Skip to main content

Read the Documents!

The Fifth Passage all Catholics should understand:

5) “But the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ” (Dei Verbum, #10).
Fr. Hans Kung and Pope Benedict XVI


Unfortunately, following the council an "alternative magisterium" was allowed to ferment. When asked by Vittorio Messori in his famous interview with Cardinal Ratzinger about the fact that he once was associated with some theologians who have since run afoul with the CDF, the Cardinal’s reply sheds much light on this “spirit of Vatican II”:

It is not I who have changed, but others. At our very first meetings I pointed out two prerequisites to my colleagues. The first one: our group must not lapse into any kind of sectarianism or arrogance, as if we were the new, the true Church, an alternative magisterium [emphasis added] with a monopoly on the truth of Christianity. The second one: discussion has to be conducted without any individualistic flights forward, in confrontation with the reality of Vatican II with the true letter and the true spirit of the Council, not with an imaginary Vatican III. These prerequisites were increasingly less observed in the following period up to a turning point—which set in around 1973—when someone began to assert that the texts of Vatican II were no longer the point of reference for Catholic theology ….that the Council still belonged to the traditional, clerical moment of the Church and that it was not possible to move forward very much with such documents [emphasis added]. They must be surpassed.

It is important to understand the part played by neomodernism in bringing about this division within the ranks of the “new theology.” As I discuss in my book, it was the establishment of “an alternative magisterium on the part of theologians who viewed the Vatican II documents as inadequate who demonstrated the pride warned against by Cardinal Ratzinger. I believe it consistent with Catholic teaching to see in the apostasy of this “anthropocentric society” the work of “the hidden enemy who sows errors and misfortune in human history.”

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News

DANCING WITH MR. D:   This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News : 'via Blog this'

Dancing With Mr. D: Grooming the Little Children

A former pro-transgender activist said she regretted her previous work in pro-transgender activism, adding she felt she was "indoctrinated" on gender ideology in an interview with  Fox News Digital.  "I started to realize that what I had been doing at my job at the LGBT Center, it was grooming," Kay Yang, a former employee of a location in New York, said. Grooming in this context means "to get into readiness for a specific objective." Kay works as a 'deprogrammer' to help parents and children who have been 'indoctrinated' by the 'cult-like' transgender agenda. Yang herself previously went by they/them and worked as a 'trans educator' in schools for years.  Listen to her testimony.    

Blogging Disciples!

To promote a book I spent years in writing , I began this blog. I am a baby boomer who knows all too little about blogging and the latest techie stuff. As I was perusing various Catholic blog sites, I noticed a post by Fr. Longenecker entitled,   "The Smoke of Satan."  If one troubles oneself to read Fr.'s quite accurate assessment, and becomes interested in just exactly how, according to the Pope who coined the phrase "Smoke of Satan" the Devil made his entrance into the post-Vatican II Church in the U.S., then my book is just what the Savior may have ordered, so why don't you!?

Bishops Bishoping!

As the nation’s courts increasingly strike down popularly-supported state bans on marriage between men who have sex with men, and women who have sex with women, bishops increasingly are “bishoping”, to coin a term I use often in my book; i.e., they are at long last defending the faith against the onslaught always sure to come from the secular culture. Diocesan Catholic schools in Cincinnati and Oakland, Calif., are weathering criticism for contracts that require teachers not only to witness to the faith in the classroom, but also in how they live their lives in the public square. Condemnation of Catholic-school contracts that ask teachers to not controvert the Church in public have received dramatized coverage from the secular media in California and Ohio, where a slight number of teachers are opposing the contractual language. A a teacher in a Catholic school it is heartening to see the dioceses in question standing their ground, emphasizing the dynamic role teachers ...

About the Author II

In the years prior to the Second Vatican Council, I also remember attending daily Mass before elementary school, which, because we had fasted for three hours, allowed us to eat breakfast in Mr. Sullivan’s math class. I remember bellowing out Tantum Ergo   at Wednesday Evening Benediction, which I was in the habit of attending with my Mom, siblings and “Gramp,” (her Dad, John). I also remember looking forward to participating in the praying of that most sublime form of prayer, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, with my St. Joseph’s Daily Missal. With Pope Benedict’s having granted permission for priests to offer the Extraordinary form of the Roman Rite, we hear much ado in the form of reaction against this from Catholic “progressives,” and about how the Council placed a new emphasis on the laity’s participation at Mass, the implication being that Catholics did not actively participate at Mass prior to Vatican II, opting for such devotions as the praying of the Rosary or Holy Car...

Progressive Catholics? Catholic Right Catholics? Whaddup?

But I, brethren, could not address you as spiritual men, but as men of the flesh, as babes in Christ.   I fed you with milk, not solid food; for you were not ready for it; and even yet you are not ready,  for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving like ordinary men? For when one says, "I belong to Paul," and another, "I belong to Apollos," are you not merely men?                                                                                    -1 Corinthians 3: 1-4 During the cou...

Have Nothing To Do With the Dragon!

In Chapter three, I wrote the following: "If one is worldly and hedonistic, Satan enters with temptations of the flesh. One hears often that the “liberation” of the human libido began in earnest in the United States in the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. Americans, troubled over repressive attitudes toward human sexuality, hoped for a revolution that would free them from outdated moral and social constraints. The ensuing revolution resulted not in liberation but in license and a host of societal sexual crises. One has only to think of the tremendous increase in the number of post-1960s illegitimate births and abortions, sexually transmitted diseases, opposition to censorship of pornography (especially on the Internet), and the resulting sexual addiction (in some extreme instances resulting in murder). Consider too the tremendous blows to marriage and the family done by adultery, the battle over the homosexual lifestyle in the United States, Canada and Europe (now to the poi...

From: The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God

Lumen Gentium instructed that religious are to live out the counsels in community to a greater degree in service to the Church (living for God alone), and in doing so model for the laity what grace can accomplish. Reflecting upon why God made us, which is to share in His life forever, religious are only too happy to be a road sign for the rest of humanity pointing the best way to love of neighbor. Paul VI, expanding on Lumen Gentium , alluded to this in Evangelica Testificatio , his Apostolic Exhortation of June, 1971: It is precisely for the sake of the kingdom of heaven that you have vowed to Christ, generously and without reservation, that capacity to love, that need to possess and that freedom to regulate one's own life, which are so precious to man. Such is your consecration, made within the Church and through her ministry—both that of her representatives who receive your profession and that of the Christian community itself, whose love recognizes, welcomes, sustains ...

Who He is to Judge

I have chronicled in these pages evidence of Pope Francis' traditional views on marriage and family, which give the lie to heterodox claims that he is their man. The latest:    Pope Francis warned the bishops of Puerto Rico on Monday, Dear brothers in the Episcopate: I rejoice in being able to greet you on the occasion of the Ad Limina Apostolorum pilgrimage visit. It is my desire that (this visit) be a fruitful experience of communion for each one of you and for Church on its pilgrim journey in Puerto Rico. I thank His Excellency Roberto Octavio González Nieves, Archbishop of San Juan and President of the Bishops Conference for the words he addressed to me in the name of all of you. In that beautiful Caribbean archipelago was founded one of the first three dioceses that were established on the American continent. Since then, the Church’s history has been interwoven with the faithfulness and tenacity of its pastors, religious, missionaries and lay people that, res...

Liberal Catholic? Conservative Catholic? Or just plain ol' Roman Catholic?

From "The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God": During the course of my prior catechetical career I spoke often with parents, colleagues, and parishioners about catechesis and the Church. Stereotypical remarks in these conversations ran as follows: “Oh, I hear the principal is a liberal Catholic,” or “the teachers at my previous job were all from the Catholic Right,” or “Isn’t the new Pope a fundamentalist conservative?” The principal so-called “liberal” groups in the public square today are Call to Action, Voice of the Faithful, Women‘s Ordination Conference, the Catholic Theological Society of America, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, and Catholics for a Free Choice. During the homosexual priest scandals in 2003, the American media sought out almost exclusively representatives of these groups and priests and religious sympathetic to their views as spokespersons for the Church. Among those (mis)labeled by the “liberal-progressive-leftists” as “conservative-tr...