(The Observer of All Crude Things)
by
Thomas A. Droleskey
This article will begin with ten paragraphs that are lifted entirely from an article published six days ago now,
L'Osservatore Benedetto.
It was on November 22, 2008, that L'Osservatore Beatles praised the singers who helped to popularize the smoking of marijuana and rank immorality. (See
Yesterday's Evils, Today's Accepted Norm.)
It was on April 29, 2009, that L'Osservatore Obamus breathed an editorial "sigh of relief" that the first one hundred days of the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama had been, according to editor Gian Maria Vian, not as bad as expected. (See
Urbanely Accepting Evil.)
It was on May 20, 2009, that L'Osservatore Obamus editor Gian Maria Vian praised Barack Hussein Obama's commenced address at the University of Notre Dame as "very respectful," claiming that Obama is not "a pro-abortion president." (See
Respect Those Who Break the First Commandment? Respect Those Who Break the Fifth Commandment.)
It was on June 18, 2009, that L'Osservatore Obamus editor Gian Maria Vian defended in support of the Marxist-trained, pro-abortion Barack Hussein Obama in an interview with a reporter from Inside the Vatican magazine. (See
L'Osservatore Del Naturalista.)
It was on June 27, 2009, that L'Osservatore Weirdo praised the bizarre Michael Jackson after his death. (See Big Pharm Trumps the Holy Cross and
Vatican-paper-hails-Jackson.)
It was on July 14, 2009, that L'Osservatore Occulto praised the latest Harry Potter motion picture. (See
L'Osservatore Occulto,)
It was on July 17, 2009, that L'Osservatore Wilde praised the works of the late Oscar Wilde, a man who is still heralded by the lavender community for his poems in support of indecency even though he made a deathbed conversion to the Catholic Faith. (See Vatican does U-turn to praise Oscar Wilde | Mail Online and Benedict praises perverted archbishop Juliusz Paetz.)
It was on October 22, 2009, that L'Osservatore Marxista offered a measure of praise for the work of the man who gave us the Marxist form of Communism that has wreaked so much murder and mayhem upon the world in the past ninety-two hours. (See
L'Osservatore Marxista.)
L'Osservatore Romano under the editorship of Gian Maria Vian has also praised Galileo
Galilei and Charles Darwin.
None of this would have been at all thinkable under any of our true popes. Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI? Ah, he has not a problem at all with any of the freewheeling editorials and articles that have appeared in L'Osservatore Romano under Gian Maria Vian's direction. He has not offered a word of criticism, as Vian himself pointed out in the interview he gave to Inside the Vatican magazine on June 18, 2009:
Should a reader interpret the editorial line of the newspaper to be also that of the Pope and the Secretariat of State?
Vian: Well, we need to distinguish something here. The paper is not official: it is not the expression, in every single part, of the point of view of the Vatican, that is, of the Secretariat of State. But it is obvious that it is an authoritative point of view of the Holy See, because ours is the only newspaper of the Holy See and has a century and a half of history. We were started during the American Civil War. That finished in 1865 and we were started in 1861. It’s a paper with a very long history and it has always been rightly interpreted as the expression of the thought of the Holy See, without a doubt, but that is not to say that every word that comes out in the paper is exactly the thought of the Pope or the Secretary of State.
But the average reader would assume that he will find in the Vatican’s newspaper an editorial line that is in agreement with the Pope...
Vian: Let’s say that L’Osservatore Romano expresses a line generally in agreement with the Holy See. This is obvious because the paper is owned by the Holy See. My editor, in the Italian sense of the owner of the paper, is the Pope, via the Secretariat of State. I could not possibly create a paper in disagreement with the owner, just like no newspaper director could create a paper in dissension with the owner. If I ran the newspaper like that, I would have already been fired.
Do you receive regular feedback from Cardinal Bertone or the Pope on articles that you publish?
Vian: I am here since the fall of 2007 and I have never had a problem. The Pope and the Secretary of State have so far given me and the newspaper their full confidence.
I know the paper very well: my grandfather wrote for this paper, my father wrote for this paper, my brother wrote for this paper and I wrote for this paper from 1977 until 1987 and then 20 years later I’ve come back as director. I knew the paper very well, it was the newspaper that arrived at home every day when I was a child.
I did not imagine I would find the autonomy that I have found here. Sure, we have made mistakes. But I jokingly say that it’s my editor, the owner, who is infallible, not me, not us.
We make mistakes, but so far not the Pope, the Secretary of State or anyone in the Secretariat of State has ever said, ‘You’ve made a serious error.’
They are happy that we do our job and we our happy that they do their jobs.
We work in autonomy except in a few areas of particular interest on international questions and then we work in close collaboration with the Secretariat of State. (Latest Newsflash - Inside the Vatican Magazine.)
It is very telling that Gian Maria Vian has been at L'Osservatore Romano for the past two years now and that he has "never had a problem." Why would he have had a problem publishing all of those articles listed above? Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has not said a word of criticism about "Archbishop" Robert Zollitsch's blatant apostasy when the latter denied, on Holy Saturday, April 11, 2009, that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ had died in atonement for our sins on the wood of the Holy Cross. The only thing that seems to get Ratzinger/Benedict's attention is when someone puts into the question the nature and extent of the crimes committed by the agents of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich (see Williamson, Bishop Richard). Crimes against the Faith? Ratzinger/Benedict has shown himself to be so very sanguine about theological error, which is why he tolerates the lunacy these days in L'Osservatore Romano.
All right. Enough of the reprise of the material from L'Osservatore Benedetto, which has been reprinted en toto because it is useful once again to review in light of L'Osservatore Di Tutte Cose Grezze's (the observer of all crude things) endorsement of The Simpsons animated television show on the American television network that has championed the cause of popularizing crudities, the FOX network, which is owned by the thirty-third degree Mason and "papal" knight named Rupert Murdoch. Although I have never watched The Simpsons, I have read about the vulgar nature of the program and the influence that the rude, crude behavior of the animated characters has had upon viewers, especially the young.
This is a far cry from the way things ware fifty years ago.
One would have to be living in a cave not to realize that the behavior of many people when out and about in public places today is dramatically different than what it was fifty years ago. Vulgarities and profanities uttered in public, especially within earshot of the young, were very rare, if almost unheard of in the best of restaurants and supermarkets. People dressed with pride and dignity. There were no bare-chested men walking around in parks or tattooed women checking out customers at the Bohack store or the Manhattan Food store on Middle Neck Road in Great Neck, New York. A father did not have to worry about a patron at Au Petit Moulin restaurant in Great Neck, New York, or Maude Craig's restaurant in Lake Success, New York, or the Villa Victor restaurant n Syosset, New York, or the fabled Milleridge Inn in Jericho, New York. A patron who spent $3.50 on a box seat at the Polo Grounds or its successor home of the New York Mets, the now demolished William A. Shea Municipal Stadium, wouldn't have to worry about hearing any foul language from other spectators (such language was reserved for the bleachers in the Polo Grounds or the upper reaches of the Upper Level at Shea Stadium).
The residual influences of Christendom were still strong in the 1950s, although the corrosive effects of naturalism were undermining these influences on a gradual basis. Still and all, however, Catholic men were intent, at least for the most part, on being gentleman and Catholic women were intent on acting as ladies, at least in public. Helping to retard the corrosive effects of naturalism was the fact that Catholics still attended Holy Mass in massive numbers and that they were receiving true Sacraments to help them get home to Heaven. While it is true, as I have noted in many other commentaries on this site, that the outlook of many Catholics in the United States of America was thoroughly naturalistic, the sensus Catholicus was maintained in many areas of daily life, especially insofar as one's comportment and dress in public.
The social revolutions of the 1960s were aided and abetted by the conciliar revolution that resulted in the loss of the true Sacraments for the lion's share of baptized Catholics. The Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service celebrated the profanities of popular culture, many of which have been incorporated into that service under the aegis of "inculturation of the Gospel" ("rock" liturgies, "folk" liturgies, "Afro-American" liturgies, "Native American" liturgies, etc.). Novus Ordo presbyters have encouraged their flocks to dress "casually" while attending their profane services that are so offensive to God. Some of the worst aspects of popular culture are glorified from the pulpit.
Indeed, a presbyter in the Diocese of Rockville Centre said from the pulpit in 1982 (after having viewed the motion picture Gandhi), "You know, I think that Christ was a very Gandhi-like figure." (No, I am not making this up. I heard this with my own ears. Even two students, brother and sister twins, that I was teaching in a religious education program on Monday nights at the time thought the presbyter's comments were blasphemous. The boy, said, "I think that this priest is thinking up his homilies as he's walking across the street from the rectory. He thinks nothing of blaspheming Our Lord.") And, of course, we have seen the sorry spectacle of the conciliar "archbishop" of San Francisco, California, George Niederauer, praising a motion picture, Brokeback Mountain, that glorified perversity. There has also been a presbyter in Waco, Texas, who "blessed" a Hooter's restaurant there three years ago, an establishment where the female servers are not exactly attired in line with Our Lady's Fatima Message (FOXNews.com - Sweet Hooters.)
This descent into madness is the logical end result of pluralism, which winds up corrupting even believing Catholics into accepting quite passively one cultural degradation after another as something beyond or their control or, worse yet, as representing "no big deal" for them or for their children. The true Mass and the true Sacraments served as a bulwark to retard the process of cultural degradation. Once that bulwark was taken away, however, we have seen our own people descend into levels of barbarism that hearken back to most of our families' pre-Christian roots in the Europe of the First Millennium as the Faith was being spread by the Apostles and those who followed them.
Anyone who thinks that a sanguine acceptance of profanity or vulgarity or crudity in the service of the eternal welfare of the souls for whom Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ became Man in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost and was born for us in Bethlehem so that He could die on the wood of the Holy Cross to redeem ought to consider the sanguinity represented by L'Osservatore Romano's celebration of The Simpsons:
VATICAN CITY – To put it as the devout Ned Flanders would, the Vatican's newspaper thinks "The Simpsons" are an okely dokely bunch.
L'Osservatore Romano on Tuesday congratulated the show on its 20th anniversary, praising its philosophical leanings as well as its stinging and often irreverent take on religion.
Without Homer Simpson and the other yellow-skinned characters "many today wouldn't know how to laugh," said the article titled "Aristotle's Virtues and Homer's Doughnut."
The paper credited "The Simpsons" — the longest-running American animated program — with opening up cartoons to an adult audience.
The show is based on "realistic and intelligent writing," it said, though it added there was some reason to criticize its "excessively crude language, the violence of certain episodes or some extreme choices by the scriptwriters."
Religion, from the snore-evoking sermons of the Rev. Lovejoy to Homer's face-to-face talks with God, appears so frequently on the show that it could be possible to come up with a "Simpsonian theology," it said.
Homer's religious confusion and ignorance are "a mirror of the indifference and the need that modern man feels toward faith," the paper said.
It commented on several religion-themed episodes, including one in which Homer calls for divine intervention by crying: "I'm not normally a religious man, but if you're up there, save me, Superman!"
"Homer finds in God his last refuge, even though he sometimes gets His name sensationally wrong," L'Osservatore said. "But these are just minor mistakes, after all, the two know each other well." (Vatican Paper Says 'The Simpsons' Are Okely Dokely - CBS News.)
Praising The Simpsons for "its stinging and often irreverent take on religion"? To treat religion in a stinging and irreverent manner is something to be praised?
"Many today wouldn't know how to laugh" without Homer Simpson and the other yellow-skinned characters? Human beings don't have the inherent ability given them by God to laugh when faced with the juxtaposition of two unrelated concepts (which is how the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen said defined humor)? People needed Homer Simpson to make them laugh? Are these insane morons and idiots and nincompoops serious?
Some reason to criticize "excessively crude language, the violence of certain episodes or some extreme choices by the scriptwriters"? Some reason to criticize? Some? What's realistic about popularizing language that would never be used by anyone aspiring to the heights of personal sanctity?
"Simpsonian theology"? Homer's "religious confusion and ignorance are 'a mirror of the indifference and the need that modern man feels toward faith'"?
To paraphrase the naturalist named Ronald Wilson Reagan, there they [the conciliarists] go again. Modern man? There is no such thing as "modern man." Yet it is, however, that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has time and time again in his writing over the length of his career referred to the needs of "modern man" and his "search" for God, implying that God Himself had made his Divine Revelation so obscure that it can only be found with difficulty and/or the circumstances of "modern" life have made the "search" for Him more difficult than it has been in the past.
Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ did not make Incarnate in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb to make Himself obscure. His Co-Equal and Co-Eternal Father in Heaven sent a star to hover over His birthplace in Bethlehem to let the unbelieving Jews know that the Redeemer of the entire human race had been born. The Jews and their wretched puppet king, Herod the Great, did not believe. Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar saw, and they rejoiced exceedingly:
Who having heard the king, went their way; and behold the star which they had seen in the east, went before them, until it came and stood over where the child was. And seeing the star they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. (Matthew 2: 9-10.)
Our Lord performed miracles during His Public Ministry and proclaimed Himself to be God in the very Flesh:
Amen, amen I say to you: If any man keep my word, he shall not see death for ever. The Jews therefore said: Now we know that thou hast a devil. Abraham is dead, and the prophets; and thou sayest: If any man keep my word, he shall not taste death for ever. Art thou greater than our father Abraham, who is dead? and the prophets are dead. Whom dost thou make thyself? Jesus answered: If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father that glorifieth me, of whom you say that he is your God. And you have not known him, but I know him. And if I shall say that I know him not, I shall be like to you, a liar. But I do know him, and do keep his word.
Abraham your father rejoiced that he might see my day: he saw it, and was glad. The Jews therefore said to him: Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham? Jesus said to them: Amen, amen I say to you, before Abraham was made, I am. They took up stones therefore to cast at him. But Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple. (John 8: 51-59.)
"Modern man" does not need a cartoon series featuring crudities and vulgarities to help him "find" God, Who has given us His Catholic Church as the sole means in which can be found His teaching and His means of sanctification. And to assert that "Homer Simpson" and God "know each other well" even though the fictional character makes a "minor mistake" by getting "His name sensationally wrong." How can any man claiming to be a Catholic priest make such an assertion? No one knows God well unless he knows Him as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His Catholic Church. And getting God's Holy Name "sensationally wrong" is not a "minor mistake." Our first Pope, Saint Peter, made this point abundantly clear as is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles:
Neither is there salvation in any other. For there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved. (Acts 4: 12.)
While some might protest (yet again) that the views expressed in the new L'Osservatore Romano scandal do not necessarily represent those of the conciliarist-in-chief, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, it must be kept in mind that, as noted in L'Osservatore Benedetto, the false "pontiff" has thus far not said a word in public about the apostasy of his fellow German, "Archbishop" Robert Zollitsch, 261 days ago, that is on April 11, 2009, as the latter denied that Our Lord died on the wood of the Holy Cross in atonement for our sins.
Ratzinger/Benedict also personally endorsed the blasphemous motion picture, The Nativity Story, that portrayed Our Lady as a sulky, moody, rebellious teenager who stormed out of her parents' house when she learned that she had been betrothed to Saint Joseph, a total misrepresentation of truth and a denial of the doctrinal effects of Our Lady's Immaculate Conception as the Mother of God had perfect integrity of body and soul and was not subject to unruly or disorderly passions. If portraying the Mother of God in a blasphemous manner means nothing to Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, why should an article in L'Osservatore Di Tutte Le Cose Grezze that praises The Simpsons bother him in the slightest. It won't.
Then again, of course, Ratzinger/Benedict has personally blasphemed the honor and glory and majesty of God by esteeming the symbols of false religions with his own hands and by daring to claim that "peace" is the product of the "coexistence" of the world's religions. He has denied the nature of dogmatic truth itself, thereby attacking the very nature of God and of His Divine Revelation. Praise of The Simpsons in the pages of L'Osservatore Di Tutte Le Cose Grezze is just small potatoes by way of comparison.
We invoke the patronage of the Holy Innocents today, the fourth day in the Octave of Christmas, to help us to be willing to die for the Faith, if only by means of the white martyrdom of being rejected by friends and former associates for our refusal to accept the apostasies of conciliarism as having anything at all to do with the Catholic Faith.
There are indeed many opportunities for white martyrdom today. Herods aplenty sit in the halls of civil government in the United States of America and around the world. These Herods have their enablers in the counterfeit church of conciliarism.What a joy it should be to us to be alive at this time, the very time that God has appointed from all eternity would be ours in which to live in order to give Him honor and glory through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary as members of the Catholic Church, praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit.
We must never rue anything that happens to us in this passing, mortal vale of tears. Our sins deserve far, far worse than anything we can possibly suffer in this life that we have been given by God to glorify Him as we seek to sanctify and to save our immortal souls by accepting the cross in our daily lives as the path by which we can make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world.
We must have the same spirit of joy and gratitude as that which was possessed by the Catholics who lived in the First Millennium as they accepted the persecutions of the Roman emperors and of other potentates. We must remember at all times that nothing--and I mean absolutely nothing--we suffer in this life is the equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Our Lord to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death. The crosses of the moment, no matter their source (civil, ecclesiastical, physical, emotional), are meant to be the means of our sanctification and salvation. We must rejoice in the cross always. As my dear wife says, "The Cross is our victory." We must keep this in mind no matter the difficulties of the moment. For the victory represented by the Cross is none other than eternal life IF we persevere until the end in a state of Sanctifying Grace.
Seeking to avoid immersing ourselves in the popular culture that is so heralded by the conciliarists and incorporated into the profane "liturgy" of their one world religion, may we continue to rejoice during these days of the Christmas Octave that a Saviour is born unto us of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is our life, our sweetness, and our hope.
A continued blessed Christmas to you all!
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!
Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
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.
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.
Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.
The Holy Innocents, pray for us.
See also: A Litany of Saints
