Coloring Everything He Says and Does

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Pope Saint Pius X and Pope Pius XII warned us very specifically about the contempt that Modernists have for the truths contained in the Sacred Deposit of Faith and for the Fathers and Doctors of the Holy Mother Church who have explicated and defended them:

42. Would that they had but displayed less zeal and energy in propagating it! But such is their activity and such their unwearying labor on behalf of their cause, that one cannot but be pained to see them waste such energy in endeavoring to ruin the Church when they might have been of such service to her had their efforts been better directed. Their artifices to delude men's minds are of two kinds, the first to remove obstacles from their path, the second to devise and apply actively and patiently every resource that can serve their purpose. They recognize that the three chief difficulties which stand in their way are the scholastic method of philosophy, the authority and tradition of the Fathers, and the magisterium of the Church, and on these they wage unrelenting war. Against scholastic philosophy and theology they use the weapons of ridicule and contempt. Whether it is ignorance or fear, or both, that inspires this conduct in them, certain it is that the passion for novelty is always united in them with hatred of scholasticism, and there is no surer sign that a man is tending to Modernism than when he begins to show his dislike for the scholastic method. Let the Modernists and their admirers remember the proposition condemned by Pius IX: "The method and principles which have served the ancient doctors of scholasticism when treating of theology no longer correspond with the exigencies of our time or the progress of science." They exercise all their ingenuity in an effort to weaken the force and falsify the character of tradition, so as to rob it of all its weight and authority. But for Catholics nothing will remove the authority of the second Council of Nicea, where it condemns those "who dare, after the impious fashion of heretics, to deride the ecclesiastical traditions, to invent novelties of some kind...or endeavor by malice or craft to overthrow any one of the legitimate traditions of the Catholic Church"; nor that of the declaration of the fourth Council of Constantinople: "We therefore profess to preserve and guard the rules bequeathed to the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, by the Holy and most illustrious Apostles, by the orthodox Councils, both general and local, and by everyone of those divine interpreters, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church." Wherefore the Roman Pontiffs, Pius IV and Pius IX, ordered the insertion in the profession of faith of the following declaration: "I most firmly admit and embrace the apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions and other observances and constitutions of the Church.''

The Modernists pass judgment on the holy Fathers of the Church even as they do upon tradition. With consummate temerity they assure the public that the Fathers, while personally most worthy of all veneration, were entirely ignorant of history and criticism, for which they are only excusable on account of the time in which they lived. Finally, the Modernists try in every way to diminish and weaken the authority of the ecclesiastical magisterium itself by sacrilegiously falsifying its origin, character, and rights, and by freely repeating the calumnies of its adversaries. To the entire band of Modernists may be applied those words which Our predecessor sorrowfully wrote: "To bring contempt and odium on the mystic Spouse of Christ, who is the true light, the children of darkness have been wont to cast in her face before the world a stupid calumny, and perverting the meaning and force of things and words, to depict her as the friend of darkness and ignorance, and the enemy of light, science, and progress.''This being so, Venerable Brethren, there is little reason to wonder that the Modernists vent all their bitterness and hatred on Catholics who zealously fight the battles of the Church. There is no species of insult which they do not heap upon them, but their usual course is to charge them with ignorance or obstinacy. When an adversary rises up against them with an erudition and force that renders them redoubtable, they seek to make a conspiracy of silence around him to nullify the effects of his attack. This policy towards Catholics is the more invidious in that they belaud with admiration which knows no bounds the writers who range themselves on their side, hailing their works, exuding novelty in every page, with a chorus of applause. For them the scholarship of a writer is in direct proportion to the recklessness of his attacks on antiquity, and of his efforts to undermine tradition and the ecclesiastical magisterium. When one of their number falls under the condemnations of the Church the rest of them, to the disgust of good Catholics, gather round him, loudly and publicly applaud him, and hold him up in veneration as almost a martyr for truth. The young, excited and confused by all this clamor of praise and abuse, some of them afraid of being branded as ignorant, others ambitious to rank among the learned, and both classes goaded internally by curiosity and pride, not infrequently surrender and give themselves up to Modernism. (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 2007.)

21. It is also true that theologians must always return to the sources of divine revelation: for it belongs to them to point out how the doctrine of the living Teaching Authority is to be found either explicitly or implicitly in the Scriptures and in Tradition.[4] Besides, each source of divinely revealed doctrine contains so many rich treasures of truth, that they can really never be exhausted. Hence it is that theology through the study of its sacred sources remains ever fresh; on the other hand, speculation which neglects a deeper search into the deposit of faith, proves sterile, as we know from experience. But for this reason even positive theology cannot be on a par with merely historical science. For, together with the sources of positive theology God has given to His Church a living Teaching Authority to elucidate and explain what is contained in the deposit of faith only obscurely and implicitly. This deposit of faith our Divine Redeemer has given for authentic interpretation not to each of the faithful, not even to theologians, but only to the Teaching Authority of the Church. But if the Church does exercise this function of teaching, as she often has through the centuries, either in the ordinary or extraordinary way, it is clear how false is a procedure which would attempt to explain what is clear by means of what is obscure. Indeed the very opposite procedure must be used. Hence Our Predecessor of immortal memory, Pius IX, teaching that the most noble office of theology is to show how a doctrine defined by the Church is contained in the sources of revelation, added these words, and with very good reason: "in that sense in which it has been defined by the Church."

22. To return, however, to the new opinions mentioned above, a number of things are proposed or suggested by some even against the divine authorship of Sacred Scripture. For some go so far as to pervert the sense of the Vatican Council's definition that God is the author of Holy Scripture, and they put forward again the opinion, already often condemned, which asserts that immunity from error extends only to those parts of the Bible that treat of God or of moral and religious matters. They even wrongly speak of a human sense of the Scriptures, beneath which a divine sense, which they say is the only infallible meaning, lies hidden. In interpreting Scripture, they will take no account of the analogy of faith and the Tradition of the Church. Thus they judge the doctrine of the Fathers and of the Teaching Church by the norm of Holy Scripture, interpreted by the purely human reason of exegetes, instead of explaining Holy Scripture according to the mind of the Church which Christ Our Lord has appointed guardian and interpreter of the whole deposit of divinely revealed truth.

23. Further, according to their fictitious opinions, the literal sense of Holy Scripture and its explanation, carefully worked out under the Church's vigilance by so many great exegetes, should yield now to a new exegesis, which they are pleased to call symbolic or spiritual. By means of this new exegesis the Old Testament, which today in the Church is a sealed book, would finally be thrown open to all the faithful. By this method, they say, all difficulties vanish, difficulties which hinder only those who adhere to the literal meaning of the Scriptures.

24. Everyone sees how foreign all this is to the principles and norms of interpretation rightly fixed by our predecessors of happy memory, Leo XIII in his Encyclical "Providentissimus," and Benedict XV in the Encyclical "Spiritus Paraclitus," as also by Ourselves in the Encyclical "Divino Affflante Spiritu."

25. It is not surprising that novelties of this kind have already borne their deadly fruit in almost all branches of theology. It is now doubted that human reason, without divine revelation and the help of divine grace, can, by arguments drawn from the created universe, prove the existence of a personal God; it is denied that the world had a beginning; it is argued that the creation of the world is necessary, since it proceeds from the necessary liberality of divine love; it is denied that God has eternal and infallible foreknowedge of the free actions of men -- all this in contradiction to the decrees of the Vatican Council[5] (Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.)

 

Although there are those in the "resist but recognize" movement who seek to dismiss the relevance of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's "private" writings, such as his recently released Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), to the fraud that is his "papacy," no one but no one who is in the least bit intellectually honest can deny that the false "pontiff's self-styled "risky book" is an accurate, consistent reflection of everything he has ever said and done before his "election" to succeed Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II on April 18, 2005, and thereafter. Numerous articles on this little-read and much-castigated site have discussed Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's lifelong rejection of Scholasticism that has provided him with the "freedom" as an alleged Catholic theologian and scholar to deny the nature of dogmatic truth as the cornerstone upon which build the framework of a new theology for a new religion, conciliarism.

Relentlessly pressing forth with the agenda of a revolution he helped to plan and to implement, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is bound and determined to rewrite the entirety of Catholic history and dogma to justify the Modernist propositions he learned from his mentors, each of whom was trained in the New Theology that was condemned by Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis, August 12, 1950. This is why the false "pontiff" wants to reinforce the teaching of the "Second" Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate, October 28, 1965, and this is why he is continuing to distort, pervert and misrepresent the lives and work of various Fathers and Doctors and saints, including most recently Saint Robert Bellarmine and Saint Francis de Sales, to make them appear to be precursors of his own revolutionary agenda. He has done this even with Saint Paul the Apostle (see Attempting to Coerce Perjury). He has done this also with various doctrines, including that of Purgatory (see From Sharp Focus to Fuzziness.) Indeed, the "pope" started off the year with yet another attempt to justify the falsehood of "religious liberty" (see Another Year of the Same Conciliar Apostasy, part one, Another Year of the Same Conciliar Apostasy, part two and Another Year of the Same Conciliar Apostasy, part three), using this as a springboard to announce plans for Assisi III (see Bearing "Fruits" From Hell Itself, part one, Bearing "Fruits" From Hell Itself, part 2 and Not Interested in Assisi III.)

There is nothing really new or terribly "shocking" to be found in the "risky book," Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, which I bought at the insistence of several readers despite my doing so with truly gritted teeth as I posed the following rhetorical question to those readers: "Why should I spend money to get something that Ratzinger gives away every day for free as 'Pope' Benedict XVI?" Even the though of buying the book, no less having to walk into a Barnes and Noble bookstore that sells one scandalous book after another to do so, was oppressive. It is oppressive to even have to write this relatively short and to the point article about several  aspects of the book.

Ratzinger/Benedict's Lifelong Warfare Against Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Summa Theologiae

One of the keys to understanding the Modernist mind of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is is absolute hatred for the Scholasticism of Saint Thomas Aquinas. 

As a disciple and exponent of the "New Theology" of Maurice Blondel and Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac and Karl Rahner (see Appendices A and B below) that was condemned by Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis, August 12, 1950, Ratzinger/Benedict despises the philosophical and theological clarity of Saint Thomas Aquinas, considering it "cold and impersonal," too "crystal-clear" and "ready made:"

The cultural interests pursued at the seminary of Freising were joined to the study of a theology infected by existentialism, beginning with the writings of Romano Guardini. Among the authors preferred by Ratzinger was the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. Ratzinger loved St. Augustine, but never St. Thomas Aquinas: "By contrast, I had difficulties in penetrating the thought of Thomas Aquinas, whose crystal-clear logic seemed to be too closed in on itself, too impersonal and ready-made" (op. cit., p.44). This aversion was mainly due to the professor of philosophy at the seminary, who "presented us with a rigid, neo-scholastic Thomism that was simply too far afield from my own questions" (ibid.). According to Cardinal Ratzinger, whose current opinions appear unchanged from those he held as a seminarian, the thought of Aquinas was "too closed in on itself, too impersonal and ready-made," and was unable to respond to the personal questions of the faithful. This opinion is enunciated by a prince of the Church whose function it is to safeguard the purity of the doctrine of the Faith! Why, then, should anyone be surprised at the current disastrous crisis of Catholicism, or seek to attribute it to the world, when those who should be the defenders of the Faith, and hence of genuine Catholic thought, are like sewers drinking in the filth, or like gardeners who cut down a tree they are supposed to be nurturing? What can it mean to stigmatize St. Thomas as having a "too impersonal and ready-made" logic? Is logic "personal"? These assertions reveal, in the person who makes them, a typically Protestant, pietist attitude, like that found in those who seek the rule of faith in personal interior sentiment.

In the two years Ratzinger spent at the diocesan seminary of Freising, he studied literature, music, modern philosophy, and he felt drawn towards the new existentialist and modernist theologies. He did not like St. Thomas Aquinas. The formation described does not correspond to the exclusively Catholic formation that is necessary to one called to be a priest, even taking into account the extenuating circumstances of the time, that is, anti-Christian Nazism, the war and defeat, and the secularization of studies within seminaries. It seems that His Eminence, with all due respect, gave too much place to profane culture, with its "openness" to everything, and its critical attitude...Joseph Ratzinger loved the professors who asked many questions, but disliked those who defended dogma with the crystal-clear logic of St. Thomas. This attitude would seem to us to match his manner of understanding Catholic liturgy. He tells us that from childhood he was always attracted to the liturgical movement and was sympathetic towards it. One can see that for him, the liturgy was a matter of feeling, a lived experience, an aesthetically pleasing "Erlebnis," but fundamentally irrational (op. cit. passim.). (The Memories of a Destructive Mind: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's Milestones.)

 

One who rejects Scholasticism, the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, will lose the surety, clarity and precision with which to understand for himself and then to explicate to others the truths of the Faith. Such is the expressed goal of Modernism and of its off-shoot, the New Theology, as various terms of the Faith are employed in a "double sense" to signify one thing to those who understand those terms as they have been defined by the Church from time immemorial but which are meant to signify quite another to the schismatics and heretics in the various sects of Protestantism and in Orthodoxy.  The goal of Modernism and the New Theology in this regard is "strip away," if you will, the "filter provided by Scholasticism in order to "understand" Sacred Scripture and the Fathers of the Church in a manner that would serve as the "bridge" to "unity" with such schismatics and heretics.

Thus it is that Ratzinger/Benedict explained in the foreword to Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection that his own reflections on the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has some "contact" with the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas but that the Angelic Doctor's Summa Theologiae was, we must understand, but a product of its own historical circumstances, which is the device that he has employed throughout his long career as a destroyer of the Catholic Faith to justify his novel reinterpretations of dogmatic truth and his own  rewriting of history that is nothing other than a projection from his own mind onto the actual events of the past.

Here is how Ratzinger/Benedict dismisses Saint Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae as he exalts his own Modernist work to deconstruct and thus misrepresent the events of Our Divine Redeemer's Passion, Death and Resurrection:

Closer to my intention is the comparison with the theological treatise on the life of Jesus, presented in its classic form by Saint Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae (S. Th. III, qq. 27-59). While my book has many points of contact with this treatise, it is nevertheless situated in a different historical and spiritual context, and in that sense it also has a different inner objective that determines the structure of the text in essential ways. (Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011. p. xvi.)

 

In other words, the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas was fine for its time. Its time, however, has "passed." It is necessary, as Ratzinger/Benedict sees it, to "rediscover" the true "historical figure of Jesus" so that the men of this time can have "personal" contact with Him, which implies that the Angelic Doctor's discourse on the events of Our Lord's Passion, Death and Resurrection were so "cold and impersonal" as to be incapable of reaching the hearts of men who live in what the false "pontiff" contends is a "different historical and spiritual context":

In the foreword to Part One, I stated that my concern was to present "the figure and the image of Jesus". Perhaps it would have been good to assign these two words--figure and message--a subtitle to the book, in order to clarify its intention. Exaggerating a little, one could say that I set out discover the real Jesus on the basis of whom something like a "Christology from below" would then become possible. The quest for the "historical Jesus", as conducted in mainstream critical exegesis in accordance with its hermeneutic presumptions, lacks sufficient content to exert any significant historical impact. It is focused too much on the past for it to make possible a personal relationship with Jesus. In the combination of the two hermeneutics of which I spoke earlier, I have attempted to develop a way of observing and listening to the Jesus of the Gospels that can indeed lead to personal encounter and that, through collective listening with Jesus' disciples across the ages, can indeed attain sure knowledge of the real historical figure of Jesus. (Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011. pp. xvi-xvii.)

 

Dismissing the ability of Saint Thomas Aquinas and of those of his fellow Modernists who employ what he believes to be a  too "rigid" reliance upon the historical-critical method of Biblical exegesis (see Ratzinger/Benedict believes that he has "discovered" the hermeneutic that makes it possible for men of this time to "encounter" and to "attain sure knowledge of the real historical figure Jesus," a blasphemous contention that implies that Holy Mother Church has not done this for nearly two millennia under the inspiration of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, and with the assistance of her Fathers and Doctors whose works she has held in such high esteem and which have been relied upon by the council fathers of her true councils, including the Council of Trent and the [First] Vatican Council, to reflect upon the meaning of the truths contained in the Sacred Deposit of Faith as they have conducted their deliberations under the infallible guidance of the same God the Holy Ghost.

Pope Saint Pius X explicated this Modernist approach to Divine Revelation in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, stressing the fact that Modernists must assess everything about the Faith in term of their own interior feelings and experiences, incapable of accepting the Tradition of Holy Mother Church as It has been passed down from time immemorial under the infallible guidance of God the Holy Ghost as they must "revise" and "reinterpret" that which does not correspond to their own interior dispositions and feelings:

Moreover, the first actuation, so to speak, of every vital phenomenon -- and religion, as noted above, belongs to this category -- is due to a certain need or impulsion; but speaking more particularly of life, it has its origin in a movement of the heart, which movement is called a sense. Therefore, as God is the object of religion, we must conclude that faith, which is the basis and foundation of all religion, must consist in a certain interior sense, originating in a need of the divine. This need of the divine, which is experienced only in special and favorable circumstances. cannot of itself appertain to the domain of consciousness, but is first latent beneath consciousness, or, to borrow a term from modern philosophy, in the subconsciousness, where also its root lies hidden and undetected. (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907; see Appendix C for several succeeding paragraphs from Pascendi that elaborate upon this point.)

 

Revise and reinterpret the Faith according to his own "hermeneutic," of which he is so very proud and boastful, is precisely what Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has done throughout the course of his nearly sixty years as a priest and the nearly six years he has spent as the head of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, indifferent to what our last canonized pope had to say about those who disparage or to seek to put into question the Scholasticism of Saint Thomas Aquinas:

For just as the opinion of certain ancients is to be rejected which maintains that it makes no difference to the truth of the Faith what any man thinks about the nature of creation, provided his opinions on the nature of God be sound, because error with regard to the nature of creation begets a false knowledge of God; so the principles of philosophy laid down by St. Thomas Aquinas are to be religiously and inviolably observed, because they are the means of acquiring such a knowledge of creation as is most congruent with the Faith; of refuting all the errors of all the ages, and of enabling man to distinguish clearly what things are to be attributed to God and to God alone….

St. Thomas perfected and augmented still further by the almost angelic quality of his intellect all this superb patrimony of wisdom which he inherited from his predecessors and applied it to prepare, illustrate and protect sacred doctrine in the minds of men. Sound reason suggests that it would be foolish to neglect it and religion will not suffer it to be in any way attenuated. And rightly, because, if Catholic doctrine is once deprived of this strong bulwark, it is useless to seek the slightest assistance for its defense in a philosophy whose principles are either common to the errors of materialism, monism, pantheism, socialism and modernism, or certainly not opposed to such systems. The reason is that the capital theses in the philosophy of St Thomas are not to be placed in the category of opinions capable of being debated one way or another, but are to be considered as the foundations upon which the science of natural and divine things is based; if such principles are once removed or in any way impaired, it must necessarily follow that students of the sacred sciences will ultimately fail to perceive so much as the meaning of the words in which the dogmas of divine revelation are proposed by the magistracy of the Church. . . . (Pope Saint Pius X, Doctoris Angelici, quoted in James Larson's Article 11: A Confusion of Loves; see Appendix D below for other papal references concerning the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas and their admonitions about those who dare to think their own methods superior to Scholasticism.)

 

Ratzinger/Benedict's entire approach to Sacred Scripture has been condemned many times before, including by Pope Saint Pius X in Praestantia Scripturae, November 18, 1907:

After mature examination and the most diligent deliberations the Pontifical Biblical Commission has happily given certain decisions of a very useful kind for the proper promotion and direction on safe lines of Biblical studies. But we observe that some persons, unduly prone to opinions and methods tainted by pernicious novelties and excessively devoted to the principle of false liberty, which is really immoderate license and in sacred studies proves itself to be a most insidious and a fruitful source of the worst evils against the purity of the faith, have not received and do not receive these decisions with the proper obedience. (Pope Saint Pius X, Praestantia Scripturae, November 18, 1907.)

 

It was as Joseph "Cardinal" Ratzinger that the current false "pontiff" expressed in no uncertain terms his own contempt for the determinations of the Pontifical Biblical Commission and certain unnamed popes, obviously including Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII and Saint Pius X:

 

The text [of the document Instruction on the Theologian's Ecclesial Vocation] also presents the various types of bonds that rise from the different degrees of magisterial teaching. It affirms - perhaps for the first time with this clarity - that there are decisions of the magisterium that cannot be the last word on the matter as such, but are, in a substantial fixation of the problem, above all an expression of pastoral prudence, a kind of provisional disposition. The nucleus remains valid, but the particulars, which the circumstances of the times influenced, may need further correction.

In this regard, one may think of the declarations of Popes in the last century [19th century] about religious liberty, as well as the anti-Modernist decisions at the beginning of this century, above all, the decisions of the Biblical Commission of the time [on evolutionism]. As a cry of alarm in the face of hasty and superficial adaptations, they will remain fully justified. A personage such as Johann Baptist Metz said, for example, that the Church's anti-Modernist decisions render the great service of preserving her from falling into the liberal-bourgeois world. But in the details of the determinations they contain, they became obsolete after having fulfilled their pastoral mission at their proper time.

(Joseph Ratzinger, "Instruction on the Theologian's Ecclesial Vocation," published with the title "Rinnovato dialogo fra Magistero e Teologia," in L'Osservatore Romano, June 27, 1990, p. 6, cited at Card. Ratzinger: The teachings of the Popes against Modernism are obsolete)

It was as "Pope" Benedict XVI that Joseph Ratzinger reiterated this long held contempt of the determinations of our true popes and of the Pontifical Biblical Commission:

It is precisely in this combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels that the very nature of true reform consists. In this process of innovation in continuity we must learn to understand more practically than before that the Church's decisions on contingent matters - for example, certain practical forms of liberalism or a free interpretation of the Bible - should necessarily be contingent themselves, precisely because they refer to a specific reality that is changeable in itself. It was necessary to learn to recognize that in these decisions it is only the principles that express the permanent aspect, since they remain as an undercurrent, motivating decisions from within.

On the other hand, not so permanent are the practical forms that depend on the historical situation and are therefore subject to change. (Christmas greetings to the Members of the Roman Curia and Prelature, December 22, 2005.)

 

There is no "need" for anyone to read Ratzinger/Benedict's new book, and those traditionally-minded Catholics who advertise it in their glossy publications in order to curry favor with curial officials in the conciliar Vatican are leading to "protect" the implementation of Summorum Pontificum (July 7, 2007) are leading unsuspecting souls into the devil's abyss of Modernism and its murkiness that place into question, if not denial entirely, truths of the Holy Faith while blaspheming and mocking Our Lord and His Divine Revelation.

All you really need to know about Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection is that the false "pontiff's" expressed intention was to provide a "replacement" for the "impersonal" vision of the events of Our Lord's Passion, Death and Resurrection provided by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae. It is by casting aside Scholasticism and using a combination of the historical-critical method and his own personally devised Modernist method of Biblical exegesis, one that ignores all of the insights that Our Lord and His Most Blessed Mother have provided to authentic mystics and saints about the events of our Redemption, that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI spends two hundred ninety-three pages of text denying varying elements of the Catholic Faith, including the condemnation that the Jews brought upon themselves and their race as they rejected Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (see Impressed With His Own Originality and Accepting "Popes" As Unreliable Teachers). The book was inspired by the adversary to make a mockery of Our Lord and His Catholic Church. That I  had to spend money on it all is something that I regret as no one should waste a penny of their money on this blasphemous work of Modernist manipulation and heresy.

Ratzinger/Benedict's Modernist approach was condemned in Lamentabili Sane, July 1, 1907, and it remains condemned today:

 

8. They are free from all blame who treat lightly the condemnations passed by the Sacred Congregation of the Index or by the Roman Congregations. [Condemned proposition.]

Ratzinger/Benedict's Modernist Points of Reference and Inspiration

Although perhaps superfluous in light of the evidence that Ratzinger/Benedict provides in his foreword of his Modernist predilections and methodology, it is nevertheless useful, I believe, to note the great praise that he heaps on Modernist "Catholic" "scholars" and on a Protestant "theologian" for their own works about the life of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ:

I need hardly say that I did not set out to write a "Life of Jesus." Excellent articles are already available concerning chronological and topographical questions to do with the life of Jesus. I refer especially to Jesus of Nazareth: Message and History by Jonathan Gnilka (translated by Siegfried S. Schatzmann, Peabody, Mass., 1997) and to the exhaustive study by John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew (4 vols., New York, 1991, 1994, 2001, 2009.)

A Catholic theologian has labeled my book, together with Romano Guardini's masterpiece, The Lord, as an example of "Christology from above", not without issuing a warning about the dangers inherent in such an approach. The truth is that I have not attempted to write a Christology. In the German-speaking world there is already a whole series of important Christologies by authors ranging from Wolfhart Pannenberg through Walter Kasper to Christoph Schonborn, to which the mangum opus of Karl-Heinz Menke, Jesus ist Gott der Sohn (2008) may now be added. (Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011. pp. xv-xvi.)

 

Ratzinger/Benedict listed a veritable rogues' gallery of Modernists as "sources" upon which Catholics may draw for books that he thinks delve into the depths of the life Our Lord.

Walter Kasper? This is just further proof that the false "pontiff" and the recently retired president of the "Pontifical" Council for Promoting Christian Unity are of one and the same Modernist mind. For those of you who have been hibernating for the past decade or so and are unfamiliar with the destructive work of Walter "Cardinal" Kasper, please see Forever Prowling the World Seeking the Ruin of Souls, part 1 and Forever Prowling the World Seeking The Ruin of Souls, part 2. Nothing more need be written.

Christoph Schonborn? Please see see Almost Always At Odds With Themselves, Negotiating To Become An Apostate, They Continue to Caricature Themselves, and Meltdown if you are just coming off a vacation on Gilligan's Island with Jonas Grumby and Roy Hinckley (again, that's about as culturally high brow as this writer, described by some in the traditional world as "trailer trash," gets).

Ratzinger/Benedict's reference to the work of a German Protestant "theologian," Joachim Ringleben, on page iii of his foreword is yet further proof that he rejects the nature of the Church's Divine Constitution. Holy Mother Church has been entrusted with the totality of Divine Revelation--Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition-- by her Divine Founder and Invisible Head, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and she is guided by her Mystical Spouse, God the Holy Ghost. She is complete in and of herself to teach us everything that is contained in the Deposit of Faith. She does not need the "insights" of any non-Catholic, whether Protestant or Talmudic or Mohammedan, to teach Catholics anything the life or Person of Our Lord and the teaching that He entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication.

Ratzinger/Benedict is thoroughly consistent in referencing a Protestant "theologian" as he has praised Protestant "theologians" who have gone so far as to deny the Sacred Divinity of Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as having something to "teach" us, noting that they remain "believers" despite their denial of the fact that Our Lord is indeed God in the very Flesh:

Up to the very end of his conference, Card. Ratzinger resolutely continues on this road of agnosticism and now logically comes to the most disastrous of conclusions. He writes:

 

In conclusion, as we contemplate our present-day religious situation, of which I have tried to throw some light on some of its elements, we may well marvel at the fact that, after all, people still continue believing in a Christian manner, not only according to Hick's, Knitter's as well as others' substitute ways or forms, but also according to that full and joyous Faith found in the New Testament of the Church of all time.

So, there it is: For Card. Ratzinger, "Hick, Knitter, and others" who deny the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, His Church, His sacraments, and, in short, all of Christianity, continue "despite everything" "believing in a Christian manner," even though they do so using "substitute forms of belief"! Here, the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith leaves us wondering indeed, just what it is he means by "believing in a Christian manner."

Moreover, once the "preambula fidei" have been eliminated, that "full and joyous Faith of the Church of all time" which seems [for Card. Ratzinger] to be no different from modern-day apostasies other than by its style and total character, is utterly lacking in any rational credibility in comparison with and in relation to what he refers to as "substitute ways or forms" of faith. "How is it," Card. Ratzinger wonders, "in fact, that the Faith [the one of all time] still has a chance of success?" Answer:

 

 

I would say that it is because it finds a correspondence in man's nature…..There is, in man, an insatiable desire for the infinite. None of the answers we have sought is sufficient [but must we take his own word for it, or must we go through the exercise of experiencing all religions?]. God alone [but Whom, according to Card. Ratzinger, human reason cannot prove to be truly God], Who made Himself finite in order to shatter the bonds of our own finitude and bring us to the dimension of His infinity [...and not to redeem us from the slavery of sin?] is able to meet all the needs of our human existence.

 

According to this, it is therefore not objective motives based on history and reason, and thus the truth of Christianity, but only a subjective appreciation which brings us to "see" that it [Christianity] is able to satisfy the profound needs of human nature and which would explain the "success" [modernists would say the "vitality"] of the "faith" ["of all time" or in its "substitute forms," it is of but little importance]. Such, however, is not at all Catholic doctrine: this is simply modernist apologetics (cf. Pope St. Pius X, Pascendi), based on their affirmed impossibility of grasping metaphysical knowledge (or agnosticism or skepticism), which Card. Ratzinger seemed to want to shun in the first part of his address.

Now we are in a position to better understand why Card. Ratzinger has such a wide-open concept of "theology" and of "faith" that he includes everything: theology as well as heresies, faith and apostasy. On that road of denial of the human reason's ability of attaining metaphysical knowledge, a road which he continues to follow, he lacks the "means of discerning the difference between faith and non-faith" (R. Amerio, op. cit., p.340) and, consequently, theology from pseudo-theology, truth from heresy:

 

All theologies are nullified, because all are regarded as equivalent; the heart or kernel of religion is located in feelings or experiences, as the Modernists held at the beginning of this century (Amerio, op. cit., p.542).

 

We cannot see how this position of Card. Ratzinger can escape that solemn condemnation proclaimed at Vatican I: "If anyone says...that men must be brought to the Faith solely by their own personal interior experience...let him be anathema" (DB 1812). (Cardinal Ratzinger. This article, by the way, appeared in a publication of the Society of Saint Pius X, Si, Si, No, No in January of 1998.)

 

A man who believes this has no problem at all referencing the works of non-Catholics as containing "insights" from which what he thinks is the Catholic Church can better understand what is contained in Sacred Scripture. This is why he invited a Talmudic rabbi, Shear-Yashuv Cohen, to address the conciliar "Synod of Bishops" in 2008 that dealt with the study of Sacred Scripture (see It's Not the Rabbi, It's the "Pope"). Joachim Ringleben and Shear-Yashuv Cohen? Ja! Saint Thomas Aquinas? Nein! (Yes, I know a few bits and pieces of the German language. After all, I did watch Hogan's Heroes for six years.) Ratzinger/Benedict does not believe Protestantism is evil, that it and its false doctrines and false worship are from the devil. He would scoff at anyone would repeat with Father Frederick Faber that there can be no Christianity without the Mass and that the devil himself has told us that he has composed Protestantism's liturgical ceremonies (see Appendix G below).

Ratzinger/Benedict made reference in his foreword to an alleged Scripture scholar by the name of Father John P. Meier, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York. It is worth noting that Father Meier is a protege of the late Father Raymond Brown, a Sulpician priest who denied the inerrancy of the totality of Sacred Scripture and who asserted that Our Lady's perpetual virginity cannot be proved by Scripture. Father Meier's four volume work on the life of Our Lord, A Marginal Jew, has made his own nefarious "contributions" to undermining belief in the Infancy Narratives, and it is principally on the basis of his work that Ratzinger/Benedict replaced the creche in Saint Peter's Square with a rendition of the carpenter's shop of Saint Joseph during Advent so as to signify that either "interpretation" of the location of Our Lord's Nativity could be correct. 

Father Meier's reiteration of the work of his protege, Father Raymond Brown who died in 1998, in the first volume of A Marginal Jew included a denial that Our Lady's perpetual virginity could be proved by Sacred Scripture. Father Meier was a "concelebrant" at the Midnight staging of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service on the morning of December 25, 1994, shortly after volume one of his book had been published, and he seemed to delight in the moment as John "Cardinal" O'Connor, the conciliar "archbishop" of New York from March 19, 1984, to May 3, 2000, came to his defense, denying that Father Meier meant to write what he did, standing reality on its very head. Ah, this is the same "Cardinal" O'Connor who reaffirmed a Catholic man's decision to convert to Talmudism in order to "atone" for the "crime" of his parents' having converted to the Faith before he was born (see Meltdown and Clarity Has Its Advantages).

Father Meier is quite a darling of the "ultra-progressives" in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, and it must be remembered that those "ultra-progressive" revolutionaries disagree with Ratzinger/Benedict on the degree to which the doctrinal and liturgical revolutions should be extended, not on their basic Modernist presuppositions. That the false "pontiff" noted in his foreword to the first volume of his book series the strengths and weaknesses in the "historical-critical" method used by Father Meier takes nothing away from his appreciation of the "contribution" that the priest is supposed to have made to Biblical exegesis. Saint Thomas Aquinas? Nein! Father John Meier, a qualified "Ja!"

It is important to note these influences and points of reference that Ratzinger/Benedict cites as they demonstrate that he has dismissed the Fathers and the Doctors of the Church as readily as he dismisses the binding pronouncements of our true councils and our true popes, which is why we must say to Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI: "Non serviam est." I will not serve at the altar of your false, condemned beliefs and methods.

Always Trying to "Discover" History While Projecting Onto Historical Facts His Own Ruminations

Modernists are, of course, filled with pride. It is next to impossible for them to accept the research of others, especially that which is to be found in the texts of musty old books written by men they believe had no understanding of modern methodologies and as such are unreliable "witnesses" about the events they have written. It is of the essence to believe that history is unknowable and that it must be "discovered" anew by those who bring allegedly "deeper" insights that are said to breathe "new" and "vital" life into the past so as to make it "relevant" to those of the present time. It is this prideful approach to historical truth that underlies and colors the entirety of Ratzinger/Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection as he places into question or denies matters that a believing Catholic accepts without question as coming from the hand of God, Who canst neither deceive or be deceived.

Ratzinger/Benedict has told us that history is "unknowable." Why do we doubt that this is the approach that he uses throughout his new book?

 

History remains indecipherable, incomprehensible. No one can read it. (Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Letter to Bishops, Priests, Consecrated Persons and Lay Faithful of Red China, June 30, 2007.)

If history is "indecipherable, incomprehensible," then how can we trust the false "pope's" own "reading" of history? One must remember that Ratzinger/Benedict, trained by the late Father Hans Urs von Balthasar, to believe that truth can contain contradictions, is not bound to the laws of logic used by Scholastics such as Saint Thomas Aquinas. He is thus "free" to make one positivist assertion after another without being the slightest bit embarrassed by the multiple ways in which he contradicts himself as he contradicts and denies supernatural and natural truths and the very facts of history itself. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose. (See Appendix E for a New Oxford Review critique of several examples of the false "pontiff's" penchant for self-contradiction, something that I also point out at length in Red China: Workshop for the New Ecclesiology).

Pope Saint Pius X explained the Modernist penchant for believing that history is somehow "unknowable":

9. In all this process, from which, according to the Modernists, faith and revelation spring, one point is to be particularly noted, for it is of capital importance on account of the historicocritical corollaries which they deduce from it. The unknowable they speak of does not present itself to faith as something solitary and isolated; hut on the contrary in close conjunction with some phenomenon, which, though it belongs to the realms of science or history, yet to some extent exceeds their limits. Such a phenomenon may be a fact of nature containing within itself something mysterious; or it may be a man, whose character, actions, and words cannot, apparently, be reconciled with the ordinary laws of history. Then faith, attracted by the unknowable which is united with the phenomenon, seizes upon the whole phenomenon, and, as it were, permeates it with its own life. From this two things follow. The first is a sort of transfiguration of the phenomenon, by its elevation above its own true conditions, an elevation by which it becomes more adapted to clothe itself with the form of the divine character which faith will bestow upon it. The second consequence is a certain disfiguration -- so it may be called -- of the same phenomenon, arising from the fact that faith attributes to it, when stripped of the circumstances of place and time, characteristics which it does not really possess; and this takes place especially in the case of the phenomena of the past, and the more fully in the measure of their antiquity. From these two principles the Modernists deduce two laws, which, when united with a third which they have already derived from agnosticism, constitute the foundation of historic criticism. An example may be sought in the Person of Christ. In the Person of Christ, they say, science and history encounter nothing that is not human. Therefore, in virtue of the first canon deduced from agnosticism, whatever there is in His history suggestive of the divine must be rejected. Then, according to the second canon, the historical Person of Christ was transfigured by faith; therefore everything that raises it above historical conditions must be removed. Lastly, the third canon, which lays down that the Person of Christ has been disfigured by faith, requires that everything should be excluded, deeds and words and all else, that is not in strict keeping with His character, condition, and education, and with the place and time in which He lived. A method of reasoning which is passing strange, but in it we have the Modernist criticism.  (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

 

This is the precise methodology used by Ratzinger/Benedict in Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From Nazareth to Jerusalem, spiced up, I should add, with heapin', helpin' dose of dishonesty, intellectual, that is (my apologies to the late Lester Scruggs and the late Earl Flatt). The false "pontiff" use this condemned methodology to dispense with the truth that Saint Peter and the other eleven Apostles sought to evangelize the Jews and Gentiles after the descent of God the Holy Ghost in tongues of flame upon them--and Our Lady and the others who were present in the Upper Room in Jerusalem on Pentecost Sunday--because they had a sense of urgency about the salvation of souls. Ratzinger/Benedict further added that Saint Paul himself, the Apostle "born out of time," did not really believe that there was a "necessity" for him to save souls No, for Ratzinger/Benedict, you see, Saint Paul merely wanted to fulfill a "grand conception of history. They did not have any concern that non-Catholics might lose their souls for all eternity if they did not convert:

The restlessness with which Paul journeyed to the nations, so as to bring the message to all, and, if possible, to fulfill the mission within his own lifetime--this restlessness can only be explained if one is aware of the historical and eschatological significance of his exclamation: "Necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!" (I Cor 9: 16).

In this sense, the urgency of evangelization in the apostolic era was predicated not so much on the necessity for each individual to acquire knowledge of the Gospel in order to attain salvation, but rather on the grand conception of history: if the world was was to arrive at its destiny, the Gospel had to be brought to all nations. At many stages of history, this sense of urgency has been markedly attenuated, but it has always revived, generation a new dynamisms for evangelization. (Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011, 43-44.)

 

Ratzinger/Benedict's attempt to rewrite history and to once again attempt to coerce perjured testimony from Saint Paul the Apostle concerning his arduous apostolic labor in behalf of the salvation of the souls for whom the One Who had indeed chosen him out of time as he, the false "pontiff," has done so frequently in the past (see Attempting to Coerce Perjury) is both an exercise in pure Modernist revisionism and intellectual dishonesty at one and the same time.

Saint Paul did indeed spend himself tirelessly as he knew full well that the salvation of souls depended upon his doing so, understanding furthermore that it would not go well for him at his own Particular Judgment if he did not seek willingly and freely seek the conversion of souls to the true Faith for love of Our Lord and out of complete, faithful obedience to Him. A look at the full text of verses sixteen and seventeen of the Ninth Chapter of Saint Paul the Apostle's First Epistle to the Corinthians will reveal this to be the case:

16 For if I preach the gospel, it is no glory to me: for a necessity lieth upon me: for wo is unto me, if I preach not the gospel.

17 For if I do this thing willingly, I have a reward: but if against my will, a dispensation is committed to me.(

 

The Haydock Commentary explains these passages as follows, drawing the commentary from verse sixteen from the Bishop Challoner Douay-Rheims Bible:

Ver. 16. It is no glory. That is, I have nothing to glory of. (Challoner) --- If I preach the gospel through compulsion, fear, or mere necessity, having no other means of maintenance, I must not look for a reward in heaven; but now doing it through charity and freely, I shall have my reward from God; and the more abundant the charity, the greater the reward. (St. Augustine, de Op. Mor. i. 5.)

Ver. 17. But if against my will. That is, if I do not do it with alacrity and zeal, but instigated by the sole motive of punishment, woe unto me, as he says in the preceding verse, if I am instigated by this motive alone; still the dispensation of the gospel is entrusted to me, and I must comply with that obligation, either with the zeal and alacrity of a son, or for fear of punishment, as a slave. (Estius) (Haydock Commentary)

 

It is precisely the alacrity and zeal exhibited by Saint Paul the Apostle that motivated countless other Catholic missionaries over the course of the last nearly twenty centuries to the point of shedding their blood to seek the conversion of non-Catholics to the true Faith. As is discussed in part two of this commentary, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in his letter to Pope Eugene III that was cited by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI of "proof" that Jews need not convert until the Gospel is preached to the full number of Gentiles remonstrated with his former student, Pope Eugene III, for not seeking with urgency the conversion of pagans, thereby directly contradicting Ratzinger/Benedict's contention that there it was only a desire for "history" to be "fulfilled" that "revived" a desire to preach the Gospel in various periods of the past two thousand years, not a zeal for the salvation of souls. Saint Paul did indeed take upon himself quite willingly the task given him by Christ the King to seek the conversion of the Gentiles because he knew that they would be lost without his preaching.

Endless numbers of examples of this missionary zeal could be given. Time, at least at this juncture, permits only one example among the vast number that could be adduced to demonstrate to the small readership of this site the absolute lack of the sensus Catholicus possessed by the false "pontiff." Here is but an excerpt from a letter sent by Saint Francis Xavier, that great Catholic missionary whose life has been summarized on this site so briefly in  Without Regard for Results, from India, begging university students in Europe to become missionaries to convert and thus save souls:

Many fail to become Christian in these regions because they have no one who is concerned with such pious and holy matters. Many times I am seized with the thought of going to the schools in your lands and of crying out there, like a man who has lost his mind, and especially at the University of Paris, telling those in the Sorbonne who have a greater regard for learning than desire to prepare themselves to produce fruit with it: "How many souls fail to go to glory and go instead to hell through their own neglect!" And thus, as they make progress in their studies, if they would study the accounting which our God will demand of them and of their talent which has been given to them, many of them would be greatly moved, and taking means and making spiritual exercises to know the will of God within their soul, they would say, conforming to themselves to it rather than to their own inclinations: "Lord here I am! What would you have me do?Send me wherever you will, and if need be, even to the Indies! (Saint Francis Xavier, Letter from India, 1544; see The Ignatian Tradition.)

 

This is not the spirit of conciliarism, which, of course, is false and thus of the devil. This is not the spirit that informs the mind and prompts the will of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, who is seeking to assure his readers that he is doing nothing wrong by not seeking with urgency the unconditional conversion of non-Catholics to the true Faith as he believes that there is no urgency to do so, implying that these non-Catholics are in no jeopardy at all of losing their immortal souls for all eternity if they persist to the point of their dying breaths in their false religions. Moreover, Ratzinger/Benedict is really saying here that the "true" spirit of evangelization has been discovered by the "Second" Vatican Council and the magisterium of the conciliar "popes," who have recognized that the salvation of individual souls is not the reason that the Gospel is preached and that those who had sought converts in the past believed in a "distorted" view of Catholicism that has now been "corrected."

"Pope" Benedict XVI's sanguine disregard for the salvation of the souls of non-Catholics has its origins with the heresy of "universal salvation" that he learned from Father Hans Urs von Balthasar but which he has been quite careful not to state in so many words. He does not have to state his explicit approval of and support for "universal salvation," however, as his deeds have told us that this is indeed the case as he has refused to say a word about the necessity of converting to the true Faith whenever he has spoken before non-Catholics. He is quite literally an Anti-Saint Peter.

Ratzinger/Benedict is also an anti-Pope Pius IX, whose Syllabus of Errors he believes has been replaced by the text of Gaudium et Spes (December 7, 1965), which he has called a "countersyllabus of errors" (Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 382). By attempting to project onto the zealous Saint Paul the Apostle his own false belief that non-Catholic souls are not in jeopardy of going to Hell for all eternity, Ratzinger/Benedict contrasts himself with Pope Pius IX, who realized that his own soul stood in jeopardy of eternal loss if he died having to render an account to Christ the Divine Judge because he did not do all within his power to invite those outside of the One Sheepfold of Christ that is the Catholic Church into the true flock:

It is for this reason that so many who do not share 'the communion and the truth of the Catholic Church' must make use of the occasion of the Council, by the means of the Catholic Church, which received in Her bosom their ancestors, proposes [further] demonstration of profound unity and of firm vital force; hear the requirements [demands] of her heart, they must engage themselves to leave this state that does not guarantee for them the security of salvation. She does not hesitate to raise to the Lord of mercy most fervent prayers to tear down of the walls of division, to dissipate the haze of errors, and lead them back within holy Mother Church, where their Ancestors found salutary pastures of life; where, in an exclusive way, is conserved and transmitted whole the doctrine of Jesus Christ and wherein is dispensed the mysteries of heavenly grace.

It is therefore by force of the right of Our supreme Apostolic ministry, entrusted to us by the same Christ the Lord, which, having to carry out with [supreme] participation all the duties of the good Shepherd and to follow and embrace with paternal love all the men of the world, we send this Letter of Ours to all the Christians from whom We are separated, with which we exhort them warmly and beseech them with insistence to hasten to return to the one fold of Christ; we desire in fact from the depths of the heart their salvation in Christ Jesus, and we fear having to render an account one day to Him, Our Judge, if, through some possibility, we have not pointed out and prepared the way for them to attain eternal salvation. In all Our prayers and supplications, with thankfulness, day and night we never omit to ask for them, with humble insistence, from the eternal Shepherd of souls the abundance of goods and heavenly graces. And since, if also, we fulfill in the earth the office of vicar, with all our heart we await with open arms the return of the wayward sons to the Catholic Church, in order to receive them with infinite fondness into the house of the Heavenly Father and to enrich them with its inexhaustible treasures. By our greatest wish for the return to the truth and the communion with the Catholic Church, upon which depends not only the salvation of all of them, but above all also of the whole Christian society: the entire world in fact cannot enjoy true peace if it is not of one fold and one shepherd. (Pope Pius IX, Iam Vos Omnes, September 13, 1868.)

Now you understand how Ratzinger/Benedict can speak as he did in Cologne, Germany, on Friday, August 19, 2005:

We all know there are numerous models of unity and you know that the Catholic Church also has as her goal the full visible unity of the disciples of Christ, as defined by the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council in its various Documents (cf. Lumen Gentium, nn. 8, 13; Unitatis Redintegratio, nn. 2, 4, etc.). This unity, we are convinced, indeed subsists in the Catholic Church, without the possibility of ever being lost (cf. Unitatis Redintegratio, n. 4); the Church in fact has not totally disappeared from the world.

On the other hand, this unity does not mean what could be called ecumenism of the return:  that is, to deny and to reject one's own faith history. Absolutely not!

It does not mean uniformity in all expressions of theology and spirituality, in liturgical forms and in discipline. Unity in multiplicity, and multiplicity in unity:  in my Homily for the Solemnity of Sts Peter and Paul on 29 June last, I insisted that full unity and true catholicity in the original sense of the word go together. As a necessary condition for the achievement of this coexistence, the commitment to unity must be constantly purified and renewed; it must constantly grow and mature. (Ecumenical meeting at the Archbishopric of Cologne English)

 

The beliefs stated by Ratzinger/Benedict in Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection color everything he says and does as "Pope" Benedict XVI, something will be elaborated upon in part two of this commentary at some point later today, Saturday in Passion Week, or tomorrow, Palm Sunday.

Let me reiterate once again what I wrote a little over a month ago before I close part one of this commentary as a result of fatigue and the need to arise early for Holy Mass on Saturday in Passion Week.

One of the great tricks of the devil has been to use the zeal for falsehood possessed by the conciliar "popes" and their "bishops" to convince the relative handful of Catholics who do see falsehood for what it is that a regime of "papal" error does not represent the onset of a general state of apostasy that cannot have anything to do with the Catholic Church. This makes a mockery of the papacy and of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. This makes a mockery of Catholicism by mocking the immutability of God Himself.

Even though Pope Leo XIII taught in the much-quoted Paragraph Nine of Satis Cognitum that those who defect from the Faith in one thing defect from It in Its entirety and are no longer members of the Catholic Church (see Appendix F below), some traditionally-minded Catholics believe that men who they view as legitimate and valid Successors of Saint Peter and Vicars of Our Lord Jesus Christ can be possessed of such a welter of mental errors as to make them unreliable teachers of the Faith. Many Catholics--and I was one of them for a time--who are traditionally-minded and who abhor the conciliar novelties, including the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service, believe that they can just dismiss "unofficial" or "private" views of "popes" on matters pertaining to Faith and Morals, making themselves, whether they intend it or not, as something of a "super-magisterium" who can sift through the words and actions of true popes to determine their Catholicity while clinging to the delusional fiction that men who defect from the Faith in one thing have retained It at all. (See As We Continue To Blaspheme Christ the King and His True Church.)

Men who are true and legitimate Successors of Saint Peter and Vicars of Jesus Christ on earth are not possessed of a welter of mental errors on matters that have been defined by the teaching authority of Holy Mother Church and/or are part of her Ordinary Magisterium. They do not issue "private" books replete with personal speculation, such as that contained in Ratzinger/Benedict's Light of the World book-length interview with German journalist Peter Seewald (see (If Them, Why Not Others?, Let the Olympic Games of Absurdity Begin!, Razing The Last Bastions, Nothing New Under Benedict's Sun,Words and Actions Without Consequences and Making a Mockery of Catholicism). They do not esteem the symbols of false religions or enter into the places of false worship, no less call them "sacred." None of this is from God. Each of this is from the devil himself.

But what about Pope John XXII's erroneous belief that only those souls in Heaven who had bodies could see the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity? Wasn't that a private view? Yes, it sure was. It was a private view on a matter of doctrine that had not been defined by Holy Mother Church solemnly, although it was the common opinion of her theologians. Those who do not want to even begin to see how Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has defected from the defined truths of Catholic Faith and Morals in numerous ways, both "privately" and in his "official" capacity as "Benedict XVI" have to take refuge, therefore, in one or more of a variety of sophistries, including those provided by Ratzinger/Benedict himself by means of the "hermeneutic of continuity and discontinuity" or the Gallicanism of the Society of Saint Pius X or the failure to understand the nature of the Church's charism of infallibility properly.

Defenders of all things conciliar and of all things Benedict may want to assert that the words and actions of the conciliar "popes" have been without consequences for the legitimacy as true and legitimate Successors of Saint Peter. They just happen to be wrong. And look at the wreckage of souls that has been created by these "popes," a wreckage that is not possible for the visible had of the Catholic Church to produce by means of his words and public actions that lack the integrity of the Faith and, most indeed, contradict it.

In the midst of the incredible apostasy and blithe acceptance of it as something to be expected, mind you, from true popes, we must, as always, have recourse to Our Lady as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit and as we keep her company in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and in our time in fervent prayer before her Divine Son's Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament. She will help us to cleave only to true bishops and to true priests who make absolutely no concessions to the abominable apostasies and blasphemies and sacrileges of conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of its "popes" and "bishops" who offend God so boldly, so openly and so brazenly--and with the full support and admiring approval of most of the world's baptized Catholics.

While each person must come to recognize this for himself (it took me long enough to do so; I defended the indefensible for far too long!), we must nevertheless embrace the truth once we do come to recognize and accept it without caring for one moment what anyone else may think about us as we make reparation for our sins, which did indeed transcend time and served to help to motivate the Jews of Our Lord's day to cry out for His Crucifixion just as we mock Him by means of our disordered self-love and stubborn refusal to obey His Commandments, and those of the whole world as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

As I noted last year now, we can never grow accustomed to apostasies that can never become acceptable with the passage of time. We can never grow accustomed to offenses given to God by the conciliar "popes" and their conciliar "bishops." We must never "spin" in their behalf.

We must cleave to the Catholic Church, not to the counterfeit church of conciliarism, as we attempt to plant the seeds for the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary as we seek to live more and more penitentially, making reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary for our own many sins and for those of the whole word.

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon.

 

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

 

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

Appendix A

An  Excerpt from Mr. James Larson's By Arts Entirely New

 

De Lubac, and proponents of the "New Theology" in general, simply do not understand "the God of scholastic theology."

.

To them, the God of St. Thomas and the traditional Church is not sufficiently "vitally immanent." The God Who created us in His own Image, and sustains us every second of our lives with this same creative action; the God Who died for our sins and for our eternal salvation, and draws us into His very own life through baptism and the other sacraments; the God Who gives His Own Son in Holy Communion, Who insures that we are in possession of infallible truth through His Church, and promises His faithful the Gift of the Beatific Vision - this God, and this faith, are too sterile, absolute, and pharisaical for them.

.

The problem for these people seems to be that all that constitutes the traditional Catholic concept of grace and supernatural life is considered as Gift, and not something that is their own by right, or by nature.

.

They choose to barter the Infinite Gift of God for the paltry personal possession of an ounce of supernatural life which is somehow independent of this Gift. It is almost unbelievable foolishness; but even more, it amounts to infinite ingratitude.

.

What we may be sure of is the enormously destructive consequences of their effort. Again, we have the wisdom of Pope St. Pius X in Pascendi [#34]:

.

"The domineering overbearance of those who teach these errors, and the thoughtless compliance of the more shallow minds who assent to them, create a corrupted atmosphere which penetrates everywhere, and carries infection with it."

.

It has penetrated everywhere. It penetrated to the heart of Fr. Joseph Ratzinger when he said that the survival of Catholicism depended on it being freed from the "constraining fetters of Roman Scholastic Theology." We are now experiencing that freedom - the very freedom which has virtually destroyed the faith of Catholic Europe and much of the rest of the world. It is this atmosphere, created by Modernist philosophy and theology in response to reductive secular science, which must be combated as the primary source of decay in the Church. (James Larson, By Arts Entirely New.)

 

Appendix B

John Vennari's Thumbnail Critique of the New Theology

Maurice Blondel [1861-1949], a layman, ultimately formulated the philosophy on which the New Theology is based. In order to "win over modern men" who reject objectivism (the submission of the mind to objective reality) Blondel formulated a "subjectivist" philosophy, more in line with other modern philosophies.

How did he do this?

By stating that religion is not something that goes from the head to the heart (objective reality), but from heart to head (subjective). He said, "nothing can enter man which does not come from out of him and correspondence in some way to a need he has of expansion." Hence anything supernatural (sanctifying grace) that is in man ultimately comes from the nature of man himself.

What's wrong with that? St. Paul says "Faith comes by hearing" - that is, it comes from God presenting reality to man and then man accepting it. Also sanctifying grace (our created participation in the Divine Life of God) is not NATURAL to us. It is a free gift that is above our nature (more on this later). Neither Faith, nor the supernatural life of grace is "inside" man" already. Yet Blondel said "NOTHING can enter man which does not come from out of him." Blondel's teaching, in fact, is an extension of the Modernist notion of "Divine Immanence" condemned by Pope St. Pius X. That's why many refer to Blondel as a "neo-modernist".

Was Blondel in good faith?

The great Dominican, Father Garrigou-Lagrange believed that Blondel was not in good faith. Blondel manifested the trademarks of a modernist: 1) Blondel quoted texts of St. Thomas to make them mean the opposite of what they say; 2) he repeatedly met well-argued criticism from his adversaries with a mere categorical denial; 3)he continually claimed to be misunderstood; 4)he was always "explaining" how his thinking is really orthodox, so that to this day it is disputed what he is actually saying; 5) years later, he admitted to Fr. Henri de Lubac that he purposely disguised his true ideas in order to escape certain censure from Church authorities.

Who was Father Henri de Lubac?

Father de Lubac [1896-1991] was a Jesuit who saw in Blondel's teaching the basis of a New Theology. Blondel has rejected Thomistic philosophy, and de Lubac would incorporate this into a new system that would reject Thomistic theology.

Did the New Theology have any sympathizers in high places?

Even though Pope Pius XII had warned against these new teachings, the Vatican Secretary of State, Msgr. Montini, gave encouragement to the New Theology. At the same time, Montini was also conducting back-door dealings with the Stalinists, again, contrary to the will of Pius XII.

What is the heart of de Lubac's New Theology?

Building on Blondel's philosophy, de Lubac taught that the supernatural is a necessary perfection of nature, without which nature is frustrated in its essential aspirations. This means that the super natural is NEEDED to complete nature which remains incomplete without it. Hence, the supernatural is not a gratuitous gift but a part of nature owed to nature; in other words, the supernatural is not supernatural but natural, and lies within the bounds of nature.

Why is this wrong?

The Catholic Church teaches that the whole supernatural order of grace is exactly that: gratuitous-a sheer gift of God. Nature may be capable or well-suited to supernature, but it in no way strictly requires grace which is of a different order, infinitely superior, and given by God, as God wills, in a manner essentially independent of the received nature. This New Theology leads to pantheism. In 1981, in his book Gethsemane, the lone voice of CARDINAL SIRI got right to the heart of de Lubac's confusion. He warned that if de Lubac's theology is taken to its logical conclusion, "it would mean either that Jesus Christ is not God, or that man is Divine - again, modernism!

Was de Lubac in good faith?

Father Garrigou-Lagrange exposed de Lubac's errors in his 1946 article "Where is the New Theology Leading Us?," pointing out that this new theology is just a rehash of modernism. De Lubac simply responded with insults and mockery, accusing Garrigou-Lagrange of having "simplistic views on the absoluteness of truth." When Pope Pius XII condemned de Lubac's theology in Humani Generis, (#'s 29,30,32,34), de Lubac simply stated that this was "highly one-sided...it doesn't concern me."

But wasn't de Lubac a great expert on the Fathers of the Church?

Writing in THE THOMIST (1950) Father David Greenstock warned that the only reason that the leaders of the New Theology overwhelm the reader with the Greek Fathers is in order to GET AROUND St. Thomas Aquinas, whom they actually disdain, no matter how much they pledge their devotion to him.

Anything else about de Lubac?

Henri de Lubac was an avid defender of the evolutionist/pantheist Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard also propagated great confusion regarding the natural and supernatural orders, claiming that nature EVOLVES into supernature - again, modernism!

Can Teilhard be defended as orthodox?

Not at all. How is it possible to defend a man who makes pantheistic statements such as, "Catholicism deceived me with its narrow definitions of the World...THE WORLD around me BECOMES DIVINE..."

Did de Lubac have any regrets?

At the end of his life, he started to wonder if perhaps he hadn't allowed himself to stray into forbidden doctrine. He wrote, "This period is as full of error as any...maybe I should have concentrated more on essentials...for the last seven or eight years I have been paralyzed by the fear of confronting head on, in concrete fashion, the essential problems in their scolding reality. Out of wisdom or weakness? Was I right or wrong? By then however, he had already done his damage. Today, his cult lives on. (John Vennari, A SHORT CATECHISM ON THE NEW THEOLOGY, Catholic Family News, August, 1998.)

Appendix C

Pope Saint Pius X on the Modernist Reliance Upon Subjectivism

Moreover, the first actuation, so to speak, of every vital phenomenon -- and religion, as noted above, belongs to this category -- is due to a certain need or impulsion; but speaking more particularly of life, it has its origin in a movement of the heart, which movement is called a sense. Therefore, as God is the object of religion, we must conclude that faith, which is the basis and foundation of all religion, must consist in a certain interior sense, originating in a need of the divine. This need of the divine, which is experienced only in special and favorable circumstances. cannot of itself appertain to the domain of consciousness, but is first latent beneath consciousness, or, to borrow a term from modern philosophy, in the subconsciousness, where also its root lies hidden and undetected.

It may perhaps be asked how it is that this need of the divine which man experiences within himself resolves itself into religion? To this question the Modernist reply would be as follows: Science and history are confined within two boundaries, the one external, namely, the visible world, the other internal, which is consciousness. When one or other of these limits has been reached, there can be no further progress, for beyond is the unknowable. In presence of this unknowable, whether it is outside man and beyond the visible world of nature, or lies hidden within the subconsciousness, the need of the divine in a soul which is prone to religion excites -- according to the principles of Fideism, without any previous advertence of the mind -- a certain special sense, and this sense possesses, implied within itself both as its own object and as its intrinsic cause, the divine reality itself, and in a way unites man with God. It is this sense to which Modernists give the name of faith, and this is what they hold to be the beginning of religion.

8. But we have not yet reached the end of their philosophizing, or, to speak more accurately, of their folly. Modernists find in this sense not only faith, but in and with faith, as they understand it, they affirm that there is also to be found revelation. For, indeed, what more is needed to constitute a revelation? Is not that religious sense which is perceptible in the conscience, revelation, or at least the beginning of revelation? Nay, is it not God Himself manifesting Himself, indistinctly, it is true, in this same religious sense, to the soul? And they add: Since God is both the object and the cause of faith, this revelation is at the same time of God and from God, that is to say, God is both the Revealer and the Revealed.

From this, Venerable Brethren, springs that most absurd tenet of the Modernists, that every religion, according to the different aspect under which it is viewed, must be considered as both natural and supernatural. It is thus that they make consciousness and revelation synonymous. From this they derive the law laid down as the universal standard, according to which religious consciousness is to be put on an equal footing with revelation, and that to it all must submit, even the supreme authority of the Church, whether in the capacity of teacher, or in that of legislator in the province of sacred liturgy or discipline.

9. In all this process, from which, according to the Modernists, faith and revelation spring, one point is to be particularly noted, for it is of capital importance on account of the historicocritical corollaries which they deduce from it. The unknowable they speak of does not present itself to faith as something solitary and isolated; hut on the contrary in close conjunction with some phenomenon, which, though it belongs to the realms of science or history, yet to some extent exceeds their limits. Such a phenomenon may be a fact of nature containing within itself something mysterious; or it may be a man, whose character, actions, and words cannot, apparently, be reconciled with the ordinary laws of history. Then faith, attracted by the unknowable which is united with the phenomenon, seizes upon the whole phenomenon, and, as it were, permeates it with its own life. From this two things follow. The first is a sort of transfiguration of the phenomenon, by its elevation above its own true conditions, an elevation by which it becomes more adapted to clothe itself with the form of the divine character which faith will bestow upon it. The second consequence is a certain disfiguration -- so it may be called -- of the same phenomenon, arising from the fact that faith attributes to it, when stripped of the circumstances of place and time, characteristics which it does not really possess; and this takes place especially in the case of the phenomena of the past, and the more fully in the measure of their antiquity. From these two principles the Modernists deduce two laws, which, when united with a third which they have already derived from agnosticism, constitute the foundation of historic criticism. An example may be sought in the Person of Christ. In the Person of Christ, they say, science and history encounter nothing that is not human. Therefore, in virtue of the first canon deduced from agnosticism, whatever there is in His history suggestive of the divine must be rejected. Then, according to the second canon, the historical Person of Christ was transfigured by faith; therefore everything that raises it above historical conditions must be removed. Lastly, the third canon, which lays down that the Person of Christ has been disfigured by faith, requires that everything should be excluded, deeds and words and all else, that is not in strict keeping with His character, condition, and education, and with the place and time in which He lived. A method of reasoning which is passing strange, but in it we have the Modernist criticism.

10. It is thus that the religious sense, which through the agency of vital immanence emerges from the lurking-places of the subconsciousness, is the germ of all religion, and the explanation of everything that has been or ever will be in any religion. This sense, which was at first only rudimentary and almost formless, under the influence of that mysterious principle from which it originated, gradually matured with the progress of human life, of which, as has been said, it is a certain form. This, then, is the origin of all. even of supernatural religion. For religions are mere developments of this religious sense. Nor is the Catholic religion an exception; it is quite on a level with the rest; for it was engendered, by the process of vital immanence, and by no other way, in the consciousness of Christ, who was a man of the choicest nature, whose like has never been, nor will be. In hearing these things we shudder indeed at so great an audacity of assertion and so great a sacrilege. And yet, Venerable Brethren, these are not merely the foolish babblings of unbelievers. There are Catholics, yea, and priests too, who say these things openly; and they boast that they are going to reform the Church by these ravings! The question is no longer one of the old error which claimed for human nature a sort of right to the supernatural. It has gone far beyond that, and has reached the point when it is affirmed that our most holy religion, in the man Christ as in us, emanated from nature spontaneously and of itself. Nothing assuredly could be more utterly destructive of the whole supernatural order. For this reason the Vatican Council most justly decreed: "If anyone says that man cannot be raised by God to a knowledge and perfection which surpasses nature, but that he can and should, by his own efforts and by a constant development, attain finally to the possession of all truth and good, let him be anathema." (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Appendix D

Our True Popes on Saint Thomas Aquinas

Innocent VI: "The teaching of this Doctor above all others, with the exception of Canon Law, has precision in terminology, propriety of expression, truth of judgment: so that never is one who has held it been found to have deviated from the path of truth."

Pius V: "It was wrought by the providence of Almighty God that by the force and truth of the Angelic Doctor's teaching, by which he illumined the Apostolic Church with the refutation of innumerable errors, that the many heresies which have arisen after his canonization have been confounded, overthrown and dispersed. This has been made evident both earlier and recently in the sacred decrees of the Council of Trent."

Clement VIII to the Neapolitans: "Devoutly and wisely are you thinking of adopting a new patron of your city, your fellow citizen, the Angelic interpreter of the Divine Will, splendid in the sanctity of his life and by his miracles, Thomas Aquinas, since indeed is this honor owed with the greatest justification to his virtues joined to his admirable doctrine. Indeed, witness to his doctrine is the great number of books which he composed, in a very brief time, in almost every class of learning, with a matchless arrangement and wondrous clearness, without any error whatsoever."

Paul V: "We greatly rejoice in the Lord that honor and veneration are increasing daily for the most splendid champion of the Catholic Faith, blessed Thomas Aquinas, by the shield of whose writings the Church Militant successfully parries the spears of the heretics.

And Leo XIII, at once embracing hand surpassing all of the praises of his predecessors, says of him: "Distinguishing reason from Faith, as is proper, but nevertheless combining the two in a friendly alliance, he both preserved the rights of each and had regard for the dignity of both., in such a way too that reason, carried on the wings of Thomas to the highest human limit, now almost cannot rise any higher, and faith almost cannot expect more or stronger helps from reason than it has already obtained through Thomas."

--And again, presenting St. Thomas to Catholics as a model and patron in various sciences, he says: "In him are all the illustrious ornaments of mind and character by which he rightly calls others to the imitation of himself: the richest doctrine, incorrupt, fittingly arranged; obedience to the Faith, and a marvelous consonance with the truths divinely handed down; integrity of life with the splendor of the greatest virtues." (Readings from the Dominican Breviary (II Nocturn) for the feast of the Patronage of Saint Thomas Aquinas, November 13.)

But, furthermore, Our predecessors in the Roman pontificate have celebrated the wisdom of Thomas Aquinas by exceptional tributes of praise and the most ample testimonials. Clement VI in the bull "In Ordine;" Nicholas V in his brief to the friars of the Order of Preachers, 1451; Benedict XIII in the bull "Pretiosus," and others bear witness that the universal Church borrows luster from his admirable teaching; while St. Pius V declares in the bull "Mirabilis" that heresies, confounded and convicted by the same teaching, were dissipated, and the whole world daily freed from fatal errors; others, such as Clement XII in the bull "Verbo Dei," affirm that most fruitful blessings have spread abroad from his writings over the whole Church, and that he is worthy of the honor which is bestowed on the greatest Doctors of the Church, on Gregory and Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome; while others have not hesitated to propose St. Thomas for the exemplar and master of the universities and great centers of learning whom they may follow with unfaltering feet. On which point the words of Blessed Urban V to the University of Toulouse are worthy of recall: "It is our will, which We hereby enjoin upon you, that ye follow the teaching of Blessed Thomas as the true and Catholic doctrine and that ye labor with all your force to profit by the same." Innocent XII, followed the example of Urban in the case of the University of Louvain, in the letter in the form of a brief addressed to that university on February 6, 1694, and Benedict XIV in the letter in the form of a brief addressed on August 26, 1752, to the Dionysian College in Granada; while to these judgments of great Pontiffs on Thomas Aquinas comes the crowning testimony of Innocent VI: "His teaching above that of others, the canonical writings alone excepted, enjoys such a precision of language, an order of matters, a truth of conclusions, that those who hold to it are never found swerving from the path of truth, and he who dare assail it will always be suspected of error."

The ecumenical councils, also, where blossoms the flower of all earthly wisdom, have always been careful to hold Thomas Aquinas in singular honor. In the Councils of Lyons, Vienna, Florence, and the Vatican one might almost say that Thomas took part and presided over the deliberations and decrees of the Fathers, contending against the errors of the Greeks, of heretics and rationalists, with invincible force and with the happiest results. But the chief and special glory of Thomas, one which he has shared with none of the Catholic Doctors, is that the Fathers of Trent made it part of the order of conclave to lay upon the altar, together with sacred Scripture and the decrees of the supreme Pontiffs, the "Summa" of Thomas Aquinas, whence to seek counsel, reason, and inspiration.

A last triumph was reserved for this incomparable man -- namely, to compel the homage, praise, and admiration of even the very enemies of the Catholic name. For it has come to light that there were not lacking among the leaders of heretical sects some who openly declared that, if the teaching of Thomas Aquinas were only taken away, they could easily battle with all Catholic teachers, gain the victory, and abolish the Church. A vain hope, indeed, but no vain testimony. (Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris, August 4, 1879.)

Appendix E

New Oxford Review Critique of Ratzinger/Benedict's Ability to Contradict Himself

In Cardinal Ratzinger’s Values in a Time of Upheaval, he muddies up his phrase [the dictatorship of relativism]; indeed, he reverses his position. He says, “The modem concept of democracy seems indissolubly linked to that of relativism.” Well, well! But then he backtracks: “This means that a basic element of truth, namely, ethical truth, is indispensable to democracy.” But then he backtracks again: “We do not want the State to impose one particular idea of the good on us. ... Truth is controversial, and the attempt to impose on all persons what one part of the citizenry holds to be true looks like enslavement of people’s consciences.” And he says this on the same page!

Yes, we know: Some of our readers feel that the Pope is above all criticism; he cannot make a mistake, even in his previous writings. But what he has written here is contradictory and inscrutable.

Ratzinger says, “The relativists ...[are] flirting with totalitarianism even though they seek to establish the primacy of freedom ...” Huh?

So, what is he saying? “The State is not itself the source of truth and morality.... Accordingly, the State must receive from outside itself the essential measure of knowledge and truth with regard to that which is good. ... The Church remains outside’ the State. ... The Church must exert itself with all its vigor so that in it there may shine forth moral truth ...”

Then he says, “Conscience is the highest norm [italics in original] and ... and one must follow it even against authority. When authority - in this case the Church’s Magisterium - speaks on matters of morality, it supplies the material that helps the conscience form its own judgment, but ultimately it is only conscience that has the last word.”

So the Church’s Magisterium will not “exert itself with all its vigor,” because “conscience has the last word.” Indeed, Ratzinger says that “one must follow the erring conscience.” Does the Church support relativism too? Pope John Paul II said in his Encyclical Veritatis Splendor, “Conscience is not an infallible judge” (n. 62; italics in original).

What happened to a rightly formed conscience? The Catechism says, “Personal conscience and reason should not be set in opposition to the moral law or the Magisterium of the Church” (n. 2039), and “One must therefore work to correct the errors of moral conscience” (n. 1793). (A Contradictory Definition of Relativism. See also: Cardinal Ratzinger's Subjectivism.)

Appendix F

Paragraph Nine from Pope Leo XIII's Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896

The Church, founded on these principles and mindful of her office, has done nothing with greater zeal and endeavour than she has displayed in guarding the integrity of the faith. Hence she regarded as rebels and expelled from the ranks of her children all who held beliefs on any point of doctrine different from her own. The Arians, the Montanists, the Novatians, the Quartodecimans, the Eutychians, did not certainly reject all Catholic doctrine: they abandoned only a certain portion of it. Still who does not know that they were declared heretics and banished from the bosom of the Church? In like manner were condemned all authors of heretical tenets who followed them in subsequent ages. "There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by our Lord and handed down by Apostolic tradition" (Auctor Tract. de Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos).

The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium. Epiphanius, Augustine, Theodore :, drew up a long list of the heresies of their times. St. Augustine notes that other heresies may spring up, to a single one of which, should any one give his assent, he is by the very fact cut off from Catholic unity. "No one who merely disbelieves in all (these heresies) can for that reason regard himself as a Catholic or call himself one. For there may be or may arise some other heresies, which are not set out in this work of ours, and, if any one holds to one single one of these he is not a Catholic" (S. Augustinus, De Haeresibus, n. 88). (Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896.)

Appendix G

The Evil That is Protestantism

 

"Where there is no Mass," writes one of the Fathers of the English Oratory, "there is no Christianity." The reason is plain. Christ's life was one of sacrifice--not merely of the figurative sacrifice of praise and prayer, but one of outward act, of suffering and of death. His religion must be like Himself: it must be the continuation of the divine human life that He led upon earth, representing and perpetuating, by some sacred rite, the sacrifice that began in the womb of Mary and ended upon the cross of Calvary. That rite is the holy Mass. Do we always realize it as such? Does the conviction sink deep into us, when offering, or assisting at the adorable sacrifice, that Jesus is re-enacting, in our presence, the mysteries of His life and death?

The altar of the Mass is the holy house of Nazareth, the city of Bethlehem, the Egyptian place of exile, the hill of Calvary, the garden-tomb in which Our Saviour's corpse reposed, and the Mount of Olives from which He ascended. The Passion, it is true, is that which is primarily represented and continued in the holy Mass; yet the prayers and rites of the sacrifice refer, at times, to other mysteries. Thus the dropping of a part of the sacred host into the chalice, before the Agnus Dei, represents the reunion of Christ's soul with His body and blood on the morning of the Resurrection. For a description of the many and beautiful analogies between the eucharistic life of Our Lord and His sacred Infancy, we refer the reader to Father Faber's Treatise on the Blessed Sacrament.

The Mass is truly a "hidden treasure," and, alas, our cold, dead faith allows it to remain so. If we valued it as we ought, we would hurry every morning to the church, ceaseless of the snows of winter and the heats of summer, in order to get a share of the riches of this treasure.

The saints knew the value of one Mass: that it was a dark day in their calendar on which they were deprived of the happy privilege of saying or hearing Mass. Although St. Francis de Sales was overburdened with apostolic work on the Mission of the Chablais, he made it a point never to miss his daily Mass. In order to keep his holy resolution, he had frequently to cross the river Drance, to the village of Marin, in which there was a Catholic church. It happened, in the winter of 1596, that a great freshet carried away a portion of the bridge over the stream, and the passengers were, in consequence, compelled to cross on a plank laid over those arches of the broken structure that had withstood the waters. Heavy falls of snow, followed by severe frosts, made this board very slippery, so that it became dangerous to attempt passing on on it; but St. Francis was not be deterred, for despite the remonstration of his friends, he made the perilous journey every morning, creeping over the icy plank on his hands and feet, thus daily risking his life rather than lose Mass.

Dear Christian reader! beg this glorious saint to obtain for you and me some portion of his burning love for the most holy and adorable sacrifice of the altar. (American preface to Saint Leonard of Port Maurice's The Hidden Treasure: Holy Mass.)

As the strange circumstances of Nicola's possession became known everywhere, several Calvinist preachers came with their followers, to "expose this popish cheat," as they said. On their entrance, the devil saluted them mockingly, called them by name, and told them that they had come in obedience to him. One of the preachers took his Protestant prayer book, and began to read it with a very solemn face. The devil laughed at him, and putting on a most comical look, he said: "Ho! Ho! My good friend; do you intend to expel me with your prayers and hymns? Do you think that they will cause me any pain? Don't you know that they are mine? I helped to compose them!"

"I will expel thee in the name of God," said the preacher, solemnly.

"You!" said the devil mockingly. "You will not expel me either in the name of God, or in the name of the devil. Did you ever hear of one devil driving out another?"

"I am not a devil," said the preacher, angrily, "I am a servant of Christ."

"A servant of Christ, indeed!" said Satan, with a sneer. "What! I tell you, you are worse than I am. I believe, and you do not want to believe. Do you suppose that you can expel me from the body of this miserable wretch? Ha! Go first and expel all the devils that are in your own heart!"

The preacher took his leave, somewhat discomfited. On going away, he said, turning up the whites of his eyes, "O Lord, I pray thee, assist this poor creature!"

"And I pray Lucifer," cried the evil spirit, "that he may never leave you, but may always keep you firmly in his power, as he does now. Go about your business, now. You are all mine, and I am your master." (Exorcism of Nicola Aubrey)