Tuesday, March 19, AD 2024 6:38am

The Pope Hates US

 

 

Lots of reaction to that anti-American article in La Civilta Cattolica article.  Go here to read about it.  First, from Phil Lawler at Catholic Culture:

 

With a harsh denunciation of American conservatism, published in the semi-official Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica, the Vatican has plunged headlong into a partisan debate in a society that it clearly does not understand, potentially alienating (or should I say, further alienating) the Americans most inclined to favor the influence of the Church.

 

Why? Why this bitter attack on the natural allies of traditional Catholic teachings? Is it because the most influential figures at the Vatican today actually want to move away from those traditional teachings, and form a new alliance with modernity?

The authors of the essay claim to embrace ecumenism, but they have nothing but disdain for the coalition formed by Catholics and Evangelical Protestants in the United States. They scold American conservatives for seeing world events as a struggle of good against evil, yet they clearly convey the impression that they see American conservativism as an evil influence that must be defeated.

While they are quick to pronounce judgment on American politicians, the two authors betray an appalling ignorance of the American scene. The authors toss Presidents Nixon (a Quaker), Reagan, Bush, and Trump into the same religious classification, suggesting that they were all motivated by “fundamentalist” principles. An ordinary American, reading this account, would be surprised to see the authors’ preoccupation with the late Rev. Rousas Rushdoony and the Church Militant web site: hardly major figures in the formation of American public opinion. The essay is written from the perspective of people who draw their information about America from left-wing journals rather than from practical experience.

Go here to read the rest.   Samuel Gregg at Catholic World Report gives his opinion on the piece:

This brings me to a very odd article that recently appeared in La Civiltà Cattolica: the Italian Jesuit periodical published twice a month and which enjoys a quasi-official status inasmuch as the Vatican’s Secretariat of State exercises oversight over the articles it publishes. Entitled “Evangelical Fundamentalism and Catholic Integralism in the USA: A Surprising Ecumenism,” its authors Father Antonio Spadaro SJ (Civiltà Cattolica’s Editor-in-chief) and Rev. Marcelo Figueroa (a Presbyterian pastor who is Editor-in-chief of L’Osservatore Romano’s Argentinean edition), make various assertions about specific political and religious trends in the United States: claims which are, at best, tenuous and certainly badly informed.

Consider, for instance, the authors’ analogy between the theological outlook of particular strands of American Evangelicalism and ISIS. As far as I am aware, American self-described fundamentalists are not destroying 2000 year-old architectural treasures, decapitating Muslims, crucifying Middle Eastern Christians, promoting vile anti-Semitic literature, or slaughtering octogenarian French priests. Another questionable contention made in the article is that the Holy Roman Empire was constituted as an effort to realize the Kingdom of God on earth. This particular analysis will come as news to serious historians of that complicated political entity which became, as the saying goes, neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire.

Various links are also made between climate change skepticism, the faith of white southern Christians (comments which, if applied to other racial groups, would be denounced by some as verging on bigotry), and apocalyptic thinking among some American Evangelicals. Taken together, it is claimed, these things reflect and help fuel a Manichean view of the world on the United States’ part. Then there is the article’s peculiar association of the heresy of the Prosperity Gospel with recent efforts to protect religious liberty in America.

No doubt, Evangelical scholars and others will highlight the many problems characterizing the article’s grasp of the history of Evangelical Christianity and fundamentalism in America. One agnostic friend of mine who happens to be a leading historian of American Evangelicalism at a prestigious secular university described the article’s take on this subject to me as “laughably ignorant.” I also suspect Rev. Figueroa and Father Spadaro are oblivious, for instance, to many Evangelicals’ embrace of natural law thinking in recent decades: something that, by definition, immunizes any serious Christian from fideist tendencies. But two particular claims made by the authors require a more detailed response.

Go here to read the rest.  Next, Father Z:

 

By now you may have seen the attack on Americans – conservative Americans and traditional Catholic Americans – in what some people consider a semi-official publication of the Holy See Civiltà Cattolica (now aka Inciviltà cattolica).  The title in English: “Evangelical Fundamentalism and Catholic Integralism in the USA: A surprising ecumenism”

“Integralism” is perhaps not used as much in these USA as it is in Europe.  This term is a dog whistle.  In somewhat broad terms, it can be used generically for the position that one’s religious beliefs should dictate their politics and social involvement.  However, “integralism” developed in a specific context of conflict between Catholicism and modernity in Europe.  In France and Italy, the haters of Catholic tradition often refer to anyone who wants traditional worship as being “intégriste”.  It is flung like an insult.  For a quick and fascinating lesson on “integralism”, and what Spadaro is calling conservative Americans, head over to the Wikipedia article.  HERE Wiki is perfect as a source, but it gives you a rapid entry point.

The Holy See’s newspaper, the increasingly irrelevant L’Osservatore Romano, reprinted the anti-American attack with the title: “Ecumenism of Hate”

Again, this term “integralism” is a dog whistle: the troops are being called up to launch their own campaign of intolerant repression of anyone who might stand in the way of their agenda.

The vicious attack piece is penned by Fr Antonio Spadaro, the Jesuit editor of Inciviltà cattolica.  Fr. Spadaro is so interested in the life and works of Pier Vittorio Tondelli that he created his own website about him (HERE).

The co-author of the article, with the Jesuit who is dedicated to the study of Tondelli, is Marcelo Figueroa, a Presbyterian pastor, who is the editor of the Argentinian edition of L’Osservatore Romano.  He once had a TV show in Argentina with the future-Pope Francis and a rabbi.

Go here to read the rest.  None of this should come as a surprise.  The Pope has a history of hating America and Americans as noted by George Neumayr:

The pope’s swipe at America pleased the media. They regard his anti-Americanism as one of his more winning qualities. He picked that bug up from the communist and leftists in Argentina, for whom hating Yankees is a national pastime.

Even his sympathetic chroniclers in the Catholic press, such as John Allen, have noted his disdain for Americans. Save for a few fellow political and doctrinal liberals (such as D.C.’s Wuerl, Boston’s O’Malley, Chicago’s Cupich, and Newark’s Tobin), Pope Francis has given few Americans clout at the Vatican. He took special delight in humiliating the American Cardinal Raymond Burke, whose traditionalism represented everything Francis dislikes about American Catholics. “The pope hates American conservatives,” a priest said to me.” The stripping of Burke’s power, he said, shattered morale within priestly American circles: “From then on we knew that we would have targets on our backs.”

Bishop Bernard Fellay, head of the Society of Pius X, has made the remark that Vatican officials have told him that most of the pope’s anti-conservative gibes are directed at Americans.

The pope’s weakness for Latin American liberation theology — he has been rehabilitating many of its most checkered proponents, such as Leonardo Boff (who shared his plans for socialist world government with the pope at his urging before he wrote his environmentalist encyclical) — also drives his anti-Americanism. Liberation theology was concocted, at least in part, by communists who wanted to turn the religious peasants of Latin America against the United States during the Cold War. The pope’s obtuse apologists say that he rejected this movement. But he didn’t. He came out of it.

Go here to read the rest.  The last thing America’s conservative Catholics, among the loyalist Catholics on the planet, would ever want is a fight with a Pope.  However that fight is on us, and it should not be a one-sided bout.  As for myself, I say, “Bring it Holiness. What you are peddling is not Catholicism.  You are misusing your highest office for your petty leftist politics and spite, and it is past time for every loyal Catholic to call you on it, hinder you to the best of their ability, and to do their best to preserve the Faith from you.”

 

 

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Don L
Saturday, July 15, AD 2017 6:30am

I recall, as a young sailor (Korea-early 1950’s) standing outside the Vatican next to one of the large fountains when a man with a long overcoat opened one side and offered a display of rosary beads and holy water etc for sale. Having just bought beads blessed by the pope I told him I didn’t need his wares, so he then opened his other side of his overcoat to display pornography and a few whisky bottles thinking, if I wasn’t holy, then I’d buy this stuff.
Somehow, I suspect, with good and evil so upside down these days, his kind might well be operating inside…..

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Saturday, July 15, AD 2017 6:33am

Of course Jorge Bergoglio hates us. We are everything that he and his henchmen are not and can never be.

What is interesting is that this criticism does not include (unless I missed it) any citation of Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae by Pope Leo XIII, warning against the heresy of Americanism:

http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Leo13/l13teste.htm

Perhaps because that encyclical is too conservative for their liberal progressive feminist tastes.

We have to face reality. We have an evil Pope surrounded by evil henchmen. He must be deposed and anathematized, and his henchmen must be driven out of the Vatican as Jesus drove the money changers out of the Temple. Every time I have to attend a Novus Ordo Mass and the priest starts speaking some Bergoglian heresy, I will blog about it, email him and email his Bishop. It may do not any good. But if we don’t start speaking out against these demonic assassins of all that is holy and righteous, then they will win.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Saturday, July 15, AD 2017 10:14am

Certainly, as it is understood in France, « Intégrisme » is quite unconnected with “Throne and Altar” Conservatism. Rather it was an attack on certain, mostly Jesuit Neo-Scholastics who talked of a “natural order,” governed by Natural Law, consisting of truths accessible to unaided human reason, as something that can be kept separate from the supernatural truths revealed in the Gospel. They saw the political and social order as having its own autonomy and argued that right reason can legitimately arrive at valid conclusions without recourse to supernatural revelation as their necessary source or sanction.

It was this teaching Jacques Maritain had in mind when he insisted “Integral political science . . . is superior in kind to philosophy; to be truly complete it must have a reference to the domain of theology, and it is precisely as a theologian that St. Thomas wrote De regimine principum . . . the knowledge of human actions and of the good conduct of the human State in particular can exist as an integral science, as a complete body of doctrine, only if related to the ultimate end of the human being. . . the rule of conduct governing individual and social life cannot therefore leave the supernatural order out of account (The Things that are not Caesar’s)

So, too, Maurice Blondel, who declared that we must never forget “that one cannot think or act anywhere as if we do not all have a supernatural destiny. Because, since it concerns the human being such as he is, in concreto, in his living and total reality, not in a simple state of hypothetical nature, nothing is truly complete (boucle), even in the sheerly natural order”

The saw that to hold otherwise would be to justify the liberal privatisation of religion, as irrelevant to public policy.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Saturday, July 15, AD 2017 10:16am

Last paragraph should begin “They saw…”

Dave Griffey
Dave Griffey
Saturday, July 15, AD 2017 12:43pm

“As far as I am aware, American self-described fundamentalists are not destroying 2000 year-old architectural treasures”

Perhaps I’m wrong, but the only ones I see in our country who are calling for the destruction or eradication of old monuments and architectural treasures are decidedly not conservative. But then the ones I see wanting the courts to step in and punish people for not embracing their ideologies aren’t necessarily standing exclusively to the right of center. But then, the ones I see subtly suggesting violence could be a justified reaction to particularly appalling speech and attitudes aren’t necessarily confined to the conservative fundamentalist circles. Could it be that the Church is simply coming clean and admitting it wants to join the rest of the liberal religious movement and declare fealty to the modern left, and that includes excusing the inexcusable as long as it’s directed against those who fail to conform with the rising power of modern progressives?

The Bear
Saturday, July 15, AD 2017 4:30pm

Francis is a small-minded man with a resentment for Northern – especially U.S. – wealth, success and power. Economics is a zero-sum game for him. If we are rich and Venezuela is poor, we must have taken our wealth from them. He sees things in naturalistic terms from a leftist, if not Marxist, perspective. That is not an “oh, by the way,” to explain his hatred of American conservatives. That is the horrific reality of our Church today. It is not animated by anything that would seem out of place in the New America Foundation or any other Soros-tentacled think tank that have already turned the USCCB into a Democrat front group. If you ever wondered what the Catholic Church would look like without God, you have your big chance now.

Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Sunday, July 16, AD 2017 2:54am

Let us thank Pope Francis for drawing a clear line in the sand on the interpretation of Catholic doctrine. On one side is 2000 years of traditional interpretation where Christ is the center of worship and on the other is Pope Francis and his followers of the modernist new age of Vatican II who have a utopian vision with Man at the center.

Perhaps it is the raging homosexual activity at the Vatican that has twisted their minds. We have now reached a point where God may feel He must intervene. Let us pray for them. Let us pray for us.

Philip Nachazel
Philip Nachazel
Sunday, July 16, AD 2017 3:55am

@ Michael Dowd.

Yes. Prayers are needed. The farce is unbecoming of the Holy office. Long in patience and rich in mercy is our God. How long will he suffer this blatant protestant Pope? Not much longer I hope.

God bless Cardinal Burke. Our American Pope.

Dan Curry
Dan Curry
Sunday, July 16, AD 2017 7:08am

I’d like to know : what can I do to fight this? I attend a traditional FSSP traditional Latin mass. I read as much as I can. I pray. I’m overwhelmed at the parish novus ordo mass and organization. The Catholic high school here has liberalbreachers. This Bishop here is left… pro illegal immigration…. I would organize a group to meet to discuss and pray … but what would we be called— those folks who are against Pope Francis??Our state is only 6% Catholic. I’m just stumped!

Philip Nachazel
Philip Nachazel
Sunday, July 16, AD 2017 7:40am

Dan Curry

Start at the holyleague.com

Our monthly meeting is men only.
Mass..then dinner at church..then guest speakers…then hour of Adoration with confession available during adoration.

Yes 3 and a half hours long that passes so quickly. Great monthly remedy for staying faithful to Holy Church regardless of poor leadership. Cardinal Burke started this up a few years ago… Resurrected from centuries
ago, this form of gathering has deep Roots and efficacious in the fight aginist ALL evil.

Mary De Voe
Sunday, July 16, AD 2017 11:40am

blogging, blogging, blogging…
Tertullian became a heretic and was excommunicated from the Catholic Church.
Our innate, human Constitutional First Amendment cannot be overridden or abrogated by cruel, unjust, and flimsy Washington State law that I believe was an :”ex poste facto’ law prohibited by our Constitution: Article I, Section 9-10 or political correctness or anyone…
Beliefs and actions belong to two different realms. Beliefs belong to the transcendent realm. Actions belong to the community as “Blessings of Liberty” as proscribed in The Preamble, the purpose of our Constitution and our Founding Principles, or curses, scandals, depriving our Constitutional Posterity, all future generations, of freedom to mature and to freely choose their pursuit of Happiness, their destiny.
Every person has a personal space that may not invaded or entered into without the individual sovereign person’s invitation and welcome, for any purpose, including forming an informed contract through informed consent. While the government may regulate business space, the state does not own the person or his personal space, the rest is subjection and slavery. Would you not agree? The DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE was written to get King George III’s military men out of the colonists’ home and private property.
Self-defense against the addiction to sodomy, the vice of lust and scandal is a human right inscribed in The Preamble. The state forcing compliance into the addiction to sodomy and evil is tyranny. Addiction to sodomy is NOT a civil right.
Is establishing a “right” to addiction to sodomy really in everyone’s best interest?
Arlene’ s Flowers has an innate human right to self-defense. Innate human rights become our civil rights, safeguarded by the Founding Principles, since our sovereign nation is instituted through the sovereign personhood of every sovereign person. Sovereignty over oneself is lost through addiction.
How can you believe in God when you do not believe in your own existence? God is existence, infinite existence…before any and all creation. God is Being, infinite Being. What God has joined together let no man put asunder.

The Truth will out. The longer it takes the finer it gets.. Sodomites and lesbians forfeit their sovereignty over themselves in their addiction. No sovereign person has a civil right to violate “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” to practice assault and battery on another person or to abuse himself.
Addicts to the vice of lust and addiction to sodomy ostracize themselves from “the public”.
Addiction to sodomy is NOT a civil right, nor is addiction a religious belief. Blaming God for their free will act of addiction to sodomy is blasphemy. No. Atheism is not a religious expression; not a religious belief. Atheism is a belief in no God. Atheism is a belief, but atheism is not a true belief. Atheism is anti religion and will eventually deny all persons their unalienable human rights. Only an infinite God can endow unalienable human rights. “The rights the state gives, the state can take away.” Thomas Jefferson.
People, all people have a constitutional right to self-defense. The law says that if the persons are in the residence of a particular business, or rental place where the owner lives, the owner gets to choose who he will allow to share his residence. Only if the owner does not live there, then he must allow all individuals. So wedding places where the owners live are exempt by the owners’ presence and personal space. Make your own way. Stop imposing your way of life on other people who are also enjoying our freedom.

Male brides and female husbands are perjury in a court of law. Male brides and female husbands are a disgrace. Can Justice exist without TRUTH? Can Justice persist in perjury?

People, all people have a constitutional right to self-defense. The law says that if the persons are in the residence of a particular business, or rental place where the owner lives, the owner gets to choose who he will allow to share his residence. Only if the owner does not live there, then he must allow all individuals. So wedding places where the owners live are exempt by the owners’ presence and personal space. Make your own way. Stop imposing your way of life on other people who are also enjoying our freedom.

Arlene’ s Flowers has an innate human right to self-defense. Innate human rights become our civil rights, safeguarded by the Founding Principles, since our sovereign nation is instituted through the sovereign personhood of every sovereign person. Sovereignty over oneself is lost through addiction.
“Invidious discrimination” against addiction to sodomy and the vice of lust is a virtue.
Woodrow Wilson, as President promoted The League of Nations. Wilson hated our Founding Principles and wished our Constitution to be abolished and for American citizens to be ruled over by foreign interests.
Our Constitution as the backbone of true freedom would have been marvelous as a rule for all nations. Wilson wanted atheism or communism; the state as our god. In this, with Wilson’s oath to uphold our Founding Principles, made Wilson a man without a country.
We now have The United Nations, one of the most atheistic regimes on the face of the earth. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of The United Nations was truly written by Eleanor Roosevelt. The United Nations savaged Eleanor Roosevelt’s work and imposed an atheistic regime upon the world.
The United Nations has wanted 1) An International Court which it got. 2) A Standing Army which it may have gotten to every ill repute. 3) The unauthorized authority to tax American citizens which would infringe and annihilate every American citizen’s sovereignty and the sovereignty to institute America.
Sovereignty is like virginity. One is or one is not.
Mary, our sovereign Virgin, will defeat the Muslim threat to freedom and subjection to the Sharia Law that disembowels our personal sovereignty. Allah has no son to love and to love him. “WHO is TRUTH?” “Behold the Son of Man.”

Julie @ Connecticut Catholic Corner
Sunday, July 16, AD 2017 2:09pm

We used to talk about the “smoke of Satan” in the Church, no more. The Church is currently engulfed in the flames of Hell with our current pope. Though Hell will not prevail, its flames are charring every corner of our Faith.

Elaine Krewer
Admin
Sunday, July 16, AD 2017 5:56pm

I really don’t know what to make of this. Yes, the article in question is based on an extremely distorted concept of American conservatism and is grossly unfair to one of the most doggedly faithful segments of the Church… people like us who have kept the faith through thick and thin.

But… didn’t Christ Himself reserve his harshest words, NOT for the obvious sinners, but for His own followers (“Get behind me Satan!” “O you of little faith!”) and for the most devoutly religious people of His day, i.e. the Pharisees. Were not some of the canonized saints subjected to unfair and false accusations from their own bishops, religious superiors, etc. yet remained obedient and faithful? And if it’s wrong for liberals to put their politics above their faith, isn’t it equally wrong for conservatives to do it? I guess I’m still trying to come up with a plausible reason why God would allow the Vicar of Christ himself and His Chrurch to kick us (religious/political conservatives) in the teeth right when we most need them to “have our backs”. Oh well, God chastises those He loves but He never said we had to like it or pretend it doesn’t hurt…

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Monday, July 17, AD 2017 3:58am

Elaine Krewer wrote, “Christ Himself reserve his harshest words, NOT for the obvious sinners, but for His own followers… and for the most devoutly religious people of His day, i.e. the Pharisees.”

It was in the sme spirit that Maurice Blondel castigated the Jesuit, Père Pedro Descoqs for distorting the gospel to political ends: ““A Catholicism without Christianity, submissiveness without thought, an authority without love, a Church that would rejoice at the insulting tributes paid to the virtuosity of her interpretative and repressive system… To accept all from God except God, all from Christ except His Spirit, to preserve in Catholicism only a residue that is aristocratic and soothing for the privileged and beguiling or threatening for the lower classes—is not all this, under the pretext perhaps of thinking only about religion, really a matter of pursuing only politics?”

Like wise, one recalls the scathing words of the editor of Blondel’s publication, L’Annales de philosophie chrétienne, the Oratorian, lAbbé Lucien Laberthonnière: to those French Catholics who hoped that L’action française would lead to “the triumph of the Church in society.”

“’The triumph of the Church in society?’ That would be excellent. But then, it is necessary to examine by what means our religion permits us to pursue it. Moreover, it has not been promised us. And then, it is not, perhaps, the most pressing of our tasks.

The Church is like Christ. To go to souls, she is, in her own essence, a soul of truth and kindness. And, if He needs a body to act in the world, it is by His soul and for His soul that His body subsists. And, if we wish His body to be beautiful and vigorous, if we wish it to be radiant, let us labour to enrich her soul with the faith and love of our souls.

Her power does not consist in giving orders, to which external obedience is required, backed up by threats or favours. Her power is to raise souls to the life above. It is to give birth to and to cultivate in consciences the supernaturalising obligation to live for God and for others, through Christ, and to pass through temporal defeats to a triumph that is timeless.

Do not indulge in childish dreams, when you have in your grasp eternal realities that invite you. Understand, all you who would triumph and reign on earth – Et nunc, reges, intell1gite.” (Ps 2:10) [To a French audience, instantly recognizable as the text of Bossuet’s funeral oration for Henrietta Maria, widow of the executed Charles I of England, that everyone reads at school]

« Et puis, ce n’est peut-être pas le plus pressé de notre tâche ». – Perhaps, it is not the most pressing of our tasks. These are words we could well ponder today.

c matt
c matt
Monday, July 17, AD 2017 8:29am

one’s religious beliefs should dictate their politics and social involvement.

The horror!! As for God’s purposes vis-a-vis Bergoglio, who knows? A slap across the face witha cold wet fish is likely not very pleasant, but it does get your attention.

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