Let's give credit where it is due. Our Jesuitical Fathers have generously restrained themselves from the disgraceful direct hyperbole and insult more commonly associated with commentary on Bloggers from either from the Reverends Longenecker or Rosica. Kudos to our Jesuit friends at America, for their "charity," attempted, that is, until you get to the heart of the matter.
Near the end of the first paragraph, they use the word "bullying." An interesting word and one that has become popular in some circles.
Shall we talk about bullying?
Who paid his legal bill? I had to pay mine!
That was money that could have gone as extra mortgage payments or retirement savings or renovations or a trip with my wife. You bet I'm still peeved about that!
We can go on; I can go on. I have specific examples of other bullying and attempted intimidation even to the point of threatening my livelihood from an "unidentified cleric."
Another, was an attempt to intimidate priests to have me "fired" from Cantor positions by mounting a whisper campaign that I am "making the Pope look bad." One actually suggesting I shut the blog down as a sign of "good-will."
In January and February 2015, there were at least three occurrences by an anonymous person or persons to directly interfere with my livelihood and my work -- my career and my vocation in sacred music, and actual attempts to interfere in my employment on more than one occasion!
Yes, you read that correctly.
There have been attempts by some to silence me for years. They are not very smart, they have not figured out that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. They will not silence this blogger.
Bullying? Intimidation? Threatening? Coercion?
I have known it directly, including the physical battery, assault and mental abuse as a 13 year old boy from certain sons of St. Basil's and their "Congregation." I survived that, there is nothing they can throw at me now.
Bullying, you say?
You filthy Jesuit swine! You "whitewashed sepulchres" with your intellectual pride. You "brood of vipers" who have betrayed your holy founder and His Lord and ours!
You write of bullying?
Oh, there is plenty and it is all from within the Catholic Church and from men who have no business in the priesthood. Effeminates, leaches, malefactors, prideful, arrogant, and faithless, feckless men who have disgraced the Bride of Christ, men who hide behind their clerical garb as some great oracles of holy wisdom.
Bullies all right, but it's not the bloggers.
What these men are revealing is that blogs punch above their weight and these men are running scared. They are afraid because they know that we are on to them and that they can no longer do their work without it being called out into the light. They know that when this Pope is dead; they will be dead with him. They have no progeny. They have no growth. Their time is short and we all know it and so do they.
We're on to them and we're not letting them go.
In a recent talk in Rome given at the Voice of the Family conference, Raymond Cardinal Burke had this to say about the current situation in the Church:
“I think of so many faithful who express to me their profound concerns for the Church in the present time, when there seems to be so much confusion about fundamental dogmatic and moral truths. In responding to their concerns, I urge them to deepen their understanding of the constant teaching and discipline of the Church and to make their voices heard, so that the shepherds of the flock may understand the urgent need to announce again with clarity and courage the truths of the faith and to apply again with charity and firmness the discipline needed to safeguard the same truths.”
"Make their voices heard," said the Cardinal!
In a blog post on May 30, Father Hunwicke stated with clarity that:
"Vatican I made clear that ex cathedra pronouncements of the Roman Pontiff are infallible and irreformable ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae. This implies that pronouncements not ex cathedra are or may be reformable by the reception or non-reception of the Church."
Read that again, "reformable by the reception or non-reception of the Church!"
Mark my words friends and enemies alike. This mockery, Amoris Laetitia and much more that may come from this papacy will all be undone. It will be undone and declared anathema by a future holy pope. He will correct the ambiguities in the documents of Vatican II, he will condemn the errors and heresies devised by those who manipulated it, he will restore the sacred liturgy and he will teach with clarity and truth. He will preach that mercy and justice are linked; that truth is not relative and that Christ never changes. That pope, I believe, is living today. I only pray that I may be granted the grace to see that papacy, and rejoice in it.
Catholics must stop ascribing to Francis, or any Pope for that matter, that which he does not have. Stop giving credence to Protestant bigotry about papal infallibility, that we worship the man and everything he says. Stop committing papolatry as if the passing of gas scented with frankincense somehow signifies new revelation.
Which magazine said just the other day in a Tweet, "The Church of Pope Francis"?
If you think this writer will ever bow to worship at the Church of Pope Francis, or the Church of Benedict or any other Pope for that matter, you can go straight to where that idolatry will get you. It is not the "Church of Pope Francis!" It is the Church of Jesus Christ, Catholic! This Pope is His Vicar, His servant and ours. He is not a god. He is not infallible when he farts frankincense. He is not infallible with what he says in his daily homilies unless he states infallible teachings already revealed.
These priests who use such phrases as "radical traditionalist" whatever the heck that means are manipulating and insulting. As a convert, this next statement wouldn't apply to Longenecker, but it would certainly to Rosica; "What faith did his parents or grandparents practice?" Were they "radical traditionalists?" or were they just, "Catholics!" If Fathers Rosica and Longenecker defend their remarks with some kind of historicism, then that is an admission that there is a pre and post Vatican II Church - that the old one is dead and this new one is better, more merciful, more just and that all that came before was wrong.
Bovine excrement!
There are only "Catholics."
The words of Robert DePlante come to mind:
What Catholics once were, we are. If we are wrong, then Catholics through the ages have been wrong. We are what you once were. We believe what you once believed. We worship as you once worshipped. If we are wrong now, you were wrong then. If you were right then, we are right now.
There are no Taliban Catholics, radical traditionalist, rad-trads, mad-trads and other such scandalous epithets used by Rosica, Longenecker, Shea, Armstrong and others. They sit there chastising bloggers and accuse us of doing exactly what they do. You are either a Catholic or you're a heretic. There is no grey.
Our parents and our grandparents did not have the knowledge and tools we have in order to stand up and protect the Faith and the Church. If they did, we would most certainly not be in the position we are in today. They did not read encyclicals or exhortations and they never thought to read the Council documents.
They trusted the priests and bishops, and what did it get them?
They trusted the priests and bishops, and what did it get them?
Their sons sodomised.
Their daughters molested.
The Holy Mass, debased and disgraced and often rendered illicit if not outright, invalid.
Our Lord insulted.
Our Lord insulted.
Altars smashed.
Communion rails broken up.
Artwork and their patrimony whitewashed.
Scandals.
Scandals.
The faith in ruins.
For fifty years, Catholics have been poked like a bear in a cage. What do you expect? That they are going to sit and take it? Poke someone long enough and you can be sure, the bear is going to bite back.
You can say turn the other cheek, but that is personal. We are fighting for Christ and His Church, our patrimony, our families and our culture and there will be no turning of any cheeks.
And don't think we're ever going away.
The Web We Weave
Basilian Father Thomas Rosica, CEO of Salt and Light Television Network in Canada and an English-language assistant to the Holy See Press Office, speaks May 11 during the 25th annual observance of World Communications Day in Brooklyn, N.Y. Father Rosica was presented the DeSales Media Group's St. Francis de Sales Communicator of the Year Award. (CNS photo/Robert M. Longo)
In recent years some Catholic watchdog groups have led campaigns against church institutions and individuals who work within them that have had the effect of ruining careers, disrupting lives and generating unjustified tension within the Catholic community. Catholic service entities have been the frequent but not the only targets of these critics. These efforts have been typified by extreme rhetoric and relentless bullying on social media—ignoring beams, compulsively seeking splinters—and church bureaucracies have in some cases acceded to their pressure tactics.
Thomas Rosica, C.S.B., founding chief executive officer of Canada’s Salt and Light Media Foundation, delivered the keynote address during the Brooklyn Diocese’s observance of World Communications Day on May 11. He pulled no punches in condemning this unfortunate phenomenon and the broader problem of a Catholic web of anger and accusation. “The character assassination on the Internet by those claiming to be Catholic and Christian has turned it into a graveyard of corpses strewn all around,” he said. Father Rosica deplored “the obsessed, scrupulous, self-appointed, nostalgia-hankering virtual guardians of faith” who “resort to the Internet and become trolling pontiffs and holy executioners.”
His words will no doubt only provoke those he is criticizing. He should not have to stand alone in doing so. In this Year of Mercy, Catholic communicators have a special responsibility to model the merciful relationships they seek to encourage in others. Debate, even fierce debate, in the church should not be unwelcome; but charity and esteem for the person—not rhetorical stratagems bent on personal destruction—should typify our dialogue.
