

planet is the work of a rapacious West. 

Ignoring the role of corruption, mismanagement, 

and counter-productive 

ideology in failed or deteriorating 

states, it gives a ruinous pass to 

Third World oligarchs and despots. The 

White Man’s Burden now rises to the 

ozone layer. 

Bergoglio’s resentment of First World 

prosperity is of a piece with his simplistic 

understanding of the “financial 

interests” and “financial resources” he 

condemns. He nurses a Luddite yen to 

roll back the Industrial Revolution for 

a fantasy of pre-industrial harmony 

between man and a virginal Mother 

Earth. He demonizes the very means 

that have raised millions out of poverty, 

and that remain crucial in continuing to 

raise standards of living among the poor. 

A Telling Papal 

Appointment 

Take no comfort from Laudato Si’’s 

restatements of the Catholic Church’s 

traditional positions on the sanctity 

of life, the primacy of the family, and 

rejection of abortion. In this context, 

orthodoxy and pious expression serve 

a rancid purpose. They are a Trojan 

horse, a vehicle for insinuating surrender 

to pseudo-science and the eco-fascism 

that requires it. 

Promiscuous papal embrace of the 

climate-change narrative includes a 

chilling call for the creation of global 

overseers to manage the Progressive 

dream: abolition of fossil fuels. The twentieth 

century gave us stark lessons in the 

applications of compulsory benevolence. 

The “global regulatory frameworks” the 

Pope hankers for will, without scruple, 

crush orthodoxy when it suits. 

Or might Bergoglio welcome that? 

His appointment of Hans Schellnhuber 

to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences 

raises the question. Schellnhuber is a 

zealous promoter of the theory of manmade 

climate change and advocate of 

population control. He has lobbied for 

an Earth Constitution, a Global Council, 

and establishment of a Planetary 

Court, a transnational legal body with 

enforcement powers on environmental 

and population issues. In short, Schellnhuber 

is the Vatican’s advance man 

for bureaucratic tyranny on a global 

scale. It is a telling appointment.

Romanticizing Poverty 

Laudato Si’ leans heavily on Romantic 

personification (“our Sister, Mother 

Earth . . . cries out to us”) and nature 

poetry. These are arational devices 

that evade logical argument. They are 

employed here to justify left-wing ideology 

and more concentrated power. The 

document hands a bouquet to all statists, 

collectivists, crackpot world-improvers, 

antagonists to free enterprise, 

and to freedom itself. Every authoritarian 

jackal and central planner on the 

planet can pluck a bloom from it. 

Papal suspicion of private property 

and infatuation with a “theology 

of poverty” lend sanctimony to the 

class antagonism hibernating in the 

Church’s “preferential option for the 

poor,” a problematic concept derived 

from Liberation Theology. (Problematic 

because the promise of the resurrection, 

the ineradicable core of Christianity, 

is not directed to a class, but to 

individuals.) 

It is reasonable to think that Bergoglio 

is a greater friend to poverty than 

to the poor. 

Falsifying the Gospel 

A strain of inadvertent comedy runs 

through Laudato Si’. Il Papa assumes 

the posture of governess to the world— 

Mary Poppins on the Throne of Peter. 

Who else could align the magisterium 

of the Catholic Church with exhortation 

to turn off the air conditioner, shut 

the lights, and be sure to recycle? For 

this Christ died: to atone for petroleum 

products. And for carbon emissions 

from private cars carrying only one 

or two people. 

While Christians in the birthplaces 

of Christianity are crucified and 

beheaded for their faith, young girls are 

kidnapped and sold for the price of a 

pack of cigarettes, our encyclical whines: 

“In many parts of the planet, the elderly 

lament that once beautiful landscapes 

are now covered with rubbish.” 

There is more in that letter-to-the-editor 

vein: “Neighborhoods, 

even those recently built, are 

congested, chaotic and lacking in sufficient 

green space. We were not meant to 

be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass 

and metal, and deprived of physical 

contact with nature.” 

Of course not. We were meant to 

live in a beautiful, walled-in enclave 

like Vatican City with splendid gardens, 

a throng of world-class museums, 

its own armed gendarmerie aligned 

with Interpol, and an impenetrable 

immigration policy. 

Gospel quotations are bent to serve. 

In the chapter “The Gaze of Jesus,” we 

read this: “98. Jesus lived in full harmony 

with creation, and others were 

amazed: ‘What sort of man is this, that 

even the winds and the sea obey him?’ 

(Mt 8:27).” 

That passage from Matthew has not 

a thing to do with harmony. Rather, it 

tells of Jesus’ dominion over nature. 

It is a statement of authority, of lordship 

over the natural order. The verse 

complements one from John: “He that 

cometh from above is above all.” By 

abolishing the scriptural intuition of 

power and might, the truncated quotation 

makes Jesus a screen on which 

to project a chimera of cosmic equality. 

Luke is similarly falsified by omission: 

“Are not five sparrows sold for 

Church Leftism ■ By Maureen Mullarkey 

two pennies? And not one of them is 

forgotten before God.” Jesus’ intention 

lies in the sweetness of the verse that 

follows—his assurance that man is 

more than the sparrows. But Laudato 

Si’ suggests otherwise by leaving out 

the fulfillment of its own quotation. 

Intellectual and 

Moral Confusion 

Replete with cooing reference to Francis 

of Assisi, Laudato Si’ ignores the 

single aspect of Assisi’s “Il Poverello” 

most relevant to our time. It is not the 

fey proto-hippie of high-fructose legend 

that speaks best to us now. It is the 

would-be martyr who sailed to Egypt 

alongside Crusaders to preach the gospel 

to a Muslim sultan. 

Resurgent Islam and the spread of 

Sharia are the Church’s enemies, not 

oil, coal, and gas. None are poorer than 

those who live, despised, in the path 

of ISIS. Where, then, is the encyclical 

calling for the conversion of Islam away 

from its murderous climate of hatred? 

Instead, the Vicar of Christ calls all 

the world—intending primarily the 

West—to “ecological conversion.” 

Intellectual and moral confusion of 

such magnitude is a judgment on the 

ecclesial culture that produced it and 

the popular culture that consents to it. 

Maureen Mullarkey is an artist 

and culture critic, most recently 

for First Things and currently for 

her blog, StudioMatters.com. 

Special Edition ■ 9

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Q & A 

Buchanan on Politics 

and the Issues 

Voiceover: Now, once again, Raymond 

Arroyo: 

Arroyo: Welcome back to The World 

Over live. Donald Trump continues 

to ride high in the presidential polls 

here in the U.S., Planned Parenthood 

is on the hot seat over those recently 

released, explosive undercover videos, 

and a controversial Iran nuke deal is 

being sold here on Capitol Hill. With 

topics this diverse there is only one 

guest who can possibly cover it all. He is 

a syndicated columnist, former adviser 

to three U.S. presidents, and a twotime 

presidential candidate himself, 

the most prolific Patrick J. Buchanan. 

Great to see you! 

Buchanan: Good to see you, Raymond! 

Arroyo: Good to have you back. I want 

to start with this Trump poll. In the 

new Quinnipiac polls it shows Trump 

at 20%, Scott Walker at 13, and Bush 

down at 10%. What is happening here? 

Buchanan: Donald Trump has commanded 

the political stage ever since 

about the first of July, if not a week or 

so before. He’s a got a dramatic persona, 

he’s raised this issue of immigration, 

people have attacked him and 

jumped on him. People are looking at 

him, and they say, “At least the guy is 

authentic; he’s real, he’s saying what he 

believes.” And he’s up against a field 

which I think is fairly colorless; it’s 

sort of vanilla, and The Donald is a 

personality, and he’s really made this 

race exciting and interesting. People are 

looking at the TV saying, “What’s he 

going to say about Rick Perry today?” 

Arroyo: He is entertaining—he’s a 

compelling figure, he’s known to many 

kids who watch TV. My own children, 

“Oh, Donald Trump, I didn’t know 

Donald Trump is running for president.” 

They know this guy, as opposed 

to so many of these other candidates. 

Buchanan: It’s not only that: he fills 

up a great, empty space in American 

politics. The American people think 

the folks working up on the Hill, they 

get nothing done. They’re all talk and 

no action, and when they run and they 

promise things, and they never deliver, 

and he’s talking about what people care 

about, the lost jobs from these trade 

deals … these are the issues. … Ronald 

Reagan said, “A country that can’t 

control its borders isn’t really a country 

anymore,” and that’s exactly what 

he’s saying. 

Arroyo: Now, Pat, you ran twice, and 

you had this same message … you 

almost took down President Bush at 

the time; you gave him a run for his 

money in New Hampshire. Tell me 

how things have changed today for an 

insurgent candidate who is obviously 

running against Washington. Has the 

math changed given the last eight years 

of the Obama administration? 

11 

In a July 2015 interview 

with EWTN’s Raymond 

Arroyo, pundit and former 

presidential candidate 

Pat Buchanan spoke out 

about Trump, the Iran 

nuclear deal, the Planned 

Parenthood videos, and more

Q & A ■ Raymond Arroyo’s Interview with Pat Buchanan 

Buchanan: The math in the Republican 

party has not changed that greatly 

in my judgment, except this: there is 

a greater awareness in the Republican 

party of the border issue than there 

was when I raised it in 1991, 1992. Secondly 

the Republican party has lived 

with, and the country has lived with, 

all these trade deals, and they found 

out that all your factories and jobs … 

look, in the first decade of this century, 

55,000 factories were shut down, and 

six million manufacturing jobs disappeared. 

Now we said in 1991 and 92, 

this is what’s going to happen. Now 

that it’s happened, it’s a little easier to 

make the case. 

Arroyo: Yeah. So you’ve got Trump in 

there. How has he changed the dynamics 

of this race, the issues that will be 

talked about? I mean, you’ve mentioned 

two of the biggest, trade and immigration. 

These are things that, let’s face it, 

some of the other candidates, a lot of 

these other candidates, are not talking 

about, really don’t want to talk about. 

Has he made these two issues “must 

discuss” for whoever ends up with this 

nomination? 

Buchanan: I think he’s not only done 

that, certainly on the immigration issue 

and security on the border, and secondly 

on the trade issue, but the Republican 

party is locked into its free-trade 

agenda, ideologically and because the 

folks down the street at the Chamber of 

Commerce, the Business Roundtable, 

the Fortune 500, they say, “Look, we 

want the ability to move our factories 

to Asia and bring our products back 

free of charge, and that’s what we give 

you all this money for.” And Trump is 

hammering that issue, but he’s doing 

something else also, as I said. He’s filling 

up this vacuum, and … there’s a 

real belief in the country, I think, that 


the political class, the ruling class, has 

failed America, and that’s exactly what 

he is saying, and they’re all part of it. 

Arroyo: Is there another candidate 

that you see in this lineup who could 

possibly step into the position should 

Trump begin to fail? I mean, this guy’s 

got a 58% negative rating right now in 

the polls…. 

Buchanan: If you get 42% in the primaries 

you win. 

Arroyo: Yeah, don’t worry about the 

negatives, is that the Buchanan math 

here? 

Buchanan: You know, I found out 

when I was running against Bush—it 

was Brown, Clinton, Buchanan, and 

Bush [who] were the last four standing 

in two of the parties; all four of us had 

negatives in the 40s. All four of us. Of 

course, my positives weren’t that high, 

but all four of us had the same negatives—but 

that’s what these things do 

to you. But you mentioned one individual. 

I had thought there was one, 

and that was Ted Cruz, because he’s 

a terrific speaker, he’s a debater, and 

he’s been standing by Trump’s statements 

on the border and defending him 

against these attacks. That’s another 

thing that’s helped Trump, is the piling 

on of his fellow Republicans telling him 

to get out of the race. Who are these 

people to tell individuals whether or 

not they’re allowed to run for President 

of the United States? And so I think 

when they’ve all piled on, the American 

people tend to say, look, I’ll go with the 

underdog here. 

Arroyo: And you believe Trump can 

go all the way here? 

Buchanan: Well, we don’t know if 

there is a possibility he could implode 

or explode somewhere along the way, 

55,000 factories were shut 

down, and six million 

manufacturing jobs 

disappeared. Now we 

said in 1991 and 92, this is 

what’s going to happen. 

or make some statement or something, 

or the opposition researchers dig up 

things that are really very bad news, 

worse than everything else. 

Arroyo: As you wrote, the presidential 

race is a minefield for the cautious, and 

Trump is not a cautious man. For the 

incautious… 

Buchanan: He’s made a couple of 

gaffes, but the American people, I 

think, to their credit, are saying, “Look, 

okay, he shouldn’t have said that, you 

know, that McCain failed because 

he was captured,” or something like 

that, but they say, “That doesn’t justify 

a death sentence in politics; we’re 

driving him out of the race when we 

haven’t had a chance to vote.” 

Arroyo: You know, it’s interesting, 

Christie and Cruz, are the two guys 

who have sort of supported Trump and 

his run every step of the way. 

Buchanan: He has assets that they 

don’t have, and, of course, he’s consuming 

all of the oxygen out there. 

These other fellows can’t get any air 

time, and when they get air time they’re 

asked, “What do you think about Donald 

Trump?” 

Arroyo: Yeah, that’s not what you 

want to hear! Amazingly, there’s a St. 

Petersburg poll came out today. It shows


Trump at 26%, beating Bush, who’s at 

20, and Marco Rubio, at 10%. That’s in 

the state of Florida, which is stunning. 

Buchanan: Well, if you had the primary 

in Florida and that’s the outcome, 

it would be the end of the race. 

Arroyo: So you really think he has… 

Buchanan: Well, see, in the last time 

out you saw Herman Cain was in lead, 

and Michelle Bachmann’s lead, and 

Newt had a real run, and all of them 

had a run, and it can be that he [Trump] 

implodes or that he goes down and you, 

all of a sudden, run the Iowa Caucuses 

and, say he runs third or fourth, that 

would knock the air out. He would have 

to come back in New Hampshire, but 

if it were right now, with these kinds 

of numbers, and this surge going on, I 

bet he wishes it were January 1. 

Arroyo: I need to go to this Planned 

Parenthood video. The latest undercover 

video of Planned Parenthood 

officials discussing the sale and acquisition 

of body parts was released this 

week. Now this is Dr. Savita Ginde. 

She’s the VP and medical director of 

the Planned Parenthood of the Rocky 

Mountains. Watch this. It’s disturbing. 

Video: We do tissue collection for 

CSU at Fort Collins… had collected 

some. 

Here are some organs. They’re all attached. 

Here’s the stomach—oops, 

sorry— heart, kidney, and adrenal. 

I don’t know what else is in there—tiny— 

I don’t see the legs, did you see any 

legs? 

I didn’t really look, but… There you 

go, yup! You got all of them right 

there. You got another boy! 

Arroyo: Disturbing, disturbing 

video. And at the end you heard the 

These other fellows can’t 

get any air time, and when 

they get air time they’re 

asked, “What do you think 

about Donald Trump?” 

guy poking at the dish there, and they 

have the body parts of this child, and 

he says, “Oh, it’s a boy!” It is staggering 

that you have these people admitting… 

Last week they were saying, “This is 

fetal tissue”; now we’re talking about 

body parts and identifying the remains 

as a boy. What does this represent for 

Planned Parenthood? 

Buchanan: Well, what it represents 

for the country: unbelievably cold, callous, 

ideological indifference to human 

life… Eating a salad and drinking wine 

and talking about selling the body 

parts of an infant that’s been destroyed 

in the womb with the collaboration of 

its mother and some “doctor”—yeah, 

it’s staggering. I think a lot of Americans 

of my generation never thought 

they’d live in a country like this. 

Arroyo: I have to tell you, the repulsion 

that I’ve seen in the emails and the 

calls, some of these people are identifying 

as “pro-choice.” These are people 

who support abortion rights; they 

are stunned by this because I think for 

the first time people are having to confront 

the reality that this is a human 

life being taken. Wherever anybody 

is on the spectrum of support for the 

public policy, the reality of this and the 

grisly business of dedicating remains 

for research or other uses is just… it’s 

abominable, is what it is. This is Cecile 

Richards, not the lion we keep hearing 

about so much who was shot in Zimbabwe. 

This is Cecile Richards. She is 

the President of Planned Parenthood 

responding to the video you just saw 

and others like it. 

Video: Cecile Richards: This has 

been a three-year, well-funded effort 

by the most [blanked out] of the anti-abortion 

movement in this country 

to try to entrap doctors. And, of 

course, highly doctored videos, which 

show absolutely, doctors repeatedly 

said… it’s all been edited out. Planned 

Parenthood does not at all profit from 

fetal tissue donation, which is an important, 

important element of health 

care research in this country. 

Arroyo: She’s denying any culpability 

here. She says this is perfectly legal, Pat. 

Buchanan: Well, she says there are 

parts of the tape where doctors are saying, 

“We’re not selling body parts,” or 

something like that, but that doesn’t 

deny the reality of what these folks 

said, what they’re talking about, what 

we saw, and what they did. And the 

idea that you can take an unborn child 

fighting for life and look at it as something, 

you know, like we can take its 

parts after we kill it, crush the head, 

crush the body parts, and save the special 

parts for sale in America in 2015 

is astonishing. 

Arroyo: Watching just that segment, 

where they’re poking with the stick 

through the remains and saying, “Hey, 

you like an eyeball, you want a heart, 

and, oh, look here’s a leg, and it’s a boy!” 

That alone is the most indicting bit of 

video. I don’t know what you say to 

that. 

Buchanan: Well, you know, what does 

it say about the people that can do that 

so casually, when you realize that this 



unborn child has been murdered, torn 

to pieces, and you’re looking at the 

results of what was done. 

Arroyo: Pat, there is an effort on Capitol 

Hill to defund Planned Parenthood. 

Mitch McConnell has scheduled what 

we have to admit is little more than a 

pro forma vote. It doesn’t look like he’s 

going to get the 60 votes. That’s what 

you’d need to override the presidential 

veto. Is this just kabuki on Capitol Hill? 

Buchanan: It’s 67 to override the presidential 

veto, but I think they ought 

to do it. I think they ought to put that 

up and say, “Look, this is what we’re 

voting against, and if you fellows want 

to vote for it, go ahead and vote for it, 

but we are revolted by this whole thing, 

repulsed by it, and we’d like to go on 

record and say we want no part of an 

organization that does that, and we 

don’t want to give the tax dollars of the 

American people to people like that.” 

Arroyo: Well, the vote is going forward 

on Monday, but passage does not 

appear likely. 

Buchanan: It will be interesting to see 

who votes which way on it. 

Arroyo: Right. Well, the problem is 

this bill wouldn’t even touch all the 

Medicare reimbursement, Medicaid 

reimbursement—that’s where it all 

flows through. Planned Parenthood has 

so many funding mechanisms via the 

federal government. It’s very difficult 

to get a handle on all of them. But we 

will continue to watch this, and we’ll 

be right back when we’ll explore the 

Iranian nuclear deal and the Pope’s 

climate change mission, as well as what 

he could say when he visits the U.S. in 

September. Patrick Buchanan remains 

with us when The World Over live continues. 

Stay right there. 

“… the idea that you can take an unborn child 

fighting for life and look at it as something, you 

know, like we can take its parts after we kill it, crush 

the head, crush the body parts, and save the special 

parts for sale in America in 2015, is astonishing.” 

• • • 

Arroyo: Welcome to The World Over 

live. Syndicated columnist, author, and 

two-time presidential candidate Pat 

Buchanan is once again at the desk with 

us. Let’s get into this Iran nuclear deal. 

Minority leader Nancy Pelosi today 

called the deal a “diplomatic masterpiece.” 

What’s wrong with that, Pat? 

Buchanan: Well, let me say this: the 

deal is going to go through. It’s going 

to go through because if the United 

States, for example, if they overrode 

the President’s veto of their rejection 

of the deal, the United States would be 

relatively isolated and all these other 

countries would simply head straight 

for Iran. And if Iran is smart, and I 

think they’re very smart, they would 

simply agree to the terms of the deal 

and follow them scrupulously, and the 

Americans would be outside the whole 

business, and I think you’d have a lot 

of American businesses climbing the 

walls. But let me say this: I’ve had a view 

for a long time that Iran doesn’t want 

a bomb. They have the ability and the 

knowledge to build one. They could 

have built one long ago. They stopped 

short of that. They didn’t take the 

uranium up to 90% enrichment. They 

did that for a reason. They are using 

the negotiations to get the sanctions 

lifted to go back into the international 

community to get all that money and 

to be recognized because if they can 

get peace, if they can avoid war with 

the United States, the Iranians in ten 

years, along with Shia Iraq, will be the 

dominant power in the Persian gulf. 

That’s what they’re interested in being. 

You know, I don’t think the Iranians 

want a bomb. The Israelis have got dozens, 

scores, hundreds of bombs. But 

what they don’t have is the size of the 

country; the [Iranian] population is 

ten times as large. Over time, Iran, if 

it avoids a war with the United States, 

it is going to be the dominant power in 

the Gulf, and that’s why they negotiated 

the deal, and that’s why they gave away 

as much stuff as they did. 

Arroyo: They didn’t give away much, 

Pat. You’ve got to give them twenty-four 

hours notice before you do inspections. 

This is not a good deal, Pat. 

Buchanan: Look, they got rid of their 

plutonium reactor, that’s out the window 

… all the centrifuges are gone, 

the high-quality centrifuges, 98% of 

the uranium… they’re throwing all 

that stuff out because they’re saying, 

“Look, we know how to build a bomb! 

We don’t need all this. You give us the 

hundred…” If I were an Iranian I’d take 

the hundred-and-fifty billion, I’d say, 

“We don’t want war with the Americans. 

If we stay out of a war with the 

Americans, the future belongs to us.” 



Arroyo: I want to play Secretary John 

Kerry, who probably would like the 

Buchanan approach on this. Here he 

is pitching the deal: 

Video: Kerry: … just incentive for 

an arms race in the region for Egypt 

or Saudi Arabia or one of the other 

countries to try to get a bomb, will 

be if this agreement is rejected. And 

the reason will be that Iran will go 

back to enriching, we will not have 

inspections, we will not have insight, 

and they will say, “Oh, my God…” 

Arroyo: What do you think? 

Buchanan: I don’t think Iran would go 

back to enriching. I think Iran would 

follow—it’s not their agenda— well, 

follow the deal. Then you get the UN’s 

lifted sanctions, the Europeans lift 

sanctions, the Russians, Chinese, and 

the Iranians are just saying, “Look, we 

signed our agreement, we honor our 

agreements, here comes all the money,” 

and the American business guys are 

going to be saying, “Why are all the 

Europeans in Tehran selling cars and 

TVs and we’re not?” 

Arroyo: We don’t have access to the 

market. 

Buchanan: The point is, yeah, I think 

this is where Netanyahu and all the 

others, they say, “They’re racing to a 

bomb, they’re two weeks from a bomb, 

they’re going to get it…” No, they’re 

not! They didn’t move past a certain 

threshold because they want the deal 

to get rid of the sanctions…. 

Arroyo: There have been some concerns 

raised about the way that the 

main negotiator on the Iranian side, 

Zarif, who was negotiating with Kerry, 

there are some who were saying, “That 

relationship was a little too cozy.” Kerry 

and Zarif knew each other; they met 

at George Soros’ dinner, and apparently 

Zarif’s son stood in John Kerry’s 

daughter’s wedding. Is that a concern to 

you, that they may have been too cozy 

and that Iran shaped this deal and that 

America gave away too much? 

Buchanan: Well I think maybe we 

could have got a better deal, but I’ll 

be honest, when I saw it come out, and 

I saw all the uranium’s coming out, all 

the centrifuges are shut down, they get 

no refining plant, they’re going to turn 

heavy water into light water, you say, 

“Why are they doing all this if they’re 

out to build a bomb?” The answer is, 

they’re using this for another purpose! 

The Americans, of course, “Oh, they’re 

going to have a bomb,” but in twenty-four 

days do you really think you 

can put together centrifuges and get 

them working and get the highly-enriched, 

90% uranium in twenty-four 

days? 

Arroyo: See, I interviewed Chris 

Christie a few days ago, and he said 

Ronald Reagan would have walked 

away from a deal like this. You were 

there at Reykjavik when he did walk 

away from the deal. 

Buchanan: I was there, I saw it. I 

was looking right down at him, and 

he walked out of that room. 

Arroyo: Should they have walked out 

of this deal? 

Buchanan: Reagan was right to walk 

out of that one. They were taking away 

SDI. I mean, Regan had cut a deal, 

frankly, which I didn’t like. It was, you 

know, get rid of nuclear weapons, and 

fortunately Gorbachev said, “We’ll go 

with getting rid of all these offensive 

weapons, but by the way, you got to 

give up your SDI,” which was a stupid 

thing to say. He brought it in late Sunday 

night, and Reagan just, you know, 

pounded the table. He came out, his 

face was a mask of rage; I don’t want 

to repeat some of the things he said 

at the end, but let me tell you, I came 

back with him on Air Force One, and I 

was drinking and laughing along with 

Tony Dolan, and here comes Reagan to 

the back of the plane, he’s got his little 

running suit on, and said, “Pat, did I 

tell you about the time Jimmy Stewart 

and I were…”—he was right back to 

the old Reagan. I said, “Guys, there’s a 

part of this man that is fourteen years 

old!” It was wonderful—and that was 

the charm—it was so attractive about 

him. But it was just a phenomenal day, 

phenomenal night. 

Arroyo: Well, and he ended up 

winning. 

Buchanan: Well, this is what I told 

him. I told him on the plane. I said, 

“Don’t worry! The Russians will come 

back for the INF agreement. Ditch the 

intermediate nuclear forces in Europe. 

“Over time, Iran, if it 

avoids a war with the 

United States, it is going 

to be the dominant power 

in the Gulf, and that’s 

why they negotiated the 

deal, and that’s why 

they gave away as much 

stuff as they did.” 



“I think the Holy Father, when he comes to 

economics, I think he is too much a man of 

the neo-socialist left. I think he looks upon 

capitalism almost in a Marxist view.” 

They’re scared to death of our Pershings 

and Cruise [Missiles].” I said, 

“That’s why they’ve come to Reykjavik; 

they’re going to come back to that 

deal.” And they came back that November, 

and Reagan gave up the Pershings 

and Cruise Missiles, and they gave up 

their SS20s. 

Arroyo: I need to refer to a column 

you recently wrote, and I’ll use it as 

a means of getting into our conversation 

about Pope Francis. The headline 

was, “Is capitalism diabolic?” And 

you’re referring to Pope Francis’s statements 

in South America, particularly 

in Bolivia, where he called capitalism 

“an intolerable system.” What are your 

concerns about that? 

Buchanan: I think the Holy Father, 

when he comes to economics, I think 

he is too much a man of the neo-socialist 

left. I think he looks upon capitalism 

almost in a Marxist view. To 

me, the free enterprise system, as it’s 

evolved and developed, is the greatest 

promoter of prosperity, and it’s moved 

more people out of poverty and to the 

working class and the middle class than 

any other system on earth. Now does it 

have real problems, can it be improved? 

Yeah, but which is a better system? I 

mean, it’s certainly not the Marxist, 

it’s certainly not what they had down 

there in Argentina; I mean, they went 

belly-up about fifteen years ago. 

Arroyo: Now some will say, “Look, 

he’s trying to attach a moral vision to 

the capitalist system. He’s concerned 

that the focus has been solely on profit 

to the exclusion of your fellow man.” 

Buchanan: There’s a very valid point 

there, but the purpose of business, 

people go into business and they buy 

and provide things and grow things, 

in order that they may make a profit so 

they can feed their family out of that, 

and that profit motive is part of human 

nature. Now, does it get out of control if 

you get one individual, you know, playing 

monopoly… I mean you’ve played 

monopoly and you get all the houses 

and you build on all the properties and 

then you run everybody out of business 

and kill them. So he’s right there, but, 

you know—but you’re concerned about 

the way he goes about rectifying that, 

invoking an international system that 

should somehow redistribute wealth. 

Look, you’ve got that in the European 

Union. Ask the Greeks if it’s working 

out well for them! 

Arroyo: Well, let’s talk about his climate 

change agenda which he has been 

pushing mightily. He invited all the 

mayors, many mayors from the U.S. 

and around the world into the Vatican 

just a few weeks ago and they have 

signed on to this effort to push these 

climate reforms that the U.N. is considering 

in December, in Paris. A good 

idea, or has he exceeded his charism? 

Buchanan: Well, I think he’s well outside 

the realm of where he is speaking 

on faith and morals. Quite frankly, I 

think there’s legitimate dissent. I mean, 

I am a climate change skeptic. I hope 

that doesn’t excommunicate me. Look, 

we are stewards of the earth, and when 

I was growing up the air was dirty, the 

Potomac was polluted, and we’ve done 

a tremendous amount to clean that up; 

America’s done more than almost any 

country in the world. Maybe we’ve got 

to do more, but the idea of a globalized 

entity imposing its views and values— 

that opens the door to global tyranny. 

I don’t think the Holy Father really 

understands, you know, the problems 

and benefits of the American free 

enterprise system as well as he might if 

he hadn’t been raised down there with 

the guys with the shiny boots and sunglasses, 

the Peronistas. 

Arroyo: What do you think he’s going 

to say when he comes here, particularly 

this joint session of Congress? 

Buchanan: I think he’ll probably say 

many of the same things. It’s such a 

golden opportunity. I think the Holy 

Father is, as I am, something of a confrontationist, 

and I think he will read 

us the riot act in a kind way. But I think 

he’s going to say a lot of things, such 

as he’s been saying, on climate change, 

and on poverty, and I’ll bet he gets into 

the immigration issue, and he will not 

emulate Donald Trump. 

Arroyo: Yes, let’s go to this last issue 

we have to touch before I let you go. 

This is Robert Gates, the national president 

of the Boy Scouts of America on 

their decision to allow gay scout leaders 

into the organization. We’ll play this, 

and I want the Buchanan take on it. 

Voice: Due to the social, political, 

and legal changes taking place in our 



country, and in our movement, I did 

not believe the adult leadership policy 

could be sustained. Any effort to 

do so was inevitably going to result in 

simultaneous legal battles, in multiple 

jurisdictions, and at staggering cost. 

Arroyo: What do you make of that 

justification for the decision? 

Buchanan: It explains it, quite frankly. 

They’re going to file lawsuits against 

the Boy Scouts in state after state after 

state, discrimination and all the rest 

of it. Fighting all these lawsuits will 

bankrupt the organization, so he said 

maybe we’re going to have to make 

this retreat on this issue. But I think 

it could be sort of the beginning of the 

end of the Boy Scouts. I think it’s awful 

because, look, whether we like it or not, 

the statistics will tell you that probability 

is far higher of abuse of boys by 

active homosexuals who have them in 

their custody, and we don’t need to go 

too far outside the Catholic Church to 

understand that. So I think the Mormons, 

I guess, are looking at whether 

they want the Boy Scouts to continue. 

I think the Catholic Church should 

take a long, hard look at whether or not 

they want to continue the association. 

Arroyo: Well, Robert Gates made the 

point and the board that works with 

the bishops’ conference that oversees 

the Catholic involvement in the Scouts, 

they think, “Okay, our religious rights 

will be protected.” We’ll see, but if the 

justification for changing the policy 

is you were worried about litigation, 

how do you stop the same litigation 

challenging the religious exemption? 

Buchanan: Well, you get the First 

Amendment with the religious exemption, 

with the Church, just like you do 

on contraception and abortifacients 

and things like that. I mean, I would go 

along with the Church if it said, “Look, 

we’re not going along with this policy 

and we think we’re protected by it 

because we’re the Catholic Church and 

we’ve got a First Amendment right to 

exclude or include whoever we want on 

moral grounds.” And then if you win 

the battle, you’ve got the victory, and 

if you don’t, good bye and good luck! 

Arroyo: Very good. Well, we’ll leave 

it there. Thank you for being here, Pat. 

Pat’s latest book The Greatest Comeback: 

How Richard Nixon Rose from 

Defeat to Create the New Majority is 

still available in bookstores everywhere 

and online. 

Buchanan: Before all the bad things 

happened, Raymond. 

Arroyo: And you were there right 

before it all happened, Pat. 


Pope Francis 

Who Is Pope Francis? 

For one thing, he’s an 

Argentine—and that 

explains a lot, says one 

of his countrymen 

BY JACK TOLLERS 

Well, for what it’s 

worth, here goes 

my effort in trying 

to translate 

for the average 

American reader who the Pope is, what 

it means to be an Argentine, why it’s 

so difficult to understand one and the 

other… 

Did I say “translate”? Yes, after all 

that’s my business, though I’m obviously 

using the term in a wider sense, 

the differences between Argentina and 

America being so deep that there is 

more to it than meets the eye. 

Let’s start with Argentina. 

Please don’t get me wrong; it’s not 

that I don’t love my country, but it sure 

makes you want to cry now and again 

(as Jesus did for His country, if I got 

my Gospel right). And Simone Weil has 

aptly explained that there’s no other 

way of loving your own country—with 

compassion, that is. 

Having said that, this country is 

pretty much a disaster. In the way 

Argentines perceive things, talk, 

behave—or misbehave—it’s an anomalous 

country: a place where one cannot 

take words at face value, where unpunctuality 

is the norm, where the rule of 

law is pretty much disdained; a place 

full of double-talk, where people seldom 

come out with a straight answer. 

It’s a difficult place to live in: flimsy 

logic, inconsistency, lack of seriousness, 

18 

nearly non-existent courtesy, false 

modesty, dishonesty, dirty habits and 

general unfairness make up the usual 

fare. 

We’re sort of used to all this (and 

much more) in a way that your average 

American could never understand 

unless he happened to do some time 

down here. 

There’s a whole bunch of Argentine 

words that anyone foreign (be it someone 

from Spain, say, or even Mexico) 

would be hard put to explain: words 

like piola, macaneador, chanta, trucho 

and so many more depict a people who 

find it laughable to cheat, to trick, to 

swindle, to get away with anything— 

who enjoy nothing so much as breaking 

the rules. As a rule, Argentines hate 

rules, and that’s why the propensity to 

anarchy keeps showing up in the public 

sphere. Usually, Argentines love to pretend 

and have no time for uprightness, 

fair play or straight talk. Lying is common; 

words mean nothing unless they 

are put to work for cunning purposes, 

for a ruse, for any scam, to put one over 

you. It is a make-believe country. 

Okay, I know you think I’m exaggerating 

(that now it’s me, the Argentine, 

who’s pulling your leg); that no 

society could survive such habits and 

customs; that there must be more to 

the country than my dreary depiction. 

And you’re right. There is. Except 

for a bunch of thoroughly decent

Argentines the country would have 

all but disappeared decades ago. To 

my mind, this is especially true about 

Argentine women; but no, you can also 

find lots of engaging people among the 

men. Hospitable, good mannered, well 

brought up, brave, sprightly young 

Argentines can be found in every job, 

in every college, in every corner of the 

country. 

They are, however, a minority (and, 

as I see it, always have been), which goes 

a long way to explaining the financial, 

economical, institutional and moral 

mess which characterizes us as a country—and 

I’m weighing my words. 

Enter Perón. As you may know, he 

ruled the country thrice and established 

a political movement (called, 

of all things, “Peronism”) that has run 

the place on and off for the better part 

of the last sixty years. Now Peronism is 

not only a very popular movement, it’s 

a way of playing politics, of handling 

power, of doing business, of looking at 

the world, which is very much made up 

of those horrible Argentine traits which 

I’ve been telling you about. Peronism 

reflects the lower classes’ ethos of the 

country… and Perón himself was quite 

a nasty piece of work. 

Now to Jorge Bergoglio. He’s a 

typical peronista: his ways, language, 

style (or lack of), social and ideological 

background is peronista through 

and through. Coming from the lower 

classes he was studying chemistry 

when he decided to join the Jesuits 

and was ordained in the years just after 

Vatican II. 

Enter the Argentine Catholic 

Church, and especially the Jesuits in 

this country. If the country, as a rule, is 

an unreliable one, you cannot begin to 

guess what a mess the Catholic Church 

was even before Vatican II, let alone 

afterwards. 

But here, a short aside is necessary. 

I have dedicated most of my life 

to translating and promoting the work 

of an Argentine Jesuit, Father Leonardo 

Castellani (1899-1981), who comes 

out like something of a mighty exception: 

a very clever scholar, a serious and 

devout priest, who made it his job to 

denounce the terrible circumstances, 

the ruinous state of the Argentine 

Catholic Church of his time. 

Well, to cut a long story short, in 

1949 he was expelled from the Society 

of Jesus in a scandalous way—precisely 

because of his complaints and public 

denunciation of the local Church’s state 

of affairs. He was especially sharp and 

bitter when referring to seminary curricula, 

terrible teachers, worse books, 

and complete lack of scholarship—and 

all that back in the Forties! In his time, 

it was very difficult to find in this country 

a well-read and properly trained 

priest (like himself, the great exception). 

The after-effects of Vatican II in 

such circumstances could only make 

matters worse, and that’s exactly what 

happened. It was a perfect debacle. 

Take Bergoglio, for example. His 

studies amounted to nothing substantial. 

The Jesuits over here have no professors 

worthy of the name; the subjects 

were tossed about in an unscholarly 

manner; the philosophy was never 

properly taught (and it would only 

be half-digested Suárez in the best of 

cases). The theology seats had been all 

but captured by badly trained Jesuits 

who were prone to repeat the last of 

Teilhard’s work, or Rahner’s, when 

not disgorging the tenets of Liberation 

Theology (the Nouvelle Theologie 

never made it over here, few people 

could read French or German, and St. 

Thomas was all but ignored). The liturgy 

was perfectly awful, no one knew 

Latin, and scriptural studies were little 

Pope Francis ■ by Jack Tollers 

less than a sham. (Let me tell you, I 

know what I’m talking about: the main 

Jesuit College is a very short way from 

where I’m writing. I’ve been there dozens 

of times, and have done part of my 

research on Father Castellani at their 

library. Some library! One of the poorest 

I’ve seen in the country, and that’s 

saying quite something). 

So what does Bergoglio know? With 

that sort of training, pretty much nothing. 

No Latin—no languages at all, for 

that matter: his Italian is awful, not a 

word of English, no French, let alone 

his clumsy Spanish! (I wonder what 

on earth he studied in Germany for a 

couple of months, as he was reported to 

have done, because he knows no German 

either. And he certainly did not 

earn a degree over there.) 

Well, then, how come he was elected 

Pope? Search me. 

All I can tell you is that he’s the perfect 

example of an Argentine, Peronist, 

Jesuit of the second half of the twentieth 

century. A ruthless double-dealer, 

he made his way up the ranks of the 

A ruthless double-dealer, 

he made his way up the 

ranks of the Society of 

Jesus with surprising 

speed: consider that he was 

ordained in 1969 and only 

four years later was ruling 

all Argentina’s Jesuits as 

a Provincial Superior! 


Pope Francis ■ by Jack Tollers 

Society of Jesus with surprising speed: 

consider that he was ordained in 1969 

and only four years later was ruling 

all Argentina’s Jesuits as a Provincial 

Superior! After six years, he became 

the Rector of the College I was telling 

you about (“Colegio Máximo”), holding 

that position from 1980 to 1986. It 

was then that he fell badly with nearly 

every Jesuit in this country because 

he played his part against Arrupe and 

the General Congregation No. 34—and 

into John Paul’s hands. That’s how he 

eventually was finally rehabilitated by 

the Vatican, and with the help of Buenos 

Aires’s bishop (Msgr. Quarracino) 

he became his auxiliary (1992) and, in 

the end, bishop himself of Buenos Aires 

(1997). In 2001 he was made Cardinal 

and Primate of this country. 

So, yes, he played his hand carefully 

and, in the long run, won the 

day. Which wouldn’t mean a thing if 

it weren’t for the fact that his election is 

very telling about the current condition 

of the Catholic Church. 

Bad news, eh? Yeah, well, I know 

that you’ll think I’ve been exaggerating—that 

things couldn’t be that bad, 

that there must be something in this 

man, our new pope. 

So I’ve failed to convince you. Okay, 

my fault. 

All the same, an Argentine Pope! 

And a Peronist one! 

It is all, I hasten to recognize, quite 

unbelievable. But, for that matter, so 

is Benedict’s abdication… and subsequent 

deportment. These are strange 

times indeed. 

Jack Tollers is an Argentinian 

scholar, novelist and translator. 

This article first appeared at 

unamsanctamcatholicam.com. 


Plain Truth 

Sodomy and the Constitution 

Suddenly, in midsummer, 

everyone from USA Today to 

the Vatican is talking about 

the same topic: homosexual 

marriage. This is a little 

strange, since nobody, give or take an 

eccentric Roman emperor or two, has 

ever talked about it before. It threatens 

to eclipse the war in Iraq. 

I feel a certain sympathy, almost a 

sense of solidarity, with sane homosexuals—the 

silent majority, as it 

were. From time immemorial there 

have been men who have been chiefly 

attracted, erotically, to other men or, 

more commonly, boys. I don’t quite 

get it, I can’t regard it as anything but 

abnormal, I suppose one should disapprove 

of it, but there it is. I agree with 

C.S. Lewis, who, when asked about it, 

declined to discuss it at length because 

it wasn’t among the temptations that 

assailed him. 

Of course this isn’t necessarily 

rational: I’m not especially tempted to 

commit ax murder either, but I’m quite 

willing to condemn it, if anyone doubts 

that I oppose it in principle. I wouldn’t 

want everyone to be an ax murderer, 

and if pressed I’ll admit that I wouldn’t 

want everyone to be homosexual. Our 

Creator has disposed most of us otherwise, 

and that’s fine with me. As the 

woman in a James Thurber cartoon 

effuses to a startled male, “I just love 

the idea of there being two sexes, don’t 

you?” Amen, lady. Where the opposite 

sex is concerned, I’ve always been 

inclined to swoon a bit. 

But even if I were otherwise 

inclined, I would still, I trust, see the 

point of there being two sexes. I’d recognize 

it as a shortcoming in myself 

that I was unable to respond to the 

other sex—viz., the female—in the way 

that nature seems to have ordained. 

And here, if I may presume to say 

so, I think that I speak for most sodomites. 

In the “gay marriage” debate, 

American public discussion has maintained 

its usual wretched level. And as 

usual, the liberals don’t realize how 

silly they sound. There have been the 

routine complaints about old men in 

the Vatican trying to control others’ 

sex lives, refusing to adapt to the times, 

lacking the charity enjoined by Christ, 

hypocritically ignoring the Church’s 

own problem with pedophile priests, 

et cetera, et cetera. 

All this is miles off the point. 

Homosexuals already have the right 

to marry, even if they can’t or won’t 

exercise it—that is, the right to marry 

someone of the opposite sex. This is 

supposedly a heartless thing to say, but 

what is being demanded now is not 

the extension of a right, but the total 

redefinition of a thing that existed long 

before the Catholic Church came along. 

The basic reason for marriage is 

neither religious nor romantic; it’s 

21 

Writing in 2003, the late 

commentator foresaw this 

year’s same-sex “marriage” 

ruling—and deplored 

the judicial usurpations 

that made it possible 

BY JOSEPH SOBRAN

Plain Truth ■ by Joseph Sobran 

practical. It connects a man with his 

children (and their mother), providing 

for their support, clarifying property 

rights, establishing inheritance, and so 

forth. Every society has some version 

of it. Every society also has homosexuality, 

especially pederasty, but even 

those societies most tolerant of different 

sexual practices have seen no 

need for same-sex “marriage,” simply 

because it’s an absurdity. To put it clinically, 

children are seldom conceived 

in the lower end of the digestive tract. 

So as not to prejudice the case, think 

only of non-Christian cultures: Chinese, 

Japanese, African, Arab, Viking, 

Aztec, Greek, Roman, Inca, Babylonian, 

Indian, Persian, Apache, Sioux, 

Eskimo, Hawaiian, as many as you like. 

Has the notion of same-sex marriage 

ever occurred to even one of them? Of 

course not, because it’s a contradiction 

in terms. Which is really all there is to 

say about the matter. 

It isn’t even necessary to disapprove 

of homosexuality in order to see that 

it can never have anything to do with 

marriage. This is where conservatives 

are getting as confused as liberals. Both 

sides think the issue is basically a moral 

one; a question of what kind of sexual 

behavior society is going to bless or 

condemn. 

But the case would be just the same 

if homosexuality were regarded as the 

healthy norm and heterosexuality as 

a shameful deviation. It would still 

be necessary to make arrangements 

for the offspring of all those filthy 

“breeders.” It would be a question not 

of rights, but of responsibilities. In that 

case marriage might be inflicted as a 

sort of penalty, but it would be indispensable 

anyway. “You have to teach 

these people the consequences of their 

behavior.” 

So why, after so many millennia, 

has this weird subject suddenly come 

up now? Only in America, one sighs. 

For one thing, there are many material 

incentives—employees’ benefits and 

government entitlements for which 

spouses are eligible—to get married, 

and these are also incentives to broaden 

the definition of marriage; that is, to 

apply the word marriage to domestic 

partnerships that aren’t really marriages 

at all. 

And in today’s liberal culture, any 

basic social distinction can be stigmatized 

as “discrimination”—not discrimination 

in the old and sane sense 

of keeping unlike things separate, but 

in the current punitive sense of discriminating 

“against.” If you suffer 

any disadvantage from the ability of 

others to tell things apart, you now 

become a “victim” of discrimination, 

and the state must do something about 

it. Which brings us to the practical nub 

of the present issue. It can be summed 

up in two words: Anthony Kennedy. 

When Associate Justice Anthony 

Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court 

wrote the majority opinion striking 

down a Texas sodomy law at the end 

of the Court’s last term, liberals and 

conservatives alike saw the handwriting 

on the wall. Kennedy objected to 

that law on grounds that it “discriminated” 

against homosexuals as a class 

or group. 

It didn’t take a wizard to foresee the 

next step: Kennedy and his colleagues 

will very likely rule, in the fairly near 

future, that all laws based on the traditional 

and universal definition of 

marriage are also unconstitutionally 

“discriminatory.” 

Kennedy may not think very clearly, 

but nobody can deny that he thinks big. 

Overthrowing marriage itself would 

be a “historic” judicial act, sure to win 

liberal applause. 

Naive people may wonder just 

where the Court gets off, redefining 

marriage. Well, why not? The Court 

has already redefined human life. 

And how do such things come 

about? We owe it all to the Fourteenth 

Amendment. And thereby hangs a tale. 

Ratified under duress after the Civil 

War, the Fourteenth forbids any state to 

“deny to any person ... the equal protection 

of the laws.” These few words have 

produced more judicial mischief than 

all the rest of the U.S. Constitution. 

Originally their meaning was narrow 

and specific. After the war, the 

Republican Congress wanted to pass 

a civil rights act to protect Southern 

Negroes, newly freed from slavery, 

from being denied the normal 

rights of citizenship. But the Federal 

It isn’t even necessary to disapprove of 

homosexuality in order to see that it can never 

have anything to do with marriage. This is where 

conservatives are getting as confused as liberals. 


Government had no authority to pass 

the act: under the federal principle as 

laid down in the Tenth Amendment, 

this was an area reserved to the separate 

states. The Fourteenth would provide 

a Constitutional basis for the act. 

There is a huge historical irony here. 

The Fourteenth was necessary because 

Congress and the Federal judiciary still 

took the Tenth seriously. But over time, 

the judiciary has used the Fourteenth 

to nullify—and in effect repeal—the 

Tenth. To adapt a phrase of Justice 

Antonin Scalia, the Equal Protection 

clause is the clause that devoured the 

Constitution. 

The first great milestone in the 

Supreme Court’s liberal activism was 

its 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of 

Education. There it held that there 

can be no such thing as “separate but 

equal”: “Separate facilities are inherently 

unequal.” Logically, this was 

dubious (it would rule out separate 

restrooms for the sexes, for example). 

But the Court was feeling its oats, and 

ever since then it has constantly broadened 

the meaning of “the equal protection 

of the laws.” 

Countless state and local laws have 

been struck down on this pretext—so 

many that we can safely say that all 

state laws now exist only by sufferance 

of the Court. Today, no powers 

are firmly “reserved to the states, or to 

the people,” because there is no effective 

check on the judiciary. The other 

two branches have abdicated. 

Now, if ever, is the time 

to hit the Court where 

it lives. Kennedy and 

his colleagues must be 

told that they are flirting 

with impeachment 

The Tenth Amendment was finally 

destroyed in 1973 by Roe v. Wade, 

which announced—again citing the 

Fourteenth Amendment—that the 

states didn’t even have the Constitutional 

authority to protect unborn 

children from violent death. If the 

Court could strip the states of even 

that basic power, federalism in America 

was truly defunct. But though the 

ruling spawned a powerful anti-abortion 

movement, nobody proposed to 

discipline the Court itself. Everyone 

saw the moral and practical upshot of 

Roe, but hardly anyone saw the Constitutional 

implications. 

Thanks to its expansive interpretation 

of the Fourteenth Amendment, the 

Court’s most arbitrary word is law. And 

Americans have passively accepted this. 

The Court routinely usurps vast powers 

without resistance or opposition. 

Now Justice Kennedy has served 

notice that the Fourteenth can be 

Plain Truth ■ by Joseph Sobran 

invoked to redefine marriage itself, 

under the Equal Protection Clause. 

He and perhaps a majority of his colleagues 

are plainly disposed to find 

traditional marriage laws unconstitutionally 

“discriminatory.” 

Republicans in Congress, apparently 

supported by President Bush, 

want to amend the Constitution to 

define marriage as a union between a 

man and a woman. That is, they want 

to amend the Constitution to anticipate 

a grotesque misinterpretation 

of it and prevent an assault on marriage 

overwhelmingly opposed by the 

American people. But this approach is 

totally wrong-headed and inadequate. 

It accepts the Court’s usurpations as 

legitimate, without challenging the 

Court’s authority to commit them. 

Now, if ever, is the time to hit the 

Court where it lives. Kennedy and his 

colleagues must be told that they are 

flirting with impeachment and removal 

from office, if they dare to tamper with 

the institution of marriage. Nothing 

less will do; the rule of law itself is at 

stake. It’s long past time for the Court 

to be stripped of its immunity from 

Constitutional remedies. 

The late Joseph Sobran was a columnist 

and senior editor at National Review, 

and later wrote for his own publication, 

Sobran’s: The Real News. 

© Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation 


A Back Door to Communion for 

the Divorced and “Remarried” 

The Final Report of the 

Synod on the Family 

is a masterpiece of 

obfuscation—and an 

invitation to the profanation 

of Holy Matrimony 

BY BISHOP 

ATHANASIUS SCHNEIDER 

The XIV General Assembly 

of the Synod of the Bishops 

(October 4—25, 2015), 

which was dedicated to 

the theme of “The Vocation 

and Mission of the Family in the 

Church and Contemporary World,” 

issued a Final Report with some pastoral 

proposals submitted to the discernment 

of the Pope. The document itself 

is only of an advisory nature and does 

not possess a formal magisterial value. 

Yet during the Synod, there 

appeared those real new disciples of 

Moses and the new Pharisees, who in 

the numbers 84-86 of the Final Report 

opened a back door or looming time 

bombs for the admittance of divorced 

and remarried to Holy Communion. 

At the same time those bishops who 

intrepidly defended “the Church’s own 

fidelity to Christ and to His truth” 

(Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, 

Familiaris Consortio, 84) were 

in some media reports unjustly labeled 

as Pharisees. 

The new disciples of Moses and 

the new Pharisees during the last two 

Assemblies of the Synod (2014 and 

2015) masked their practical denial of 

the indissolubility of marriage and of 

a suspension of the Sixth Commandment 

on a case-by-case basis under 

the guise of the concept of mercy, 

using expressions such as: “way of 

discernment,” “accompaniment,” 

24 

“orientations of the bishop,” “dialogue 

with the priest,” “forum internum,” 

“a fuller integration into the life of 

the Church,” a possible suppression 

of imputability regarding the cohabitation 

in irregular unions (cf. Final 

Report, nn. 84-86). 

This text section in the Final Report 

contains indeed a trace of a Neo-Mosaic 

practice of divorce, even though 

the redactors skillfully and, in a cunning 

manner, avoided any direct 

change of the doctrine of the Church. 

Therefore, all parties, both the promotors 

of the so-called “Kasper agenda” 

and their opponents, are apparently 

satisfied stating: “All is OK. The Synod 

did not change the doctrine.” Yet, such 

a perception is quite naive, because it 

ignores the back door and the pending 

time bombs in the above-mentioned 

text section which become manifest by 

a careful examination of the text by its 

internal interpretive criteria. 

Even when speaking of a “way of 

discernment” there is talk of “repentance” 

(Final Report, n. 85), there 

remains nevertheless a great deal of 

ambiguity. In fact, according to the 

reiterated affirmations of Cardinal 

Kasper and like-minded churchmen, 

such a repentance concerns the past 

sins against the spouse of the first valid 

marriage, and the repentance of the 

divorced indeed may not refer to the

A back door to communion ■ by Bishop Athanasius Schneider 

acts of their marital cohabitation with 

the new civilly married partner. 

The assurance of the text in the 

numbers 85 and 86 of the Final Report 

that such a discernment has to be made 

according to the teaching of the Church 

and in a correct judgement remains 

nevertheless ambiguous. Indeed, Cardinal 

Kasper and like-minded clerics 

emphatically and repeatedly assured 

that the admittance of the divorced 

and civilly remarried to Holy Communion 

will not touch the dogma of 

the indissolubility and sacramentality 

of marriage, but that a judgement in 

the conscience in that case has to be 

considered as being correct even when 

the divorced and remarried continue 

to cohabitate in a marital manner, and 

that they should not be required to live 

in complete continence as brother and 

sister. 

In quoting the famous number 84 

of the Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris 

Consortio of Pope John Paul II in number 

85 of the Final Report, the redactors 

censored the text, cutting out the following 

decisive formulation: “The way 

to the Eucharist can only be granted to 

those who take on themselves the duty 

to live in complete continence, that is, 

by abstinence from the acts proper to 

married couples.” 

This practice of the Church is based 

on Divine Revelation of the Word of 

God, both written and transmitted 

through Tradition. This practice of the 

Church is an expression of the uninterrupted 

Tradition since the Apostles 

and, thus, remains unchangeable 

for all times. Already Saint Augustine 

affirmed: “Who dismisses his adulterous 

wife and marries another woman, 

whereas his first wife still lives, remains 

perpetually in the state of adultery. 

Such a man does not any efficacious 

penance while he refuses to abandon 

the new wife. If he is a catechumen, he 

cannot be admitted to baptism, because 

his will remains rooted in the evil. If 

he is a (baptized) penitent, he cannot 

receive the (ecclesiastical) reconciliation 

as long as he does not break with 

his bad attitude” (De adulterinis coniugiis, 

2, 16). In fact, the above intentional 

censorship of the teaching of 

Familaris Consortio in n. 85 of the Final 

Report, represents for any sane hermeneutics 

the very interpretive key for 

the understanding of the text section 

on divorced and remarried (numbers 

84-86). 

In our days exists a permanent and 

omnipresent ideological pressure on 

behalf of the mass media, which are 

compliant with the unique thought 

imposed by the anti-Christian world 

powers, with the aim to abolish the 

truth of the indissolubility of marriage—trivializing 

the sacred character 

of this Divine institution by spreading 

an anti-culture of divorce and concubinage. 

Already 50 years ago, the Second 

Vatican Council stated that modern 

times are infected with the plague 

of divorce (cf. Gaudium et spes, 47). 

The same Council warns that Christian 

marriage as Christ’s sacrament 

should “never be profaned by adultery 

or divorce” (Gaudium et spes, 49). 

The profanation of the “great sacrament” 

(Eph. 5, 32) of marriage by adultery 

and divorce has assumed massive 

proportions at an alarming rate not 

only in civil society but also among 

Catholics. When Catholics by means 

of divorce and adultery theoretically 

and as well as practically repudiate 

the will of God expressed in the Sixth 

Commandment, they put themselves 

in a spiritually serious danger of losing 

their eternal salvation. 

The most merciful act on behalf of 

the Shepherds of the Church would 

be to draw attention to this danger by 

means of a clear—and at the same time 

loving—admonition about the necessarily 

full acceptance of the Sixth Commandment 

of God. They have to call 

things by their right name, exhorting: 

“divorce is divorce,” “adultery is adultery” 

and “who commits consciously 

and freely grave sins against the Commandments 

of God—and in this case 

against the Sixth Commandment—and 

In quoting the famous number 84 of the Apostolic 

Exhortation “Familiaris Consortio” of Pope John Paul 

II in number 85 of the Final Report, the redactors 

censored the text, cutting out the following decisive 

formulation: “The way to the Eucharist can only be 

granted to those who take on themselves the duty 

to live in complete continence, that is, by abstinence 

from the acts proper to married couples.” 



dies unrepentant will receive eternal 

condemnation being excluded forever 

from the kingdom of God.” 

Such an admonition and exhortation 

is the very work of the Holy 

Spirit as Christ taught: “He will convict 

the world concerning sin and righteousness 

and judgment” (John 16:8). 

Explaining the work of the Holy Spirit 

in “convincing concerning sin,” Pope 

John Paul II said: “Every sin wherever 

and whenever committed has a reference 

to the Cross of Christ—and therefore 

indirectly also to the sin of those 

who ‘have not believed in him,’ and 

who condemned Jesus Christ to death 

on the Cross” (Encyclical Dominum 

et Vivificantem, 29). Those who conduct 

a married life with a partner who 

is not their legitimate spouse, as it is 

the case with the divorced and civilly 

remarried, reject the will of God. To 

convince such persons concerning this 

sin is a work moved by the Holy Spirit 

and commanded by Jesus Christ and 

thus an eminently pastoral and merciful 

work. 

The Final Report of the Synod 

unfortunately omits to convince the 

divorced and remarried concerning 

their concrete sin. On the contrary, 

under the pretext of mercy and a false 

pastorality, those Synod Fathers who 

supported the formulations in the 

numbers 84-86 of the Report tried to 

cover up the spiritually dangerous state 

of the divorced and remarried. 

De facto, they say to them that their 

sin of adultery is not a sin, and is definitely 

not adultery or at least is not 

a grave sin and that there is no spiritual 

danger in their state of life. Such a 

behavior of these Shepherds is directly 

contrary to the work of the Holy Spirit 

and is therefore anti-pastoral and a 

work of the false prophets to whom 

one could apply the following words of 


the Holy Scripture: “Woe to those who 

call evil good and good evil, who put 

darkness for light and light for darkness, 

who put bitter for sweet and sweet 

for bitter” (Is. 5:20) and: “Your prophets 

have seen for you false and deceptive 

visions; they have not exposed your 

iniquity to restore your fortunes, but 

have seen for you oracles that are false 

and misleading” (Lam. 2:14). To such 

bishops the Apostle Paul without any 

doubt would say today these words: 

“Such men are false apostles, deceitful 

workmen, disguising themselves 

as apostles of Christ” (2 Cor. 11:13). 

The text of the Final Report of the 

Synod not only omits to convince 

unambiguously divorced and civilly 

remarried persons concerning the 

adulterous and thus gravely sinful 

character of their lifestyle, it justifies 

indirectly such a lifestyle by means of 

assigning this question ultimately to 

the area of the individual conscience, 

and by means of an improper application 

of the moral principle of imputability 

to the case of cohabitation of 

the divorced and remarried. In fact, 

applying the principle of imputability 

to a stable, permanent and public life 

in adultery is improper and deceptive. 

The diminution of the subjective 

responsibility is given only in the case 

when the partners have the firm intention 

to live in complete continence and 

make sincere efforts therein. As long 

as the partners intentionally persist to 

continue a sinful life, there can be no 

suspension of imputability. The Final 

Report gives the impression that a public 

lifestyle in adultery—as it is the case 

of civilly remarried—is not violating 

the indissoluble sacramental bond of a 

marriage, or that it does not represent a 

mortal or grave sin, and that this issue 

is furthermore a matter of private conscience. 

Hereby one can state a closer 

drift towards the Protestant principle 

of subjective judgement on matters of 

faith and discipline, and intellectual 

closeness to the erroneous theory of 

“fundamental option,” a theory already 

condemned by the Magisterium (cf. 

Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Veritatis 

Splendor, 65-70). 

The Shepherds of the Church should 

not in the slightest manner promote a 

culture of divorce amongst the faithful. 

Even the smallest hint of yielding to 

the practice or to the culture of divorce 

should be avoided. The Church as a 

whole should give a convincing and 

strong witness to the indissolubility 

of the marriage. Pope John Paul II 

said that divorce “is an evil that, like 

the others, is affecting more and more 

Catholics” and that “the problem must 

be faced with resolution and without 

delay” (Familiaris Consortio, 84). 

De facto, they say to 

them that their sin of 

adultery is not a sin, and 

is definitely not adultery 

or at least is not a grave 

sin, and that there is no 

spiritual danger in their 

state of life. Such behavior 

of these Shepherds is 

directly contrary to the 

work of the Holy Spirit.


The Church has to help the divorced 

and remarried with love and patience to 

recognize their own sinfulness and to 

help them to convert with their whole 

heart to God and to the obedience to 

His holy will, which is expressed in the 

Sixth Commandment. As long as they 

continue giving a public anti-witness 

to the indissolubility of marriage and 

contributing to a culture of divorce, the 

divorced and remarried cannot exercise 

those liturgical, catechetical and 

institutional ministries in the Church, 

which demand by their own nature a 

public life in accordance with the Commandments 

of God. 

It is obvious that public violators 

of, for instance, the Fifth and Seventh 

Commandments, such as owners of 

an abortion clinic or collaborators of 

a corruption network, not only cannot 

receive Holy Communion but, evidently, 

cannot be admitted to public 

liturgical and catechetical services. In 

an analogous manner, public violators 

of the Sixth Commandment, such as 

divorced and remarried, cannot be 

admitted to the office of lectors, godparents 

or catechists. Of course, one 

must distinguish the gravity of the evil 

caused by the lifestyle of public promotors 

of abortion and corruption from 

the adulterous life of divorced people. 

One cannot put them on the same footing. 

The advocacy for the admission of 

divorced and remarried to the task of 

godparents and catechists aims ultimately 

not at the true spiritual good 

of the children, but turns out to be an 

instrumentalization of a specific ideological 

agenda. This is dishonesty and 

a mockery of the institution of godparents 

or catechists, who by means 

of a public promise took on the task 

of educators of the faith. 

In the case of godparents or catechists 

who are divorced and remarried, 

their life continuously contradicts their 

words, and so they have to face the 

admonition of the Holy Spirit through 

the mouth of the Apostle Saint James: 

“But be doers of the word, and not hearers 

only, deceiving yourselves” (James 

1:22). Unfortunately, the Final Report 

in n. 84 pleads for an admittance of the 

divorced and remarried to liturgical, 

pastoral and educational offices. Such a 

proposal represents an indirect support 

to the culture of divorce and a practical 

denial of an objectively sinful lifestyle. 

Pope John Paul II on the contrary indicated 

only the following possibilities of 

participating in the life of the Church, 

which for their part aim at true conversion: 

“They should be encouraged 

to listen to the word of God, to attend 

the Sacrifice of the Mass, to persevere 

in prayer, to contribute to works of 

charity and to community efforts in 

favor of justice, to bring up their children 

in the Christian faith, to cultivate 

the spirit and practice of penance and 

thus implore, day by day, God’s grace” 

(Familiaris Consortio, 84). 

There should remain a salutary area 

of exclusion (non-admittance to the 

Sacraments and to the public liturgical 

and catechetical offices) in order to 

remind the divorced of their real serious 

and dangerous spiritual state and, 

at the same time, to promote in their 

souls the attitude of humility, obedience 

and of longing for the authentic 

conversion. Humility means courage 

for truth, and only those who humbly 

subject themselves to God will receive 

His graces. 

The faithful, who have not yet the 

readiness and the will to stop with the 

adulterous life, should be spiritually 

helped. Their spiritual state is similar 

to a kind of “catechumenate” regarding 

the sacrament of Penance. They 

can receive the sacrament of Penance, 

which was called in the Tradition of 

the Church “the second baptism” or 

“the second penance,” only if they sincerely 

break with the habit of the adulterous 

cohabitation and avoid public 

scandal in an analogous manner as 

do the catechumens, the candidates 

for Baptism. The Final Report omits to 

call the divorced and remarried to the 

humble recognition of their objective 

sinful state, because it omits to encourage 

them to accept with the spirit of 

faith their non-admittance to the Sacraments 

and to the public liturgical 

and catechetical offices. Without such 

a realistic and humble recognition of 

their own real spiritual state, there is 

no effective progress towards authentic 

Christian conversion, which in the case 

of the divorced and remarried consists 

in a life of complete continence, ceasing 

to sin against the sanctity of the sacrament 

of marriage and to disobey publicly 

the Sixth Commandment of God. 

The Shepherds of the Church and 

especially the public texts of the Magisterium 

have to speak in an utmost 

clear manner, since this is the essential 

characteristic of the task of the official 

teaching. Christ demanded from all 

His disciples to speak in an extremely 

clear manner: “Let what you say be ‘Yes’ 

or ‘No’; anything more than this comes 

from evil” (Math 5:37). This is valid all 

the more when the Shepherds of the 

Church preach or when the Magisterium 

speaks in a document. 

In the text section of the numbers 

84-86 the Final Report represents, 

unfortunately, a serious departure 

from this divine command. Indeed, 

in the mentioned passages the text does 

not plead directly in favor of the legitimacy 

of the admittance of the divorce 

and remarried to Holy Communion; 

the text even avoids the expression 

“Holy Communion” or “Sacraments.” 



Instead, the text, by means of obfuscating 

tactics, uses ambiguous expressions 

like “a more full participation in the 

life of the Church” and “discernment 

and integration.” 

By such obfuscating tactics the 

Final Report in fact put time bombs 

and a back door for the admittance of 

the divorced and remarried to Holy 

Communion, causing by this a profanation 

of the two great sacraments of 

Marriage and Eucharist, and contributing 

at least indirectly to the culture 

of divorce—to the spreading of the 

“plague of divorce” (Second Vatican 

Council, Gaudium et spes, 47). 

When reading carefully the text 

section “Discernment and Integration” 

in the Final Report, one has the 

impression of a highly skillful, elaborated 

ambiguity. One is reminded of 

the following words of Saint Irenaeus in 

his Adversus haereses: “He who retains 

unchangeable in his heart the rule of 

the truth which he received by means 

of baptism, will doubtless recognize 

the names, the expressions, and the 

parables taken from the Scriptures, but 

will by no means acknowledge the blasphemous 

use which these men make 

By such obfuscating 

tactics the Final Report 

in fact put time bombs 

and a back door for 

the admittance of the 

divorced and remarried 

to Holy Communion. 


of them. For, though he will acknowledge 

the gems, he will certainly not 

receive the fox instead of the likeness 

of the king. But since what may prove 

a finishing-stroke to this exhibition is 

wanting, so that anyone, on following 

out their farce to the end, may then 

at once append an argument which 

shall overthrow it, we have judged it 

well to point out, first of all, in what 

respects the very fathers of this fable 

differ among themselves, as if they were 

inspired by different spirits of error. 

For this very fact forms a proof from 

the outset that the truth proclaimed by 

the Church is immoveable, and that the 

theories of these men are but a tissue 

of falsehoods” (I, 9, 4-5). 

The Final Report seems to leave the 

solution of the question of the admittance 

of the divorced and remarried 

to Holy Communion to local Church 

authorities: “accompaniment of the 

priests” and “orientations of the 

bishop.” Such a matter is, however, 

connected essentially with the deposit 

of faith, i.e. with the revealed word of 

God. The non-admittance of divorced 

who are living in a public state of adultery 

belongs to the unchangeable truth 

of the law of the Catholic faith and consequently 

also of the law of Catholic 

liturgical practice. 

The Final Report seems to inaugurate 

a doctrinal and disciplinary 

cacophony in the Catholic Church, 

which contradicts the very essence of 

being Catholic. One has to be reminded 

of the words of Saint Irenaeus, about 

the authentic shape of the Catholic 

Church in all times and in all places: 

“The Church, having received this 

preaching and this faith, although scattered 

throughout the whole world, yet, 

as if occupying but one house, carefully 

preserves it. She also believes the points 

of doctrine just as if she had but one 

soul, and one and the same heart, and 

she proclaims them, and teaches them, 

and hands them down, with perfect 

harmony, as if she possessed only one 

mouth. For, although the languages of 

the world are dissimilar, yet the import 

of the tradition is one and the same. 

For the Churches which have been 

planted in Germany do not believe or 

hand down anything different, nor do 

those in Spain, nor those in Gaul, nor 

those in the East, nor those in Egypt, 

nor those in Libya, nor those which 

have been established in the central 

regions of the world (Italy). But as the 

sun, that creature of God, is one and the 

same throughout the whole world, so 

also the preaching of the truth shines 

everywhere, and enlightens all men 

that are willing to come to a knowledge 

of the truth. Nor will any one of the 

rulers in the Churches, however highly 

gifted he may be in point of eloquence, 

teach doctrines different from these 

(for no one is greater than the Master); 

nor, on the other hand, will he who is 

deficient in power of expression inflict 

injury on the tradition. For the faith 

being ever one and the same, neither 

does one who is able at great length 

to discourse regarding it, make any 

addition to it, nor does one, who can 

say but little diminish it” (Adversus 

haereses, I, 10, 2). 

The Final Report in the section on 

the divorced and remarried carefully 

avoids confessing the unchangeable 

principle of the entire Catholic tradition, 

that those who live in an invalid 

marital union can be admitted to Holy 

Communion only under the condition 

that they promise to live in complete 

continence and avoid public scandal. 

John Paul II and Benedict XVI confirmed 

strongly this Catholic principle. 

The deliberate avoidance of mentioning 

and reaffirming this principle in the


The Final Report seems to 

inaugurate a doctrinal and 

disciplinary cacophony 

in the Catholic Church, 

which contradicts the very 

essence of being Catholic. 

text of the Final Report can be compared 

with the systematic avoidance 

of the expression “homoousios” on 

behalf of the opponents of the dogma 

of the Council of Nicea in the fourth 

century—the formal Arians and the 

so-called Semi-Arians—who invented 

continuously other expressions in order 

not to confess directly the consubstantiality 

of the Son of God with God the 

Father. 

Such a declination from an open 

Catholic confession on behalf of the 

majority of the episcopate in the fourth 

century caused a feverish ecclesiastical 

activity with continuous synodal 

meetings and a proliferation of new 

doctrinal formulas with the common 

denominator of avoiding terminological 

clarity, i.e. the expression “homoousios.” 

Likewise, in our days the two last 

Synods on Family avoided naming and 

confessing clearly the principle of the 

entire Catholic tradition, that those 

who live in an invalid marital union 

can be admitted to Holy Communion 

only under the condition that they 

promise to live in complete continence 

and avoid public scandal. 

This fact is proven also by the immediate 

unequivocal reaction of the secular 

media and by the reaction of the 

main advocates of the new un-Catholic 

practice to admit divorced and 

remarried to Holy Communion while 

maintaining a life of public adultery. 

Cardinal Kasper, Cardinal Nichols 

and Archbishop Forte, for instance, 

publicly affirmed that, according to 

the Final Report, one can assume that 

a door in some way has been opened 

to Communion for the divorced and 

remarried. There exists as well a considerable 

number of bishops, priests 

and laity who rejoice because of the 

so-called “opened door” they found 

in the Final Report. Instead of guiding 

the faithful with a clear and an 

utmost unambiguous teaching, the 

Final Report caused a situation of 

obscuration, confusion, subjectivity 

(the judgement of the conscience of 

the divorced and forum internum) and 

an un-Catholic doctrinal and disciplinary 

particularism in a matter which 

is essentially connected to the deposit 

of faith transmitted by the Apostles. 

Those who in our days strongly 

defend the sanctity of the sacraments 

of Marriage and Eucharist are labeled 

as Pharisees. Yet, since the logical principle 

of non-contradiction is valid and 

common sense still functions, the contrary 

is true. 

The obfuscators of the Divine truth 

in the Final Report are more like Pharisees. 

For in order to reconcile a life 

in adultery with the reception of Holy 

Communion, they skillfully invented 

new letters, a new law of “discernment 

and integration,” introducing 

new human traditions against the 

crystalline commandment of God. To 

the advocates of the so-called “Kasper 

agenda” are addressed these words of 

the Incarnated Truth: “You made void 

the word of God by introducing your 

own tradition” (Mark 7:13). Those who 

during 2,000 years spoke relentlessly 

and with an utmost clarity about the 

immutability of the Divine truth, often 

at the cost of their own life, would be 

labelled in our days as Pharisees as well; 

so Saint John the Baptist, Saint Paul, 

Saint Irenaeus, Saint Athanasius, Saint 

Basil, Saint Thomas More, Saint John 

Fisher, Saint Pius X, just to mention 

the most glowing examples. 

The real result of the Synod in the 

perception of the faithful and of secular 

public opinion was that there has been 

practically only one focus on the question 

of the admittance of the divorced 

to Holy Communion. One can affirm 

that the Synod in a certain sense turned 

out to be in the eyes of public opinion 

a Synod of adultery, not the Synod of 

family. Indeed, all the beautiful affirmations 

of the Final Report on marriage 

and family are eclipsed by the 

ambiguous affirmations in the text section 

on the divorced and remarried, a 

topic which was already confirmed and 

decided by the Magisterium of the last 

Roman Pontiffs in faithful conformity 

with the bi-millennial teaching and 

practice of the Church. It is therefore 

a real shame that Catholic bishops, the 

successors of the Apostles, used synodal 

assemblies in order to make an 

attempt on the constant and unchangeable 

practice of the Church regarding 

the indissolubility of the marriage, i.e. 

the non-admittance to the Sacraments 

of the divorced who live in an adulterous 

union. 

In his letter to Pope Damasus, Saint 

Basil drew a realistic picture of the 

doctrinal confusion caused by those 

churchmen who sought an empty compromise 

and an adaptation to the spirit 

of the world in his time: “Traditions are 

set at nought; the devices of innovators 

are in vogue in the Churches; now men 

are rather contrivers of cunning systems 

than theologians; the wisdom of 



The obfuscators of the Divine truth in the Final Report 

are more like Pharisees. For in order to reconcile a life 

in adultery with the reception of Holy Communion, 

they skillfully invented new letters, a new law of 

“discernment and integration,” introducing new human 

traditions against the crystalline commandment of God. 

this world wins the highest prizes and 

has rejected the glory of the cross. The 

elders lament when they compare the 

present with the past. The younger are 

yet more to be compassionated, for they 

do not know of what they have been 

deprived” (Ep. 90, 2). 

In a letter to Pope Damasus and 

to the Occidental Bishops, Saint Basil 

describes as follows the confused situation 

inside the Church: “The laws 

of the Church are in confusion. The 

ambition of men, who have no fear 

of God, rushes into high posts, and 

exalted office is now publicly known 

as the prize of impiety. The result is, 

that the worse a man blasphemes, 

the fitter the people think him to be 

a bishop. Clerical dignity is a thing of 

the past. There is no precise knowledge 

of canons. There is complete immunity 

in sinning; for when men have been 

placed in office by the favor of men, 

they are obliged to return the favor 

by continually showing indulgence to 

offenders. Just judgment is a thing of 

the past; and everyone walks according 

to his heart’s desire. Men in authority 

are afraid to speak, for those who have 

reached power by human interest are 

the slaves of those to whom they owe 

their advancement. And now the very 

vindication of orthodoxy is looked 

upon in some quarters as an opportunity 

for mutual attack; and men conceal 

their private ill-will and pretend 

that their hostility is all for the sake 

of the truth. All the while unbelievers 

laugh; men of weak faith are shaken; 

faith is uncertain; souls are drenched 

in ignorance, because adulterators of 

the word imitate the truth. The better 

ones of the laity shun the churches as 

schools of impiety and lift their hands 

in the deserts with sighs and tears to 

their Lord in heaven. The faith of the 

Fathers we have received; that faith we 

know is stamped with the marks of the 

Apostles; to that faith we assent, as well 

as to all that in the past was canonically 

and lawfully promulgated.” (Ep. 92, 2). 

Each period of confusion during 

the history of the Church is at the 

same time a possibility to receive many 

graces of strength and courage and a 

chance to demonstrate one’s love for 

Christ the Incarnated Truth. To Him 

each baptized and each priest and 

bishop promised inviolable fidelity, 

everyone according to his own state: 

through the baptismal vows, through 

the priestly promises, through the solemn 

promise in the episcopal ordination. 

Indeed, every candidate to the 

episcopacy promised: “I will keep 

pure and integral the deposit of faith 

according to the tradition which was 

always and everywhere preserved in 

the Church.” The ambiguity found in 

the section on divorced and remarried 

of the Final Report contradicts 

the above-mentioned solemn episcopal 

vow. Notwithstanding this, everyone in 

the Church—from the simple faithful 

to the holders of the Magisterium— 

should say: 

“Non possumus!” I will not accept 

an obfuscated speech nor a skillfully 

masked back door to a profanation of 

the Sacrament of Marriage and Eucharist. 

Likewise, I will not accept a mockery 

of the Sixth Commandment of God. 

I prefer to be ridiculed and persecuted 

rather than to accept ambiguous texts 

and insincere methods. I prefer the crystalline 

“image of Christ the Truth, rather 

than the image of the fox ornamented 

with gemstones” (Saint Irenaeus), for 

“I know whom I have believed”, “Scio, 

Cui credidi!” (2 Tim 1:12). 

Athanasius Schneider is Auxiliary 

Bishop of the Archdiocese of Saint Mary 

in Astana, Kazakhstan. This article first 

appeared on Rorate Caeli (rorate-caeli. 

blogspot.com) on November 2, 2015, 

and is reprinted with permission. 


Q & A 

In Defense of Tradition 

Last March, the traditional 

Catholic weblog Rorate Caeli 

interviewed Raymond Leo 

Cardinal Burke via telephone 

on numerous topics. 

His Eminence showed himself to be 

brilliant and yet filled with humility; 

and his care and concern for traditional 

Catholics must be acknowledged and 

appreciated. In this wide-ranging interview, 

His Eminence talked about issues 

such as: Vatican officials threatening 

to sue bloggers; more priests coming 

under his authority; the dismantling 

of the Franciscans of the Immaculate; 

how traditional Catholics can save their 

souls in this modern world—and get 

their children the Sacraments in the 

traditional rite in the face of dissenting 

bishops; priestly celibacy; daily confusion 

from Pope Francis; and much, 

much more. 

Vatican Officials 

Threatening to 

Sue Bloggers 

Rorate Caeli: Your Eminence, 

thank you very much for agreeing 

to this interview. As the most-read 

international blog for traditional 

Catholics, we believe this will give 

much hope to our readership, and 

to traditional-minded Catholics 

everywhere. For our first question: 

The traditional world, recently, has 

been stunned by the news that two 

officials of the Vatican have threatened 

to sue traditional-minded 

Catholic bloggers and reporters. 

Do you agree with this approach, 

and do you think we should expect 

to see more of this in the future? 

Cardinal Burke: Unless the blogger 

has committed a calumny on someone’s 

good name unjustly, I certainly 

don’t think that that’s the way we as 

Catholics should deal with these matters. 

I think contact should be made. I 

presume that the Catholic blogger is in 

good faith, and if there’s someone in 

the hierarchy who is upset with him, 

the way to deal with it would be first to 

approach the person directly and try 

to resolve the matter in that way. Our 

Lord in the Gospel and St. Paul in his 

First Letter to the Corinthians instruct 

us not to take our disputes to the civil 

forum, that we should be able, as Catholics, 

to resolve these matters among 

ourselves. (cf. Mt. 18:15; 1 Cor. 6:1-6) 

Confusion from 

Pope Francis 

After eight years under Pope Benedict 

XVI, clergy, laymen, even the 

media became accustomed to clarity. 

With so much confusion stemming 

from the daily statements of 

Pope Francis, confusion from the 

31 

An Interview with Cardinal 

Raymond Burke

Q & A ■ An Interview with Cardinal Raymond Burke 

Synod, et cetera, is it best to focus 

more on the local and parish level 

and on the Church’s tradition, 

rather than looking for specific 

guidance from Rome on issues of 

the day? 

Yes, I think that, in fact, Pope Francis 

himself has given that indication. For 

instance in his Apostolic Exhortation, 

Evangelii Gaudium, he says that he 

doesn’t consider it to be a magisterial 

teaching. (n. 16) With someone like 

Pope Benedict XVI, we had a master 

teacher who was giving us extended 

catechesis on various subjects. I now 

say to people that, if they are experiencing 

some confusion from the method of 

teaching of Pope Francis, the important 

thing is to turn to the catechism 

and to what the Church has always 

taught, and to teach that, to foster it 

at the parish level, beginning first with 

the family. We can’t lose our energy 

being frustrated over something that 

we think we should be receiving and 

we’re not. Instead, we know for sure 

what the Church has always taught, and 

we need to rely on that and concentrate 

our attention on that. 

“If you change the 

Church’s discipline with 

regard to access to Holy 

Communion by those 

who are living in adultery, 

then surely you are 

changing the Church’s 

doctrine on adultery.” 


Communion for 

Adulterers 

Speaking of that teaching and what 

we’re hearing, you’ve made news 

lately by saying you will resist any 

teaching that’s heterodox on marriage, 

and that Catholics should 

fight back, which gets to a whole 

other question we were asking 

about. What should be the response 

of faithful Catholics if there is a 

change in the discipline in regards 

to Holy Communion for divorced 

and remarried adulterers? 

I was answering a hypothetical question. 

Some people have tried to interpret 

it as an attack on Pope Francis, 

which it wasn’t at all. It was a hypothetical 

question posed to me, and I simply 

said, “No authority can command us to 

act against the truth, and, at the same 

time, when the truth is under any kind 

of threat, we have to fight for it.” That’s 

what I meant when I said that. When 

the hypothetical question was put to 

me, “What if this agenda is pushed?” 

I said, “Well, I simply have to resist it. 

That’s my duty.” 

How can a faithful Catholic fight 

back? Is it in his home? Is it on a 

blog? 

I think you have to keep teaching, in 

your home and in your own personal 

life, to hold to the truth of the Faith 

as you know it, and also to speak up 

about it and to make known to the 

Holy Father your deep concern, that 

in fact you cannot accept a change in 

the Church’s discipline, which would 

amount to a change in her teaching on 

the indissolubility of marriage. Here I 

think it’s very important to address a 

false dichotomy that’s been drawn by 

some who say, “Oh no, we’re just changing 

disciplines. We’re not touching the 

Church’s doctrine.” But if you change 

the Church’s discipline with regard to 

access to Holy Communion by those 

who are living in adultery, then surely 

you are changing the Church’s doctrine 

on adultery. You’re saying that, in some 

circumstances, adultery is permissible 

and even good, if people can live 

in adultery and still receive the sacraments. 

That is a very serious matter, 

and Catholics have to insist that the 

Church’s discipline not be changed in


some way which would, in fact, weaken 

our teaching on one of the most fundamental 

truths, the truth about marriage 

and the family. 

Dissenting Bishops and 

Summorum Pontificum 

Getting to something that’s right 

in Your Eminence’s wheelhouse, 

how do we fulfill the promise and 

the mandate of Summorum Pontificum 

at this particular time in 

the Church, and what role does 

Canon Law play in making the 

traditional Latin Mass available 

in every parish? 

The law stands as it was given by Pope 

Benedict XVI, and it has not been 

changed. The document for its implementation 

was issued by the Pontifical 

Commission Ecclesia Dei. All of 

that holds. All of that urges that when 

there is a desire for the traditional Mass 

among a group of the faithful, it is to 

be provided for them. 

Sticking to Summorum, for families 

whose children have never 

been exposed to the Novus Ordo, 

yet their local ordinary will not fulfill 

the mandates of Summorum by 

granting them traditional Confirmation, 

should those families take 

their children to a neighboring diocese 

or a personal parish like the 

Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter in 

order to have them confirmed in 

the traditional rite? 

They certainly have the right to receive 

the sacraments in the traditional rite, in 

the Extraordinary Form. If they can’t 

receive it in their own diocese, then 

certainly they could ask their parish 

priest to give them a note that the child 

is ready to be confirmed, and then have 

them confirmed in another place where 

it is permitted. 

Dismantling the 

Franciscan Friars 

of the Immaculate 

You probably know, we have been 

covering the disheartening and 

frightening accounts of the Franciscan 

Friars of the Immaculate being 

dismantled over the last year. Does 

Your Eminence think that the commissioner, 

Father Volpi, has been 

fair? And what does Your Eminence 

think of Father Volpi’s court mediation 

statement regarding the founder’s 

family? 

I really don’t have the kind of direct 

information on which to make a judgment 

about the matter. I have to say 

that, just from an outsider’s view, 

Father Volpi has taken some very strong 

actions very quickly. Seemingly, I read 

the story too, he had to admit that the 

accusation which he made against 

Father Stefano Manelli, the founder 

of the Friars of the Immaculate, and 

his family members, of somehow misusing 

the temporal goods of the Friars 

of the Immaculate, was not true. 

That’s certainly a very serious matter. 

Many friars are leaving, and it would 

seem that there should be some way 

of dealing with the whole situation in 

which the order itself wouldn’t collapse, 

because they were strong, they had a 

lot of vocations, and they have a great 

number of apostolates. That’s the part 

that’s worrisome to me. 

There are reports, and frankly we 

get personal reports of this, of FFI 

priests saying they’re “fleeing,” 

they’re “in hiding,” using those 

words from the current FFI under 

Fr. Volpi. There are also reports of 

bishops taking in FFI priests seeking 

refuge in their dioceses. Would 

Your Eminence encourage those 

other bishops to do the same? 

If there’s a priest who desires to leave 

his religious community, and this is a 

good priest, and there isn’t anything 

contrary to the bishop accepting him, 

I think a good bishop would certainly 

accept such a priest and try to help 

him to become a priest in his diocese. 

There’s a process; it takes time. 

The priest who is wanting to leave his 

religious community has to have a 

welcoming bishop. When a bishop is 

able to welcome such a priest, I think 

the bishop should be happy to do that, 

because it assists a good priest to be 

able to continue to exercise his priestly 

ministry. 

Traditional Priests 

Suppressed by 

Dissenting Bishops 

What, in Your Eminence’s opinion, 

are good priests supposed to do 

who are being suppressed by their 

bishops? We know of many, though 

we’re not going to name them publicly. 

Some have no mission whatsoever 

now, and they’re living on 

donations and help from family and 

friends. Some find it necessary to 

join independent groups. What is 

Your Eminence’s advice to those 

priests who simply want to live, 

preach and say Mass as all priests 

did before the Council? 

I would simply urge them to seek a 

bishop who is receptive to such priests 

and would try to help them, if he can, 

or if he can’t help them directly himself, 



to help them find another bishop who 

would permit them to lead a good 

priestly life. That’s all that one can 

do. Obviously, also, there is recourse 

to the Congregation for the Clergy. If 

the priest feels that he’s simply being 

treated unjustly, then he could ask 

the Congregation for the Clergy to 

intervene. 

There are reports that in an attempt 

to fix the problem we just discussed, 

an Apostolic Administration for 

traditional priests and religious 

may be in the works, in order to 

solve many of these issues facing 

them, in terms of living out their 

vocations strictly according to 

Summorum Pontificum. Can Your 

Eminence comment on where in the 

process that may be—the future of 

an Apostolic Administration? 

Such a thing is possible. I’m not 

aware that anything is in process in 

that regard. Maybe it is, I just haven’t 

heard about it. Certainly that is a possibility 

and would be a way of assisting 

these priests and the faithful who are 

attached to them to remain in communion 

with the Church. 

More Priests Coming 

Under Cardinal 

Burke’s Authority? 

Now, Your Eminence may have a 

bias on this question, but would the 

Sovereign Military Order of Malta 

theoretically be able to function as 

an Apostolic Administration, giving 

faculties for traditional priests 

and religious? 

Well, the Sovereign Military Order of 

Malta, the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, 

has incardinated priests. But it 

“I don’t refer to it [priestly celibacy] just as a 

discipline because it has to do with what from 

the earliest centuries the Church understood 

as being most fitting for her priests. … and 

therefore I would think it’s very difficult to 

conceive that there would be a change on this.” 

did so as a sovereign military order, 

not as an Apostolic Administration. 

The Order has a Prelate, appointed by 

the Holy Father, who participates in the 

governance of the Order. He is clearly 

the lawful superior of any priests incardinated 

in the Order. Right now, we’re 

studying the whole situation because 

we have requests from additional 

priests who wish to be incardinated 

in the Order. But certainly it has happened 

in the past, and there’s no reason 

why it couldn’t continue to happen, 

not in virtue of the establishment of 

an Apostolic Administration, but in 

virtue of the nature of the Order. 

Priestly Celibacy 

We were already planning on asking 

this question months ago when 

we first started crafting these interview 

questions, and then the Pope 

was reported to have said just yesterday 

the issue of married priests is 

“on his agenda.” Is priestly celibacy 

for western priests under serious 

threat with this pontificate? 

That would be a very serious matter 

because it has to do with the example 

of Christ Himself, and the Church 

has always treasured in her priests the 

following of Christ’s example, also in 

His celibacy. I’ve heard this reported, 

but I haven’t been able to verify it, 

but that would be, obviously, a very 

serious matter. The matter was taken 

up already by a world synod of bishops 

in the late ’60s, and at that synod 

there was a very solid reaffirmation of 

the Church’s teaching on clerical celibacy. 

I don’t refer to it just as a discipline 

because it has to do with what 

from the earliest centuries the Church 

understood as being most fitting for 

her priests. It’s something more than a 

discipline, and therefore I would think 

it’s very difficult to conceive that there 

would be a change on this. 

Encouragement for 

Traditional Catholics 

What words of encouragement can 

Your Eminence give to traditional 

Catholics who are struggling to save 

their souls and the souls of their 

children in this modern world, and 

without, it sometimes seems, any 

help from Rome? 

I frequently say to those who are writing 

to me and are expressing such discouragement, 

or are asking for direction 

in what seems to be a very troubled 



situation, that when, in times like this, 

there seems to be some confusion in 

the governance of the Church, then we 

have, more than ever, to steep ourselves 

in the Church’s constant teaching and 

to hand that on to our children and to 

strengthen the understanding of that 

teaching in our local parishes and our 

families. And our Lord has assured 

us—He didn’t tell us that there wouldn’t 

be attacks on the Church, even from 

within, but He has assured us that the 

gates of Hell will never prevail over the 

Church. In other words, Satan, with his 

deceptions, will never finally prevail 

in the Church. We have to have that 

confidence about us and go about it 

with great joy and great determination, 

in teaching the Faith, or in giving witness 

with apologetics to souls who don’t 

understand the Faith or who have not 

yet become members of the Church. 

We know that the gates of Hell will not 

prevail, but in the meantime, our way 

is the Way of the Cross. And when we 

have to suffer for the sake of what we 

believe, what we know to be true, we 

can embrace that suffering with the 

knowledge of the final outcome: that is, 

that Christ is the Victor. He is the one 

that ultimately overcomes all the forces 

of evil in the world and restores us and 

our world to the Father. That is the way 

in which I try to encourage faithful 

Catholics. I think it’s important, too, 

that devout traditional Catholics get 

to know one another and support one 

another, to bear one another’s burdens, 

as the Scripture says. We ought to be 

prepared to do that and be sensitive to 

families that might be suffering some 

particular difficulty in this regard, 

and try to be as close to one another 

as possible. 

Third Vatican Council? 

Thank you. We only have a few questions 

left. There are some very loose 

reports, but from credible sources, 

of Francis considering calling a 

Third Vatican Council. Has Your 

Eminence heard anything about 

this at all? 

No, not at all. 

Process for 

Choosing Bishops 

Episcopal appointments in the 

United States were, on average, 

conservative-leaning under Benedict 

XVI. That was not the case 

everywhere. From this arises what 

is a clear gap with the priests and 

actual churchgoing faithful of the 

new generation that are widely conservative, 

attached to the true catechism, 

to Catholic moral law, to 

a reverent Sacred Liturgy. Is Your 

Eminence in favor of a new orientation 

in the naming of bishops in the 

United States and elsewhere? Is the 

current method for the selection of 

bishops a good one, in your view? 

I think it is. It involves the consultation 

not only of other bishops and priests 

in the diocese, but also the lay faithful. 

And there is always the possibility 

for individual members of the laity or 

groups of lay faithful to make known 

their concerns to the Congregation for 

Bishops or the Nuncio. I think that 

the most important thing is to let the 

Apostolic Nuncio know, when there’s 

an appointment of a bishop being 

considered for a diocese, that there 

are very many faithful Catholics who 

have particular needs and to express 

those needs. 

Current Role in 

the Church 

What’s Your Eminence’s main focus 

on work these days? 

“When, in times like this, there seems to be some 

confusion in the governance of the Church, then 

we have, more than ever, to steep ourselves in the 

Church’s constant teaching and to hand that on to 

our children and to strengthen the understanding of 

that teaching in our local parishes and our families.” 

My main focus is on the Sovereign 

Military Order of Malta, helping the 

Grand Master with the governance of 

the Order, especially in the spiritual 

dimension. The Order has a twofold 

purpose: the defense of the Faith, and 

the care of the poor. The two things 

honestly go very much together. I’m 

helping him with questions about the 

structure of the Order itself in order to 

fulfill more effectively those two purposes, 

but also to deal with questions 



“When we know our 

faith well, then we have a 

strong desire to worship in 

accordance with our faith, 

and at the same time our 

worship makes us desire 

more to know our faith.” 

that inevitably come up in any Catholic 

organization with regard to doctrine 

and with regard to morals. That’s my 

main focus. I am also spending time 

studying and writing on important 

questions in the Church today. 

Traditionalists 

Restoring the Church 

Do you see traditional Catholics 

taking more of a leading role, in 

the future, in the restoration of the 

Church? 

I think so. I find more and more very 

strong Catholic families who are 

devoted to the traditional Mass, and 

I think that those families will have 

more and more influence in the time 

to come. If those families influence 

other families, then obviously there’s 

a momentum that grows. 

Is there anything else that we haven’t 

touched upon that Your Eminence 

would like to add? 

Just to encourage everyone to be 

devoted to the Sacred Liturgy, which 

is the highest expression of our Catholic 

faith, the highest expression of 

our life in God, and to be very devoted 

to the study of the Catechism of the 

Catholic Church, and to the teaching 

of the Faith in our homes and in our 

local communities. The Church has 

suffered terribly from decades of poor 

catechesis, such that the faithful, children 

and young people, even adults, 

don’t know their faith, and we need to 

address that because the two things go 

together. When we know our faith well, 

then we have a strong desire to worship 

in accordance with our faith, and at the 

same time our worship makes us desire 

more to know our faith. And then, 

obviously, all of that gets expressed 

in action by the charity of our lives, 

especially on behalf of those who are 

in most need. 

That leads to one last question. Your 

Eminence has mentioned the family 

in the home many times. Was John 

Paul II prophetic when he spoke 

about the Domestic Church? 

Oh, yes. He said that the Church comes 

to us by way of the family, and that’s 

true. Christ Himself comes by way of 

the family. He was prophetic in the 

sense that he pronounced again what 

the Church has understood from the 

very beginning. That term, Domestic 

Church, is very ancient, and it was 

repeated at the Second Vatican Council. 

It’s a very ancient terminology for 

the family. In that he was prophetic, 

in the sense that he set forth what God 

Himself teaches us about the family. 

That’s all we have for Your Eminence. 

Thank you very much for 

your time today and for your 

incredible service to Holy Mother 

Church. 


Orthodoxy and Spirituality 

The Silent Action of the Heart 

Fifty years after its promulgation 

by Pope Paul VI, 

will the Constitution on 

the Sacred Liturgy from the 

Second Vatican Council be 

read? Sacrosanctum Concilium is not 

de facto a simple catalogue of reform 

“recipes” but a real “magna carta” of 

every liturgical action. 

With it, the ecumenical council 

gives us a magisterial lesson in method. 

Indeed, far from being content with a 

disciplinary and exterior approach, the 

Council wants to make us reflect on 

what the liturgy is in its essence. The 

practice of the Church always comes 

from what She receives and contemplates 

in Revelation. Pastoral care cannot 

be disconnected from doctrine. 

In the Church, “that which comes 

from action is ordered to contemplation” 

(cfr. n. 2). The Council’s Constitution 

invites us to rediscover the Trinitarian 

origin of the liturgical action. 

Indeed, the Council establishes continuity 

between the mission of Christ the 

Redeemer and the liturgical mission of 

the Church. “Just as Christ was sent by 

His Father, so also He sent the Apostles” 

so that “by means of sacrifice and 

sacraments, around which the entire 

liturgical life revolves” they accomplish 

”the work of salvation” (n.6). 

Actuating the liturgy is therefore 

nothing other than actuating the work 

of Christ. The liturgy in its essence is 

“actio Christi.” It is the “work of Christ 

the Lord in redeeming mankind and 

giving perfect glory to God” (n.5). It is 

He who is the great Priest, the true subject, 

the true actor in the liturgy (n.7). 

If this vital principle is not accepted in 

faith, there is the risk of making the 

liturgy into a human work, a self-celebration 

of the community. 

By contrast, the real work of the 

Church consists in entering into the 

action of Christ, in uniting oneself to 

that work which He received as a mission 

from the Father. So, “the fullness 

of divine worship was given to us” since 

“His humanity, united with the person 

of the Word, was the instrument of our 

salvation” (n.5). The Church, the Body 

of Christ, must therefore become in 

Her turn an instrument in the hands 

of the Word. 

This is the ultimate meaning of the 

key concept of the Conciliar Constitution: 

participatio actuosa. Such participation 

for the Church consists in 

becoming the instrument of Christ the 

Priest, with the aim of sharing in His 

Trinitarian mission. The Church takes 

part actively in the liturgical action of 

Christ in the measure that She is His 

instrument. In this sense, to speak of “a 

celebrating community”” is not devoid 

of ambiguity and requires prudence. 

(Instruction Redemptoris Sacramentum, 

n. 42). Participatio actuosa should 

not then be intended as the need to do 

37 

The Church’s top liturgical 

authority calls for a more 

tradition-oriented reading 

of Vatican II’s Constitution 

on the Sacred Liturgy 

BY CARDINAL ROBERT SARAH

Orthodoxy and Spirituality ■ by Cardinal Robert Sarah 

something. On this point the Council’s 

teaching has frequently been 

deformed. Rather, it is about allowing 

Christ to take us and associate us with 

His Sacrifice. 

Liturgical participatio must thus be 

intended as a grace from Christ who 

“always associates the Church with 

Himself” (S.C. n. 7). It is He that has the 

initiative and the primacy. The Church 

“calls to Her Lord, and through Him 

offers worship to the Eternal Father” 

(n.7). 

The priest must thus become this 

instrument which allows Christ to 

shine through. Just as our Pope Francis 

reminded us recently, the celebrant is 

not the presenter of a show; he must not 

look for popularity from the congregation 

by placing himself before them 

as their primary interlocutor. Entering 

into the spirit of the Council means, 

on the contrary, making oneself disappear—relinquishing 

the center stage. 

Contrary to what has at times been 

sustained, and in conformity with the 

Conciliar Constitution, it is absolutely 

fitting that during the Penitential Rite, 

the singing of the Gloria, the orations 

and Eucharistic Prayer, for everyone—the 

priest and the congregation 

alike– to face ad orientem together, 

expressing their will to participate in 

It is time to start listening 

to the Council. The 

liturgy is “above all 

things the worship of 

the divine Majesty.” 


the work of worship and redemption 

accomplished by Christ. This way of 

doing things could be fittingly carried 

out in the cathedrals where the liturgical 

life must be exemplary (n. 4). 

To be very clear, there are other 

parts of the Mass where the priest, acting 

in persona Christi Capitis, enters 

into nuptial dialogue with the congregation. 

But this face-to-face has 

no other end than to lead them to a 

téte-à-tète with God, who through the 

grace of the Holy Spirit, will make it 

a heart-to-heart. The Council offers 

other means to favor participation 

through “ the acclamations , responses, 

psalmody, antiphons, and songs, as well 

as by actions, gestures, and bodily attitudes” 

(n.30). 

An excessively quick reading and 

above all, a far too human one, inferred 

that the faithful had to be kept constantly 

busy. Contemporary Western 

mentality, formed by technology and 

bewitched by the mass media, wanted 

to make the liturgy into a work of effective 

and profitable pedagogy. In this 

spirit, there was the attempt to render 

the celebrations convivial. The liturgical 

actors, animated by pastoral 

motives, tried at times to make it into 

didactic work by introducing secular 

and spectacular elements. Don’t we see 

testimonies, performances and clapping 

on the increase? They believe that 

participation is favored in this manner, 

whereas in fact, the liturgy is being 

reduced to a human game. 

“Silence is not a virtue, nor noise 

a sin, it is true,” says Thomas Merton, 

“but the continuous turmoil, confusion 

and noise in modern society or in certain 

African Eucharistic liturgies are 

an expression of the atmosphere of its 

most serious sins and its impiety and 

desperation. A world of propaganda 

and never-ending argumentations , of 

invectives, criticisms, or mere chattering, 

is a world in which life is not 

worth living. Mass becomes a confused 

din, the prayers an exterior or interior 

noise.” (Thomas Merton, The Sign of 

Jonah, French edition, Albin Michel, 

Paris, 1955, p. 322). 

We run the real risk of leaving no 

space for God in our celebrations. We 

risk the temptation of the Hebrews in 

the desert. They attempted to create 

worship according to their own stature 

and measure, but let us not forget they 

ended up prostrate before the idol of 

the Golden Calf. 

It is time to start listening to the 

Council. The liturgy is “above all 

things the worship of the Divine Majesty” 

(n.33). It has pedagogic worth in 

the measure wherein it is completely 

ordered to the glorification of God 

and Divine worship. The liturgy truly 

places us in the presence of divine transcendence. 

True participation means 

renewing in ourselves that “wonder” 

which St. John Paul II held in great consideration 

(Ecclesia de Eucharistia, n. 

6). This holy wonder, this joyful awe, 

requires our silence before the Divine 

Majesty. We often forget that holy 

silence is one of the means indicated 

by the Council to favor participation. 

If the liturgy is the work of Christ, 

is it necessary for the celebrant to 

introduce his own comments? We 

must remember that, when the Missal 

authorizes an intervention, this must 

not turn into a secular and human discourse, 

a comment more or less subtle 

on something of topical interest, 

nor a mundane greeting to the people 

present, but a very short exhortation so 

as to enter the Mystery (General Presentation 

of the Roman Missal, n.50). 

Regarding the homily, it is in itself a 

liturgical act which has its own rules.

Orthodoxy and Spirituality ■ by Cardinal Robert Sarah 

Participatio actuosa in the work of 

Christ presupposes that we leave the 

secular world so as to enter the “sacred 

action surpassing all other” (Sacrosanctum 

concilium, n.7). De facto, “we claim, 

with a certain arrogance, to stay in the 

human—to enter the divine.” (Robert 

Sarah, “Dieu ou rien”, p. 178). 

In such a sense, it is deplorable 

that the sanctuary (of the high altar) 

in our churches is not a place strictly 

reserved for divine worship, that secular 

clothes are worn in it, and that the 

sacred space is not clearly defined by 

the architecture. Since, as the Council 

teaches, Christ is present in His Word 

when this is proclaimed, it is similarly 

detrimental that the readers do not 

wear appropriate clothing indicating 

that they are not pronouncing human 

words but the Divine Word. 

The liturgy is fundamentally mystical 

and contemplative, and consequently 

beyond our human action; 

even the participatio is a grace from 

God. Therefore, it presupposes on our 

part an opening to the mystery being 

celebrated. Thus, the Constitution recommends 

full understanding of the 

rites (n.34) and at the same time prescribes 

that “the faithful may also be 

able to say or to sing together in Latin 

those parts of the Ordinary of the Mass 

which pertain to them” (n.54). 

In reality, the understanding of 

the rites is not an act of reason left to 

its own devices, which should accept 

everything, understand everything, 

master everything. The understanding 

of the sacred rites is that of sensus fidei, 

which exercises the living faith through 

symbols and which knows through 

“harmony” more than concept. This 

understanding presupposes that one 

draws close to the Divine Mystery with 

humility. 

But will we have the courage to follow 

the Council up to this point? Such 

a reading, illuminated by faith, is, however, 

fundamental for evangelization. 

In fact, “to those who are outside as a 

sign lifted up among the nations under 

which the scattered children of God 

may be gathered together” (n.2). It [the 

reading of Sacrosanctum concilium] 

must stop being a place of disobedience 

to the prescriptions of the Church. 

More specifically, it cannot be an 

occasion for laceration among Catholics. 

The dialectic readings of Sacrosanctum 

concilium—i.e., the hermeneutics 

of rupture in one sense or 

another—are not the fruit of a spirit 

of faith. The Council did not want to 

break with the liturgical forms inherited 

from Tradition, rather it wanted to 

deepen them. The Constitution establishes 

that “any new forms adopted 

should in some way grow organically 

from forms already existing” (n.23). 

In this sense, it is necessary that 

those celebrating according to the usus 

antiquior do so without any spirit of 

opposition, and hence in the spirit of 

Sacrosanctum concilium. In the same 

way, it would be wrong to consider the 

Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite 

as deriving from another theology that 

is not the reformed liturgy. It would 

also be desirable that the Penitential 

We often forget that holy 

silence is one of the means 

indicated by the Council 

to favor participation. 

Rite and the Offertory of the usus 

antiquior be inserted as an enclosure 

in the next edition of the Missal with 

the aim of stressing that the two liturgical 

reforms illuminate one another, 

in continuity and with no opposition. 

If we live in this spirit, then the liturgy 

will stop being a place of rivalry 

and criticisms, ultimately allowing us 

to participate actively in that liturgy 

“which is celebrated in the holy city of 

Jerusalem toward which we journey as 

pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the 

right hand of God, a minister of the 

holies and of the true tabernacle” (n.8). 

Cardinal Robert Sarah is Prefect of 

the Congregation for Divine Worship 

and the Discipline of the Sacraments. 

This article first appeared in the official 

Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore 

Romano, on June 12, 2015. The English 

translation was done by Francesca 

Romana for rorate-caeli.blogspot.com. 


Beyond the Pablum 

Archbishop Lefebvre, 

Pope Paul VI, and 

Catholic Tradition 

BY NEIL MCCAFFREY 

Not every papal or 

conciliar statement is 

infallible, or even wise. 

Not every papal policy 

is prudent, or in the best 

interests of the Faith. 

The article below was originally 

written in 1977 but 

as best we can determine 

was never published. It 

puts forth the view of one 

learned Catholic layman, prior to the 

suspension of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, 

the founder of the Society of St. Pius 

X, which has just been regularized by 

Pope Francis, who decreed, as his Year 

of Mercy dawned, that its priests are 

free to hear confessions. The author of 

this piece, the late Neil McCaffrey, was 

neither a member of the SSPX nor a 

partisan. But he did know the Church 

inside-out, and knew something of 

Catholic history and politics. 

The Lefebvre case is bringing orthodox 

American Catholics to a boil. The 

dispute, long simmering, centers on 

Pope Paul VI, but it concerns not only 

the merits of one individual pope. History 

is full of such ad hoc squabbles, and 

history deals with them in its own good 

time. The present dispute raises more 

basic questions. What, if any, are the limits 

of papal power? What does a living 

pope owe not merely to the doctrines 

of the Church but to its traditions? Its 

usages? What does he owe to the ideas 

and policies of his predecessors? What 

should be his relations to a world hostile 

to the Faith? 

40 

To one group—let’s call them the 

conservatives—the questions exist not 

as subjects for exploration but simply 

as points for affirmation, slogans for 

the troops. The pope can do no wrong 

(or, if he can, don’t mention it till he’s 

in the grave a safe century or so). Ours 

not to reason why, or question; ours but 

to rally round the papal flag, with the 

conservatives establishing the ground 

rules for Flag Day. 

The opposition have no such simple 

formula to counter with. The opposition 

are groping—and bleeding. And the 

dispute is the more poignant, the more 

bitter, because most of the opposition 

until yesterday ranged themselves with 

the conservatives. 

But then, reality broke through. 

For some years after the Council, the 

conventional line had been: the Pope 

is isolated/misled/uninformed/captive/what-have-you. 

This position 

always depended on a vast innocence 

of Church and human affairs, and moreover 

needed occasional tokens that the 

Pope was really on their side. The pressure 

of catastrophe had to eat away at 

that position—particularly when the 

Pope was at pains to show that he does 

indeed know what is going on, that he 

is indeed the author of these policies, 

that he is no fool, and that he is not at all 

pleased with Catholics who oppose him.

Beyond the Pablum ■ by Neil McCaffrey 

When these facts began to hit home, 

less balanced Catholics reached for new 

explanations, and came up with kookery: 

the Pope is a Communist/Freemason/imposter; 

or was invalidly elected; or 

is drugged; and so on. Sensible Catholics, 

rejecting all this nonsense but still confronting 

the cruel fact of a pope hostile 

to much of what they hold sacred, had to 

enter upon what may be called, at least 

analogously, their dark night of the soul. 

But if God is there, dark nights of 

the soul can be illuminating. Troubled 

Catholics began to consider seriously 

what had once been mere abstractions 

to them. Not every papal or conciliar 

statement is infallible, or even wise. Not 

every papal policy is prudent, or in the 

best interests of the Faith. No pope, St. 

Peter himself knows, is beyond error, 

and no humble pope refuses to correct 

his error. And, as Dante and St. John 

Chrysostom once told us, some popes 

do go to Hell. 

These truths had almost to force 

themselves on many a conscientious 

Catholic. But once they did, these Catholics 

made a wondrous discovery: the 

truth had set them free. They found to 

their delight that they had at last joined 

the Catholic mainstream of centuries. 

Now the traditions they revered meant 

so much more to them as they became 

more deeply a part of those traditions. 

They drew strength from those traditions. 

To be specific, they found in Catholic 

tradition almost universal respect, 

even reverence, for the pope as St. Peter’s 

successor—but nothing of the pope-cando-no-wrong 

aberration. They found 

some courtier flattery of popes, but none 

from Catholics who had a decent respect 

for the pope, and for themselves. They 

found among real Catholics a widespread 

love for the pope as father, and 

almost no papolatry. (A good son loves 

and respects his father—but he doesn’t 

praise him for coming home drunk. 

Refuting Stephen Decatur’s “My country, 

right or wrong,” Chesterton once 

remarked that it was like saying, “My 

mother, drunk or sober.”) 

God writes straight with crooked 

lines, and when disaster strikes the 

Church, Providence invariably seems to 

draw good from it. And why not? Christ, 

after all, has already conquered. Thus, 

the derelictions of the present papacy 

have forced thoughtful Catholics to 

reconsider the papolatry some had succumbed 

to in recent decades: a corrective 

badly needed in many quarters—just 

as, in the opposite direction, the Councils 

of Florence and Vatican I helped to 

right the balance after the Council of 

Constance had heaped indignities on 

the papacy. (Incidentally, I wonder how 

many edicts of Constance those council 

buffs among today’s conservatives would 

subscribe to. Or is the most recent Council 

the only one that counts?) 

But enlightenment of the sort that 

squares with Catholic tradition does not 

bestow on the loyal opposition the easy 

one-dimensional formulas generated by 

the Vatican cheerleaders. Loyal to the 

pope? Of course—but not to Honorius I 

when he errs or Sergius III when he murders. 

Peter must be corrected by Paul, 

and Gregory XI did not lack for courtiers 

to assure him that he was doing right by 

staying in Avignon. But the girl who told 

him bluntly that his place was in Rome, 

and just as bluntly urged him to resign 

if he would not exercise his authority, is 

honored as one of the great women in 

Catholic history, St. Catherine of Siena. 

My disagreement with some in the 

conservative Catholic media is twofold: 

they distort our present crisis, and 

are not even true to their own murky 

principles. They distort by suppressing 

news about the Pope—which is to say, 

they fail as Catholic journalists. They 

never report when the Pope receives a 

Communist leader, or Women’s Lib pioneer 

Betty Friedan, or mass murderer 

Idi Amin. They do not tell us that he 

refused to meet with an international 

pilgrimage of traditional Catholics even 

though they kept an all-night prayer vigil 

in St. Peter’s Square—though at the same 

time he was receiving three Portuguese 

revolutionaries. We could never have 

learned from them that the Pope joined 

with the international Left to condemn 

the Franco government for executing 

the Spanish terrorists. In papers that 

proclaim admiration for the Pope, why 

is news of so many of his key activities 

carefully excluded? 

The answer may be that the conservative 

Catholic press finds these activities 

shameful. But doesn’t this repugnance 

really speak well for it? I think not. First 

of all, Catholic newspapers must print 

Catholic news honestly, or they fail in 

their first duty. But more than that, suppressing 

news about the Pope says something 

interesting about one’s professed 

admiration for him. If it cannot bring 

itself to report activities it finds shameful, 

why does the conservative Catholic 

press at the same time pretend that the 

Pope is blameless? 

There is one other alternative: the 

conservative Catholic press shares the 

Pope Paul VI understands 

his Council far better 

than his conservative 

admirers. He has never 

disguised his conviction 

that the Council was 

the gateway to change. 


Beyond the Pablum ■ by Neil McCaffrey 

The conservative 

Catholic press is the 

prisoner of its own 

inconsistency, trapped 

in it by a liberal Pope. 

Pope’s penchant for revolutionaries, 

but dares not let on for fear of losing its 

readers. But this explanation is absurd 

on the face of it. The first alternative is 

the only one that rings true. The conservative 

Catholic press is the prisoner of 

its own inconsistency, trapped in it by 

a liberal Pope. 

Of course they don’t have to be 

trapped. What they can do, what I hope 

someday they will do, is to subject their 

premises to a good dose of Catholic history, 

swear off papolatry, and take the 

cure. It may pinch, but adversity is the 

price of growth, and a channel of grace. 

The situation of papal-loyalist organizations 

differs in one way from that 

of the press: they are not newspapers. 

They therefore have no obligation to 

report awkward facts—though they do 

have an obligation to face them. I believe 

they, and the like-minded Catholic press, 

resist the facts, and here also fall short 

of their own principles. 

Their position is familiar: the conciliar 

documents are blameless; the Pope is 

just as blameless as guardian of the Faith 

and tradition; everything bad that has 

happened has happened in spite of the 

Pope and the Council. 

Who can deny the enormous emotional 

appeal of this position? Almost 

every orthodox Catholic used to hold it, 

if he doesn’t now. Every orthodox Catholic 

wishes he could hold it. There is only 

one argument against it: it isn’t true. 


Among other things, the argument 

is jejune. As if Church councils are only 

judged by their documents! People who 

think this have no sense of the texture 

of human affairs, hence of history. If we 

judge the Council of Constance merely 

off the handful of disciplinary measures 

it passed and Martin V signed, 

we would yawn and give it a paragraph 

in Church history. How different was 

the reality—an anti-papal orgy the like 

of which the Church has never seen (save 

perhaps in the last fifteen years), whose 

effects dogged the Church for more than 

four centuries. 

Not surprisingly, Pope Paul VI 

understands his Council far better than 

his conservative admirers. He has never 

disguised his conviction that the Council 

was the gateway to change in the Church, 

and was meant to be. And he has underscored 

this, pointing out that Gaudium 

et Spes was a break with the old Catholic 

view of the world held by many of the 

saints. (He could with greater accuracy 

have said all of the saints—not to mention 

the authors of the Epistles, and our 

Lord Himself.) 

As for the conciliar documents themselves, 

they require an exegesis that could 

fill a bookshelf. But they do breathe a 

spirit, especially where they deal with 

temporal problems, that clashes with the 

structures of earlier popes on liberalism 

and humanism. 

It is no accident that liberals the 

world over sang hymns to the Council. 

Were they all wrong? The children of 

this world are wise in their generation. 

The liberals know their own. In particular, 

they know that the Council moved 

their way on religious liberty—whereas 

they despised the views of earlier popes 

(who, in turn, were simply repeating 

what had been the unvarying attitude 

of the Church since the Apostolic Age). If 

the Council did not offer a wholly novel 

view of religious liberty (novel, that is, 

for the Church; it is old hat for liberals), 

then words have lost all meaning. This, 

I suspect, is one reason why Archbishop 

Lefebvre is denied his hearing. The Vatican 

is loath to defend a hopeless case, 

even in its own court. 

But the Pope himself has given us 

the final refutation of the conservative 

position, in condemning Archbishop 

Lefebvre. Among other things the Pope 

demands that the Archbishop accept 

the post-conciliar “orientations” of the 

Church—which are, by definition, new, 

or else the Pope, the Archbishop, and the 

rest of us would be arguing over nothing. 

Which leads to my point that the 

conservative axis is here again betraying 

its own position. Why do they decline 

to follow the post-conciliar orientations? 

The Pope has endorsed them. Why do 

they resist the pentecostal wave? The 

Pope smiles on it. Why do they shy 

away from the revolutionary activities 

of papal appointees in the Third World? 

Why do they quarrel with theological 

ideas that are taught in Rome’s pontifical 

seminaries? Why do they argue 

with catechisms imposed by nearly all 

the bishops of the world? These bishops, 

after all, are answerable to the Pope; most 

are appointees; and the caliber of the 

appointments has remained constant 

over fourteen years. 

I think I know why. Scratch a conservative—and 

more often than not you’ll 

find a traditionalist. But a traditionalist 

who shrinks from resolving the ambiguity 

of his own position. This is not 

surprising. It hurts to change. 

Which is just what we’ve been telling 

our father, the Pope. Who isn’t listening, 

and doesn’t care. 

For a brief biography of the late 

Neil McCaffrey please see page 4.

Fine Sermons 

Remembering the Ember Days: 

A Casualty of “Reform” 

From the fourth lesson from 

the prophet Zecharia: These 

then are the things which you 

shall do: Speak the truth 

every one to his neighbor; 

judge truth and judgment of peace in 

your gates; and let none of you imagine 

evil in your hearts against his friend. 

How many present here know the 

origin of the Japanese word, tempura? 

This word has come into the English 

language and is well known especially 

to those who like fried shrimp: shrimp 

tempura. It is not a secret but a fact not 

well known that this word in its Latin 

form was introduced to the Japanese by 

Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in the 

context of the Mass we are celebrating 

today, today being Ember Saturday in 

September, otherwise known as Quattuor 

Anni Tempora, the four times of 

the year. These days were and are, at 

least in the Extraordinary Form of the 

Roman rite, days of abstinence. And 

so the Portuguese Jesuits, to help their 

converts plan meals that were meatless, 

introduced them to fried shrimp, to be 

eaten during the Quattuor Tempora, 

and the Japanese still call shrimp fried 

in a batter, tempura, from Tempora. 

Most here, but more than most 

Catholics, do not know that the Ember 

Days go back to at least the fourth century 

in the Church, and that Pope Leo 

believed they were of apostolic origin. 

They occur four times in the year: after 

St Lucy’s Day in December, after Ash 

Wednesday, after Pentecost, and after 

the Feast of the Holy Cross in September. 

The Ember Days are always 

on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. 

And if you look at when they occur, 

you see that they come at the beginning 

of the natural seasons of the year: 

autumn, winter, spring and summer. 

These wonderful days marked a 

pause in the year, when the natural calendar 

and the Church calendar paused 

to take stock of the present and to look 

forward to the future, invoking God in 

behalf of the spiritual life of the individual 

and beseeching the Almighty 

that the physical needs of the men and 

women of the world would be met— 

praying for things like good weather, 

a good harvest, justice and peace. And 

if you look at the prayers and readings 

for this Ember Day Mass, you will see 

all of these elements come together. 

The Ember Days were also associated 

with prayers for vocations and as a 

time for ordinations: after the Kyrie the 

Tonsure was conferred; after the first 

lesson, the door-keepers are ordained; 

after the second, the readers; after the 

third, the exorcists; after the fourth, 

the acolytes; after the fifth, the subdeacons; 

after the epistle, the deacons; 

and before the last verse of the Tract, 

the priests. 

43 

A Sermon for Ember 

Saturday, 22 September 2012 

BY FR. RICHARD G. CIPOLLA

Fine Sermons ■ by Fr. Richard G. Cipolla 

One of the tragedies of the 

post-Conciliar time of the Church is 

the disappearance of the Ember Days. 

As part of the liturgical reform, the 

Ember Days were suppressed, but Pope 

Paul VI asked that the bishops of each 

country encourage the celebration of 

Masses during the year that would echo 

the themes of the Ember Days. He also 

lifted the requirement of abstinence for 

these days. But the fact is that once a 

custom grounded in Tradition is made 

optional or left to the judgment of a 

local church, that custom disappears. 

In retrospect, we can see that at the 

very time when Catholics, faced with 

an increasingly secular culture, needed 

these four times in the year to fast 

and pray in the rhythm of the Church 

year and the year of nature to remind 

themselves of who they are and what is 

ultimately important, the Ember Days 

were removed from the universal calendar 

in the name of reform. 

Surely the loss of Catholic 

identity that is a mark 

of this present time is in 

part due to the removal 

and suppression of those 

very ways, liturgically 

and naturally, that are 

reminders to Catholics 

of who they are and to 

what they are called. 


Surely the loss of Catholic identity 

that is a mark of this present time is in 

part due to the removal and suppression 

of those very ways, liturgically and 

naturally, that are reminders to Catholics 

of who they are and to what they 

are called. It is a great blessing that we 

come here today and celebrate this Saturday 

Ember Day in this shrine church. 

And we do so in the presence of the 

mortal remains of una santa grande, 

a great saint, Mother Frances Xavier 

Cabrini. She heard these readings every 

year at Mass, and surely they resonated 

with her and her mission. Jesus’ healing 

miracle in the Gospel must have struck 

her in a special way, she for whom faith 

and good works were inseparable. 

Like all great saints, Mother Cabrini 

understood that faith is not something 

that is held close and put into a lovely 

box to look at when the mood strikes. 

She thought she had a calling to the religious 

life early on in Italy, but because 

of her poor health, she was refused. So 

she went to run an orphanage in Lombardia, 

and it was there that she drew 

other women around her and founded 

the beginnings of what she envisaged as 

a missionary institute and what would 

eventually become the Missionary Sisters 

of the Sacred Heart. 

Perhaps somewhat romantically, 

she dreamed of a missionary effort in 

China. But in her meeting with the 

great Pope Leo XIII, she heard from 

him those words oft quoted: Not to 

the East, Sister, but to the West. For 

the Pope was acutely aware of the dire 

need for a ministry to the hundreds of 

thousands of Italian immigrants who 

came to the United States to escape the 

poverty and the turmoil of their life in 

Italy, especially in the poverty-stricken 

southern part of Italy. They came here 

not knowing the language, strangers 

in a foreign land, looked down upon, 

unsure of their faith in a Protestant 

country, subject to proselytizing by 

those taking advantage of their ignorance 

and poverty. 

And so Mother Cabrini came to 

New York, hoping to found an orphanage 

for Italian immigrant children. 

Cardinal Corrigan told her that it was 

not opportune to do what she wanted 

to do and told her to return to Italy. 

But Mother Cabrini did not return to 

Italy, and instead stayed in Manhattan 

and ministered in a remarkable way to 

the Italian immigrants. And she ministered 

to them not only spiritually but 

in practical ways: in housing, in education, 

in gaining employment. She was 

a realist, and this realism came from 

her Catholic faith. She said: “When one 

works for the glory of God, then His 

works are subjected to violence. This 

is why I am never surprised when I 

meet opposition in my ventures. In fact, 

I look upon them as good signs. For 

to whatever degree I am confronted 

by opposition or violence, that is the 

measure of how much I succeeded in 

glorifying the Divine Majesty.” 

Mother Cabrini was not just another 

woman who did much good among the 

poor and dispossessed. Her holiness 

came from her faith that compelled 

her to do what she did. This is what 

our age does not understand. Contrary 

to the New York Times, it does matter 

for a Catholic religious whether he or 

she is at one with the teaching of the 

Church, for without this unity of mind, 

heart and spirit with the Church, good 

works performed are not what they 

should be: pointers to the love of God 

in Jesus Christ, without which all good 

works are in vain. What drove her was 

her love for Christ. She said: I will go 

anywhere and do anything in order to 

communicate the love of Jesus to those 

who do not know Him or who have


… the Mass we celebrate here today was the Mass 

that Mother Cabrini knew and loved; it is the Mass 

that was at the heart of her life as a Catholic and 

religious; it is the Mass that strengthened her and 

enabled her to do the remarkable things she did… 

forgotten Him. And she brought Christ 

to the poor not only in New York, but in 

Chicago and Denver and Louisiana and 

California, and yes, even to New Jersey. 

And even to Argentina and Brazil and 

Nicaragua: wherever there were poor 

immigrants, she ministered to them 

in the name of Christ. 

Mother Cabrini loved this country 

and its people deeply and became an 

American citizen—and became the 

first American citizen to be canonized. 

We must remember this as well: the 

Mass we celebrate here today was the 

Mass that Mother Cabrini knew and 

loved; it is the Mass that was at the 

heart of her life as a Catholic and religious; 

it is the Mass that strengthened 

her and enabled her to do the remarkable 

things she did; it is the Mass to 

which she brought back so many immigrants 

who had fallen away. 

We ask the intercession today of 

Mother Cabrini: that the Traditional 

Mass may bring back to the Church the 

many who have drifted away from the 

Faith; that the Traditional Mass may 

once again be the light that shines in 

the darkness, the antidote to the grey 

secularism of our time that threatens 

faith itself; that more and more young 

priests may be brought to the beauty 

and truth of this Mass and so be transformed 

spiritually, just as the bread 

and wine are transformed at this Mass 

into the Body and Blood of Christ. And 

finally we address her, she who is present 

with us at this Mass with all the 

angels and saints in that language that 

was hers from her birth, that language 

of art and music, quella lingua la più 

bella del mondo. Madre Cabrini, prega 

per la Chiesa Cattolica. Aiuta il nostro 

Papa, Benedetto, che abbia corraggio, 

fede, e santità. O Santa Francesca Savero, 

prega che la messa tradizionale può 

rinnovare la Chiesa e riscaldare il cuore 

dei suoi fedeli. Prega per tutti noi, che 

possiamo portare l’amore di Cristo in 

un mondo che ha dimenticato che cos’è 

l’amore. 

Fr. Richard Cipolla is pastor of St. Mary 

church in Norwalk, CT, an Oxford Ph.D., 

and a convert from Anglicanism. 


Fine Sermons 

The Celebration of the 

Traditional Roman Mass is 

a Prophetic Statement 

Sermon for the 14th Sunday 

After Pentecost, 2015 

BY FR. RICHARD G. CIPOLLA 

Yesterday was the feast day 

of the Beheading of St. 

John the Baptist. I would 

like to say that there are 

very few people who do 

not know the details of the story surrounding 

the beheading—which actually 

has a proper English word derived 

from the Latin—the “decollation” of 

St. John the Baptist. But we live in a 

culture in which stories from the Bible 

no longer form an integral part of the 

culture. It would be interesting to do 

a survey in Grand Central Station at 

rush hour and ask people if they have 

ever heard of the Beheading of St. John 

the Baptist, or even whether they have 

heard of St. John the Baptist. 

But those possessing an aesthetic 

sensibility would know about this 

event, for the story, with its lurid 

details, has been the basis of paintings 

by artists from Fra Lippo Lippi to 

Titian and Caravaggio. Oscar Wilde’s 

play in French called Salomé, which he 

(of course) wrote before his deathbed 

conversion, was notorious in its day. 

The script was made into an opera by 

Richard Strauss that still plays in opera 

houses throughout the world, its most 

famous scene being the Dance of the 

Seven Veils. 

Why do we celebrate this feast? We 

celebrate this feast for the same reason 

we celebrate the birth of John the Baptist 

in June as a first class feast: because 

of who he is in salvation history. John 

the Baptist is not only the forerunner 

of Christ. He who comes out of the desert 

preaching repentance for sin is the 

last of the prophets, that majestic line 

including Moses and Elijah and Jeremiah 

and Isaiah and Zephaniah and 

Malachi. And the role of the prophet 

was to speak the word of the Lord God 

to his people and, most often, to tell the 

people that they had turned their backs 

on the law of God and were sinning 

grievously and if they did not repent, 

terrible things would happen to them. 

Most of the prophets were reluctant to 

take on this mantle. Moses demurred 

on the basis of a speech impediment, 

Isaiah claimed unworthiness, Jonah 

tried to get out of it by running away 

by ship—with disastrous results. The 

calling of Jeremiah is one of the most 

moving of prophetic callings: 

The word of the Lord came to me thus: 

“Before I formed you in the womb I 

knew you, before you were born I dedicated 

you, a prophet to the nations I 

appointed you.” 

46


“Ah, Lord God,” I said, “I know 

not how to speak; I am too young.” 

“Say not ‘I am too young.’ To 

whomever I send you, you shall go; 

whatever I command you, you shall 

speak. Have no fear before them. Because 

I am with you to deliver you,” 

says the Lord. Then the Lord extended 

his hand and touched my mouth! 

“See I place my words in your mouth. 

“This day I set you over nations 

and over kingdoms, to root up and to 

tear down, to destroy and to demolish, 

to build and to plant….But do 

you gird your loins; stand up and tell 

them all that I command you…They 

will fight against you, but not prevail 

over you, for I am with you to deliver 

you,” says the Lord. (Jer. 1:1-19) 

Jeremiah’s pleas for a return to 

God to the kings and people of Judah 

went unheeded, and Jerusalem was 

destroyed by Babylon in the sixth century 

B.C., and Jeremiah was forced into 

exile into Egypt and some say was murdered 

there by his own countrymen. 

Not a happy ending. 

But neither was the ending of the 

last of the prophets, John the Baptist. 

What did John die for? He died for 

the truth. And truth, when one dies 

for it, is never general, it is never an 

abstraction. It is always specific. John 

declared that King Herod’s marriage 

was unlawful and the relationship was 

adulterous. This stung Herod’s wife 

deeply, and when the opportunity 

came, she demanded John’s death. We 

all know the story about Herod’s big 

banquet for all the important people 

in Jerusalem and how Herod’s wife’s 

daughter from her previous marriage 

danced and delighted the inebriated 

king, who promised her anything she 

wanted. And what her mother wanted, 

asked for and got was John the Baptist’s 

head on a platter. Not a happy ending. 

But prophets never have happy endings. 

For their job is to shout clearly the 

reality of the state of affairs: that the 

people have strayed from the paths of 

righteousness, that they have strayed 

from the Commandments of God, 

that the way they worship has become 

corrupt and syncretistic, worshipping 

other gods in the name of tolerance and 

fitting in. It is true that there were times 

when the prophet’s voice was heeded 

…prophets never have happy endings. For their 

job is to shout clearly the reality of the state of 

affairs: that the people have strayed from the paths 

of righteousness, that they have strayed from the 

Commandments of God, that the way they worship 

has become corrupt and syncretistic, worshipping 

other gods in the name of tolerance and fitting in. 

and reform accepted, but those times 

are the great exception. 

And what of the prophetic voice 

of the Catholic Church today? The 

prophetic voice against abortion was 

indeed heard but too late to prevent 

the passage of Roe v. Wade. And that 

prophetic voice is growing dimmer as 

society rushes toward a hell-bent individualistic 

liberalism that is intolerant 

of any voice raised in opposition. The 

prophet always speaks directly to those 

involved in the corrupt society: to the 

king, to the priests, to the people. The 

prophet would thunder and ask Barack 

Obama directly: “What does it mean to 

call yourself a Christian and support 

abortion as a right? How is this consonant 

with God-given life and with love? 

Repent and return to God!” 

We will soon embark on a year of 

official political debates, not something 

to look forward to. But imagine if a 

prophet stood up and looked at Hillary 

Clinton in the eye and thundered: 

“How in God’s name can you support 

abortion and Planned Parenthood and 

call yourself a Methodist Christian? On 

what teachings of Christ do you base 

your moral choices?” And the prophet 

would not let her retreat into the mantra 

of “My religion is a personal thing 

and I will not force everyone to believe 

as I do.” The prophet would look Joe 

Biden in the eye and ask: “How can 

you as a Catholic vote for and support 

positions on moral issues that are contrary 

to the faith in which you claim 

to believe? How does this square with 

the clear teaching of the Church on 

these issues? Turn back to the Lord 

and repent you of your ways!” And the 

prophet would ask similar and terribly 

uncomfortable questions and demand 

an answer of all the candidates of both 

parties. But the odds are not good that 

such a prophet will be among those 



This Mass is a prophetic 

gesture not only to the 

world but to the Church, 

which like the Israelites of 

old wants to be relevant 

to the world by playing 

catch-up with a society 

that increasingly hates 

all that the Church 

stands for and is. 

men and women who will be part of 

the reality show that we call political 

debate. 

But we must remember that even if 

there were such prophets their message 

would be rejected over and over again. 

That is the state of what the world has 

been, is, and always will be. That is not 

pessimism; it is reality. The world will 

ever be in opposition to the law of God, 

which is the law of love. 

May I suggest this to you: that what 

we do here today in the celebration of 

the Traditional Roman Mass is a prophetic 

statement. The celebration of 

this Mass thunders against the noise 

and babble of the world, the noise that 

fills so many of our churches as well, 

this Mass thunders against the noise 

with its silence. This Mass that is the 

distillation of centuries of worship 

prophesies against the cult of the new 

that drives so many of us to distraction. 

The beauty of this Mass, with its choreography 

that points ineffably away 

from itself, prophesies against a society 

awash in the destructive forces of 

pornography and sexual license and 

in the forgetting of the Christian and 

classical understanding of beauty, a 

society that has forgotten what beauty 

is. This Mass is a prophetic gesture not 

only to the world but to the Church, 

which like the Israelites of old wants 

to be relevant to the world by playing 

catch-up with a society that increasingly 

hates all that the Church stands 

for and is. And so it is no wonder that 

there is hostility within the Church 

among her bishops and priests to this 

Mass, for a prophet is never welcome 

in his own house. 

We can thank God, in some sense, 

that we have not been called to be Jeremiah 

to this culture. Most of us wear 

ear-plugs to avoid hearing that call. For 

to hear that call would indeed be difficult 

and would risk an unhappy ending. 

But we can and do thank God that 

He gives us grace and strength each 

day to be faithful to his Word and to 

his Church and that we are fed in this 

place in Word and Sacrament. And for 

that we say: Deo gratias. 



The Glory of the Low Mass 

The tiny transept had its 

little altar, with a Greek 

cross in relief against a 

purple disk. Overhead 

the enormous curve of 

the vaulting hung heavy, and so low 

that a man could touch it by stretching 

an arm; it was as black as the mouth of 

a chimney, and scorched by the fires 

that had consumed the cathedrals built 

above it. 

Presently the clap-clap of sabots 

became audible, and then the smothered 

footfall of nuns; there was silence 

but for sneezing and nose-blowing stifled 

by pocket-handkerchiefs, and then 

all was still. 

A sacristan came in through a little 

door opening into the other transept, 

and lighted the tapers on the high 

altar; then strings of silver-gilt hearts 

became visible in the semicircle all 

along the walls, reflecting the blaze 

of flames, and forming a glory for a 

statue of the Virgin sitting, stiff and 

dark, with a Child on Her knees. This 

was the famous Virgin of the Cavern, 

or rather a copy of it, for the original 

was burnt in 1793 in front of the great 

porch of the Cathedral, amid the delirious 

raving of sans-culottes. 

A choir-boy came in, followed by an 

old priest; and then, for the first time, 

Durtal saw the Mass really as a service, 

and understood the wonderful beauty 

that lies inherent in a devout commemoration 

of the Sacrifice. 

The boy on his knees, his soul aspiring 

and his hands clasped, spoke aloud 

and slowly, rehearsing the responses of 

the Psalm with such deep attention and 

respect that the meaning of this noble 

liturgy, which has ceased to amaze us, 

because we are so used to hearing it 

stammered out in hot haste, was suddenly 

revealed to Durtal. 

And the priest himself, unconsciously, 

whether he would or no, took 

up the child’s tone, imitating him, 

speaking slowly, not merely tripping 

the verses off the tip of his tongue, 

but absorbed in the words he had to 

repeat; and he seemed overwhelmed, 

as though it were his first Mass, by the 

grandeur of the rite of which he was to 

be the instrument. 

In fact, Durtal heard the celebrant’s 

voice tremble when standing before 

the altar in the presence of the Father, 

like the Son Himself whom he represented, 

and imploring forgiveness for 

all the sins of the world which He bore 

on His shoulders, supported in his grief 

and hope by the innocence of the child 

whose loving care was less mature and 

less lively than the man’s. 

And as he spoke the despairing 

words, “My God, wherefore is my spirit 

heavy, and why dost Thou afflict me?” 

[Psalm 42] the priest was indeed the 

image of Jesus suffering on the hill 

49 

Together with the Martyrs 

in the Catacombs 

BY J.K. HUYSMANS 

AN EXCERPT FROM J.K. HUYSMANS 

NOVEL, THE CATHEDRAL (1898)

Orthodoxy and Spirituality ■ by J.K. Huysmans 

of Calvary, but the man remained in 

the celebrant—the man, conscious of 

himself, and himself experiencing, in 

behoof of his personal sins and his own 

shortcomings, the impressions of sorrow 

contained in the inspired text. 

Meanwhile his little acolyte had 

words of comfort, bid him hope; and 

after repeating the Confiteor in the 

face of the congregation, who on their 

part purified their souls by the same 

ablution of confession, the priest with 

revived assurance went up the altar 

steps and began the Mass. 

Positively, in this atmosphere of 

prayers crushed in by the heavy roof, 

Durtal, in the midst of the kneeling 

Sisters and women, was struck with a 

sense as of some early Christian rite 

buried in the catacombs. Here were 

the same ecstatic tenderness, the same 

faith; and it was possible even to imagine 

some apprehension of surprise, and 

some eagerness to profess the faith in 

the face of danger. And thus, as in a 

vague image, this sacred cellar held the 

dim picture of the neophytes assembled 

so long since in the underground 

catacombs of Rome. 

Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) 

was a French novelist best known 

for his novel À rebours. This excerpt 

from The Cathedral first appeared 

on rorate-caeli.blogspot.com. 



Switching to the 

Traditional Mass 

In 2008, the sole Trappist Monastery in Germany, the Abbey of Mariawald, 

became the first (and, so far, the only) Trappist monastery to completely 

return to the pre-Conciliar liturgical books since the liturgical reforms of 

the 1960s. It was one of the few houses in the world to make use of what is 

stated at Art. 3 of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum (allowing for 

whole religious houses to become exclusively traditional), and this only after, it 

was repeatedly reported then, the personal intervention of Pope Benedict XVI. 

In May 2013, Father Abbot Dom Josef Vollberg granted an admirable interview 

to German Catholic paper Die Tagespost, and it had never been translated. Following 

is the translation by the traditional Catholic weblog Rorate Caeli (roratecaeli.blogspot.com). 

“The reawakened wisdom of 

centuries seems to help the 

priest become more priest, 

and the monk more monk.” 

Most Reverend Father Abbot, four 

years ago you changed your abbey 

over to the Extraordinary Form. 

What changes did this bring to your 

monastery? 

We were able to celebrate the first Solemn 

Mass in the classical Roman Rite 

here in Mariawald in January 2009. 

And then, one month later, we began 

to celebrate Conventual Mass in the 

Extraordinary Form. At first, not all 

the brethren welcomed this change. 

But in the meantime the situation has 

somewhat improved. Of course, as a 

priest, one had to learn how to celebrate 

the Rite, which was demanding 

and far from easy. And also, one had to 

re-familiarize oneself with Latin. Little 

by little, we completed the change. The 

second step was to sing the office of 

Terce in the traditional form, on Sundays, 

before Holy Mass. In this way 

we were able to establish liturgical 

unity. And then, we gradually changed 

over the Little Hours: Sext, None and 

Compline. Later, we did the same with 

Vespers and Lauds. And then, finally, 

from 2009 to 2010 we did the same 

with Vigils. This meant giving ourselves 

wholly to this liturgy, with its 

more intensive theocentric character, 

which suits our contemplative vocation 

in a special way. 

What kind of spiritual development 

have you noticed since then? What 

has been the effect of this change to 

the Extraordinary Form on your 

community? 

We must not underestimate the spiritual 

enrichment, which has been 

brought about by the search for and 

rediscovery of the sources. Important 

features of ecclesial tradition can now 

51

Orthodoxy and Spirituality ■ an Interview with Father Abbot Dom Josef Vollberg 

once again play a significant role. Our 

monastic vocation receives its character 

from the Rule of Saint Benedict, which 

we have vowed to observe. The Rule of 

Saint Benedict and the Latin Liturgy in 

the older Form constitute a symbiosis, 

within which the one fosters the understanding 

and significance of the other. 

Just as the Holy Sacrifice is offered 

daily, so is a portion of holy Rule read 

every day, and usually it falls to me to 

interpret. And undoubtedly there is a 

lot of truth in the old adage: “Keep the 

Rule, and the Rule will keep you.” It 

must also be said, and more certainly, 

that no-one can survive without the 

Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The traditional 

form in which we now celebrate 

the Mass seems to suit us to an extraordinary 

degree. And also, the reawakened 

wisdom of centuries seems to help 

the priest become more priest, and the 

monk more monk. There is no doubt 

that this reform has changed some of 

us. And Mariawald has changed. But 

it would be asking too much of us, to 

evaluate the scale of this change. We 

must leave all that to God and to His 

Holy Mother, to Whom this place is 

dedicated. 

The Rule of Saint Benedict 

and the Latin Liturgy in 

the older Form constitute 

a symbiosis, within 

which the one fosters 

the understanding and 

significance of the other. 


Have more men entered since the 

changes, which were, after all, 

meant to bring this about? 

I would dispute that this was the aim 

of the Reform. The Sacred should not 

be used in this way. It was, in the first 

place, a question of God, and the honor 

which was His due. Of course, a monastery 

must give thought to vocations, 

but this cannot be its main aim. And 

yes, we did hope that a strengthening 

of monastic and Catholic ideals, 

brought about by the Reform, might 

result in a renewed attractiveness. And 

it is true that more have entered since 

then. However, a love of the Extraordinary 

Form is not enough to qualify 

someone for admission. Nor indeed, 

a love of the peculiarities of our own 

Cisterician Rite, with its small liturgical 

variations in the calendar, or sometimes 

slightly modified Mass formularies. 

To begin with, a man must have 

a real calling to be a monk. Hence it is 

important to be very careful in one’s 

choice of applicant. One needs to get 

to know him well. So before postulancy 

there is a probationary period 

of at least four weeks. This phase of 

mutual acquaintance is very important 

if one is to make the right decision 

over an admission. Large numbers have 

expressed an interest in our monastery. 

Since 2009, we have heard from 

more than forty. 2012 was a good year, 

with the rare event of a Solemn Profession. 

We also had the Clothing of a 

novice. So at present, things are going 

well. The real life of a monk presents 

an exceptional challenge to many people, 

for no-one can be a monk without 

sacrifice. Just the regular rising in the 

middle of the night is far from easy, 

for monks are human too. Admittedly, 

theirs is a special commitment. Let 

me clarify this a little. There are other 

professions whose duties include nightshifts, 

whether this be on the railways, 

in a bakery, or a hospital. As monks 

we do not have to do any work which 

offers concrete help to others, and yet 

we want to get up at 2:30. In this, we 

base ourselves on Christ, Who prayed 

at night. I also think of Saint Paul, who 

prayed by night in prison, and of the 

first monks, who did so deliberately, 

precisely when the day was still utterly 

fresh and unburdened. And thousands 

upon thousands have followed their 

example since then. “God first” is literally 

what we strive for in our life. 

Saint Benedict says that nothing should 

come before the worship of God. And 

this is why we begin our prayer at night 

at 3 o’clock, on behalf of so many people 

in the Church and in the world, in 

order, as it were, to break through the 

darkness, which so often surrounds us. 

And indeed in order to absorb something 

of God’s light which shines in 

the darkness. 

How have the Faithful who come 

to your Masses reacted? 

Their reactions varied greatly. Fortunately, 

protests tended to be rare. From 

among our regulars, apart from those 

who stayed, there were some who chose 

to go elsewhere. And then, there were 

several who came for the first time. 

Since the Reform, and this has been 

very striking, young people keep on 

coming, which used never to happen. 

And every so often, a lasting relationship 

would develop out of a casual visit. It 

may be that through the classical form 

of the Liturgy something is offered to 

the modern world which it lacks, this 

world so filled with technology, calculation, 

finance, and pleasure. And it is 

precisely the young who discover in our 

Liturgy an unobtrusive way of finding

Orthodoxy and Spirituality ■ an Interview with Father Abbot Dom Josef Vollberg 

Many people do not 

realize that it is also a 

question of the fullness of 

Faith, where we may not 

pick and choose. The Faith 

must be respected and 

cherished in its entirety. 

peace and prayer. Here one is not drawn 

inescapably into an organized dialogue, 

which one has continually to join in. 

One can sit down quietly and entrust 

oneself to what is taking place. One 

can follow it and bring to it all one’s 

intentions. The Divine Liturgy offers 

a space which is fortunately not under 

our dominion. Yes, indeed, God comes 

to us, if we abandon ourselves to the 

Liturgy, if we hand ourselves over to 

Him, Who stands here at the very heart 

of things. I am glad to say, that we have 

received numerous positive emails and 

letters. However, some were very negative, 

and not far removed from hatred, 

giving voice to the greatest incomprehension. 

Rejection of the Extraordinary 

Form was often linked to rejection of the 

Holy Father, who had authorized and 

encouraged the Reform with fatherly 

generosity. One can sense the presence 

of a subtle incomprehension and even 

stupidity surrounding the monastery. 

Since the Pope himself approved our 

undertaking, I do hope that the Reform 

has God’s blessing, since it is, in the end, 

a question of the honor due to Him, and 

also of the salvation of souls, an aspect 

frequently forgotten today. We believe in 

God, we believe in eternal life, which He 

has prepared for those who love Him. 

In the Credo during Holy Mass, we profess 

our Faith in eternal life. Our life 

should lead us into this eternity. And 

the Reform of Mariawald should help 

us to reach that goal. 

Are you in touch with communities 

abroad? 

Well, really very little. Our problem is 

that we are few in number, and so it is 

often difficult for us to keep in touch 

with other monasteries. There are only 

ten of us, of whom several are older. 

And I, as Abbot, am very largely taken 

up with duties in the house. There has 

been closer contact with individual 

Benedictine monasteries of Tradition 

in France, e.g. with Le Barroux and 

Fontgombault, or others, or with Vyssi 

Brod in the Czech Republic. And we 

are often in touch with the priests of 

the Fraternity of St. Peter, working in 

‘the world,’ who are very close to us 

through the Mass. However, there is 

often a very different dynamism at 

work in a contemplative monastery. 

Of course sometimes we must leave 

our own small world to attend to certain 

important matters. But usually the 

work inside the house is so demanding 

that life is more than full. 

Would you go the way of the Reform 

again? 

Certainly I would, even though I know 

it’s not an easy way in which one only 

makes friends. Some see the Reform 

as an attack on their own personal territory; 

indeed, as an attack on their 

supposedly sovereign rights of interpretation. 

They regard the Pope, but not 

themselves, as fallible. But we believe 

the Reform is important. It’s a question 

of significant values, which have been 

lost in many places, and which are in 

danger of being lost in monastic life 

too. Indeed, they are being lost there 

as well. Of course one cannot copy former 

times absolutely, but one should 

try to recover precious treasures, 

one of which is the Liturgy, with its 

clear Godward direction, which is so 

important in the contemplative life! 

Many people do not realize that it is 

also a question of the fullness of Faith, 

where we may not pick and choose. The 

Faith must be respected and cherished 

in its entirety. There are many topics 

of discussion in the Catholic Church, 

but something of great urgency is basic 

catechesis, which covers the Creed 

and everything which constitutes our 

Faith. We neglect what belonged to 

it from the beginning, and therefore 

what belongs to it now and will belong 

to it in the future. The revival of Tradition 

can help to put an end to this 

threat. It can gain acceptance for the 

Faith in its fullness. In all this, I am 

encouraged by what I discover in the 

Scriptures: it is a matter of nothing 

less than the Truth, of Reality, which 

does not depend on majority opinion. 

I am reminded of Moses. He was often 

in dire straits; indeed, they wanted to 

stone him. And sometimes I think of 

this or that prophet in ancient Israel 

who was similarly treated. It gives one 

comfort and confidence just to consider 

their steadfastness. The truth does not 

have an easy time, but it comes from 

God; indeed, God Himself is Truth, 

not in the abstract, but in a highly concrete 

personal form: Christ Himself. 

Let me say it once again: Truth does 

not depend on majority opinion. And 

we see this in Christ Himself, in Our 

Lord. He Himself was not moved by 

majority opinion. So we find ourselves 

in the very best company! And so, yes, 

I would do it all over again. 


Reconsideration 

Girolamo Savonarola 

Over 500 years after what many regard as his martyrdom, is the Church 

ready to venerate one of her most controversial figures? 

1452-1498: 

from Excommunication 

to Beatification 

BY MICHAEL DAVIES 

Originally written for The Latin Mass 

Magazine under Roger A. McCaffrey, 

this piece by the late Michael Davies, 

we believe, has new relevance. Now, a 

regime in Rome hugely popular with the 

press carefully overlooks much of the 

personal corruption and faithlessness 

of the European hierarchy while singling 

out certain prelates for censure as 

“closed-hearted” or doctrine-“obsessed.” 

In the closing decades of the fifteenth 

century and the opening 

decades of the sixteenth, the ideals 

of the Christian faith had 

become gravely compromised 

by the poor example of those in high 

places, above all in Rome. Good Catholics 

who had no intention of breaking 

with the Church protested against 

the scandals of ecclesiastical life. St. 

John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, 

the only English bishop willing to die 

rather than renounce communion with 

the Holy See, warned that if the Pope 

did not reform his court, God would 

reform it for him. By far the most dramatic 

protest against papal corruption 

came from Girolamo Savonarola, who 

for centuries has been the subject of 

lively controversy among Catholic 

scholars, and whose complete rehabilitation 

now appears to be a distinct 

possibility. 

The story of Savonarola cannot be 

understood without some knowledge 

54 

of Florence at the close of the fifteenth 

century. And we must begin by drawing 

a distinction between two intellectual 

and aesthetic tributaries of the 

Renaissance. The early flowering of art 

and literature, exemplified by Giotto 

and Dante, and the revival of classical 

studies in the early Renaissance, were 

by no means seen as a threat to the 

Church. The Church did not oppose 

these benign developments of the mind 

of the Italian people. Indeed, it was the 

Church which gave the artists of the 

thirteenth century their employment 

and set them their tasks. Their intellectual 

milieu was still entirely religious. 

Several popes opposed the pagan and 

materialistic degeneration of humanism, 

but none of them accused the art 

of the Renaissance of being inimical 

to Christianity. 

But Medici Florence exemplified 

the pagan and materialistic side of the 

Renaissance which, not content with 

restoring antique knowledge and culture 

to modern humanity, eagerly laid 

hold of the whole intellectual life of 

heathen times, including its emphasis 

on sensual pleasure. Lorenzo de 

Medici, Lorenzo il Magnifico, was the 

chief supporter of this school. A number 

of great Florentines had opposed 

the degeneracy of the republic, but the 

most celebrated and most effective 

opposition came from the Dominican 

friar Girolamo Savonarola.

Reconsideration ■ by Michael Davies 

Girolamo Savonarola was born at 

Ferrara on September 21, 1452. The 

Savonarolas came from Padua, and 

Girolamo was the third of seven children. 

From his earliest years it was evident 

that he was intellectually gifted. 

Michael Savonarola, his grandfather, 

arranged for him to study at the University 

of Ferrara. He received a thoroughgoing 

humanist education and as a 

university student he was exceptionally 

assiduous, devoting himself entirely to 

his studies, especially philosophy and 

medicine. In 1474 he heard a powerful 

sermon on repentance preached by an 

Augustinian priest and experienced a 

dramatic conversion similar to that of 

Francis of Assisi. Savonarola resolved 

to renounce the world and live entirely 

for God. In April 1475 he entered the 

Dominican order at Bologna. 

In 1481 Savonarola’s superiors sent 

him to preach in Florence, the center 

of the Renaissance that he so despised. 

The court of Lorenzo de Medici was the 

epitome of the immorality—if not outright 

paganism—which characterized 

Savonarola initiated an 

internal reform of his 

monastery. … Vocations 

blossomed and the 

number of monks of San 

Marco rose from 50 to 

238, many of them coming 

from the most aristocratic 

families of Florence. 

many classes of society. His sermons 

made no impression whatsoever upon 

the Florentines, who were considered to 

be so unsophisticated as to be repulsive 

to cultured society. He had employed 

a professor of diction to improve his 

preaching, but his instruction resulted 

only in a mechanical eloquence which 

left his audience cold or even hostile. 

Undeterred, Savonarola preached in 

other cities during the years 1485-1489. 

He began to preach directly from his 

heart with words of passion and sincerity 

addressed directly to the hearts 

of his listeners. He became, after St. 

Bernardine of Sienna, the greatest 

preacher of the Italian Middle Ages. 

In 1482 Savonarola was assigned as 

lector in theology to the priory of San 

Marco, Florence. 

At Brescia in 1486 Savonarola 

preached on the Book of Revelation, 

the first manifestation of what was to 

become his obsessive preoccupation: an 

apocalyptic interpretation of his own 

era. God would judge and punish society 

for its wickedness, he prophesied, 

and the regeneration of the Church 

would follow. 

Whatever Savonarola’s faults, it cannot 

be denied that the motivating force 

of his life was the salvation of souls. As 

he was later to prove, he was willing to 

give his life to combat wickedness and 

spread holiness. In 1489 he returned 

to Florence for what would be his triumph 

and eventual downfall. He began 

preaching to the novices at San Marco, 

his principal theme being the corruption 

of the Church and of the world at 

large. Reports of these sermons spread 

through Florence. The faithful flocked 

to hear him, and the room in which he 

spoke quickly became too small for the 

congregation. The faithful begged him 

to begin preaching in church and in 

August 1490 he preached the first of 

his sermons on the Apocalypse from 

the pulpit of San Marco. The response 

was a total contrast with his preaching 

of 1481. His success was complete. All 

Florence came to hear him and to hang 

upon his every word. His success in 

preaching was matched by his progress 

in the Dominican Order, and such was 

the esteem of his confreres that in 1491 

he was appointed Superior of the Monastery 

of San Marco and its dependent 

foundations. 

He was soon involved in disputes 

with other Dominican congregations 

and in a thorough reform of all the 

houses under his control. His prime 

concern was with the formation of the 

young friars. The formation he gave 

them was particularly notable for the 

love and knowledge of the Scriptures 

that he instilled. Their piety was devoid 

of any false mysticism or affectation, 

and the young monks were cheerful. 

But the regime was too austere 

and rigid. The young men were very 

poorly fed, being able to eat only what 

they could gain from the poor pittance 

obtained from their manual work. But 

such was the magnetism of his personality 

that the cream of the youth of 

Florence sought entry into San Marco. 

The principal benefactor of this monastery 

was Lorenzo de Medici himself, 

but Savonarola would not compromise 

his principles by so much as meeting 

him when he came to visit the monastery; 

Lorenzo was forced to pace 

up and down waiting in vain for the 

superior to come out and speak to him. 

The Dominican considered the Medici 

the primary source of the sins of Florence 

and the oppressors of its liberties. 

Lorenzo’s opinion of the new prior was 

far from favorable, but he continued his 

generous donations to the monastery. 

Savonarola initiated an internal 

reform of his monastery. San Marco 



and other monasteries of Tuscany were 

separated from the Lombard Congregation 

of the Dominican Order and 

with papal approval were formed into 

an independent congregation in 1493. 

Monastic life was reformed in this new 

congregation of which Savonarola was 

the Vicar General. He set an example 

of a strict life of mortification; his 

cell was small and poor, his clothing 

coarse, his food simple and scanty. Lay 

brothers of the monastery were obliged 

to learn a trade and clerics were kept 

constantly at their studies. Vocations 

blossomed and the number of monks 

of San Marco rose from 50 to 238, many 

of them coming from the most aristocratic 

families of Florence. 

While building up his monastic 

community Savonarola continued to 

preach with burning zeal and soon 

became the most influential person in 

Florence. His sermons and his powerful 

personality made a deep impression 

on all who heard him. He castigated the 

immoral, vainglorious, pleasure-seeking 

Florentines and terrified many of 

them into a return to the observance 

of Christian virtues. A city renowned 

for its licentiousness rapidly became a 

convent, claimed its cynical neighbors. 

Savonarola did not hesitate to use 

his sermons to attack Lorenzo de 

Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent himself, 

as the promoter of paganized art 

and immoral living, and as the tyrant 

of Florence. But as Lorenzo lay on his 

deathbed Savonarola was the priest he 

called to minister his last rites. (There 

is no truth to the story that Savonarola 

refused him absolution.) 

From 1493 onwards Savonarola’s 

preaching was directed at the heart 

of the malaise within the Church. He 

spoke with increasing violence against 

the immorality of a large part of the 

clergy, particularly of many members 

of the Roman Curia, and above all of 

the Roman Pontiff himself, Alexander 

VI. He spoke in prophetic terms 

of the approaching judgment of God 

and of an avenger who would initiate 

a reform of Church life. This was to be 

his fatal mistake, for he chose as his 

avenger Charles VIII, King of France, 

who had invaded Italy and was considered 

by the Pope and all the Italian 

cities and states to be their implacable 

enemy. Furthermore, the immoral life 

of Charles VIII and his extravagant 

ideas hardly qualified him to be promoted 

as an instrument of God. 

Charles VIII entered Italy and 

advanced towards Florence. Lorenzo’s 

son, Pietro de Medici, who was 

hated both for his tyranny and for his 

immoral life, was driven from the city 

with his family as a result of Savonarola’s 

preaching. With a delegation 

of Florentines, the Dominican met 

Charles VIII at Pisa. The King was 

able to enter Florence unopposed, 

and before departing handed it over 

to Savonarola, who drew up a unique 

constitution for the city. It can best 

be described as a theocratic democracy, 

based on Savonarola’s political 

and social theories. Christ was to be 

considered the King of Florence and 

protector of its liberties. A great council, 

as the representative of all the citizens, 

became the governing body of the 

republic and the law of Christ was to 

be the basis of political and social life. 

Savonarola did not interfere directly in 

politics and affairs of state, but he presented 

himself as nothing less than the 

oracle of God. This insistence invested 

his teaching and preaching with a fatal 

weakness. For while his orthodoxy was 

beyond reproach, he demanded that his 

teaching be accepted unquestioningly 

not on the ground of its conformity to 

Catholic doctrine, but because he was 

directly inspired by God. 

There was an undeniable regeneration 

in the moral life of a majority of 

citizens. Many persons brought articles 

of luxury, playing cards, ornaments, 

pictures of beautiful women and the 

writings of pagan and immoral poets to 

the monastery of San Marco where they 

were publicly burned. It is undoubtedly 

true that much that was beautiful 

and precious, part of the patrimony of 

Florence and of mankind at large, perished 

in these flames. Savonarola has 

been blamed for this, but such scorn 

would not have troubled him. It has 

been said, no doubt correctly, that 

he lacked a true aesthetic sense and 

From 1493 onwards Savonarola’s preaching was 

directed at the heart of the malaise within the 

Church. He spoke with increasing violence against the 

immorality of a large part of the clergy, particularly 

of many members of the Roman Curia, and above 

all of the Roman Pontiff himself, Alexander VI. 



could not distinguish true beauty from 

coarse sensuality. It is even claimed 

that he had paintings by Botticelli 

burned because they depicted nude 

or seminude women. 

A brotherhood founded by Savonarola 

for young people encouraged a 

pious Christian life among its members. 

On Sundays members of the 

brotherhood went from house to house 

and along the streets to take dice and 

cards from the citizens, and to exhort 

luxuriously dressed women to lay aside 

frivolous ornamentation. This brotherhood 

developed for practical purposes 

into a police force for regulating morality. 

It engaged in spying and denunciation 

to achieve its objectives; children 

were encouraged to report the sins of 

their parents. 

Flushed with success, Savonarola 

became more recklessly passionate in 

his sermons. He envisioned his mission 

as securing the moral regeneration 

of all Italy and then of the entire 

Church. He continued to insist that 

God’s instrument for achieving this 

aim was to be Charles VIII—a view 

that ultimately brought about an open 

conflict with Pope Alexander VI. The 

Pope and every Italian city but Florence 

opposed the French king, as did the 

Emperor Maximilian I; and so Alexander 

had no difficulty in making the 

conflict appear political rather than 

religious: not one of a saintly monk 

denouncing the depravity of the Pope 

and many churchmen, but of an arrogant, 

politically minded monk allying 

himself with a foreign invader. 

Savonarola preached with increasing 

virulence against the Pope and 

the Curia. On July 25, 1495, a mildly 

phrased papal brief commanded Savonarola 

to come to Rome to defend himself 

on the issue of prophecies that had 

been attributed to him, which by then 

were becoming more and more sensational. 

In reality Alexander’s objective 

was to persuade the Dominican 

to refrain from any further comment 

concerning his private life. Savonarola 

explained that he fully accepted his 

obligation to obey a command from the 



Sovereign Pontiff, but that he declined 

to leave Florence on the grounds of 

poor health and the potential danger 

of the journey. He was, he insisted, 

badly needed at that time in Florence. 

“So it is not God’s will that I leave just 

now.” Another brief followed on September 

8, forbidding the Dominican to 

preach—an order reaffirmed in Licet 

Uberius of October 16. 

But Savonarola had already begun 

preaching again on October 11 in 

order to rouse Florentines once more 

against Pietro de Medici, and on February 

11, 1496, the Signoria of Florence 

commanded him to preach again. He 

resumed his sermons on February 17, 

thus enabling Alexander VI to charge 

him with disobedience to ecclesiastical 

authority. (It is highly significant that 

it had not been out of obedience to the 

Pope that he had desisted from preaching; 

he had done so only to examine 

his conscience as to his motives and 

manner of preaching.) In a series of 

Lenten sermons he denounced the 

immorality and corruption of Rome 

Savonarola did not 

interfere directly in politics 

and affairs of state, but 

he presented himself 

as nothing less than 

the oracle of God. This 

insistence invested his 

teaching and preaching 

with a fatal weakness. 


in the most violent terms, and roused 

the Florentines to a state of passionate 

excitement. He insisted from the pulpit 

that the Pope must be disobeyed if 

he commanded something wrong—a 

position which, while sound Thomistic 

teaching, was hardly likely to please 

Alexander. 

The Pope, fearing a possible schism, 

took action. On November 7, 1496, 

the Dominican monasteries of Rome 

and Tuscany were formed into a new 

congregation, their first Vicar General 

being Cardinal Caraffa (later 

to become the reforming Pope Paul 

IV). Savonarola refused to obey and 

during Lent 1497 he preached with an 

unprecedented virulence against the 

evils found in Rome. Addressing the 

Pope directly, he stated bluntly: “You 

have erected a house of debauchery. 

You have placed a prostitute upon the 

throne of Solomon. The Church has set 

up a sign for all who pass by inviting all 

those who can pay to enter in and do 

whatever pleases them. Those who seek 

to do God’s will are cast outside. Oh, 

prostituted Church, you display your 

lewdness everywhere for men to see.” 

On May 12, 1497, Savonarola was 

excommunicated by means of the bull 

Cum Saepenumero. The friar, believing 

himself to be directly charged by 

God, and therefore entitled to disobey 

ecclesiastical authority, disregarded 

the excommunication. On June 19 

he replied to the Pope with a letter 

“Against the excommunication,” 

claiming that the excommunication 

had been falsely obtained and that the 

judgment against him was null and 

void. “Whoever excommunicates me,” 

declared the friar, “excommunicates 

God.” He insisted that his mission was 

divine and that therefore his excommunication 

was not valid in the sight 

of God. “If ever I ask absolution from 

this excommunication, may God cast 

me into the depths of Hell, for I should, 

I believe, have committed thereby a 

mortal sin.” 

The Florentine ambassador in 

Rome intervened unsuccessfully on 

his behalf. Alexander explained to the 

ambassador: 

I do not condemn this monk for the 

doctrines that he preaches but because 

he refuses to ask for his excommunication 

to be lifted, declares it to 

be without value and continues his 

preaching in defiance of our express 

will. All this constitutes straightforward 

contempt for our authority and 

that of the Holy See, and a dangerous 

example of the most serious degree. 

We ask nothing more of Savonarola 

than recognition of our supreme 

authority. 

Savonarola was not calling into 

question the authority of the Pope and 

the Curia as such, but the worthiness 

of those found at the head of the Christian 

religion at that time. He proposed 

calling a General Council to deal with 

those individuals whom he considered 

culpable. He sent letter to the rulers 

of Christendom urging them to carry 

out this scheme, which, on account of 

the alliance of Florence with Charles 

VIII, was not outside the realm of possibility. 

Such a Council could perhaps 

have intimidated Alexander VI into 

resigning, and might have initiated 

at least a partial reform of the Curia 

(thereby possibly preventing the Reformation). 

Savonarola was almost certainly 

correct to claim that Alexander 

had purchased the papacy, and this, he 

argued, meant that Alexander had no 

right to be Pope. The crime of simony 

had been put forward as a classic case 

which justified the deposition of a


doubtful pope. In 1513, ten years after 

the death of Alexander, Pope Julius II 

denounced simony in his bull Cum 

Tam Divino, and stated that it invalidated 

the election of anyone tainted 

with it, including the Pope himself. The 

case of Alexander VI prompted a good 

number of contemporary theologians 

to take the same severely critical attitude 

towards simony as the impetuous 

Savonarola. After listing the cardinals 

bribed by Alexander VI to secure his 

election, Ludwig Pastor in his classic 

History of the Popes comments: 

By a mysterious decree of Providence 

it transpired that a man was invested 

with the supreme dignity of the 

Church who in other times would 

not have been admitted to even the 

lowest ranks of the clergy in view of 

his dissolute morals. Then began for 

the Church an era of ignominy and 

scandal. 

Despite his excommunication, 

Savonarola celebrated Mass on Christmas 

Day and distributed Holy Communion. 

On February 11, 1498, he began 

to preach at the cathedral again and to 

explain why he considered the sanctions 

imposed upon him to be null and 

void. In the face of the evils afflicting 

the papacy he had not the least doubt 

that he was the new Amos charged with 

correcting the High Priest. 

Resentment at the Dominican’s 

moral dictatorship had been building 

for years, and the Florentines 

now turned against him. Monsignor 

Philip Hughes describes Savonarola’s 

dictatorship as one of “crazy severity”; 

beneath the surface the city was seething 

with discontent. There were riots 

in Florence and the Monastery of San 

Marco was attacked. Savonarola and 

two fellow Dominicans were arrested. 

Alexander demanded that they be sent 

to him for trial. The republic refused, 

but promised that the Pope should 

impose the final sentence. The papal 

delegate, the Dominican General and 

the Bishop of Ilerda were sent to Florence 

to attend the trial. The official 

proceedings, while still extant, were 

falsified by the notary. The captured 

friars spent forty-five days in Florence’s 

Signoria prison, and despite being tortured 

and humiliated, Savonarola managed 

to write his Commentary upon 

Mercy, one of the most moving works 

in the history of the Church. On May 

22, on the basis of admissions obtained 

through torture, Savonarola and two 

other members of his order were condemned 

to death “on account of the 

enormous crimes of which they had 

been convicted.” Savonarola confessed 

under torture—authorized by the 

Pope himself—that he had acted not 

by divine inspiration but for personal 

motives; but he withdrew the confession 

before his execution. 

The three friars were hanged and 

burnt at the stake on May 23, 1498, in 

the Piazza della Signoria. The papal 

commissaries declared that they had 

been proven guilty of schism and 

heresy, and announced that the Pope, 

in his mercy, offered them a plenary 

indulgence. Savonarola bowed his head 

as a sign of acceptance. The three friars 

were allowed to make their confessions 

and receive Holy Communion. 

Before their execution, the Bishop of 

Vaison, Benedict Paganozzi, degraded 

the three from their priestly rank and 

religious status. During the ceremony 

of degradation the bishop stated: “I will 

separate you from the Church Militant 

and the Church Triumphant.” With 

great disdain Savonarola corrected 

the bishop’s poor theology: “From 

the Church Militant, not from the 

Savonarola was not calling 

into question the authority 

of the Pope and the Curia 

as such, but the worthiness 

of those found at the 

head of the Christian 

religion at that time. 

Church Triumphant. That is not in 

your power.” After the execution the 

ashes were thrown into the river Arno 

to prevent followers of the Dominican 

from obtaining any relics. 

Monsignor Hughes writes: 

It was, of course, a terrible retribution 

for the wild, unmeasured language in 

which the Dominican had attacked 

the evil life of the monstrously bad 

man who then disgraced the chair 

of St. Peter, and for the endeavors he 

had made to dislodge him from it… 

to choose the heresy process as the 

convenient instrument for the destruction 

of the friars was a scandalous 

perversion of justice. It was the 

case of the Templars and of St. Joan 

all over again, but with the Pope, a 

leading agent in the wickedness. 

There was no reaction to follow 

the death of the prior of San Marco. 

A faithful few clung fast to all that he 

had taught them, but the great commercial 

city continued on its way, 

corrupted and contented, as did, 

for many years yet, the papal curia 

against whose scandals the great Dominican 

had witnessed. 



Savonarola’s writings were examined 

by a theological commission 

during the pontificate of Paul IV (1555- 

1559) and found to be free from error. 

Nothing that he wrote or said is the 

least tainted by heresy. His book The 

Triumph of the Cross is a superb and 

inspiring apology for the Church. Its 

detailed explanation of the sacraments 

displays a perfect Thomistic orthodoxy. 

All the traditional documents are 

explained and praised as “conforming 

to the highest level of reason.” Savonarola 

also writes with fervor of Our 

Lady and the saints. For him, beautiful 

churches, their towers, their altars and 

their bells proclaim the glory of God. 

Without exception, “all the institutions 

of the Church are admirable. And for 

those who wish to know more of the 

Church, let them read attentively the 

writings of our doctors, let them study 

these works with care, and they will 

know that the worship of the Church 

does not come from men but from 

God.” 

Savonarola’s writing is replete with 

a lively piety, bordering upon lyricism 

and at times exaltation. It contains no 

new insights into mysticism but follows 

closely the teaching of St. Bonaventure. 

His philosophy was straightforward 

Thomism, but expressed with 

an admirable and exceptional clarity. 

Ninety examples of his writing are still 

extant, ranging from simple letters to 

huge volumes. 

According to the May 1996 issue of 

Inside the Vatican, an effort is afoot not 

simply to exonerate Savonarola but to 

beatify him. Father Innocenzo Venchi, 

a Dominican scholar-friar, has 

been charged with making the case 

for Savonarola’s beatification. He maintains 

that the friar’s excommunication 

was not valid. This is perfectly possible; 

excommunication does not involve 

papal infallibility, and indeed there 

have been many invalid excommunications 

in the history of the Church. 

But Fr. Venchi also insists that 

there was no political involvement in 

Savonarola’s apostolate. It is hard to see 

how his involvement with Charles VIII 

could have been anything but political, 

and if this is the case it could prove 

to be a serious impediment to beatification. 

During the beatification and 

canonization of the Martyrs of England 

and Wales during the reign of Elizabeth 

I, for example, the least hint of political 

involvement ruled out any possibility 

of beatification. 

Father Venchi also denies that 

Savonarola ever disobeyed the Pope, 

a position which certainly does not 

accord with the facts. The friar refused 

to go to Rome when ordered to by the 

Pope, continued to preach after being 

forbidden to do so, and offered Mass 

and administered the sacraments after 

his excommunication. Now, disobeying 

the Pope is not necessarily a sin. It 

could even be a meritorious action if 

done for the right reason. But Savonarola 

went beyond disobedience. He 

made clear in his letter to the Emperor 

demanding a General Council to 

depose the Pope that he did not consider 

Alexander to be a true pope. He 

wrote: 

Every abomination, every villainy 

spreads throughout the world, but 

you remain silent and you venerate 

the pestilence sitting on the Chair 

of Peter. This is why Our Lord, outraged 

by this intolerable corruption, 

has permitted the Church to be without 

a Pastor for some time. For I assure 

you in the name of God, in verbo 

Domini, that Alexander VI cannot 

possibly be considered to be Pope by 

any possible stretch of the imagination 

and can never be Pope. For apart 

from the execrable crime of simony… 

this man is not a Christian, he does 

not even believe there is a God, he 

has gone beyond the furthest limits 

of infidelity and impiety. 

What must our judgment be concerning 

this controversial Dominican? 

He was certainly neither heretical nor 

schismatic, and his excommunication 

was certainly invalid. A papal excommunication 

must in itself be just and 

founded upon truth; it is not valid 

simply because it is pronounced by 

the Pope. Savonarola was a fervently 

Savonarola displayed a far more profound Catholic 

instinct than most of his contemporaries, insisting 

that despite the depths to which the Church had 

sunk, as a divinely founded institution she would rise 

again to her former glory—as indeed proved to be 

the case with Trent and the Counter Reformation. 



devout Catholic devoted entirely to 

God and His Church. Alexander VI 

was, as Msgr. Hughes expressed it, 

“a monstrously bad man who… disgraced 

the chair of St. Peter.” Savonarola 

displayed a far more profound 

Catholic instinct than most of his contemporaries, 

insisting that despite the 

depths to which the Church had sunk, 

as a divinely founded institution she 

would rise again to her former glory— 

as indeed proved to be the case with 

Trent and the Counter Reformation. 

The shame of Alexander VI and other 

unworthy Renaissance popes would be 

eclipsed in less than a century by the 

glory of such Jesuit saints as Ignatius, 

Francis Xavier and, not least, a Borgia: 

St. Francis Borgia, third General of 

the order and a direct descendant of 

Alexander VI. Mention must also be 

made of other new orders, such as the 

Theatines founded by St. Cajetan, the 

Barnabites by St. Anthony Mary Zaccaria 

and the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. 

Savonarola manifested simultaneously 

the traits of heroic sanctity and 

Savonarola’s Last Prayer by John-Peter Pham 

Heretic or prophet? Long a controversial figure, Fra Girolamo 

Savonarola continues to provoke passionate debate 

among theologians, historians, and other literati five centuries 

after dying at the stake in Florence’s Piazza della 

Signoria. But even his most bitter critics never cast the least 

doubt on the personal sanctity of the Dominican prior 

of San Marco. Taking his cue from the Holy Father’s call 

in the Apostolic Letter Tertio Millenio Adveniente for the 

Church to engage in a profound examination of conscience, 

Cardinal Silvio Piovanelli, Archbishop of Florence, has 

recently raised the possibility of beatifying the friar: “It 

would be good if, five hundred years after the execution 

of Girolamo Savonarola, there could be some steps taken 

towards recognizing his holiness and martyrdom.” 

Savonarola was a fiery orator, who in 1496, succeeded 

in driving the Medici from Florence and installing in 

their place a reformist theocratic regime that challenged 

the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI. During the two short 

years in which the regime survived, Savonarola almost 

single-handedly turned the clock back in Florence on 

the encroachments of the naturalist and humanist culture 

of the early Renaissance which he perceived—quite 

correctly—as a threat to Christendom. 

On May 21, 1498, he and two fellow Dominicans who 

were condemned along with him were burned at the 

stake, their agenda of reform left to die until the rise of 

Martin Luther. Notwithstanding revisionist claims to the 

effect that Savonarola was a forerunner of the Protestant 

Reformation—an argument easily refuted as (one hopes) 

his corpus becomes available in modern edition—his 

spirit was intensely Catholic. At his very last Mass, on 

the morning of his execution, Savonarola held the Host 

in his hands and, looking down at it, spoke the following 

prayer, which is reproduced here for the first time in 

English translation: 

Lord, I know that you are true God, creator of the world 

and of mankind. I know that you are that perfect, indivisible, 

and inseparable Trinity, distinct in three Persons, 

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I know that you are that Eternal 

Word which descended from heaven to earth in the 

womb of the Virgin Mary, and which ascended the wood 

of the cross to shed your precious blood for us miserable 

sinners. I pray you, my Lord; I pray to you, my consolation, 

that all the blood you shed for me should not be in 

vain, but would be for me the remission of all my sins— 

from the time I received the waters of holy baptism up to 

this very moment—for which I beg forgiveness and cry 

to you: Lord, I am guilty. Furthermore, I beg of your forgiveness 

insofar as I have offended this city and all this 

people, whether in spiritual or temporal matters, and in 

any other matter, even if I were unaware of having been 

in error. I humbly beg forgiveness of all those around me 

and pray God to strengthen me in my end that the Enemy 

may not have any power over me. Amen. 

Now that is a preparation for Holy Communion! 

Would that all God’s priests have the same living faith 

in the Divine Presence in the Holy Eucharist and its salvific 

effects, now and sub specie aeternitatis! 

Peter Pham is the author of a number of 

books in theology and spirituality. 



a pride that bordered on arrogance. He 

certainly refused obedience to Alexander, 

and it can be argued that as 

Alexander ordered him to do nothing 

that was intrinsically wrong he should 

have obeyed. The basis for his refusal 

to obey could prove the greatest barrier 

to his eventual canonization: his claim 

to be directly inspired by God. Unless 

the Holy See is prepared to accept that 

this was indeed the case it could prove 

an insurmountable obstacle. The New 

Catholic Encyclopedia maintains that 

the most serious charge against him, 

and the one that (if anything did) justified 

his excommunication for heresy, 

schism and contempt of the Holy See, 

was that he had invoked the civil power 

to call a council and depose the Pope. 

The Encyclopedia’s judgment on the 

Dominican is that: 

Savonarola was certainly a great Catholic 

and, in some sense, certainly a 

martyr. His subjective position regarding 

Alexander VI is certainly 

beyond question, and only the matter 

of his objective guilt, depending on 

the legal judgment of his day, awaits 

further investigation. Indeed, as early 

as 1499, Savonarola was locally venerated 

as a saint. 

While Savonarola was a great and 

heroic Catholic reformer, it is interesting 

to contrast the lasting fruits of 

his apostolate, which were virtually 

non-existent, with those of the gentle 

St. Philip Neri in the following century. 

His methods could hardly have been 

more different, and their positive fruits 

are beyond calculation. (He was, incidentally, 

educated by the Dominicans 

of San Marco.) Whereas Savonarola 

denounced Rome but did not change 

it, St. Philip eschewed denunciations 

but converted the city. 

Whether or not Savonarola is beatified 

and then canonized is a matter 

entirely for the Holy See to decide. It 

would, of course, be possible to rehabilitate 

Savonarola without beatifying him, 

to admit that his excommunication 

and execution were unjust. But some 

have set their sights higher. Cardinal 

Silvano Piovanelli, the Archbishop of 

Florence, would like the beatification 

to take place in 1998, the 500th anniversary 

of the death of the Dominican. 

It is to be hoped that there will be no 

unseemly haste; beatification should 

not be arranged to coincide with an 

anniversary, but should take place only 

after the most thorough investigation. 

Some of Fr. Innocenzo Venchi’s comments 

suggest that the investigation has 

not yet been thorough enough. 

Michael Davies (1936-2004) was president 

of Una Voce International and 

the author of many books and pamphlets 

on the importance of tradition. 

This article first appeared in The Latin 

Mass Magazine, reprinted with permission, 

for which, our thanks. 


Pope Francis 

The Pope in the United 

States: An Evaluation 

Pope Francis’ visit has shown 

us once more that he can 

be clear and unambiguous 

on his priorities, and 

vocal and forthright in 

saying what he wants to say. He did 

not hesitate to make direct statements 

on immigration, on the environment, 

on the abolition of the death penalty 

and in praise of religious liberty (that 

is, religious liberty as understood by 

the Western secular consensus rather 

than the defense of the Church’s right 

to proclaim the truth in any society). 

There was no question left about the 

importance he placed on these issues. 

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said 

about the importance he accords to 

the defense of the unborn and of true 

marriage. 

We affirm—and we are not alone 

in doing so—that the entire papal visit 

to the U.S. and the UN was a series 

of missed opportunities and a monumental 

failure to affirm Church teaching 

precisely where it is under greatest 

threat from public opinion and secular 

power. These will come back to haunt 

the very same Catholics who have tried 

so hard to justify all of the Pope’s omissions 

in the past week. 

“But he spoke against abortion! He 

spoke about the right to life! He spoke 

about the need to defend marriage and 

the family!” Of course he did. Equally 

clear is that he treated these issues as 

having marginal importance. No one 

can in all honesty point to his brief and 

often vague reminders on abortion and 

declare that the defense of the unborn 

was one of his primary interests during 

his visit. Even less can it be said that 

he gave a clear and ringing defense of 

true marriage as only between a man 

and a woman. During his main address 

on the topic of the family—the address 

at the “Prayer Vigil for the Festival of 

Families” in Philadelphia—the Pope 

focused on the material needs of families 

rather than the defense of the very 

essence and identity of the family. At 

least the Pope had mentioned the word 

“abortion” in the course of his visit, but 

on the defense of true marriage he was 

never as forthright. 

It is true that he visited the Little 

Sisters of the Poor—privately, unofficially, 

in an unscheduled detour, 

without his words being published. 

It is equally true that an openly “gay” 

celebrity who is vocally supportive 

of pseudo-“marriage” was given a 

high-profile role in a Mass during the 

papal visit. It should have been easy to 

see which gesture would be more visible 

and have a greater impact on the 

public. Henceforth it will be considered 

“more Catholic than the Pope” to 

exclude publicly practicing homosexuals 

and opponents of Church teaching 

from being lectors (and by analogy 

from many other important lay roles), 

63 

The papal visit was a 

monumental failure to 

affirm Church teaching 

precisely where it is 

under greatest threat 

BY AUGUSTINUS

Pope Francis ■ by Augustinus 

Instead of pretending that the few bones the Pope 

threw in their direction was a lavish feast, prolifers 

and the advocates of true marriage need to 

think hard about how to overcome the even greater 

clerical apathy that will now surely be their lot. 

making a mockery of the meaning of 

what it means to be a Catholic in good 

standing. 

Some Catholic pundits have 

defended the Pope by saying that it was 

completely his prerogative to choose 

his words and his points of focus. We 

do not contest the Pope’s prerogatives, 

but neither should we hide the cost of 

his choices to the defense of truth. By 

choosing to focus on issues that easily 

attracted the applause of the world, 

by choosing to spend the bulk of his 

time speaking about these issues, Francis 

has given a clear example to the 

American bishops and to the clergy 

to soft-pedal the defense of Church 

teaching on “unpleasant,” “divisive” 

and “unpopular” teachings even more. 

Pro-lifers and the defenders of true 

marriage should ask themselves in all 

honesty if the papal visit will encourage 

the bishops and the clergy to speak 

even more forcefully in defense of the 

unborn and of marriage. The more the 

Pope’s well-meaning advocates defend 

his omissions, the more they tell the 

clergy that there is nothing wrong with 

downplaying or saying very little about 

Church teachings on sensitive topics. 

Instead of pretending that the few 

bones the Pope threw in their direction 

was a lavish feast, pro-lifers and 

the advocates of true marriage need to 

think hard about how to overcome the 

even greater clerical apathy that will 

now surely be their lot. 

It is also a fact that the Pope’s lack 

of clarity made it easy for the enemies 

of human life and of true marriage to 

applaud his words without in any way 

acknowledging their Catholic meaning. 

Many Catholics expressed perplexity 

at known pro-abortion politicians 

applauding the Pope when he briefly 

mentioned the defense of human life 

during his speech at Capitol Hill, but 

this should not have surprised them. 

“The Golden Rule also reminds us of 

our responsibility to protect and defend 

human life at every stage of its development” 

may sound unambiguously 

pro-life to Catholic ears, but to secular 

ears it does not necessarily cover the 

unborn; it could be plausibly (even if 

mendaciously) “heard” by a rabid supporter 

of abortion as pertaining only 

to life after birth. 

To a Catholic, the Pope’s frequent 

praises of marriage and family (sans 

qualification) can only pertain to true 

marriage between a man and a woman; 

but to “gay activists” these could just as 

well apply to homosexual “marriages” 

and “families” made up of two persons 

of the same sex and the children 

they have “adopted.” We are not saying 

that the Pope was surreptitiously 

supporting abortion and homosexual 

“marriage”; what we are saying is 

that his words on marriage and the 

defense of the unborn were not sufficiently 

clear so as to prevent these from 

being “heard” with a completely different 

meaning, contrary to any Catholic 

intention. This is why in the defense of 

the unborn and true marriage there 

can be no space for ambiguity, no hold 

given to the other side that will allow 

them to twist what has been said. We 

cannot afford to preach the Gospel of 

Life in terms that either side can interpret 

to its liking. There can be no verbal 

ecumenism with the culture of death. 

A final note to Catholic apologists: 

don’t attack the secular media for highlighting 

what the Pope himself highlighted 

rather than focusing on the 

brief statements that he made on prolife 

issues! Don’t condemn the secular 

media for refusing to focus on what the 

Pope himself treated as of peripheral 

importance! The secular media’s coverage 

of the Pope’s words and priorities 

in the U.S. has been, on the whole, far 

more honest than that of the Catholic 

mainstream media. 

This article first appeared on September 

28, 2015, as an editorial on the 

Catholic traditionalist blog Rorate 

Caeli (rorate-caeli.blogspot.com). 


End Times? 

The “Spirit of Satan” at the 

Synod on the Family 

On a trip to Virginia in October, Bishop Athanasius Schneider of 

Kazakhstan spoke with LifeSiteNews about the Synod of Bishops 

on the Family, which was nearing its end in Rome. The bishop, 

who has developed an international reputation for his defense of 

Catholic doctrine and tradition, warned that the Synod appears 

to be taking its lead from the “anti-family agenda,” and went so far as to say that 

those advocating changes were following the “spirit” and “language” of Satan. This 

interview first appeared on LifeSiteNews.com, and is reprinted with permission. 

An Interview with Bishop 

Athanasius Schneider 

The Methods of 

the Synod 

LifeSiteNews: The Synod of Bishops 

on the Family is right now taking 

place in Rome. What are your own 

observations and impressions of 

the Synod’s discussions so far? And 

about what has not been said? 

Bishop Schneider: Well, I’m not participating 

in the Synod so I can only say 

what I’m reading in the mass media, 

and from the Catholic bloggers, and 

so from this information which I have, 

my impression is that it is the same as 

it was in the last year. The Synod is, 

unfortunately, focused only on the two 

main themes: namely, the admittance 

of the divorced and remarried to Holy 

Communion, and the recognition in 

some way of the homosexual way of 

life. These two topics are part of the 

typical agenda of the anti-Christian 

world ideology. 

It is very sad that the Synod has in 

some way let itself be conditioned to be 

lost in a scramble for this false freedom. 

It is a bondage to be under this submission 

to this typical anti-Christian 

philosophy that is both promoting the 

homosexual ideology and destroying 

family by the means of divorce. It seems 

that these are the two points around 

which there are the synodal discussions 

and the battles; and we can read 

much of this in the contributions of 

the Synod fathers and also in the later 

reports of some language groups which 

have been published. 

This is really bad, because this is 

supposed to be a synod on the family 

and it leaves the impression that 

it has become a synod for promoting 

the anti-family agenda. Therefore, for 

now it is not so openly published, and 

yet the majority of Synod fathers— 

also to be seen in the Instrumentum 

Laboris—have not spoken, at least not 

sufficiently, about the very important 

virtue of chastity. This chastity is a Biblical, 

Christian, and Apostolic virtue 

which is so necessary at all times, but 

65

End Times? ■ An Interview with Bishop Athanasius Schneider 

especially in our times, where now 

anti-chastity has become a kind of 

overriding “value,” though it truly is 

an “unvalue.” 

Unchastity has become for the modern 

world an ideology, a style which 

has to be even widely promoted. And 

so we can state that some of the Synod 

members and those who have key positions 

in the administrative structures 

of the Synod have stooped to these 

anti-Christian pressures, and such a 

submission is really a shame. How can 

members of an official synod which 

represents the successors of the Apostles 

take this stance and forget to promote 

chastity, such an essential virtue 

to cultivate when we speak about 

family and marriage, for example. And 

another thing, our intention must be to 

promote really large families and once 

more to show the immorality and the 

danger of contraception. And so to my 

perception it is these two points which 

are, regrettably, not sufficiently clearly 

treated in the Synod. 

“How can members of 

an official synod which 

represents the successors 

of the Apostles take this 

stance and forget to 

promote chastity, such an 

essential virtue to cultivate 

when we speak about 

family and marriage.” 


13 Cardinals have written a letter 

to Pope Francis where they criticize 

the lack of reliable and continuous 

transparency and the fact 

that the Commission for the Final 

Report has not been elected by the 

Synod Fathers themselves. To what 

extent would you agree with their 

objections? 

I read the letter which was published in 

the media and I completely agree with 

their observations. It is what they stated 

that has, to my knowledge, indeed a 

true foundation, a base. 

Many journalists have now 

expressed their indignation because 

of the lack of trustworthy information 

about the Synod’s ongoing discussions. 

Would you yourself have 

some observations about how this 

Synod is organized and how its 

discussions are transmitted to the 

public? 

As I already stated I am not in Rome 

and not participating in the Synod or 

its surroundings. Therefore, I cannot 

speak in a very complete manner. I can 

only say what I observe, according to 

the information which I am following 

in the mass media. 

As the letter of cardinals says, it is 

really an impression that the discussions 

are directed to a specific team so 

as to achieve a pre-determined result, 

to admit the divorced and remarried 

to Holy Communion and to admit the 

permissibility of the homosexual way 

of life. We have to call the things by 

their right name. To achieve these aims, 

the information is filtered through 

some kind of censorship in the Vatican 

press office—we can see this every 

day—and when there are some critical 

voices concerning the content or the 

procedure, there is the danger that they 

are silenced. 

Some journalists even lose their 

accreditation. It is becoming more 

and more obvious, and the manipulation 

and the tactics of those who 

held key positions in the Synod will 

probably become even more evident, in 

the future, after the scholars will have 

had access to the archives. 

Have you yourself received reports 

from Synod Fathers about how the 

Synod is progressing and about 

the topics that have been brought 

up—or not brought up—so far? Is 

the Synod going in the direction 

of preserving the Church’s traditional 

moral teaching? 

I have not received any report from a 

Synod Father and one has the impression 

that some influential members of 

the Synod are going into the direction 

of not preserving the Church’s moral 

teaching in these two areas that we 

have already spoken about: Eucharistic 

Communion for the divorced and 

remarried; and approval of the homosexual 

way of life. We hope the Holy 

Ghost will help us and that the Synod 

Fathers, in the final document, will 

repeal or repudiate these un-Christian 

elements. 

You have criticized the Synod’s 

Instrumentum Laboris (working 

document) publicly before the 

Synod. May we know what your 

main criticism of this text is? 

Yes, the main criticism is that this text 

has a main characteristic of a kind of 

relativism, that the truth is not always 

valid, that the truth can supposedly 

change under different or evolving 

historical circumstances. That is the


underlying ideological text of the whole 

document. 

It reveals itself, for example, in 

contradictory passages such as these: 

in one paragraph, there is stated the 

indissolubility of Christian marriage, 

and then in another passage there is 

shown a possibility for those couples 

who are divorced to give them permitted 

access to the Sacraments. It is 

a continuous contradiction. Or, it is 

slipped in with a veiled language which 

is both sophisticated and has characteristics 

of sophism, so as to introduce 

the homosexual way of life; for example, 

by talking about families who have 

members who have homosexual tendencies. 

And it is very clear what they 

imply and mean with that and more 

fully desire to achieve. 

There is finally introduced, through 

ambiguous expressions, the recognition 

and acceptance of this sinful way 

of life. This is in my opinion the basic 

problem of this document: it really is 

a kind of doctrinal and moral relativism. 

And the relativism is so concretely 

shown in these two specific topics. 

Do you see a likelihood that the 

defects of that working document 

will be acknowledged and corrected 

by the ongoing Synod? 

I hope for this, but I cannot say, 

because I am not participating. I do 

have, though, some concerns and some 

doubts about what we now observe and 

the methods of manipulation and censorship 

of those who have the administrative 

power in the ruling of the Synod 

and in the press office of the Synod. 

Those who have the power of 

ruling this Synod reveal themselves 

as propagators of these two topics 

(about Sacramental Communion for 

the divorced and remarried and about 

approval of homosexual acts) as we 

have mentioned, and so it remains 

for me doubtful whether the ongoing 

Synod will correct these defects. Even 

in their letter, where the 13 cardinals 

pointed out the problematic issues 

with the Instrumentum Laboris and 

the insufficient doctrinal character of 

this Instrumentum Laboris, their arguments 

were rejected. For on the very 

next day, the content was rejected by 

the General Secretary of the Synod in 

the Synod Aula. 

Because these preoccupations were 

immediately rejected, it is, humanly 

speaking, therefore very doubtful that 

the final document will unambiguously 

correct these grave defects. 

The Contents 

of the Synod 

As little as we know about the discussions 

in the Synod Hall, some 

points have been released to the 

public. Archbishop Paul-André 

Durocher from Canada presented 

the idea that the Church should do 

more for women, and possibly even 

ordain women deacons and give 

women higher positions and decision-making 

participation within 

the Church’s structures. What 

would you say about this statement? 

This is completely wrong and does not 

belong to the theme of the family. It is 

a typical agenda to destroy Catholic 

doctrine, the Catholic identity, taking 

elements from the agenda which 

started first in the Protestant churches, 

and the promotors of such proposals 

will also not likely stop with the women 

diaconate. They want to go even further, 

and, so, this is an abuse of the 

Synod to introduce heretical positions 

into the Church and to destroy the 

Apostolic Tradition. 

The sacramental order in the 

Church is a role for men, and not for 

women. This would be against women. 

The sacramental order is not a power; 

it is a ministry. Church offices are not 

a power. It is unfortunately the case 

that some clergy live and behave in a 

very worldly way, abusing the spiritual 

power, but this is not the real meaning 

of the Catholic priesthood and diaconate 

and of their sacramental offices in 

the Church. This new proposal is a 

completely wrong view. And, secondly, 

it is a wrong view of the nature and 

mission of the women in the family and 

in the Church according to God’s plan. 

It seems that Archbishop Paul-André 

Durocher is only a spokesman for 

those who want to give to the woman 

a mission and a task which she has 

not received from God, and which is 

against the plan of God; and therefore 

she will be damaged for her life as a 

Christian woman. A real Christian 

woman would never desire to occupy 

decision-making powers within the 

There is finally introduced, through 

ambiguous expressions, the recognition and 

acceptance of this sinful way of life. 



Church. In fact, the woman already 

has one of the highest decision-making 

powers because she is mother. 

There is a proverb which says: “The 

hand which rocks the crib of the child 

governs the world.” This is the real end, 

namely to educate children; and from 

the crib, even from carrying a child 

in the womb, and then until child 

becomes adult, the woman has this very 

high and responsible decision power 

to educate a new person for God, for 

the society, for heaven, for eternal life. 

What a decision power is this! 

Abbot Jeremias Schröder has publicly 

said at one of the Synod press 

conferences that a majority of the 

Synod Fathers support the idea of 

allowing different regions (and 

national bishops’ conferences) to 

establish their own ways of dealing 

with contentious issues such as 

homosexuality and divorce. What 

would be your comment on this 

proposal which has especially been 

strongly promoted by the German 

Bishops’ Conference, especially 

with respect to the preservation 

of the doctrine and morals of the 

Church? 

This proposal is not Catholic; it is 

destroying Catholicism, because 

“Catholic” means to believe in the same 

manner essential things. And to accept 

homosexuality and divorce is not a secondary 

aspect. In secondary aspects 

we can differ from one local Church to 

another—the kind of singing, the kind 

of dressing, language; we have different 

devotional practices in different countries, 

but with the same Catholic spirit 

and richness. Difference is legitimate, 

but only that which is not against the 

Catholic truth. Such differences are 

really complementary. 

By way of these slyly pluralistic new 

proposals, of course, they will destroy 

the meaning and catholicity of the 

Church. And this is also an agenda 

of the anti-Christian world ideology, 

namely to destroy from within the 

Catholic Church and to make it a Protestant-like 

conglomeration of different 

regional and confessional churches. 

This will be directly against what we 

confess every Sunday in the Creed: “I 

“By way of these slyly pluralistic new proposals, 

of course, they will destroy the meaning and 

catholicity of the Church. And this is also an agenda 

of the anti-Christian world ideology, namely to 

destroy from within the Catholic Church and 

to make it a Protestant-like conglomeration of 

different regional and confessional churches.” 

believe in one Church, Holy, Catholic 

and Apostolic.” It seems very realistic 

that this is a trick to push on, in order to 

reach the aim of acceptance of divorce 

and homosexuality, by means of their 

allowing these regional church authorities 

to decide. And, by time, and in 

this way, such destructive topics will 

be introduced. 

As we speak of the German bishops, 

let me quote Archbishop Heiner 

Koch and his own presented second 

report of the German-language 

group at the Synod. He said: “We 

have also considered what the consequences 

are of such an interrelationship 

[between God’s justice and 

mercy] with regard to the accompaniment 

of marriages and families. 

It excludes a one-sided and 

deductive hermeneutic which submits 

concrete situations to a general 

principle.” And he argued for 

the desirability to take more into 

account the personal biographies 

of people instead of insisting upon 

the moral law. What does this likely 

mean, concretely, and is this kind 

of approach with regard to the 

question of those living in extramarital 

or in adulterous relationships 

an acceptable approach for 

the Church? 

These are speciously beautiful words 

without content. Only superficially 

beautiful words, void and vague. 

Deliberately ambiguous speeches on 

the topics of theology and faith remind 

one of the speech of the serpent who 

spoke to Adam and Eve, very politely, 

very crafty, but without content, and 

filled with lies. 

The so called “theology of biography” 

is an expression without real 

theological content, and it is only an 



accumulation of words and resembles 

a Gnostic language, because it 

destroys the reality by means of seemingly 

beautiful words. It destroys the 

truths. When one reads what Archbishop 

Koch and some members from 

the German Language Group said— 

dwelling upon personal biographies 

and not upon the moral law—one is 

compelled to re-write the words of 

Our Lord Jesus Christ which He said 

to Zacchaeus in such a way: “It is okay, 

I have to respect his personal biography 

and not insist on the law that he 

has to convert.” But Zacchaeus himself 

said: “Oh my Lord, I repent. I will not 

continue with my sin. I will amend my 

life. I will give back two times as much 

of what I have stolen.” 

Or, there is the woman who sinned. 

Our Lord could have said to her: “Okay, 

you have a personal biography; I will 

not insist on moral law, go in peace.” 

No, He instead insisted on the moral 

law and said: “Go and sin no more.” 

Our Lord insisted on the moral law 

and even in a more radical way. He 

said: “When your hand seduces you, 

cut it off.” This is radicalism. That has 

nothing to do with personal biography, 

which is ultimately an anti-Christian 

statement. It is a way of approving sin, 

it is against God’s will, it is a mockery 

of the will of God, a mockery of the 

Ten Commandments. 

Bishop Franz-Josef Bode, another 

German Bishop, proposed not to 

tell cohabiting couples that they live 

in the state of sin, since this would 

not be the way of drawing them 

close or closer to the Sacrament 

of Marriage. He said one should 

regard pre-marital relationships 

in a more positive light. How would 

you respond to such claim? 

This is of course non-Christian and this 

is wrong, and is another way to approve 

sin. To speak and to act in such a way is 

unmerciful with a person who is living 

in a mortal sin and thereby offending 

God and living in a broken relationship 

to God and offending God in a 

serious manner and therefore putting 

in danger his or her eternal salvation. 

When I see a person who is going 

close to an abyss or where there is 

another danger, I will warn this person. 

It is a kind of mercy for my neighbor. 

I will not say: “I will not disturb you.” 

This applies above all to a person who 

is living against the will of God! This 

person could tomorrow die, or in one 

hour, and I will have left him there. 

And should I say: “It is okay, I will leave 

you in this danger”? And would this 

not be cruel? This would indeed also 

be highly irresponsible. 

One has doubts if Bishop Bode does 

believe that committing sexual acts 

outside marriage is a sin, that cohabitation 

is a sin. Does he believe in the 

existence of sin, of mortal sins, and 

thus, this is the consequence? Does he 

believe in Hell, in eternal damnation? 

It is to be supposed that a person who 

speaks in this manner does not believe 

really in mortal sin, with the consequence 

of eternal damnation if the sinner 

dies unrepentant. One has to ask 

if he does not believe on the ever-permanent 

validity of the revealed Divine 

Words: “You shall not commit adultery” 

and “Those who commit adultery 

will not inherit the kingdom of God.” 

These are divinely revealed words. 

Father Thomas Rosica, the Vatican 

spokesman for the Synod, has stated 

publicly with regard to homosexuality 

at a press conference: “There 

must be an end to exclusionary 

language and a strong emphasis on 

embracing reality as it is. We should 

not be afraid of new and complex 

situations. … The language of inclusion 

must be our language, always 

considering pastoral and canonical 

possibilities and solutions.” To what 

extent do you agree or disagree with 

this statement with regard to the 

language used with respect to sinful 

conduct? 

Yes, this is more or less the same matter 

and content as the previous statements; 

they have the same common characteristic 

of relativism and of not taking 

seriously the truths of the revealed 

words of God, Who speaks to us clearly. 

Indeed, the sometimes exclusionary 

language of Jesus is strong: “Cast away 

your hand, your eye,” and this with reference 

to sin. This is quite an exclusive 

language. When your brother commits 

a sin and you see this, you must warn 

him first individually; and when he 

does not hear your admonition, you 

must take witnesses and admonish 

him; and when he does not hear the 

“Or, there is the woman 

who sinned. Our Lord 

could have said to her: 

‘Okay, you have a personal 

biography; I will not insist 

on moral law, go in peace.’ 

No, He instead insisted on 

the moral law and said: 

‘Go and sin no more.’” 



witnesses, admonish him in the face of 

the whole Church; and, when he does 

not hear the Church then you have to 

treat him as a heathen. And this is the 

word of Jesus! And so we are following 

Jesus. 

Those churchmen who accuse the 

unchangeable truth of doctrine of the 

Church of possessing an exclusionary 

language have to address their words to 

Jesus Christ, and I would say to them: 

“Please say to Jesus: ‘Jesus, you have 

an exclusionary language.’” Such men 

have the arrogance to correct and to 

teach God. This is the spirit of the world 

and a grave sin against the Faith. This 

is dangerous for the salvation of the 

souls of such bishops and priests. 

They correct Jesus in His statements 

and say ultimately that Jesus in the 

Gospels did not speak correctly, and 

this insolent presumption is, in it its 

final consequence, diabolic. The devil 

says: “God is not speaking the right 

way, for He is very exclusionary!” But 

His command, in truth, is ultimately 

an exclusionary command: “When you 

do not obey my word—‘not to eat of 

this fruit’—you will die.” To die is very 

exclusionary. 

The serpent said: “No, it is not 

true, God did not say this. You will 

not die. You will be like God.” So, 

these unfaithful bishops and priests 

have effectively wanted, or maybe only 

have unconsciously wanted, in the final 

result, to be like God. They will state in 

a superior way what is true and what is 

exclusionary and what is not exclusionary. 

And then they become worse than 

the oft-maligned Inquisition. 

The Inquisition indeed had—and it 

has been recognized now by the international 

scholarship—one of the most 

elaborated and equitable methods to 

protect the accused person, in order 

to give him the possibility to have and 

apply the just means of self-defense, 

and thereby to observe scrupulously 

the rules. One has the impression that 

some of those who currently have ruling 

powers in the Synod structures are 

not observing the quite wise and balanced 

rules of procedure of the historical 

Inquisition. 

In general, what is your own assessment 

of the modern language as a 

tool to mediate meaning and substance, 

such as the words “accompaniment,” 

“exclusion,” “positive 

“Those churchmen who accuse the unchangeable truth 

of doctrine of the Church of possessing an exclusionary 

language have to address their words to Jesus Christ, 

and I would say to them: ‘Please say to Jesus: “Jesus, 

you have an exclusionary language.”’ Such men 

have the arrogance to correct and to teach God.” 

versus negative,” “gradualism,” and 

so on? 

This is again to use language without 

content to make and express an 

accumulation of letters with beautiful 

sound, but without sound substance. 

This is a perversion of language, 

in order to achieve an aim which is 

against the Word of God. And this is 

typical Gnosticism. 

They use words like accompaniment. 

But they will accompany the 

person in order that he remains in 

his sin, in the danger to die eternally. 

This is the opposite of accompaniment. 

And “gradualism” is contrary to the 

Divinely revealed truths because God 

has radically and effectively said in His 

Commandments: “Do not lie!” God 

had not said: “Oh, yes, you can lie a little 

bit”; He said: “Do not steal.” He did 

not say: “No, you can steal a little bit, 

gradually.” In the same way you should 

not commit adultery, nor unchaste acts, 

not even a little bit. For, this is contrary 

to the words and truths of God. 

This is even psychologically damaging 

to the person, because when you 

say to the liar: “Oh, you can still lie a 

little bit.” He will not change and not 

improve really; for, he does not see 

that he is in danger. He will always 

say: “Today, my lie was not so big, not 

so bad,” and so we will likely not help 

him at all. Therefore, from the point 

of view of human psychology such a 

“gradualism” is a danger. We have thus 

to say this: “You must never lie and 

never steal, nor to commit unchaste 

acts, nor to commit calumny, never!” 

And then the person will know this, 

that this is a danger, and will have as 

a goal to achieve this standard. He will 

perhaps not succeed tomorrow, this is 

another question, but he has the firm 

will to abandon this, completely. 



Of course we have to say this in a 

charitable manner, like a mother and 

a father speaking to their children. A 

responsible father and mother will 

never say “that is not so bad” when 

their child, for example, cheats in 

school. For, cheating is dishonest 

and when the parents discover it, it 

would be irresponsible for the father 

or mother to say: “Okay, you can gradually 

abandon this conduct.” No, the 

child should never cheat, and he will 

not be a moral person unless you teach 

them. You have to educate the child. 

But then, when your child says: “I made 

all my effort but lapsed once more,” 

then you must say: “Okay, please continue 

to try.” This is the pedagogy of 

God and of the Church. 

Every time when a sinner comes 

with sincere repentance to Confession 

and truly confesses his sin, the priest 

has to give him the absolution when 

he really and sincerely has used all the 

means at his disposal. When it is only a 

case of human fragility, we do not have 

the authority to deny absolution. This 

is authentic gradualism. But they—the 

innovators—apply a bad gradualism. 

They say: “Now you can live in sin. And 

then tomorrow, or perhaps in one year, 

when you want you can start to commit 

lesser sins.” This orientation is completely 

unrealistic and irresponsible. 

Not to mention, as well, that this is also 

contrary to the truth. I only now gave a 

useful example and an additional psychological 

comparison. 

I grew up in Communism, I went 

five years to Communist schools, and I 

remember very well this seductive language, 

and quite completely; for, they 

used the same terms, concepts, but in 

a perverted manner, when they spoke 

of “peace.” They said: “Oh we are promoting 

peace,” but we knew that in that 

Communist time that they were not 

promoting peace by exporting weapons 

to Cuba, to Angola, and so on; and so 

this was “the peace.” And this is cynical 

and is likewise perverting the true 

meaning of the words. 

For example, I remember as a child 

in the Communist school, that we had 

to learn a famous Communist song, 

quite famous at that time, and it goes 

like this: our country is a beautiful 

country with trees and forest, and I 

don’t know another country where 

people can breathe so freely. Freely! I 

had to sing this song again and again. 

A country where you can breathe so 

freely—and, in actuality, it was a country 

filled with prisons and with concentration 

camps. It is very sad that now 

this innovative group of bishops in the 

Synod are using a perverted language 

to promote an anti-Christian agenda. 

Your superior, Archbishop Tomash 

Peta, of Astana, Kazakhstan, has 

said recently during the Synod that, 

at the 2014 Synod, “the ‘smoke of 

Satan’ was trying to enter the aula 

of Paul VI.” He concretely mentioned 

as examples for this claim 

the attempt to allow “remarried” 

divorcees to receive Holy Communion; 

the claim that cohabitation 

“is a union which may have 

in itself some values”; and finally 

the “pleading for homosexuality 

as something which is allegedly 

normal.” He concluded with the 

regret that the “smell of Satan” is 

also to be found “in the interventions 

of some Synod fathers this 

year [2015].” Could you comment 

on his statement and explain to us 

a little more about his position? 

I consider this statement one of the 

most striking, and it was one of the 

most apt statements on the issue. He 

spoke these words which no one else 

has dared to speak. He laid a finger on 

the wound. For, it is the spirit of Satan 

to pervert the Commandments of God, 

using specifically alluring and beautiful 

language. This is the language of 

Satan, smelling of the smoke of Satan. 

Archbishop Thomas Peta sincerely said 

it and we have to hope that some of the 

Synod Fathers awoke. 

When Jesus spoke, He was often 

very exclusionary in His language. 

For example, when Peter said to 

Jesus: “Oh, you ought not to suffer 

at the Cross,” Jesus said: “Go and get 

behind me, Satan.” This is very exclusionary 

language. And so the Synod 

Fathers should also stand up and say 

such things when they see these proposals 

for accepting homosexuality 

and divorce: “Satan depart from here, 

from this Synod Hall, and from this 

“‘[G]radualism’ is 

contrary to the Divinely 

revealed truths because 

God has radically and 

effectively said in His 

Commandments: ‘Do 

not lie!’ God had not said: 

‘Oh, yes, you can lie a 

little bit’; He said: ‘Do not 

steal.’ He did not say: ‘No, 

you can steal a little bit.’” 



Holy Eternal Rome.” Some people say it 

would be helpful to make an exorcism 

upon the Synod meetings. 

Cardinal Robert Sarah had similarly 

strong words to say in his 

own intervention during this year’s 

Synod about our current situation, 

saying that there are “two unexpected 

threats (almost like two 

‘apocalyptic beasts’) located on 

opposite poles: on the one hand, 

the idolatry of Western freedom; 

on the other, Islamic fundamentalism: 

atheistic secularism versus 

religious fanaticism.” He also said: 

“What Nazi-Fascism and Communism 

were in the 20th century, 

Western homosexual and abortion 

ideologies and Islamic Fanaticism 

are today.” Would you agree with 

“[T]his is really what 

awaits us, what is in front 

of us: a dictatorship of 

the homosexual ideology. 

This is a new dictatorship. 

And we already observe 

some officials of the United 

States are condemned 

to prison when they 

refuse to fill out the 

marriage certificate for 

a homosexual couple.” 


him, and would you develop your 

own thoughts for us on this thesis? 

I completely agree with this statement; 

it is a very apt remark and a very wise 

observation. For, this is really what 

awaits us, what is in front of us: a dictatorship 

of the homosexual ideology. 

This is a new dictatorship. And 

we already observe some officials of 

the United States are condemned to 

prison when they refuse to fill out the 

marriage certificate for a homosexual 

couple. Kim Davis is an example. There 

is already starting a dictatorship and we 

do not yet know in which direction it 

is to go, so we have to be very vigilant. 

A display of one-sided thinking: 

this is typical in all dictatorships. There 

is no possibility to think another way. 

Cardinal Sarah’s analysis is very 

realistic and I agree with it. We have 

to be vigilant and prepared to be persecuted 

in different ways and manners, 

and perhaps not excluding even 

martyrdom and becoming confessors. 

Each time, as well as all these times 

of persecutions are always a time of 

great blessings for the Church and for 

her greater purification. Those cardinals 

and priests who are now so 

proudly occupying their ecclesiastical 

power positions and promoting such 

anti-Christian “values” such as homosexuality, 

will probably be the first ones 

who will deny Christ. They will deny 

Him, and they will not die for Christ, 

and especially not for the reason that 

He is God. 

This morning here at St. John the 

Baptist Parish in Front Royal, Virginia, 

you spoke in your homily 

about a neo-Marxist and neo-Communist 

worldwide dictatorship that 

we are facing today. Could you 

explain what you meant with these 

words, and did this also include the 

more sophisticated theories and 

practice of Antonio Gramsci and 

of the Frankfurt School of Social 

Research? 

We are now observing this worldwide 

phenomenon in almost all countries 

that have now laxly introduced the 

homosexual ideology into schools, into 

courts. It is there on an increasingly 

worldwide scale, with the exception 

of Africa, East Europe, Asia, which are 

not so developed. But for the rest of the 

world, everywhere else this ideology 

and agenda are now being introduced. 

This is ultimately neo-Communist 

and Marxist because the ideology of 

Marx wants to abolish every sign of 

difference. The last sign and most evident 

difference is to be found in the 

created natural sex of persons. Therefore, 

there has arrived the homosexual 

agenda. It would be perhaps worthwhile 

to make further research in the 

writings of Marx and Engels. The seat 

of homosexual ideology is already in 

Marx and Engels. Therefore, I call this 

worldwide neo-Marxist, or neo-Communist, 

action. 

I am not so acquainted with the 

theories of Antonio Gramsci; therefore, 

I would have to research this 

question much further. To abolish 

all differences, all hierarchies, this is 

Communist, this is Marxist. It would 

be worthwhile to make this additional 

historical research in the writings of 

Marx and Engels—and in Hegel, too. 

If you had the chance to meet with 

Pope Francis today, what would you 

say to the Pope about the Synod? 

What would your request to the 

Holy Father be?


“Those cardinals and 

priests who are now 

so proudly occupying 

their ecclesiastical 

power positions and 

promoting such anti- 

Christian ‘values’ such 

as homosexuality, will 

probably be the first ones 

who will deny Christ.” 

I would say: “Holy Father, your first task 

is to accomplish loyally what Christ said 

to Peter, ‘Peter, confirm your brothers 

in the Faith; I have prayed for you 

that your faith may not fail, but you are 

thus now to confirm your brothers.’ So 

I ask that you, Holy Father, confirm us, 

your brothers, with the clearest possible 

statements of the Divine Truths and to 

do that also with the most unambiguous 

and clear statements in defense of 

the Divine Truths on family and marriage, 

and thus on the dignity of chaste 

human sexuality. And to be a Defensor 

Fidei, a Confessor Fidei. It would be 

my wish that there be no possibility 

for the anti-Christian media to exploit 

your words for the aim of damaging 

the Catholic truth.” 

Finally, would you yourself like to 

add any additional comments? 

In this time, it seems that some of those 

in the Church who have received from 

God the first task to tell the truth in 

all its integrity, as it comes from the 

Apostles—and the bishops are to be 

their unmistakable successors—eventually 

do the contrary. An influential 

portion of them who occupy some key 

positions in Church administration 

are now misusing their holy, sacred 

mission so as, it seems, to ultimately 

destroy the Divine Truths about marriage 

and the family. This is very grave. 

But, God has permitted this, just 

as He permitted it in the 4th century 

when nearly the entire episcopacy, with 

few exceptions, had accepted or sympathized 

with the Arian heresy. In those 

times, the simple faithful, the children, 

loyally maintained, pure and integrally 

the truth about the divinity of Christ, 

and this fidelity in some way saved the 

Church. 

I am hoping in the fruitful purity 

of the faithful, of simple Catholics, of 

children, of young couples, of large 

families, of the simple priests, and 

others who fortunately have kept their 

purity of faith and their defense of faith 

which they accepted, such as Human 

Life International, and LifeSiteNews, 

and some others who have also made 

a very powerful and—in the eyes of 

God—effective contribution to keep 

the purity of faith and to transmit it to 

the next generation. This is really our 

hope and gives us joy and confidence 

to continue our holy battle for the faith 

we received in baptism. 

Our pure Catholic faith is a victory 

over all the attacks of the un-Christian 

world and over all sophisms and 

infernal smelling of these deceitful 

beautiful phrases and proposals of the 

neo-Gnostic clerical establishment that 

promotes this subversion. Our pure 

faith of the simple ones, “the Little 

Ones,” the “Parvuli Christi,” will win 

this struggle finally with the help of 

the grace of God and the intercession 

of Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary, 

who conquered all heresies, as says an 

ancient Marian antiphon. 


Papal Politics 

The Political Papacy of Francis 

BY GEORGE NEUMAYR 

The Pope’s 

Caricaturing of 

Conservatives 

The lack of charity for which 

he condemns them was 

on sad display in his own 

closing remarks to the Synod 

Like many modern Jesuits, 

Francis often sounds like 

he loves every religion 

except his own. Could 

anyone imagine him ever 

talking about imams, 

rabbis, or even a feminist 

witch, in the same caustic 

style that he disparages 

Catholic traditionalists? 

The scandalous synod on 

the family skidded to a 

stop last weekend in Rome 

but not before Pope Francis 

got in a few more licks 

at conservatives, whom he caricatured 

in his final remarks as heartless. 

The speech was notable for its nastiness, 

displaying the very lack of charity 

he routinely assigns to conservatives. 

The synod, he said, had exposed 

“closed hearts which frequently hide 

even behind the Church’s teachings or 

good intentions, in order to sit in the 

chair of Moses and judge, sometimes 

with superiority and superficiality, 

difficult cases and wounded families.” 

He continued: “It was about trying 

to open up broader horizons, rising 

above conspiracy theories and blinkered 

viewpoints, so as to defend and spread 

the freedom of the children of God, 

and to transmit the beauty of Christian 

Newness, at times encrusted in a 

language which is archaic or simply 

incomprehensible.” 

Under the lightweight leftism of 

Pope Francis, the question “Is the Pope 

Catholic?” seems less and less rhetorical. 

Previous popes, reading the remarks 

above, would conclude that the speaker 

held to the theology of liberal Protestantism. 

They would find the false contrasts 

between divine law and mercy, 

upon which Francis habitually relies, 

pitiful in their shallowness, and they 

74 

would find his constant resort to strawman 

fallacies and motive-mongering 

against traditionalists to be an unsightly 

blot upon the papacy. With a pope like 

this one, orthodox Catholics don’t need 

enemies. 

All the tortured throat-clearing from 

pundits about the “nuances” of Pope 

Francis is very unconvincing. He is not 

nuanced at all. He is an open left-wing 

Catholic, perfectly comfortable with the 

de facto heretics within his own order 

and inside his special cabinet of cardinals. 

Cardinal Walter Kasper, whom 

Pope Francis has identified as one of 

his “favorite” theologians, and Cardinal 

Reinhard Marx of Germany, who is one 

of his closest advisers, stand to the left 

of Martin Luther. 

Well, say the pope’s desperate propagandists, 

Francis may not possess a deep 

mind but at least he has a big heart. If so, 

it seems to bleed for everyone but orthodox 

Catholics, whose fidelity to the faith 

under secularism’s ceaseless encroachments 

is treated with contempt. 

Like many modern Jesuits, Francis 

often sounds like he loves every religion 

except his own. Could anyone imagine 

him ever talking about imams, rabbis, 

or even a feminist witch, in the same 

caustic style that he disparages Catholic 

traditionalists? If he did, he would have 

an “ecumenical” crisis on his hands. 

Early in his pontificate, video footage 

captured him teasing a blameless

Papal Politics ■ By George Neumayr 

altar boy for holding his hands together 

piously. Were they “stuck” together? the 

Pope asked the bewildered boy. That 

is what passes for humor in the liberal 

Jesuit order. Visit almost any Jesuit college 

or school and you will soon encounter 

similar instances of anti-Catholic 

gibes presented as “reform.” 

In his final remarks at the synod, 

Francis ripped into the orthodox and 

praised the heterodox, identifying 

the latter as the “true defenders of 

doctrine” for preferring “people” to 

“ideas,” for “overcoming the recurring 

temptations of the elder brother (cf. Lk 

15:25-32) and the jealous laborers (cf. 

Mt 20:1-16).” 

If future popes are to take these 

cheap polemics seriously, they will have 

to rewrite the parable of the prodigal 

son, excising any condemnations of 

him for cavorting with prostitutes. It 

turns out that sex outside of indissoluble 

marriage is no big deal. The story could 

be retitled the parable of the progressive 

son, who stands as a forerunner of 

the “Christian Newness” that granting 

Communion to those in a state of 

adultery promises. In the parable of the 

progressive son, the sin-obsessed father 

would cry at his own rigidity and FedEx 

the fatted calf to the son’s brothel. 

According to Cardinal Donald 

Wuerl, speaking to America, a Jesuit 

magazine that prides itself on undercutting 

the traditional Catholic family with 

stances in favor of modern morality, 

the synod was a smashing success, as it 

moved the Church away from “the code 

of canon law” and toward a free-floating 

“understanding of God’s mercy.” 

Jesus Christ told his disciples, “Let 

your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ 

mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from 

the evil one.” One can imagine his 

critique of the synod on the family, 

at which the Church’s no has turned 

into a maybe. A devious ambiguity is 

the new orthodoxy, and the Church’s 

“fresh air” smells more like sulfur. 

“ 

Do not deceive yourselves,” 

wrote St. Paul. 

“If any one of you 

thinks he is wise by the 

standards of this age, he 

should become a ‘fool’ so that he may 

become wise. For the wisdom of this 

world is foolishness in God’s sight.” 

Pope Francis appears to disagree. 

He treats the standards of this age very 

reverentially while undercutting “fools 

for Christ” like Kim Davis. Shortly after 

the worldly wise expressed outrage at 

his meeting with the Kentucky clerk, he 

authorized his press secretary to spin 

it as a meaningless gesture, akin to a 

random ropeline greeting. 

“The Pope did not enter into the 

details of the situation of Mrs. Davis 

and his meeting with her should not 

be considered a form of support of 

her position in all of its particular 

and complex aspects,” said his press 

secretary. “Such brief greetings occur 

on all papal visits and are due to the 

Pope’s characteristic kindness and 

availability. The only real audience 

granted by the Pope at the Nunciature 

was with one of his former students 

and his family.” 

That former student turned out to 

be a homosexual caterer with his boyfriend 

in tow, prompting such pleased 

headlines from the liberal media as: 

“Vatican distances Pope Francis from 

Kentucky clerk Kim Davis. Meanwhile, 

the Vatican confirmed that 

Francis met with a gay friend and his 

partner a day earlier.” 

Were St. Ignatius of Loyola alive 

today to witness this Jesuit papacy, he 

would see it as a grim parody. St. Ignatius 

established his order to advance 

the “Church militant.” Pope Francis 

is fostering a Church muddled. His 

spokesmen say that he is comforting 

the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, 

seeking out the scorned on the 

margins. The evidence for this claim is 

hard to find. If anything, he is comforting 

the comfortable and leaving faithful 

Christians, who have never been more 

scorned, out in the cold. 

Rolling the 

Pope’s Fiat Over 

Kim Davis 

Pope Francis alienates 

the Church’s friends and 

emboldens her enemies 

Francis isn’t worried about 

losing the good opinion of 

“ fundamentalists,” whom 

he regularly caricatures 

as out of step with the 

modern zeitgeist, but with 

losing the good opinion 

of the liberal elite. 



The endless prattle about his 

unique gifts as a “pastor” ignores that 

he routinely leaves the gate open for 

the wolves to devour the lambs. To 

treat Kim Davis as the wolf and homosexual 

activists as the lambs is not 

pastoral. It is unholy. It confuses the 

faithful, discourages the truly seeking, 

and emboldens the Church’s enemies. 

St. Paul wrote his letters to “fools 

for Christ” to confirm them in their 

faith. Pope Francis writes letters to 

opponents of Christian teaching to 

confirm them in their errors. Italian 

atheist Eugenio Scalfari felt so confirmed 

in his unbelief and relativism 

after his epistolary exchanges with 

Francis that he gushed, “an openness 

to modern and secular culture 

of this breadth, such a profound vision 

between conscience and its autonomy, 

has never before been heard from the 

chair of St. Peter.” 

According to his spokesmen, Pope 

Francis is “reaching” out to these lost 

The Pope 

They’ve Been 

Waiting For 

In September 2013, Pope 

Francis dropped a second 

bombshell interview 

that delighted liberals 


sheep. But he is not telling them that 

they are lost. He is telling them that 

they are on the right path. His former 

student, Yayo Grassi, rushed to 

the press to inform them that he and 

his boyfriend Iwan had received a 

papal blessing and that Francis, in a 

previous exchange, had assured him 

that “I want you to know that in my 

work there is absolutely no place for 

homophobia.” 

The Vatican, while offering a “clarification” 

on the Kim Davis meeting, 

hasn’t bothered to clarify that papal 

remark to Grassi. It is content to let 

the Church’s enemies think that she no 

longer takes her own moral teachings 

seriously anymore. The priority of this 

pontificate is not to “reach out” to those 

enemies for the purpose of Catholic 

conversion but for the promotion of 

political liberalism and maybe at best a 

lowest-common-denominator theism. 

Kim Davis is irrelevant to that papal 

goal and so she is easily discarded. 

Last week we learned from 

Pope Francis that the 

Church is too preoccupied 

with the killing of unborn 

children and the destruction 

of the family. This raised the obvious 

question: If those issues don’t deserve 

top billing, which ones do? Pope Francis 

supplied the answer this week in 

an interview with an Italian atheist, 

Eugenio Scalfari: 

The most serious of the evils that afflict 

the world these days are youth 

unemployment and the loneliness of 

the old. The old need care and companionship; 

the young need work and 

hope but have neither one nor the 

other, and the problem is they don’t 

even look for them anymore. They 

Francis isn’t worried about losing the 

good opinion of “fundamentalists,” 

whom he regularly caricatures as out 

of step with the modern zeitgeist, but 

with losing the good opinion of the 

liberal elite. Once they heard that Pope 

Francis had thrown Davis under his 

Fiat, he returned to their good graces. 

As one liberal pundit put it to his confreres, 

only half-facetiously, “You can 

like the Pope Again! Vatican Distances 

Pope From Kim Davis.” Saturday 

Night Live depicted Pope Francis in 

a skit untangling himself from Kim 

Davis’s embrace. 

The late cardinal of Chicago, Francis 

George, once said, “I expect to die 

in bed, my successor will die in prison 

and his successor will die a martyr in 

the public square.” Given the Church’s 

respect for the wisdom of the world 

under Pope Francis, George’s prediction 

will not come to pass. The Kim 

Davises will rot in jail while the Pope 

is driven to palaces in his Fiat. 

have been crushed by the present. You 

tell me: can you live crushed under 

the weight of the present? Without a 

memory of the past and without the 

desire to look ahead to the future by 

building something, a future, a family? 

Can you go on like this? This, to 

me, is the most urgent problem that 

the Church is facing. 

No, this is not an Onion parody. 

This is the Catholic Church, circa 2013, 

under the hope-and-change pontificate 

of Francis—the one Jon Stewart, 

Chris Rock, and Jane Fonda have been 

waiting for. They had long pined for an 

enlightened pope and now they have 

found him in a Latin American Jesuit 

so loose, so cool, so “spiritual” (celebrities 

always like a dash of “mysticism”


Were St. Ignatius of 

Loyola alive today, 

he wouldn’t recognize 

Francis as a Jesuit. He 

might not even recognize 

him as a Catholic. 

in their liberalism) that he doesn’t fret 

over such fuddy-duddy anxieties as the 

killing of the elderly and the corruption 

of children (last week he reminded us 

that we shouldn’t see our culture as 

depraved) but rather their isolation and 

joblessness. 

“Pope Frank,” as sites like Gawker 

now call him fondly, wowed his atheistic 

questioner, who burbled to the 

press afterwards that “the most surprising 

thing he told me was: ‘God is 

not Catholic.’” 

God, it turns out, isn’t all that religious. 

But he is spiritual! In a passage 

that will make moral and religious 

relativists do somersaults, Pope Francis 

informed Scalfari that he needn’t 

trouble himself with the “solemn nonsense” 

of traditionalists who insist that 

he enter by the narrow gate. That’s all 

so pre-Vatican II. Salvation comes not 

by union with God but by union with 

self: “Each of us has a vision of good 

and of evil. We have to encourage people 

to move towards what they think 

is Good.” 

“Your Holiness, you wrote that 

in your letter to me. The conscience 

is autonomous, you said, and everyone 

must obey his conscience. I think 

that’s one of the most courageous steps 

taken by a Pope,” said Scalfari. Yes, 

what could be more brave than telling 

modern man to follow his malformed 

conscience? How would he have known 

to do that otherwise? This, too, is evidently 

one of the fruits of the spirit of 

Vatican II: popes who have the guts to 

praise Jane Fonda’s conscience. 

Pope Francis appeared to warm 

to this review of his courage: “And I 

repeat it here. Everyone has his own 

idea of good and evil and must choose 

to follow the good and fight evil as he 

conceives them. That would be enough 

to make the world a better place.” 

Pope Francis let it be known that 

he is eager to run the ball into the end 

zone for team spirit-of-Vatican II, and 

now that small-minded, rule-bound 

restorationists like John Paul II and 

Benedict XVI aren’t around anymore 

to tackle him he has an open-field run. 

Listen to the implicit rebuke of his two 

predecessors in this paragraph: 

I believe I have already said that our 

goal is not to proselytize but to listen 

to needs, desires and disappointments, 

despair, hope. We must restore 

hope to young people, help the old, 

be open to the future, spread love. Be 

poor among the poor. We need to include 

the excluded and preach peace. 

Vatican II, inspired by Pope Paul VI 

and John, decided to look to the future 

with a modern spirit and to be 

open to modern culture. The Council 

Fathers knew that being open to 

modern culture meant religious ecumenism 

and dialogue with non-believers. 

But afterwards very little was 

done in that direction. [Italics added] 

I have the humility and ambition to 

want to do something. 

Under spirit-of-Vatican-II-style 

attitudinizing, the world enlightens 

the Church, not the Church the world. 

Anyone who is familiar with the cocky 

clichés of lightweight, dilettantish 

modern Jesuits will understand the 

import of this interview and hear all 

of its dog whistles: the praising of the 

late heterodox Jesuit Carlo Maria Martini, 

the politically correct sniffing at St. 

Augustine (“He also had harsh words 

for the Jews, which I never shared”), 

the condescension to saints of the past 

as products of their unenlightened 

times (as if Francis is not a product of 

his liberal times and liberal religious 

order; self-awareness is evidently not 

part of his “humility and ambition”), 

the Teilhard de Chardin-style jargon 

(“Transcendence remains because that 

light, all in everything, transcends the 

universe and the species it inhabits at 

that stage…”). 

Were St. Ignatius of Loyola alive 

today, he wouldn’t recognize Francis 

as a Jesuit. He might not even recognize 

him as a Catholic. For all of his chirpy 

talk about a personal relationship with 

Jesus Christ, Francis speaks like a subjectivist, 

for whom religion is not something 

received from the triune God but 

something created from within, which 

is the hallmark of modernism, from 

which the spirit of Vatican II sprung. 

How else to explain a pope who tells an 

atheist to seek salvation by following 

what he considers “the Good”? 

George Neumayr is a contributing 

editor to The American Spectator, 

on whose website this article first 

appeared on October 28, 2015. He is 

also co-author, with Phyllis Schlafly, 

of No Higher Power: Obama’s 

War on Religious Freedom. 


Heart & Soul 

The Liturgy as a Window 

to Another World 

Address Given at Holy 

Innocents Parish, New 

York, May 12, 2015 

BY MARTIN MOSEBACH 

When it became 

apparent in the 

early 1950s that 

television sets 

would soon be in 

many households, German bishops 

deliberated about whether it would be 

wise to allow or even promote television 

broadcasts of the Holy Mass. Indeed, 

people thought about such questions 

sixty years ago, and they asked the great 

philosopher Josef Pieper for an expert 

opinion. 

In his opinion, Pieper rejected 

such television broadcasts on principle, 

saying they were irreconcilable 

with the nature of the Holy Mass. In 

its origins, the Holy Mass is a discipline 

of the arcane, a sacred celebration of 

mysteries by the christened. He mentioned 

the lowest level in the order of 

priests—done away with following the 

Second Vatican Council—the ostiary, 

or doorkeeper, who once had to ensure 

that the non-baptized and those temporarily 

excluded leave the church and 

move to the narthex following the liturgy 

of the Word. The Orthodox still do 

so in some places; the call of the deacon, 

“Guard the doors,” is heard in every 

Orthodox liturgy before the Eucharist. 

While in Georgia I once experienced 

this demand, often merely a ceremony 

of a recollected past, being taken literally. 

A monk approached me, fell to 

his knees and apologetically asked me 

78 

to leave the church since I, as a Roman 

Catholic, was not in full agreement with 

the Orthodox Church. I gladly acquiesced 

as I think not everyone has to be 

permitted everywhere all the time. 

Sacred places and holy acts are first 

declared quite plainly by the drawing of 

boundaries, and such boundaries must 

somehow be visible and palpable. Still, 

anyone who has not given any thought 

to the dubiousness of filming the Mass 

has perhaps on occasion felt uncomfortably 

moved when they saw believers 

receiving Communion on television 

or as the camera rested on the face of 

a celebrant chewing the host. Are such 

feelings truly only atavistic, produced 

by ancient magical fears? Other cultures 

are also acquainted with an aversion to 

photography. It is as if it would disturb 

a spiritual sphere. 

So it is all the more surprising that a 

photograph of a Mass has become very 

valuable to me. I always have it in view 

on my desk. It is a black and white picture 

of a church interior badly damaged 

by bombs; massive columns still bear a 

vaulted ceiling but the rear wall of the 

church is completely collapsed, providing 

a view of a burnt-out neighborhood 

lying in ruins. The piles of stone almost 

penetrate the interior of the church. But 

the chessboard floor around the altar has 

been cleared. Three clerics are standing 

behind one another in a row on the altar 

steps wearing the large chasubles and

Heart & Soul ■ by Martin Mosebach 

dalmatics of the modern “Beuron” style. 

The open Mass book is on the right side 

of the altar; we can see by the position of 

the celebrants that they are at the Kyrie 

at the beginning of the Mass. To one 

side, in front of a column damaged by 

bomb fragments, stands the credence 

table, flanked right and left by two adult 

acolytes in cassocks and rochets. The 

congregation is not visible; it must have 

been quite a distance from the altar. A 

great feast is being celebrated here as 

the High Mass reveals. The world has 

literally collapsed, but the calendar of 

the Church year mandates this feast. It 

is celebrated wholly regardless of the circumstances 

of the times. These circumstances, 

as disastrous as they are, retreat 

for the duration of the liturgical feast. 

In a unique way, my photograph captures 

the collapse of two dimensions of 

time: the horrors of war (who knows 

in what way the five men in this document 

have been affected, who of them 

have lost relatives and homes?) and at 

the same time an exit from this time. 

It is an exit from the merciless power 

of their suffering, a turning away from 

the hopelessness of contemporaneity, 

not influenced by delusion, but in the 

awareness that the reality opened up to 

us by the liturgy is always present, that it 

perseveres, as if only separated from the 

present by a thin membrane, through all 

epochs of world history in one eternal 

Now. And this Now is entered by the 

partakers of the Mass through the portal 

of the 42nd Psalm, which is about 

the discernatio between the supplicant 

and the “gens non sancta.” Through this 

distinction, the people, all of whom 

belong to the gens non sancta, become 

a holy people for the duration of the 

liturgy; the actual circumstances of 

their existence, whether the horrors of 

destruction or the self-sufficient satiety 

of peace-time, dissolve at this boundary 

Pieper rejected such 

television broadcasts on 

principle, saying they were 

irreconcilable with the 

nature of the Holy Mass. 

crossed in the liturgy. The focus of the 

celebrants on the cross and the altar 

denotes a simultaneous turning-away. 

Standing in a row, they are like a procession 

that has come to a halt—come to 

a halt because it has attained its highest 

possible objective on earth. 

Measured against the two-thousand 

year history of the Church, this is not 

an old picture. It is not yet seventy years 

old but still seems endlessly far away 

from us today. An image of such radicalness 

in its triumphant insistence in 

the positing of a counter-world would 

not be photographable today without 

further ado, at least not in the world of 

the Roman west. It may be more of a 

possibility among the persecuted Christians 

of the Orthodox east who have 

loyally preserved their “divine liturgy.” 

Anyone looking at this picture must 

believe that the liturgy it documents 

is invincible; it has nothing to fear of 

any disaster. 

My bishop has given me a difficult 

task. He asked me to speak to you about 

the traditional Roman liturgy, which 

was the dominant liturgy in the entire 

Catholic world before it was rewritten 

by the Second Vatican Council 

in the late 1960s to an extent that far 

surpassed the reform mission of that 

council. It was an unprecedented event 

in the history of the Church. No pope 

had ever so profoundly intervened in 

the liturgy, even though modifications 

to worship over nearly two thousand 

years were—perhaps naturally and 

inevitably—numerous. 

If we were to visualize the epochal 

breaks, the changes in the culture and 

mentality that Christendom has survived, 

it would make us dizzy. And 

indeed, the Church on earth has always 

been uneasy about whether it still 

resembles the Nazarene’s foundation. 

In every century of its existence it has 

had to measure up anew to its Founder’s 

prototype and has often enough been 

threatened to be torn apart—was in fact 

torn apart—by disputes over what the 

authentic Church is. The contradiction 

of the mission it was given has and will 

never allow it to come to rest. 

Christianity is the religion of unrest 

and of contradiction; it knows no 

self-soothing. Following Christ means, 

on the one hand, self-sacrifice, anarchy, 

dissolving all social bonds, even those of 

the family, freedom from care, poverty 

and a love of our enemies that mocks all 

laws of self-preservation. On the other 

hand it means passing on the faith, the 

great mission, helping the poor and the 

weak. That involves being an institution, 

becoming a system and apparatus, 

and that means—in the hour when 

the Savior appeared—which our faith 

understands as the “fullness of time”— 

necessarily becoming Roman. 

In every age there have been people 

who found this contradiction unbearable, 

who considered the Church’s 

institutionalization, even more so her 

becoming Roman, the original sin and 

who wanted to end this contradiction. 

The indignation of these people is quite 

understandable. What they objected 

to in the institution is often enough 

undeniable. It is equally undeniable that 

all Catholics today owe their belief to 

this institution. They owe to it the long 



unbroken line of bishops and priests, 

a spiritual genealogy, which leads to 

the circle of the Apostles; they owe to 

it the dissemination of the Holy Books, 

a scholarly study of them, the object 

The Mass seemed destined 

to triumph over the law 

of European history of 

ceaseless revolutions, to be 

the common thread that 

connected not only the 

two thousand past years. 

of which is their purity from corruption; 

they owe to it great architecture 

that ever allowed them to re-imagine 

the faith and art that often did more 

to proclaim the faith than the efforts 

of the theologians. Within a few centuries 

in ancient Greece, the image of 

Apollo transformed from the splendid 

cruel superman of Homer to the almost 

abstract principle of truth in Sophocles. 

The fact that the Apostle Paul and Pope 

John Paul believed in the same Jesus 

Christ in spite of all Gnostics, Cathars 

and Bultmanns, is also owed to this 

institution. 

Being an institution always involves 

power, and an institution is exposed 

to evil temptations just as every individual 

is. Yet it was popes and bishops 

who commissioned images from painters 

in which popes and bishops were 

driven into the jaws of hell; probably a 

unique phenomenon in the iconography 

of power worldwide. It was popes and 


bishops who exhibited to the faithful the 

true way to follow Christ in the form of 

the Saints. The institution of the Church 

found its finest justification, however, 

in passing down the liturgy, which is 

precisely something other and more 

than passing down a religious doctrine. 

This liturgy, which, by sanctioning 

the hierarchy, seems to belong altogether 

to the institutional side of the 

Church, is what reverses these very contradictions. 

It allows our faith to be a 

perceptible personal event, it frees us 

from the unpredictability of whoever 

is in power, it bears the possibility of 

the shocking encounter with the person 

of Jesus through the ages. Yes, it has 

changed on its pathway through history, 

just as the shape of churches changed 

over the centuries, yet the miracle is 

still how little it has changed. 

The fact that the Church, which 

embraced many nations, had one religious 

language in which the sacred texts 

and commandments were safely preserved, 

the fact that in carrying out the 

mysteries the priest and congregation 

together turn to the east to the risen 

and returning Christ, the fact that the 

liturgy is a realization of the redemptive 

sacrifice on the Cross, that the Mass is 

thus a sacrifice—all of this was completely 

uncontested in East and West. 

The Mass seemed destined to triumph 

over the law of European history of 

ceaseless revolutions, to be the common 

thread that connected not only 

the two thousand past years, but also 

the years of the future, even if no other 

stone should remain standing upon the 

other. 

Well, we now know, after 1968, after 

the reform of the Mass that bears the 

name of Pope Paul VI, this is no longer 

the case. According to the liturgical theology 

of Pope Benedict, the Mass of Paul 

VI and the largely lost Traditional Mass 

are one single rite in an ordinary and in 

an extraordinary form. And although 

I make no objections to this theology, 

anyone with eyes and ears is forced to 

admit that the characters of the two 

are sometimes so dissimilar that their 

theoretical unity seems quite unreal. 

In my experience, the pros and cons 

of the liturgical reform cannot really 

be discussed dispassionately within the 

Church. The fronts long stood against 

one another with irreconcilable rigidity 

on this issue, although the idea of 

“fronts” presumes comparable strength, 

which was not the case. The circle of 

those who refused to accept that what 

only a moment ago had been everything, 

should now abruptly become nothing, 

was miniscule. To put it in the words 

of theologian Karl Rahner, they were 

“tragicomic marginal figures who failed 

in their humanity.” They were regarded 

as ridiculous and yet highly dangerous. 

With all the force at his disposal, Pope 

Benedict tried to defuse the conflict, 

certainly not for the sake of “peace and 

quiet,” but to rectify an aberration. 

A lot of time has passed since then, 

and the reform of Paul VI has long since 

lost its revolutionary character in the 

lives of Christians around the world. 

To most Catholics the whole debate 

over the liturgy of the traditional and 

the reformed Mass would be entirely 

incomprehensible today. Consequently 

a bit of the cantankerousness that this 

subject long generated has perhaps also 

vanished. The few people who cannot 

let go of the traditional liturgy may be a 

tad ridiculous, but they are certainly no 

longer dangerous. Thus today my objective 

is not to continue the dispute over 

the Catholic liturgy, but to remember; to 

remember the spiritual process that led 

to the genesis of the liturgy, one of the 

most surprising, bizarre, contradictory 

processes of world history.


In the words of the Apostle Paul, in 

the Mass the celebrating congregation 

proclaims “the Lord’s death until He 

comes.” This death on the Cross was, 

however, an event that was as remote as 

possible from any celebration and any 

ceremony and any rite. As much as we 

have gotten used to gazing at the Cross 

in great works of art, possibly covered 

with gems in magnificent churches, to 

wearing it as jewelry or even seeing it as 

costly or cheap trinkets, we occasionally 

realize that the reality of the Cross was a 

different one. At times, we must silently 

agree with the reasoning of aggressive 

atheists who fight against crucifixes in 

classrooms and courtrooms under the 

pretext that the sight of the tortured 

Christ is a burden, is psychological terrorism. 

Horror at the sight of the Cross 

can arise in particular from devout earnestness. 

In the second chapter of volume 

II of Goethe’s last novel, Wilhelm 

Meister’s Apprenticeship, after committing 

himself to the creed of Nicaea, 

The temple worship of 

the Jews was and has 

remained the covenant 

duty of the people, for the 

religion of Jesus Christ did 

away with nothing; it was 

never a “reform” in the 

modern sense. It was now 

fulfilled in the sense meant 

for it from the beginning. 

the old Unitarian and Spinozist cites 

the principles of the mysterious educational 

institution to which Wilhelm 

hands his son over: “… we draw a veil 

over those sufferings, even because we 

reverence them so highly. We hold it a 

damnable audacity to bring forth that 

torturing Cross, and the Holy One who 

suffers on it, or to expose them to the 

light of the sun, which hid its face when 

a reckless world forced such a sight on 

it; to take these mysterious secrets, in 

which the divine depth of Sorrow lies 

hid, and play with them, fondle them, 

trick them out, and rest not till the most 

reverend of all solemnities appears vulgar 

and paltry.” The Coptic Christians 

also shy away from open exhibition of 

the Cross. They never attach the body 

of the Savior to it and they surround it 

with so many ornaments that it is not 

recognizable at first glance as a cross, 

an ornamental veil. The Orthodox focus 

on Christ Pantocrator, on the icons of 

the Crucified, Christ stands before the 

Cross rather than hanging on it; just a 

few drops of blood indicate His wounds. 

The whole course of events of Jesus’ execution 

is, indeed, almost unbearable 

even to non-Christian readers of the 

passions of the Gospels. A man is made 

a thing, ousted from the human community; 

this is an excommunication if 

ever there was one. The knacker’s yard 

is the absolute opposite of the temple. 

Here, the absence of God prevails, nihilism, 

here the Tortured Himself is racked 

by doubts over the meaning of His path. 

Or as Chesterton said so powerfully, 

“God seemed for an instant to be an 

atheist.” 

Where out of this impasse does a 

path lead to ritual and celebration? 

The temple itself was profaned by this 

blasphemy, which for outsiders, who 

have not forgotten awe through pious 

routine, forms the deeply incomprehensible 

foundation of a religion of 

salvation. 

This path would not exist if Christ 

Himself had not pointed it out. He Himself 

opened the eyes of the disciples for 

the relation between His slaughter and a 

feast of sacrifice destined for repetition. 

He Himself taught them to associate 

the Last Supper, which already stood 

in ritual context to the Passover meal, 

with His bloody sacrificial death the 

next day. The biblical words spoken by 

Moses to establish the offering on the 

Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and the 

words of the Eucharist, which proclaim 

the surrogate sacrifice of Christ’s blood, 

are nearly identical. Exodus 24:8 says, 

“Moses then took the blood, sprinkled 

it on the people and said, ‘This is the 

blood of the covenant that the Lord has 

made with you.’” In Mark 14:23, Jesus 

“took a cup … and said to them ‘This 

is my blood of the covenant, which is 

poured out for many.’” 

This is the clue to the correct understanding 

of the events: the foundation of 

a sacrificial ceremony devised for repetition. 

A rite is an ever-renewed repetition 

of an act prescribed by an outside 

will. But the framework within which 

this foundation should be seen was also 

clear to the disciples. Paul articulated it 

when he called Christ the High Priest 

who, however, no longer absolves the 

people with the blood of a calf, but with 

his own blood. 

This is a most incredible reinterpretation. 

For the apostles, however, it 

was purely an awareness of reality: the 

slave’s death as an outcast becomes the 

free sacrificial act of a High Priest. The 

passio of death on the cross becomes 

actio—and truly the part of the Mass 

in which the sacrifice of Christ is visualized 

is called “actio”—the suffering 

becomes a deed. The deed of a High 



Priest: with Christ we have a new way to 

see reality. Christ brings about knowledge 

of this reality by thinking in terms 

of opposites that will not be resolved 

until the end of human history. It is true 

that Jesus, bathed in sweat and blood, 

gasped out his life on the cross. It is just 

as true that He was the High Priest who 

sprinkled the world in his blood and 

with freely raised arms, “took everything 

on Himself.” 

The rite in relation to which His 

disciples understood His death was, 

however, highly specific. It was one of 

the richest and most widely developed 

rites of the ancient world: the sacrifice 

of smoke and fire in the temple, performed 

by a holy priesthood before the 

Holy of Holies, which housed the Shekinah—the 

invisible cloud of God made 

perceptible by the clouds of incense— 

which make the air heavier and God’s 

presence—incorporeal and yet irrefutable—tangible 

through appealing to our 

finest sense of smell. Jesus frequently 

prayed in the temple and his followers, 

too, left the temple reluctantly to 

then shape their worship according to 

the rites and ceremonies of the temple. 

Indeed, one could say that after the fall 

of the temple, worship as it was since the 

book of Leviticus, the liturgical scriptures 

of the Old Testament, survives 

only in the Catholic and Orthodox liturgies. 

But now it must be understood 

differently in this new transparency of 

the physical signs of the realities it also 

contains. This is the new antagonism of 

Christianity: “All that is transitory is but 

a metaphor” to say it again in Goethe’s 

words. But this ability to be symbolic 

does not lessen the reality of the transitory. 

After the Son of God became man, 

matter was given a new dignity that has 

its own law. It points beyond itself, but 

is itself already filled with God’s reality. 

The religion of the Resurrection does 


not recognize an ideal in spirituality 

that overcomes matter; it recognizes not 

only the people but also the so-called 

dead matter as the substance of divine 

incarnations, so that water and wind 

and fire can become incarnations, and 

not merely symbols, of the Holy Spirit. 

This is the aesthetic of the Catholic liturgy—not 

to mention the Orthodox. 

All is symbol and all is quite real, all is 

merely precursor and all is fulfillment 

at the same time, all is the past and all 

is the future and both occur, indistinguishably 

and simultaneously, in the 

present. 

The temple worship of the Jews was 

and has remained the covenant duty 

of the people, for the religion of Jesus 

Christ did away with nothing; it was 

never a “reform” in the modern sense. 

It was now fulfilled in the sense meant 

for it from the beginning, according 

to Christian belief, and made apparent 

in the fullness of time. Just as the 

sacrifice of Christ on Calvary was even 

then both passio and actio, the liturgy, 

which served the anamnesis of this 

sacrifice, was now also multiple things 

at one time. The worship of the people 

was now this sacrifice; each sacrifice in 

world history was related to the act of 

Jesus’ sacrifice. He was the real agent of 

the liturgy; He used the people only as 

mediums. The liturgy descended deep 

to the beginning of time. It celebrated 

Sunday as the day of creation; at Easter 

it reenacted God’s separation of light 

from darkness on the first day of creation 

and sanctified the water through 

the breath of the priest, as in the beginning 

the Spirit of God hovered over the 

surface of the waters. It transformed 

the blasphemous events of Golgotha 

into their opposite, into highest sacredness; 

the gruesome slaughter into the act 

of reverence, as if to ever again make 

good the deicide, but also to reveal the 

A rite is an everrenewed 

repetition 

of an act prescribed 

by an outside will. 

reality hidden in it, the glory of the acts 

of the Redeemer. And it looked to the 

future, to the eternal heavenly liturgy 

described in the liturgical book of the 

New Testament, the Book of Revelation, 

the “marriage of the Lamb,” the liturgy 

that ever celebrates the cosmos and to 

which the people draw near only by 

their celebration. This is why the priests 

wear the alb, the white robe of the men 

standing around the throne of God in 

the Book of Revelation. This is why the 

“Lamb of God” is invoked in the liturgy. 

This is where the incense has its New 

Testament legitimacy. 

“In this realm time becomes space.” 

The liturgy confirms this line from 

Wagner’s Parsifal. In the liturgy are 

experienced in one place the various 

ages and, indeed, even the exiting from 

historic time and the entering of that 

timelessness that eternally accompanies 

us. But the fulcrum of this turbulent 

time travel is always the Cross; this is 

where the beams from past and future 

converge. Therefore it is also crucial 

that a large cross stands on the altar so 

that the priest, while he holds out his 

hands as Jesus did, looks like a dying 

man before whose eyes, in earlier times, 

a crucifix was held. 

It is part of formation through the 

liturgy that individual moments of Calvary’s 

horror are portrayed when the 

priest evokes them in his gestures. For 

example, the moment when the veil is 

taken off the chalice and paten invokes 

the moment the Christ was robbed of


his garments. Upon breaking the Host 

we recall not only the corresponding 

gesture at the Last Supper, but also the 

destruction of the body on the Cross. 

And during the “Pax Domini sit semper 

vobiscum,” when the priest slips a 

piece of the consecrated Host into the 

cup and thus reincorporates flesh and 

blood, we witness the Resurrection. 

These allusions perhaps explain what 

is meant when the Christian liturgy is 

called an “observance of the mysteries” 

(Mysterienfeier). The word mystery 

is always translated incorrectly in this 

context. It can evoke all sorts of wrong 

associations; secrecy is not far off, even 

intellectual laziness or that cunning that 

would like to surround irrationalities 

with a disastrous sublimity. For the 

purposes of the liturgy, however, mystery 

means no more than “event,” “act,” 

“phenomenon,” “occurrence.” An act 

whose meaning is only understood by 

the initiated: the truth that needs not 

be understood, but looked upon, like 

the Redeemer himself, who needed not 

respond to Pilate’s question “What is 

truth?” because His presence was the 

answer. 

Here we must clarify a particular 

German misunderstanding. In Germany 

one who defends the traditional 

liturgy of the Church incurs one of the 

harshest, explicitly morally-tinged condemnations: 

he is an “aestheticist” who 

hangs onto the old form out of a dubious 

proclivity for glittering decoration and 

the compulsions of an antique collector. 

Such tendencies would be worthy 

of derision if in truth they were not an 

expression of superficiality masking 

sheer frivolity. In Germany we like to 

distinguish between the glistening surface 

and the deeper values. Preferably, 

deeper values are not externally perceptible. 

What appears “beautiful” is mostly 

untrue and morally questionable. When 

the word “aestheticism” is uttered, the 

defender of the traditional liturgy has 

already lost; his arguments are exposed 

as symptoms of questionable character. 

It must certainly therefore be devastating 

for the traditional liturgy that 

it is beautiful; beauty defined as wellformed, 

symmetry, absence of arbitrariness, 

musical rhythm, clarity, classical 

calm, absence of the fashionable, 

perfected creation of a spiritual event. 

The intellectual historic process that led 

to this widespread distrust of beauty 

did not emerge only yesterday. It has 

its roots in that German vice, philosophy, 

an eloquent juggling of definitions 

that revels in the separation—impossible 

in reality—of content and form. 

It has roots in the Protestant culture 

of introspection and in the playing off, 

habitual since the eighteenth century, 

of pagan beauty and associated libertinage 

against Christian morality, which 

suspects the devil behind beauty. 

I will not deal further with this question, 

because I am speaking of more 

important things than the analysis of 

a national psychopathology. It is not 

about the beauty, perfection, grace and 

splendor of the traditional liturgy, as 

much as it possesses all of these. It possesses 

them in passing, inadvertently. 

For it is not the product of artistic 

work, artistic expression, artistic composition. 

The liturgy has spawned an 

almost immeasurable amount of art, 

but itself does not need art, defined as 

the personal creativity of a master. If 

we associate the concept of art with the 

conscious process of artistic creativity, 

the Mass has nothing to do with art in 

this sense because it is an anonymous 

creation, without authors, a collective 

work that unfolded over centuries as 

a living entity. It is as impersonal as 

a fire burning in a temple that is not 

allowed to go out for fear the world will 

fare badly. All its parts are arranged 

with utmost accuracy around the great 

theurgical act in their midst. Every gesture 

is designed to remind the celebrant 

and the faithful that what is acting and 

being expressed here is no individual 

human will, but the divine Master. And 

because the intention is not directed 

at it, because no personal pretension 

dominates the space, because the sole 

impulse of the celebrant is subjection 

to that which is mandated, this beauty, 

that elusive quarry, not even noticed by 

many, suddenly appears. It accompanies 

what is right, barely more than a sign 

that human self-will has been silenced 

for the short duration of the liturgy. 

Over the past four decades another 

term that has played an important role 

in the discussion about the rite of the 

Church is “contemporaneity.” This word 

is also associated with many misunderstandings. 

That something—a law, 

a custom, the use of language, a political 

position—must be “contemporary” 

sounds so perfectly normal it really 

requires no justification. As beautiful 

and good as things may be, if they are 

no longer perceived as contemporary 

they are beyond remedy, no matter what 

else speaks for them. 

In Germany one who 

defends the traditional 

liturgy of the Church 

incurs one of the harshest, 

explicitly morally-tinged 

condemnations. 



As many moderate modifications 

as it may have experienced in its history, 

the fact that the Traditional Mass 

remained essentially unchanged from 

the first Christian millennium to the 

end of the second shattered all historical 

probability. It was not just something 

from yesterday, something old-fashioned 

or outdated, looming into the 

present-day, but something almost 

incomprehensibly ancient in the millennia 

of human history. This Mass was 

already no longer contemporary in the 

nineteenth century with its aesthetics of 

Goethe and Wagner, Neuschwanstein 

and the Eiffel Tower. In the elegant 

eighteenth century attempts were 

made to hide the strange antiquity of 

the Mass under great orchestral music 

as if behind an iconostasis of modern 

sound. The Mass comes, we know, from 

Late Mediterranean Antiquity, an urban 

culture of many religions and a colorful 

mix of peoples and races, with philosophically 

enlightened upper classes 

and thousands of obscure cults of slaves 

and ordinary people. How it was able to 

hold its own in feudal, agrarian northern 

Europe is such a mystery, merely 

from the socio-historical point of view, 

that the phenomenon borders on the 

improbable. 

Certainly the un-contemporaneity 

of the liturgy represented a real problem 

And it is, I fear, a mistake 

if we think or hope that 

the use of the vernacular 

made the Mass more 

understandable. 


in many eras, and many eras of the past 

could have made it a lot simpler with 

a “contemporary” adaptation. And 

indeed, there were all sorts of attempts 

at adaptation, though they never altered 

the text of the missal or the details of the 

ceremonial language. They were rather 

production variations—to put it in theatrical 

terms—the famous Low Mass for 

instance, or the introduction of songs in 

the national language. We could say that 

now and again the Church authorities 

lost their nerve against the forces of the 

respective zeitgeist with respect to the 

liturgical program placed in their trust 

to preserve. The un-contemporaneity 

of the liturgy, which is in equidistance 

at any historical era, was regarded as a 

burden and not as what it is: a trump. 

It’s tricky with contemporaneity: 

when you try to grab and hold onto it, 

you end up holding the dead tail of a 

lizard in your hand. Arrested contemporaneity 

is necessarily always about to 

go out of date. The radical form of the 

liturgy, by contrast, cannot go out of 

date because it does not belong to time, 

but moves outside of time. 

Many arguments are based on the 

incomprehensibility of Latin in our 

present time. Have we forgotten that 

in past centuries Latin was also “understood” 

by only a few? Germany became 

a Christian country with a Latin liturgy 

at a time when the Germanic, Frankish 

and Alemannic farmers not only spoke 

no Latin, but also could not read and 

write. Incidentally the same was true 

of their masters. As for the Latin of the 

clergy, there was certainly a germ of 

reality in the satire of Ulrich von Hutten 

about the Viri obscuri, the obscurantists 

with their depraved macaroni Latin. 

Recently, philologists have very vividly 

shown that the Latin of the Mass was 

not even the Latin spoken by the people 

of Rome in the fourth century AD. 

The vernacular of that multiethnic city 

was simplified Greek, Koine. The Mass 

was Latinized out of the specific need 

to render the sacrificial act in a sacred, 

exalted language that could compete 

against the high cultural level of the 

liturgical language of paganism. 

Thus as a rhetorical linguistic work 

of art the Roman canon emerged in a 

form of rhythmic prose that is strictly 

separated from rhythmic poetry but 

that remains recognizable as an ordered 

spoken melody. There is nothing similar 

in modern languages; as a spoken 

work of art the canon is literally 

untranslatable. 

Nevertheless, even the most resolute 

advocates of the vernacular in the 

liturgy cannot claim that the faithful 

of past centuries did not know what 

was happening in the Holy Mass. They 

could not, of course, relate what they 

heard word for word, but there were 

not only words, there were gestures 

and processions, there was kneeling 

and blessings, singing and bells, and 

this entirety contained a message that 

Catholics understood very well for two 

thousand years. They experienced theophany; 

God made himself accessible 

to the people, was with them, and His 

physical nearness in the liturgy was 

just as reliably experiential as back in 

the Holy Land. No one needs to know 

more—or less—about the liturgy. Those 

who understand every word of the ceremony 

but do not know this basic truth 

have understood nothing of the Mass. 

And it is, I fear, a mistake if we think 

or hope that the use of the vernacular 

made the Mass more understandable. 

This does not even take into account 

the great problem of translation (Josef 

Pieper, who I mentioned above, said 

using everyday language in the liturgy 

could be decided only when useful 

translations existed) and everyone


The rejection of the 

traditional liturgy has 

certainly unexpectedly 

resulted in one particular 

problem for the 

contemporary Church. 

knows what unforeseen difficulties and 

substance for dispute and division this 

involves. The Sunday edition of the 

F.A.Z. [the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung—the 

leading newspaper in Germany] 

recently published a revealing 

but not surprising essay by a journalist 

who was born in former East Germany 

and raised irreligiously who described a 

visit to a Sunday Mass in the reformed 

rite. He admitted that the entire process, 

of which he understood every word, 

remained a mystery to him. That’s not 

surprising. The liturgy is not catechetical 

instruction. Celebrating it, especially 

in its reformed form, requires a great 

deal of knowledge where that form does 

not, in its symbolic fullness, unequivocally 

appeal to a basic knowledge, 

common to all cultures and grounded 

in anthropology, of the presence of the 

sacred, of the experience of sacred space, 

of the gesture of sacrifice. To me, one of 

the greatest treasures of Islam is its five 

daily prayers when the faithful prostrate 

themselves before God on the earth and 

touch their foreheads to the ground. 

How much theology becomes unnecessary 

at the sight of people praying 

so! The prayers of the traditional Latin 

and Greek, Coptic and Syro-Malankara 

liturgies are infinitely more varied 

than that of Islam, as is appropriate 

for initiation mysteries. Yet worship, 

theocentrism, reverence, submission 

to divine will, entering another world 

with other laws can also easily be read 

in them, even if they seem confusing 

and hermetic to an outsider. 

The rejection of the traditional 

liturgy has certainly unexpectedly 

resulted in one particular problem for 

the contemporary Church. To outsiders, 

including many Catholics, the Catholic 

Church today is mainly embodied in 

the morality it teaches and demands of 

its faithful, which, manifest in prohibitions 

and commandments, are contrary 

to the beliefs of the secular world. In a 

church centered mainly on the immediate 

liturgical encounter with God, 

these moral demands were related not 

only to life choices, but were specifically 

conceived as preparation for full 

participation in the liturgy. 

It was the liturgy that specified the 

goal of morality. The question was: what 

must I do to attain full communion with 

the Eucharistic Christ in the liturgy? 

What makes me only able to observe 

this Christ from a distance? That which 

is morally forbidden appeared not simply 

as the incarnation of evil, but as 

something to be avoided for the sake 

of a specific objective. And when the 

commandment that excludes us from 

Communion was transgressed, the 

sacrament of Confession stood ready 

to heal the damage and prepare us for 

Communion. Surprisingly, it turned out 

that the Catholic Church of the past, 

which focused on the liturgy, seemed 

scandalously morally lax to outsiders, 

while to contemporaries and not only 

the unchurched, the present Church 

seems unbearably preachy, merciless 

and pettily puritanical. 

Why so many observations about 

a matter that is perhaps over and done 

with? There is a passage by Ernst Jünger 

that has troubled me deeply. It is in his 

collection of aphorisms Über Autor und 

Autorschaft [On Author and Authorship]: 

“For conservatives […] the point 

comes when the files are closed. Then 

tradition may no longer be defended. 

The fathers are worshiped in silence and 

in dreams. When the files are closed, let 

them rest, held in trust for future historians.” 

This is the question that I am not 

able to answer: Is the liturgy being celebrated 

in the photo I mentioned earlier 

amidst and in disregard of terror and 

destruction truly a testimony of victory 

over history, or is it an infinitely noble, 

poignant farewell picture? Remember, 

the Orthodox churches of Russia and 

Greece, Egypt, Syria and India hold fast 

to this image of the liturgy I described in 

full conviction. These churches are not 

insignificant parts of Christendom and 

have truly been tested in the fiery furnace; 

not Rahner’s “tragicomic marginal 

figures who failed in their humanity,” 

among which I gladly count myself. In 

the course of the ecumenism required 

of us, whether we can constructively 

recall our own abundance of traditions 

will depend on whether the Church is 

entirely subject to the laws of history, 

sociology, psychology and politics or 

whether there is something in her that 

defies these laws because it comes from 

other realms. 

Martin Mosebach, born in 1951 in 

Frankfurt am Main, has lived there as 

a freelance writer since completing his 

state law exams. He has received numerous 

awards including the 1999 Heimito 

von Doderer Literature Prize, the 2002 

Kleist Prize, the 2007 Georg Büchner 

Prize and the 2013 Literature Prize of 

the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. 

TRANSLATION BY FAITH ANN GIBSON 

© MARTIN MOSEBACH 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS TO THE SOCIETY 

OF ST. HUGH OF CLUNY.ORG. 


Church Politics 

Political Theater 

The Synod on the Family 

was a Machiavellian 

maneuver to change the 

Church now and for a 

generation or more. But 

to recognize that, we 

need to understand the 

shortcomings of Pope Francis 

and his lieutenants, and 

be ready to see where he’s 

trying to take the debate 

BY ROGER A. MCCAFFREY 

“Times are changing and we 

Christians must change continually.” 

—POPE FRANCIS 

“Our future is our past.” 

—ARCHBISHOP MARCEL LEFEBVRE 

It isn’t possible to read, carefully, 

the best Church reporting of the 

past two years without developing 

nausea. We now behold 

a Church in disarray that not 

three years ago was bathed in Bavarian 

tranquillity. 

Today we see, and I have met, heartsick 

top “conservative” Churchmen, 

gamely repeating age-old Catholic 

teaching on marriage and the Sacraments, 

over-against an ascendant and 

confident liberal group promoting 

attitudes that would nullify millennia 

of Christian practice. The liberals’ 

deception: because theirs are “attitude-shifts”—which 

Francis insists 

we “must” undertake “continuously,” 

“changing with the times”—rather than 

doctrinal, then there’s “No Change in 

Doctrine.” 

Good enough for your average 

chump in the pew. 

The man who empowered and 

inspired these liberals: the first Jesuit 

pope, Jorge Bergoglio. He has long 

expressed irritation with colleagues 

he says are “obsessed” with teachings. 

To close the Synod he added fresh 

86 

castigation—why don’t we just call it 

castration?—of the doctrinal conservatives 

in an unprecedented condemnation 

of “closed hearts which frequently 

hide even behind the Church’s 

teachings.” 

He has excoriated Synod conservatives, 

in homilies at his Masses, for 

their strict adherence to traditional 

Catholic teachings—the very mission 

Christ solemnly entrusted to Peter 

and the apostles, and a habit that had 

earned many of these same prelates 

praise and encouragement from Francis’s 

predecessors. 

A few weeks after the Synod, he 

actually told a Lutheran woman longing 

to get permission from the pontiff 

to receive Communion at Catholic 

Masses, “I ask myself and I don’t 

know how to respond...it is not my 

competence.” 

“I’ve never been so discouraged about 

the prospects for the Church,” confessed 

one eminent Catholic figure 

during a chat a few weeks ago. “I had 

hoped that John Paul and Benedict had 

begun to put an end to the crisis.” He 

admitted that in his darkest moments 

he entertained thoughts of the End 

Times. 

And, he added disturbingly, “the 

fact is that the gay lobby has never been 

more active here than it is today.” We 

were sitting in the Vatican.

Church Politics ■ by Roger A. McCaffrey 

Given my source, his methodical 

approach to matters, and his stature in 

synodal proceedings, this was a stunning 

way to start one of my days. But 

he had more to say: “There is no doubt 

in my mind that Pope Benedict XVI 

was pressured to resign.” 

With these words, carefully chosen, 

he throws into question the very 

basis of the election of Jorge Bergoglio. 

I didn’t take him to suggest invalidity, 

but rather to suggest a tainted election 

of Francis. 

I said that Benedict told a German 

friend of mine that he felt like he was 

dying and could not govern, hence his 

resignation. At this, the prelate noted, 

“He’s fine now. When you go to see him 

he’s alert, sound mind, no cane, even 

῾jumps’ out of his seat to get up, one 

that is lower than the couch over there.” 

Yet in the rare photos of the ex-pope, 

usually when he’s meeting with the new 

one, Ratzinger looks fragile, dottering. 

And on a cane. 

My interlocutor will probably participate 

in the next conclave. It is on 

his mind already. He provided insight 

into significant events before the 2013 

conclave. “In the consistory in the days 

before the last conclave, there was disaffection.” 

He expected—in fact he told 

a friend in 2012, before Ratzinger spoke 

of resigning, “any new conclave will 

be chaotic.” 

In that he was half right. Team 

Bergoglio blew out the conservative 

opposition—centered around a weak 

Northern Italian who made much of 

his overtures to Islam—in four ballots. 

On the balcony an hour later, the new 

pontiff gave his opponents the proverbial 

elbow, overthrowing various hallowed 

customs, most notably (to this 

observer) placing his closest leftwing 

Cardinal-allies beside him, regardless 

of rank. The first of many insults. 

But let’s step back for a moment. Much 

of the bitterness lighting up Catholic 

conservatives centers around two 

theologically leftist Germans, Cardinals 

Walter Kasper and Reinhard 

Marx, advanced ostentatiously by Pope 

Francis over two years, who have lead 

the full-throated charge for change. 

Thanks to the Holy Father they had 

plenty of reserves: he stacked the Synod 

by eliminating a dozen of the stoutest 

conservative prelates between last 

year’s Synod rehearsal and this year’s 

main event—and replacing them with 

liberals like Chicago’s new archbishop, 

Blaise Cupich, who is searching for the 

secret formula to enable gays to receive 

Holy Communion. Several men of 

standing in the field of ethics or canon 

law or dogmatics were not asked in. 

American Cardinal Raymond Burke 

is but one example. 

Watch Burke in the months ahead. 

This consummate team player and man 

of the Church has been driven to the 

periphery, and is the point-man now 

for the doctrinal conservatives who 

never saw themselves as anything other 

than Catholic without adjectives. This 

was exactly the position of Archbishop 

Marcel Lefebvre after Vatican II. Suddenly 

after Pope Paul’s liturgical revolution 

the French prelate was “the traditionalist,” 

blamed for being divisive. 

The injection of raw Church politics 

into what should been a sedate proceeding 

that re-stated Catholic moral 

teachings is pure Argentinian populism, 

opines a Uruguayan priest with 

friends in Buenos Aires. But leftist too, 

says my friend. Peronism blended with 

Catholic theological liberalism. 

In fact, it was the pope who singled 

out, as his theological inspiration, in 

his first public speech, Kasper, a retired 

Vatican official and former secretary 

to Hans Kung, often accused of heresy 

and disciplined by Pope John Paul II, 

no disciplinarian. 

• • • 

The upshot of the Synod on the Family 

in Rome: It has nothing to do with the 

family—or with the exercise of synodal 

“collegiality.” It’s about who will exercise 

power in the Church for the next 

40 to 50 years. The changes in Church 

practice feared by conservatives have 

already taken place. Relaxation of 

marriage annulment procedures was 

enshrined this summer by Pope Francis, 

before the Synod that was supposed 

to guide him on this matter had even 

begun. 

This end-run stunned the conservative 

opposition, which, characteristically, 

said next to nothing, saving (it 

would have been argued by them in 

frantic emails and phone calls) their 

ammunition for the Synod. 

Journalists and commentators preparing 

all year for the great Synod battle 

could hardly be expected to reverse 

course and declare it over. The same 

is true for conservative prelates. But 

the battle all but ended with Pope 

Bergoglio’s streamlined annulment 

procedures. 

For that matter, any ideas about 

incorporating practicing homosexuals 

into the life of the parish or, indeed, 

about giving Holy Communion to 

them or to re-married divorcees, were 

implanted into the 2014 pre-Synod proceedings, 

as Edward Pentin documents 

in his E-book, “Rigged,” and published. 

For good measure, the pope early 

this year encouraged official photos 

of himself with a transvestite “couple” 

who had been invited by Francis to his 

Casa. He also gave a photo-op during 

his U.S. trip to his old friend the homosexual 

student, now with his “spouse.” 



When these photos hit, that Synod battle 

also ended before it began. 

So, the blizzard of Synod press-conferences 

and commentary by conservatives 

there who were appalled by all 

this, to say nothing of the avalanche 

of Synod committee and “auditor 

reports,” all serve to anesthetize conservative 

chumps looking for any paragraphs 

of doctrinal nectar—or confuses 

the faithful and prepares them 

for any change on the way. 

Yet not even this skillful strategy of 

marginalizing doctrinal conservatives 

and befuddling hidebound faithful is 

enough for Francis. His biting words 

of accusation addressed to the conservative 

prelates at the Synod’s end make 

abundantly clear his own intentions. 

The final document has not yet been 

issued. But Francis is not about to be 

resisted. The Synod will be invoked to 

complete his revolution. Those prelates 

who fail to get with the program 

in their dioceses will be replaced with 

liberals, even fired here and there on 

various pretexts. 

The pope’s allies will find their 

Synod paragraphs justifying themselves. 

The conservatives, as always, 

will find theirs. But who holds the Keys 

rules the Roman Catholic Church. 

Until the next conclave. Which, if 

rumors about poor papal health are 

true (and I think they are), is coming 

sooner than we think. 

• • • 

“The Holy Father would like you to 

leave,” said the Secretary of State, Italian 

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, to an 

old friend of mine working for Benedict 

XVI. “He wants you to [insert 

demotion]. But, it comes with a red 

hat,” added Bertone soothingly. 

My friend was predictably angry. 

And something far more significant to 


him than pride was involved. Hope for 

the project he’d been hired to do under 

the direction of his mentor Ratzinger 

was dashed. He took the post, loyally, 

yet years before, new and frustrated, he 

had told me, “The entire Curia is one 

big mess,” depicting it as dominated 

by time servers and relaxed rules of 

conduct, and by Italian clergy going 

nowhere soon but who were not always 

in the office when called. 

“Please do not replace me with an 

Italian,” he said, first chance he got, to 

the Holy Father—a phrase pregnant 

with implications, then and now. 

With that move, any lingering 

doubt about Ratzinger’s ability to deal 

with his own deputies—who disliked 

my friend—was extinguished. In the 

best of times it took my friend “months 

to get in to see him” even though 

Ratzinger had personally hired him 

with an imploring phone call years 

earlier. (“Because I like your line,” the 

pope explained.) 

Best capturing Ratzinger’s shy 

impotence was the fact, from an 

impeccable source I came to know, 

that Benedict liked to use the old Latin 

missal for some private Masses—but 

did so discretely, for fear of angering 

top Churchmen. (Redolent of the 

reports that Nixon tried to keep some 

things from Kissinger, lest he displease 

“Henry,” known to leak selectively.) 

His best friends in the Curia Benedict 

rarely saw. The fellow he demoted 

once waited four months for an hour 

alone with him; another top official 

told me that for him, “it was more like 

14 months.” Yet it was Ratzinger who 

brought him, too, to Rome. “Cardinal 

Bertone and Msgr. Ganswein (the pope’s 

secretary) kept me away,” he noted. 

Meantime, Pope Benedict was inviting 

his personal valet to join him for 

lunch regularly—an Italian who was 

I said that Benedict 

told a German friend 

of mine that he felt 

like he was dying and 

could not govern, hence 

his resignation. At 

this, the prelate noted, 

“He’s fine now.” 

stealing the pope’s correspondence 

and copying it to a press source. (Peter 

Sellers, phone Rome.) This treachery, 

the burdens of the office, plus a 

secret report about his own lieutenants 

done by three cardinals, was said 

to have devastated Benedict XVI and 

played into his dramatic resignation, 

announced in Latin to a bewildered 

consistory of cardinals, early in 2013. 

Still and all, the cardinal he hired 

and fired I saw as the Synod was set to 

open. He was relaxed, even jovial. The 

new pope’s leftwing agenda was none 

of his business. “I’m trying to get along 

with him, we have a good relationship, 

so criticizing him is not going to work.” 

But there is no way my friend will 

vote for anyone like Pope Francis in 

the next papal conclave. 

He hears open discontent and even 

anger with Pope Francis, expressed privately 

among a broad swath of high 

ranking Churchmen. This and the 

public papal explosions at conservatives 

are the biggest portent for the 

next conclave, if held any time soon. 

Many cardinals are traveling far and 

wide to deliver speeches guaranteed 

to annoy Francis—doctrinally correct


speeches that are obviously coordinated 

for maximum impact. Francis 

attacks them regularly in homilies and 

off the cuff addresses. No names are 

named, needless to say. 

The pope’s contempt for Church 

tradition—his “open tolerance of 

the expression of heretical views” is 

how writer John Henry Westen puts 

it—is a not so hidden clue as to how 

Bergoglio’s men in the next conclave 

will vote. There will be clashes in the 

pre-conclave consistory of cardinals. 

Out of it all, I am convinced, is likely to 

emerge a “moderate” in good standing 

like Schoenborn. 

But that is my own reading. Others 

with good sources weave different scenarios 

and see the potential for power 

shifting to better men. If a conclave 

were held tomorrow, they contend, 

there would be an overwhelming move 

to a man with conservative doctrinal 

credentials. 

They name Cardinal Robert 

Sarah, an unassuming African with 

a passionate message of hope, himself 

multi-lingual, educated in France and 

Italy, fluent in English, and unflinchingly 

engaged in the sensitive Church 

issues. His stirring new book has drawn 

attention from all sides of the spectrum 

but is full of code words heartening to 

If a conclave were held 

tomorrow, they contend, 

there would be an 

overwhelming move to a 

man with conservative 

doctrinal credentials. 

us conservatives. His own approach 

blends Scripture and doctrine—in fact 

“doctrine,” he says, “is Christ.” Sarah 

is admired enough by Francis to have 

been appointed to head the delicate 

Congregation for Divine Worship. He 

is capable of mixing politics and religion 

without apology: in 2010 he called 

out Muammar Gaddafi, who declared 

that Europe should convert to Islam. 

In 2012, Sarah said a UN Secretary 

General’s pro-gay speech was “stupid.” 

Some also name as papabile a classically 

neutral northern Italian, the 

Bergoglio secretary of state, Cardinal 

Pietro Parolin, distinguished for his 

foreign service but for nothing else, 

save that he is an honest broker in 

the hottest pontificate in years. Italians 

are perfect secretaries of state in 

non-Italian papacies, and Parolin, who 

had some Latin American experience, 

was evidently the least threatening to 

Francis. 

Purportedly still in the running is a 

Ratzinger man, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, 

chief of the Congregation for Bishops, 

and also with extensive Latin American 

experience, but routinely ignored by 

the new pope, who is already famous 

for over-ruling the recommendations 

of deputies. Ouellet, brought to Rome 

by Pope Benedict, nominated relatively 

conservative prelates as a matter of 

course. 

It needs to be said that virtually 

none of the conservative cardinals 

(Sarah might be the exception) would 

bear scrutiny by serious political conservatives 

whose views, as Russell Kirk 

might say, are rooted in Christianity. 

Ouellet is no exception, clinging to a 

host of leftwing views on public policy—Quebec-style. 

But he is in fact a 

doctrinal conservative. I have had the 

pleasure of spending some time with 

him and can attest to his seriousness, 

“Please do not replace 

me with an Italian,” he 

said, first chance he got, 

to the Holy Father—a 

phrase pregnant 

with implications, 

then and now. 

low-key affability, and intensity. In 

meetings with many languages thrown 

around, Ouellet is master of five or six. 

Plus Latin. 

Still, it’s my thought that Pope Bergoglio 

has every intention of rapidly 

stacking the college of cardinals, as he 

did round two of his Synod, probably 

in February, adding 20 more of his own 

cardinal appointments. He will invoke 

the Synod as his urgent justification. If 

he does hold a new consistory, I believe 

none of the above “conservatives” has 

a prayer. 

But despite the pope’s strenuous 

efforts at leftist transformation, it’s 

unlikely that his favorites—Philippine 

Cardinal Tagle and American 

Sean O’Malley—could be elected any 

time soon, given their closeness to the 

pope who has enraged a large segment 

of the college of cardinals. Two-thirds 

of the conclave is needed for election. 

It’s fair to say that two-thirds of today’s 

group is deeply unhappy with the pontiff. 

N.b.: At least 20% of the voting 

cardinals are on record as opposing 

Francis’s program. This kind of opposition 

in public is unprecedented in papal 

history dating back at least to the 19th 

century. 



• • • 

Also notable is that powerful undercurrents 

in the college of cardinals could 

actually undermine the formation of 

a reactionary voting bloc. Because if 

any two segments of that bloc compete, 

there will be a move to find someone 

perceived as “more electable”—against 

their own interests. 

Example: in conclaves, nationality, 

race, and regionalist forces are major 

factors, even decisive. (“Do not replace 

me with an Italian.”...) Bergoglio was 

selected precisely because of what he 

was not—an Italian—and because he 

was not European. He was viewed, 

consequently, as capable of fixing a 

Europe-bound Curia that was “one 

big mess.” In the consistory before the 

voting, he went on record as such a 

reformer, although he concealed, in a 

speech not ten minutes long, the radical 

nature of his program. 

By the same token, a strong reaction 

to Bergoglio’s liberal doctrinal hangups 

and pro-Islam tendencies could easily 

divide a none-too-strong conservative 

bloc between two candidates, one a 

black and the other a European, long 

enough to see a “moderate” emerge. 

The two most likely, I believe: 

Cardinal Cristoph Schoenborn of 

Vienna, who finds the middle ground 

in every controversy, but who, as the 

author of the new Catechism of the 

Catholic Church, has the stature to be 

either king-maker or king. A doctrinal 

expert who doesn’t take doctrine too 

seriously, he is a Dominican friar with 

an extensive academic resume whose 

A doctrinal expert 

who doesn’t take 

doctrine too seriously, 

he is a Dominican 

friar with an extensive 

academic resume. 

reach into every intellectual camp is 

impressive. This versatility is not contrived, 

nor is his personal warmth, 

which he ingenuously spreads around. 

Let’s put it this way: he’s a Ratzinger 

protege with a Bergoglio-like penchant 

for dangerous lines. 71 in January, he 

will garner votes from every continent 

and is a natural pick in a deadlocked 

conclave. 

The wave of uncontrolled immigration 

into Italy and the rest of Europe 

will probably roil the next conclave, 

influencing marginal votes—and elections 

are usually won on the margins— 

in the direction not of a Latin or an 

American, but of a European or, paradoxically, 

an African. While several 

Western cardinals have participated 

in showy lecturing of the indigenous 

European population as to its obligations 

re migrants, what is fascinating is 

to note those who have not. Even weaklings 

like Schoenborn have resisted the 

impulse, instead calling for hard thinking 

about the immigrant crisis. Not 

what his leftist colleagues wish to hear. 

Black Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of 

Durban, South Africa, was a vocal 

opponent of apartheid, which plays so 

easily in the West. It’s said that he stood 

up last year and shouted at Cardinal 

Baldisseri, Francis’s righthand man at 

the Synod, before a mute pope—who 

gave in to his demand. Nevertheless, 

he is moderate by temperament, a consensus-seeker, 

skilled at navigating 

between Church factions and never 

identified with the conservatives until 

Bergoglio came on the scene. And he 

is the right age for a risky “outside the 

box” pick, 74. 

One who cannot be ruled out: Ravasi, 

a very smooth Italian who, while 

a man of the left, knows how to talk 

tough over dinner with his more conservative 

colleagues. In the right environment, 

he could emerge, and would 

have a healthy bloc of Italian votes (still 

about 20% of the conclave) and European 

liberals who know him well. 

Roger A. McCaffrey was founding 

publisher and editor in chief of The 

Latin Mass Magazine and Sursum 

Corda magazine. He served on the 

senior staff of Patrick J. Buchanan’s 

first presidential campaign and heads 

Roman Catholic Books/Catholic Media 

Apostolate. He spent some time in 

Rome this year as the Synod began. 


■ Continued from page 91 

… when older priests get 

together, they will often 

wax nostalgic about longdeparted 

baseball teams, 

or how they used to shovel 

coal in furnaces, and other 

such aspects of the “good 

old days.” But mention the 

Mass they grew up with 

and see what happens: 

freezing stares and often 

outright mockery of 

what now qualifies as 

the “bad old days.” 

these men always did what they were 

told, they accepted it. But at what cost 

inwardly? 

I have often noticed that when older 

priests get together, they will often wax 

nostalgic about long-departed baseball 

teams, or how they used to shovel coal 

in furnaces, and other such aspects of 

the “good old days.” But mention the 

Mass they grew up with and see what 

happens: freezing stares and often outright 

mockery of what now qualifies as 

the “bad old days.” 

It is surely true that a human being 

who hates (or has been taught to hate) 

his childhood and the world of his parents 

is rarely a happy adult. Here we 

have a whole generation of priests who 

have been taught that the very Mass 

they offered, and yearned to offer in 

their seminary days, was outdated, 

deficient, even harmful. How much 

psychological violence did they have to 

do to themselves to accept this? What 

sorts of long-buried doubts and feelings 

of regret must they still harbor deep in 

their hearts? 

Then along comes the young priest 

with an attachment to that very same 

Beyond the Pablum ■ by Father X 

Mass (and all that goes with it), and 

suddenly the older priest is confronted 

with something that he “burned” years 

ago. 

No wonder he is discomfited, confused, 

even hostile. No wonder he prattles 

on against “turning back the clock” 

and other such nonsense. That anyone 

would question the superiority of the 

new liturgy raises inner fears and troubling 

questions in such men. After all, 

if the changes were for the best and the 

Church is better than ever, why would 

anyone want to reverse them? Unless, 

of course, things aren’t really better. 

It used to be written in critical 

Catholic histories of Martin Luther 

that his dying words were, “Perhaps it 

was all a mistake.” That nagging doubt, 

I believe, lurks in the minds of many 

priests when it comes to the liturgical 

reform. 

The anonymous author of this piece, 

written in the mid-1990s for the 

first iteration of The Latin Mass 

Magazine, is now in his 60s and a 

priest in the New York City area. 


Beyond the Pablum 

Burning What They Adored 

Why are the greatest foes of 

the traditional Mass to be 

found among those priests 

who were ordained to say it? 

BY FATHER X 

There is a story recorded 

of a remark made at the 

baptism of Clovis, the 

first King of the Franks 

to become Christian. This 

hardy pagan chieftain (the forebear of 

Charlemagne) had been a persecutor of 

Catholics; but due to the influence of 

his wife, and of divine grace, he decided 

to embrace the new Faith. And, being 

the man he was, he decided that all his 

people would make the same decision. 

Referring to this change of religion, one 

of his men reportedly said, “We will 

now adore what we have burned, and 

burn what we have adored!”—a remark 

that offers an insight into many clerical 

minds today. 

It is a well-known aspect of the 

revival of interest in the traditional 

Latin Mass that the greatest interest 

shown by priests has been among the 

“younger clergy.” Many, if not all, of 

these priests were ordained only after 

the Novus Ordo was introduced. And 

many had never said any Mass in Latin 

before, “old” or “new.” 

Ironically, it is my experience (and 

that of many other priests with whom 

I have discussed the matter), that the 

greatest “enemies” of the traditional 

Mass are among those very priests who 

were ordained to say it. The very same 

men who labored over their Wappelhorsts 

and Fortescues and O’Connells, 

who practiced all the rubrics, who were 

92 

inspired by Fr. Faber’s saying that the 

Roman Mass was the “most beautiful 

thing this side of heaven,” are now the 

most skeptical of—if not downright 

hostile to—the very thought of the “Old 

Mass” reviving. 

The more “sensitive” ones among 

them, when confronted by this interest 

in a younger priest, attribute it to some 

form of psychological or personality 

disorder. “Come on, what’s the real reason?” 

seems to be their attitude, often 

accompanied by muttered warnings 

about the dire effect of an affinity for 

the old Mass on one’s future. 

This magazine has documented the 

“underground” nature of this interest 

among some young priests. It is much 

safer to be an open dissenter on any 

number of doctrinal and moral teachings 

than to be thought “Tridentine.” 

Why? 

I think the answer can be seen in 

the old Frank’s words cited above. 

There is a whole generation of priests 

(now of an age to be pastors, chancery 

officials and bishops) who had to do 

a lot of “burning what they adored.” 

Their whole liturgical, spiritual and 

devotional lives had to be recast under 

the impact of “the changes.” The very 

things that they had been told were the 

most sacred, the most beautiful and 

permanent, were now said to be bad, 

harmful, even ludicrous. And since 

Continued on page 91 ■

“The priest has no need for permission from the 

Apostolic See or from his Ordinary” to celebrate Mass 

with the 1962 Latin Missal.—Pope Benedict XVI, July 2007 

September 14, 2007. Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos 

celebrated Mass with our Missale Romanum 

at Loreto on the first day Pope Benedict’s new law 

lifted all restrictions on the Old Mass 

A facsimile reproduction of the 

1962 altar Missal for priests 

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@ Gold-gilded pages all round 

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art adorns the text 

@ Weighs 5 lbs., 11 oz. 

@ Two-color pages throughout 

@ Quality Finch vanilla paper, 

with the Ordinary of the Mass 

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@ For maximum protection, 

shrink-wrapped and custom packaged 

Big savings on books for priests and parishes celebrating the old Latin Mass 

“One of the most complete and 

practical books to be used at the altar 

as well as in the sacristy and rectory.” 

—Msgr. John E. Steinmueller 

Now is the time 

to DONATE at 

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Famed Scripture scholar and pastor Msgr. Steinmueller was writing in 1961 about this manual of 

prayers and guide for priests using the Extraordinary Form of the Mass—or, the old Latin Mass. If you 

know a priest or parish who is taking advantage of Pope Benedict’s motu proprio, The New Sanctuary 

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• Music included! • Deluxe hardcover • Skyvertex cover, embossed • Gold gilded pages 

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SPECIAL 2016 EDITION 

“Pope A” 

He’s doing well… see page 86

SPECIAL 2016 EDITION

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