Blind To Truth, Blind To The Horror Of Personal Sin
by Thomas A. Droleskey
Many of those in ecclesiastical office in the counterfeit church of conciliarism who have made a career obfuscating, if not entirely denying and contradicting, the truths of the Holy Faith have also excelled in obfuscating the truth concerning the crimes committed by "bishops" and priests/presbyters. As one who did a good deal of hard reporting on these crimes back in the 1990s, I have first-hand experience dealing with the conciliar "bishops" and their chancery factotums as they sought time and time again to victimize the sheep who had brought to them their heartfelt pleas to correct abuses and to punish the malefactors.
The veritable explosion in the past eight years of stories about clergy abuse and of the clericalism with which it was swept under the rug is really nothing new. Even some priests/presbyters within the conciliar structures were warning seminarians as early as the early-1970s that such an explosion was coming, that it was only a matter of time before the explosion took place as men who were inclined to commit perverse sins against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments were recruited into seminaries, ordained/installed to priesthood/presbyterate, and then protected and promoted, sometimes becoming "bishops" in the conciliar structures. (See
The Six Hundred Million Dollar Man and His Friends, Enemies of Souls Universally, Refusing to Reform, Sick From Head to Toe, Modernists In Love With Old-Fashioned Clericalism, and
Just A Matter of Forgiveness?.) A vocations director for a eastern diocese explained to me in 1974 that there were dioceses "within two or three hundred miles of here" that accepted known, practicing homosexuals as seminarians. That the explosion has taken place is really not surprising.
Nor is it surprising that what started out as a scandal that rocked the conciliar ranks in the United States of America has turned out to be fairly universal in scope. The "bishops" of Ireland have had to face the results of the Murphy Report (see Never Afraid to Scandalize the Little Ones and
Aborting Reality). Scandals have rocked the conciliar structures "down under" in Australia and in Austria and The Netherlands. The scandals have now spread to Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict's native country, the Federal Republic of Germany, to take center stage as reports have revealed longstanding abuses in schools run by the Society of Jesus there, focusing also on the abuses extant in a school in Regensburg, Germany, where Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, the false "pontiff's" older brother, has admitted to slapping boys in the face when he was the head of the choir at a boys' school between 1964 and 1994, admitting also that he was aware of physical beatings of students, saying that he did not know what to do about those abuses:
The pope's brother said in a newspaper interview published Tuesday that he slapped pupils as punishment after he took over a renowned German boys' choir in the 1960s. He also said he was aware of allegations of physical abuse at an elementary school linked to the choir but did nothing about it.
And the Rev. Georg Ratzinger said he was unaware of allegations of sexual abuse in the Regensburger Domspatzen boys choir, part of a string of allegations of sex abuse against church employees across Europe in recent days.
Responding to accusations that its policies encouraged silence about the problem, the Vatican said the sexual abuse scandals in Germany and other countries are cause for anguishm but its response has been prompt and transparent
The scandal sweeping church institutions in many European countries kept widening Tuesday.
In Austria, the head of a Benedictine monastery in Salzburg admitted to sexually abusing a child decades ago and resigned. Dutch Catholic bishops announced an independent inquiry into more than 200 allegations of sexual abuse of children by priests at church schools and apologized to victims.
The German abuse allegations are particularly sensitive because Germany is the homeland of Pope Benedict XVI and because the scandals involve the prestigious choir that Georg Ratzinger led from 1964 till 1994.
Last week, the Regensburg Diocese said a former singer in the choir had come forward with allegations of sexual abuse in the early 1960s. And across Germany, more than 170 students have claimed they were sexually abused at several Catholic high schools.
Ratzinger has said repeatedly that the sexual abuse allegations date from before his tenure as choir director. Asked in the interview published Tuesday whether he knew of them, Ratzinger insisted he was not aware of the problem.
"These things were never discussed," Ratzinger told the Passauer Neue Presse German daily. "The problem of sexual abuse that has now come to light was never spoken of."
Jakob Schoetz, a spokesman for the Regensburg Diocese, told The Associated Press that Ratzinger would not comment further on the issue.
There also have been reports of severe beatings by administrators at two primary feeder schools for the choir, one in Etterzhausen and one in Peilenhofen. One director, identified as Johann M., who headed the Etterzhausen school from 1953-1992, has been cited in several allegations as being particularly abusive.
Ratzinger said boys would open up to him about being mistreated in Etterzhausen.
"But I did not have the feeling at the time that I should do something about it. Had I known with what exaggerated fierceness he was acting, I would have said something," he was quoted as saying by the German paper.
"Of course, today one condemns such actions," Ratzinger said. "I do as well. At the same time, I ask the victims for pardon."
He said he had administered corporal punishment himself.
"At the beginning, I also repeatedly administered a slap in the face, but always had a bad conscience about it," Ratzinger said, adding that he was happy when corporal punishment was made illegal in 1980.
Ratzinger said a slap in the face was the easiest reaction to a failure to perform or a poor performance. How hard the slaps were varied greatly, depending on who administered them.
The pope and his older brother are close. Joseph Ratzinger had been planning to return to Germany and move his brother into a house with him upon retirement from the Vatican — a plan made moot by his election as pope. He refers to his brother as his trustworthy guide and companion and says his brother helps him to accept old age with courage.
The Vatican moved to defuse criticism after the German justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, said Monday that a Vatican secrecy rule has played a role in a "wall of silence" surrounding sexual abuse of children. She cited a 2001 Vatican document requiring even the most serious abuse cases to be investigated internally first.
Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi defended the main ecclesiastical institutions involved, saying they have taken up the matters "promptly and decisively."
"They have shown a desire for transparency, in a way they have accelerated bringing the problem to light by inviting the victims to speak up even when the cases dated to a while back," Lombardi told Vatican Radio.
He said "mistakes" within the church were deplorable and said the cases are pushing it church toward dealing with the problem.
"While we can't deny the gravity of the anguish the church is going through, we cannot give up doing everything possible so that in the end positive results can also be achieved," Lombardi said, citing as goals better children protection and the church's own "purification."
Lombardi declined to comment on the statement attributed to the pope's brother that he slapped people.
He noted that, in Canon Law, sexual abuse of minors is among the most serious offenses, and said the Vatican's document in 2001 was "a fundamental signal in calling the bishops' attention to the gravity of the problem."
A statement from the U.S. group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests called the Vatican's claim that Catholic institutions had been timely in their reaction "depressing and disingenuous."
"Sadly, the truth is just the reverse," Peter Isely, Midwest director of the group. "Regarding pedophile priests and corrupt bishops, the church hierarchy responds only when forced to do so by external pressures." (Monsignor Ratzinger: I Ignored Physical Abuse Reports)
If someone does not understand that the beating of a child with a chair is not in se an act of unspeakable cruelty, then one is bereft of any real sense of moral right and wrong on even a level of naturalistic, Masonic decency, no less of one's obligation as a disciple of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to defend the innocent and to correct wrongdoing, bringing malefactors to justice without malice.
Even though Catholics do indeed accept the judicious use of corporal punishment, sometimes administered swiftly in circumstances where it is considered necessary to restrain a child who has lost control of himself, no Catholic can sanction the use of the beatings of students as a matter of institutional policy on a regular, sustained basis such as is being reported as having taken place in Germany.
Even one beating is one too many! And no Catholic can sanction verbal abuse, including the use of vulgar, profane language, upon students day in and day out. Worse yet, one cannot remain inert and inactive when one hears about such beatings and gross, vulgar verbal abuses.
That Monsignor Georg Ratzinger was uncertain what to do in the face of the physical beatings that were reported to him by students is very much in the character of the Ratzingers. Joseph Ratzinger himself has said that he believed that he had no choice but to join the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany. He did have a choice. He could have resisted. He could have said no. The Ratzingers have demonstrated a practical indifference to the horror of evil if it means that they must take a stand that might cost them in practical terms. The then Joseph "Cardinal" Ratzinger bore a specially large responsibility for helping to cover up the crimes of conciliar priests/presbyters that are now exploding into full public view when he was given authority by Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II in 2001 to deal with these crimes.
The lack of the sense of the horror of personal sin is a keynote of the false "pontiff's" character, something that he demonstrated in an interview Avvenire magazine in 2001:
I have nothing against people who, though they never enter a church during the year, go to Christmas midnight Mass, or go on the occasion of some other celebration, because this is also a way of coming close to the light. Therefore, there must be different forms of involvement and participation. (CARDINAL RATZINGER ON THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY).
Ratzinger/Benedict's lack of regard for the Third Commandment is but a logical consequence for the lack of regard that he has for the First and Second Commandments as he has, as Benedict XVI, personally esteemed the symbols of five false religions with his priestly hands and has said that "Christians and Jews pray to the same Lord" and has called mosques and synagogues and even a mountain in Japan, Mount Hiei, atop which the Buddhists worship their devils as "sacred" places.
One who can so flagrantly violate the First and Second Commandments with such utter impunity demonstrates in the objective order of things, leaving aside subjective culpability solely to God Himself, Who alone knows the interior dispositions of souls, that he does not understand Who God is or what He has revealed to us through His true Church. This lack of understanding of the identity of God flows logically from Ratzinger/Benedict's lack of understanding of the nature of God and His Revelation, believing that the expressions of dogmatic truth are contingent on the historical circumstances in which they were formulated. One who gets such basic things wrong is not going to have much of a real sense of the horror of personal sin and how to respond to it appropriately, which is one of the reasons that Ratzinger/Benedict and his band of conciliar "bishops" have sought to protect perverted priests/presbyters time and time again until their cover-ups and abuse of power made headlines that could no longer be ignored.
Thus it is that when cover-ups unravel--and cover-ups usually do unravel, men such as Father Federico Lombardi, S.J., make their positivist assertions that everything has been handled well and that the the leaders of institutions involved have responded appropriately when the exact opposite is true. Once again, of course, this is but a logical consequence of the denial of the nature of dogmatic truth, which is an attack on the very nature of God Himself, as it is a relatively easy thing to misrepresent and distort facts in the Order of Nature (Creation) when one promotes lies about the Order of Grace (Redemption).
No one but the most supercilious conciliar apologist believes a word of these positivist assertions, especially when Ratzinger/Benedict himself, who was the conciliar Archbishop of Munich and Freising from March 24, 1977, to February 15, 1982 (he had been appointed by Wojtyla/John Paul II to be the prefect of the conciliar Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on November 25, 1981), is now under investigation by the German Justice Minister for what he may have known about physical beatings and crimes against Holy Purity committed by priests/presbyters during his episcopal administration (see Did Benedict XVI know about abuse?).
Although there is much that can be said about the scandals now breaking throughout Europe and the fact that a ring of perverted criminals was operating within the Vatican itself (something that one could not expect Ratzinger/Benedict to know about as the Vatican has many employees and volunteers, although the case does speak volumes about the pervert-friendly culture found in the nooks and crannies of concilairism), suffice it to say for the moment that what is striking about Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's rather limpid response to these moral crimes parallels his sanguine acceptance of error and heresy on the part of others, to say nothing of his own embrace and propagation of the condemned principles that have been discussed on this site ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
To wit, who is going to be meeting with the false "pontiff" on Friday, March 12, 2010, to discuss the scandals that broken wide open in Germany? None other than the President of the German "Bishops'" Conference, "Archbishop" Robert Zollitsch, who is making his quinquennial or ad limina apostolorum visit to the Vatican. Zollitsch's visit will come precisely three hundred thirty-five days after he denied that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ died on the wood of the Holy Cross in atonement for our sins. Ratzinger/Benedict has not corrected him publicly. There has been not a word of retraction heard from the lips of Robert Zollitsch. A supposed "pope" who can be sanguine in the face of a blasphemous apostasy committed against Our Lord by one of his "bishops" will have no difficulty at all being subdued in his response to the crimes that he helped to cover-up for many years and that he may have had contemporaneous knowledge of during his years as a professor at Regensburg University and during his time as the conciliar "ordinary" of Munich and Freising.
Look at the fawning manner in which Ratzinger/Benedict greeted Barack Hussein Obama last year, wishing him a
"blessing on all your work and also for you" even though part of Obama's work has been to issue executive orders that have resulted in the chemical and surgical assassinations of innocent preborn children with the revenue generated from American taxpayers. There was a casual mention made of the "defense and promotion of life" in the official communique issued by the Press Office of the Holy See. There was no public condemnation of Obama's support for abortion. Indeed, the editors of L'Osservatore Romano have felt free to praise Obama and to publish articles in praise of many other purveyors of evil (The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Oscar Wilde, John Calvin, Karl Marx, the Harry Potter books and motion pictures, The Rolling Stones, etc.).
This is all very reflective of the spirit of conciliarism that is reflected in the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service itself, which deemphasizes the horror of personal sin and thus our need as sinners for Holy Mother Church to impose upon us external penances to discipline our frequently disordered and unruly bodies and souls:
The same awareness of the present state of the world also influenced the use of texts from very ancient tradition. It seemed that this cherished treasure would not be harmed if some phrases were changed so that the style of language would be more in accord with the language of modern theology and would faithfully reflect the actual state of the Church's discipline. Thus there have been changes of some expressions bearing on the evaluation and use of the good things of the earth and of allusions to a particular form of outward penance belonging to another age in the history of the Church. (Paragraph Fifteen, General Instruction to the Roman Missal, 1997.)
Who says that forms of "outward penance" belong to "another age in the history of the Church? Revolutionaries, that's who. Revolutionaries whose hatred for the need to do personal penance for one's sins is indicative of their lack of appreciation for the horror of personal sin (see Having No Regard for the Horror of Sin and Just A Matter of Forgiveness?). Revolutionaries who, although they would be loath to see the analogy, are just as much in league with the adversary, who hates the Holy Cross and the fact that believing Catholics, despite their own sins and failings, embrace It and love It as they attempt to lift It high with joy and gratitude in their own daily lives, as the social revolutionaries who make no pretense at all of their open hatred for Christ the King and the very instrument upon which He redeemed sinful human beings.
The only sort of "error" that Ratzinger/Benedict seems to be concerned about is that which he says that Bishop Richard Williamson of the Society of Saint Pius X committed last year when proffering his views on the nature and extent of the crimes of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. That and that alone was a "horse of a different color." Ratzinger/Benedict is totally without horror when it comes to deviations from the Faith, which is somewhat understandable given the fact that he deviates from the Faith in many ways (see
Ratzinger's War Against Catholicism).
Foreign to the Modernist mind and heart of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is the hatred of sin and heresy that should be near and dear to the heart of a true Catholic, that is near and dear to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary:
The love of God brings many new instincts into the heart. Heavenly and noble as they are, they bear no resemblance to what men would call the finer and more heroic developments of character. A spiritual discernment is necessary to their right appreciation. They are so unlike the growth of earth, that they must expect to meet on earth with only suspicion, misunderstanding, and dislike. It is not easy to defend them from a controversial point of view; for our controversy is obliged to begin by begging the question, or else it would be unable so much as to state its case. The axioms of the world pass current in the world, the axioms of the gospel do not. Hence the world has its own way. It talks us down. It tries us before tribunals where our condemnation is secured beforehand. It appeals to principles which are fundamental with most men but are heresies with us. Hence its audience takes part with it against us. We are foreigners, and must pay the penalty of being so. If we are misunderstood, we had no right to reckon on any thing else, being as we are, out of our own country. We are made to be laughed at. We shall be understood in heaven. Woe to those easy-going Christians whom the world can understand, and will tolerate because it sees they have a mind to compromise!
The love of souls is one of these instincts which the love of Jesus brings into our hearts. To the world it is proselytism, there mere wish to add to a faction, one of the selfish developments of party spirit. One while the stain of lax morality is affixed to it, another while the reproach of pharisaic strictness! For what the world seems to suspect least of all in religion is consistency. But the love of souls, however apostolic, is always subordinate to love of Jesus. We love souls because of Jesus, not Jesus because of souls. Thus there are times and places when we pass from the instinct of divine love to another, from the love of souls to the hatred of heresy. This last is particularly offensive to the world. So especially opposed is it to the spirit of the world, that, even in good, believing hearts, every remnant of worldliness rises in arms against this hatred of heresy, embittering the very gentlest of characters and spoiling many a glorious work of grace. Many a convert, in whose soul God would have done grand things, goes to his grave a spiritual failure, because he would not hate heresy. The heart which feels the slightest suspicion against the hatred of heresy is not yet converted. God is far from reigning over it yet with an undivided sovereignty. The paths of higher sanctity are absolutely barred against it. In the judgment of the world, and of worldly Christians, this hatred of heresy is exaggerated, bitter, contrary to moderation, indiscreet, unreasonable, aiming at too much, bigoted, intolerant, narrow, stupid, and immoral. What can we say to defend it? Nothing which they can understand. We had, therefore, better hold our peace. If we understand God, and He understands us, it is not so very hard to go through life suspected, misunderstood and unpopular. The mild self-opinionatedness of the gentle, undiscerning good will also take the world's view and condemn us; for there is a meek-loving positiveness about timid goodness which is far from God, and the instincts of whose charity is more toward those who are less for God, while its timidity is searing enough for harsh judgment. There are conversions where three-quarters of the heart stop outside the Church and only a quarter enters, and heresy can only be hated by an undivided heart. But if it is hard, it has to be borne. A man can hardly have the full use of his senses who is bent on proving to the world, God's enemy, that a thorough-going Catholic hatred of heresy is a right frame of mind. We might as well force a blind man to judge a question of color. Divine love inspheres in us a different circle of life, motive, and principle, which is not only not that of the world, but in direct enmity with it. From a worldly point of view, the craters in the moon are more explicable things than we Christians with our supernatural instincts. From the hatred of heresy we get to another of these instincts, the horror of sacrilege. The distress caused by profane words seems to the world but an exaggerated sentimentality. The penitential spirit of reparation which pervades the whole Church is, on its view, either a superstition or an unreality. The perfect misery which an unhallowed touch of the Blessed Sacrament causes to the servants of God provokes either the world's anger or its derision. Men consider it either altogether absurd in itself, or at any rate out of all proportion; and, if otherwise they have proofs of our common sense, they are inclined to put down our unhappiness to sheer hypocrisy. The very fact that they do not believe as we believe removes us still further beyond the reach even of their charitable comprehension. If they do not believe in the very existence our sacred things, how they shall they judge the excesses of a soul to which these sacred things are far dearer than itself? (Father Frederick William Faber,
The Foot of the Cross, published originally in England in 1857 under the title of The Dolors of Mary, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 294.)
Those who do not hate heresy do not love God. Those who do not love God will not understand the horror of personal sin and will not be prompted to take remedial measures when the bodies and souls of their brothers and sisters in Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ are suffering from abuse from others. "Boys will be boys," after all, correct? No, not correct. We are called to quit our sins and to repent of them, not to have them institutionally protected and explained away and covered up as malefactors are rewarded until such time as a scandal erupts and the Faith of many innocent souls is shaken, if not lost altogether. Saint John Bosco, for example, dealt with difficult, wayward boys. Although he used methods of charity and patience, he did so to correct their bad behavior, not to excuse such behavior or to reaffirm them in it with a casual, dismissive attitude that conveys as little sense of the horror of personal sin as that possessed by the Ratzinger Brothers.
We are indeed living in a period of profound chastisement where the devil is using the lack of faith and the bad example of Catholics all across and up and down the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide to scandalize and divide Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
The scandals afflicting the counterfeit church of conciliarism did not occur overnight. Many occurred years ago during the reign of true bishops. Granted. It is nevertheless true that the lords of conciliarism have proven themselves to be blind to the horror of personal sin because they are blind to the truth of God's very own identity and nature.
We cannot be blind to the truth about the horror of our own sins, each of which wounded Our Blessed Lord and Saviour once in time and wounds the Church Militant on earth today. We must be brutally honest about our sins and the harm that they have done to our souls and to the Mystical Body of Christ, earnestly seeking to live more and more penitentially, especially in these middle days of Lent, seeking to offer up all of our prayers and penances and physical sufferings and fastings and humiliations that come our way in a spirit of reparation to God through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. We are very much responsible for the malodorous state of the Church Militant on earth and the world-at-large.
To Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart belongs the triumph that will vanquish the lords of Modernism once and for all.
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
