“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.” ― St. Antony the Great
Pope Francis’ new comments on the death penalty are incoherent
and dangerous
Pope Francis says that his innovative teaching “does not
imply any contradiction” of the Church’s tradition but, one has to say
reluctantly, it indeed does.
By Father George Rutter
Debate has always been an invigorating and constructive way
of defining and refining views, assuming that the debaters have minds of
probity and reason. This is increasingly absent in our culture, where
subjectivism rules, and where there is only one debater, and his opponent is a
straw man of his own construction.
Yet when one reads the “spontaneous remarks” of Pope Francis
on various subjects of the day, the quality of reasoning and information of
facts is so fugitive, that frustration yields to sheer embarrassment. There is,
for example, the Holy Father’s remarks to youth in Turin on a hot June day in
2015: even a Reuters press release said that his smorgasbord of concerns, from
bankers to the weapons industry to Nazi concentration camps, was “rambling.”
While constrained by respect for the Petrine office, and aware of the strains
that imposes, it is distressing to look for a train of thought and find only a
train wreck.
FROM THE PASTOR October 30,
2016 by Fr. George W. Rutler
Exactly eight years ago I
wrote a column titled “The One We Were Waiting For” in which I referred to a
book by Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, The
Lord of the World. That dystopian novel has been cited by Pope
Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis said he has read it several times. The
protagonist, if one can apply that term to an Anti-Christ, imposed a new world
religion with Man himself as god. His one foe was Christianity, which he
thwarted in part by using “compromised Catholics and compliant priests to
persuade timid Catholics.”
Since then, that program has been realized in our time, to an
extent beyond the warnings of the most dire pessimists. Our federal government
has intimidated religious orders and churches, challenging religious freedom.
The institution of the family has been re-defined, and sexual identity has been
Gnosticized to the point of mocking biology. Assisted suicide is spreading,
abortions since 1973 have reached a total equal to the population of Italy, and
sexually transmitted diseases are at a record high. Objective journalism has
died, justice has been corrupted, racial bitterness ruins cities, entertainment
is degraded, knowledge of the liberal arts spirals downwards, and authentically
Catholic universities have all but vanished. A weak and confused foreign policy
has encouraged aggressor nations and terrorism, while metastasized immigration
is destroying remnant western cultures, and genocide is slaughtering Christian
populations. The cynical promise of economic prosperity is mocked by the lowest
rate of labor participation in forty years, an unprecedented number of people
on food stamps and welfare assistance, and the largest disparity in wealth in
over a century.
In his own grim days, Saint Augustine warned against nostalgia:
“The past times that you think were good, are good because they are not yours
here and now.” The present time, however, might try even his confidence. Sands
blow over the ruins of churches he knew in North Africa where the Cross is
virtually forbidden. By a blessed irony, a new church is opened every day in
formerly Communist Russia, while churches in our own formerly Christian nation
are being closed daily. For those who bought into the seductions of
politicians’ false hopes, there is the counsel of Walt Kelly’s character Pogo:
“It’s always darkest before it goes pitch black.”
It is incorrect to say that the coming election poses a choice
between two evils. For ethical and aesthetic reasons, there may be some bad in
certain candidates, but badness consists in doing bad things. Evil is
different: it is the deliberate destruction of truth, virtue and holiness.
While one may pragmatically vote for a flawed candidate, one may
not vote for anyone who advocates and enables unmitigatedly evil acts, and that
includes abortion. “In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law
permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or
to 'take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or vote for
it'" (Evangelium Vitae, 73).
At one party’s convention, the name of God was excluded from its
platform and a woman who boasted of having aborted her child was applauded. It
is a grave sin, requiring sacramental confession and penance, to become an
accomplice in objective evil by voting for anyone who encourages it, for that
imperils the nation and destroys the soul.
It is also the duty of the clergy to make this clear and not to
shrink, under the pretense of charity, from explaining the Church's censures.
Wolves in sheep’s clothing are dangerous, but worse are wolves in shepherd’s
clothing. While the evils foreseen eight years ago were realized, worse would
come if those affronts to human dignity were endorsed again. In the most
adverse prospect, God forbid, there might not be another free election, and
soon Catholics would arrive at shuttered churches and vacant altars. The
illusion of indifference cannot long be perpetuated by lame jokes and synthetic
laughter at banquets, for there is handwriting on the
wall.
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