Still Whittling Away At Those Remaining Bastions

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Does this mean that the Council should be revoked? Certainly not. It means only that the real reception of the Council has not yet even begun. What devastated the Church in the decade after the Council was not the Council but the refusal to accept it. This becomes clear precisely in the history of the influence of Gaudium et spes. What was identified with the Council was, for the most part, the expression of an attitude that did not coincide with the statements to be found in the text itself, although it is recognizable as a tendency in its development and in some of its individual formulations. The task is not, therefore, to suppress the Council but to discover the real Council and to deepen its true intention in the light of the present experience. That means that there can be no return to the Syllabus, which may have marked the first stage in the confrontation with liberalism and a newly conceived Marxism but cannot be the last stage. In the long run, neither embrace nor ghetto can solve for Christians the problem of the modern world. The fact is, as Hans Urs von Balthasar pointed out as early as 1952, that the "demolition of the bastions" is a long-overdue task. (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 391)

 

There are times when even I am surprised by the continuing efforts on the part of the conciliar revolutionaries to whittle away at the remaining bastions of the Catholic Faith that have not been knocked down already by the after-effects of the "Second" Vatican Council and the "magisterium" of the postconciliar "popes." Indeed, anyone who understands that Modernism is a mixture of truth and error should not be surprised that there are times when conciliar officials speak and act as though they are possessed of the sensus Catholicus despite their abiding commitment to the propagation of the errors of the conciliar revolution (the denial of the nature of dogmatic truth, the redefinition of the very nature and Divine Constitution of Holy Mother Church, support given to "episcopal collegiality, false ecumenism, inter-religious "prayer" services, religious liberty and separation of Church and State, etc) and despite their daily participation in the abominable Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service that so offends God and harms souls.

To wit, the late Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II was steadfast in his opposition to the "ordination" of women to the conciliar presbyterate and was a supporter of clerical celibacy in what purports to be the "Roman Rite" of the Catholic Church. It was, though, the soon-to-be "blessed" John Paul II who opened the door for married conciliar presbyters by the permission for the "ordination" of married Anglican "priests" to the conciliar presbyterate after their "conversions" to what they believed to be the Catholic Church. That permission, however, was premised upon the same condition that applies to married priests of the various Eastern (Uniat) Rites: they must be celibate after the death of their wives. It is certainly true that Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II opened the door to married conciliar presbyters just a crack to facilitate the "conversion" of Anglo-Catholic "priests" to the conciliar structures. That crack was, however, still premised upon the same conditions that applied to priests of the Eastern rites.

It appears as though Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, who wrote twenty-nine years ago that the "demolition of the bastions is a long-overdue task, has cracked open the door a bit more by permitting a Lutheran "theologian" who converted to the conciliar structures in 2007 to be installed as a conciliar presbyter without requiring him to take a vow of celibacy. Making matters more complex--and it must be remembered that Ratzinger/Benedict lives in a world of paradox and contradiction and complexity--is the fact that the new presbyter's wife has joined a Carmelite order, although no one can say with certainty whether they will continue to live together as man and wife:

BERLIN — In a rare move that needed the pope's approval, a Lutheran convert was ordained Tuesday as a Catholic priest in Germany and is being allowed to remain married to his wife – who has already become a nun.

Harm Klueting, 61, was ordained by Archbishop Joachim Cardinal Meisner in a private ceremony at the city's seminary, the Cologne archdiocese said.

Pope Benedict XVI gave Klueting a special permission to remain married to his wife Edeltraut Klueting, who became a Catholic Carmelite nun in 2004.

The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican's chief spokesman, said the exception is rare but there have been similar cases.

"It doesn't happen every day," he said.

Klueting and his wife were Lutherans when they married in 1977 and both served as Lutheran clerics before converting to Catholicism several years ago. They have two grown children.

The Cologne archdiocese said in a statement that the couple would not have to take the traditional vow of celibacy as long as they remain married – a highly unusual move since celibacy is normally a key requirement for Catholic priests.

Klueting and his family could not be reached for comment, and it was not clear whether they still lived together as a couple.

Lombardi said he didn't have any specific information about the Kluetings, including what the pope said about the case.

Klueting is a professor for historical theology at the University of Cologne and teaches Catholic theology at Fribourg University in Switzerland. From now on, he also will provide services as a spiritual counselor for university students.

The archdiocese published pictures of the ordination ceremony showing Klueting with short gray hair and a beard, wearing a simple white priest vestment as he received his blessings from Meisner, who was wearing a festive yellow embroidered robe and a golden cardinal's hat.

In 1950, Pope Pius XII first allowed clergymen who had converted to Catholicism to remain married, the Cologne diocese said in its statement. However, each case has to be approved by the pope himself, the statement said, adding that in the past married priests also had been ordained in the German cities of Hamburg and Regensburg.

Last month, three former Anglican bishops were ordained as Catholic priests in London, becoming the first ex-bishops to take advantage of a new Vatican system designed to make it easier for Anglicans to embrace Roman Catholicism. (Married German Ordained As Catholic Priest.)

 

Although I must admit complete and total ignorance of the permission granted by Pope Pius XII sixty-one years ago to permit "clergymen" who had converted to the true Faith to remain married, a matter that I hope will be researched by those who have the time and resources to do so to determine if this initiative was the work of either Fathers Annibale Bugnini, C.M., or Ferdinando Antonelli, O.F.M., or one of their confederates who were busy planting seeds for the revolution that was to follow upon the death of our last true pope thus far, suffice it to say that there is far, far more to this supposedly "rare" case than meets the eye at first glance. This alleged "ordination" comes just weeks after two hundred forty-nine German "theologians" in the conciliar structures signed a letter calling for married presbyters and for a role for "women in ministry." And it was in Germany forty-one years ago that nine theologians signed a letter stating that there should be at least a "discussion" of clerical celibacy in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church. One of those nine theologians was a priest of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising named Father Joseph Ratzinger:

In this confrontational atmosphere, another curious document was unburied providing more food for thought. It is a letter dated February 9, 1970 addressed to the German Conferences of Catholic Bishops that was recently published by Pipeline magazine, an organ of the Regensburg Circle of Action (AKR), and referred to by Süddeutsche Zeitung.

The letter – already in 1970 – asked for the end of priestly celibacy and was signed, among others, by Fathers Joseph Ratzinger, Karl Rahner, Walter Kasper and Karl Lehman.

A draft of that letter was exhumed from the archives of late theologian Karl Rahner. That never-published letter reads: “Our reflections lead to the need for an urgent revision of and a different approach regarding the rule of celibacy in the German Church and the Universal Church.”

Ratzinger and his friends expressed their concern that maintaining priestly celibacy would only decrease the number of candidates to the priesthood and the quality of those to enter it. If the Bishops refused to face the question, the signers threatened, they would lose their authority and cause a mass desertion in the priestly ranks.

Actually, this evaluation could not be more erroneous. In effect, to cure the disease, they propose to administer more of the same virus that caused it. The desertion en masse from the ranks of the secular and religious clergy started because of the Council and was caused by its adaptation to the modern world, and not because of the rule of celibacy. (Clergy Celibacy - Boiling Water in Germany; found on the "resist but recognize" Tradition in Action website.)

Perhaps it is merely a coincidence that "Father" Herm Klueting has been installed as a conciliar presbyter just eighteen days after the letter that was sent to the nefarious conference of conciliar "bishops" in German, which is headed by the conciliar "archbishop" of Freiburg and Breisgau, Robert Zollitsch, who denied on April 11, 2009, that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ died on the wood of the Holy Cross in atonement for our sins, calling for an end to clerical celibacy. Perhaps.

Perhaps it is merely a coincidence that "Father" Herman Klueting has been installed as a conciliar presbyter just thirty-three days after three Anglo-Catholic converts to conciliarism were installed as presbyters themselves in the counterfeit ape of the Catholic Church. Perhaps.

Perhaps Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has forgotten about that never-published letter that he signed along with eight others, including the notorious exponent of the New Theology, Father Karl Rahner, S.J., and his future partner in ecumania, Walter Kasper, to open up a "discussion" about the discipline of clerical celibacy. Perhaps.

Perhaps not, especially if one remembers that Ratzinger/Benedict has told us that he has never changed:

If someone were to cast doubt upon Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's affiliation to the progressivist current, he could find the Prelate's own admittance of such in an interview with journalist Vittorio Messori, who calls him a "balanced progressivist."

Messori points to Ratzinger as "one of the founders of the magazine Concilium, a meeting place for the progressivist wing of theology."

"'Was it a sin of youth, Your Emminence, this engagement with Concilium?' I asked him, joshing.

"'Absolutely not,' he answered. 'I did not change; they changed.'"

(Rapporto sulla Fede - Vittorio Messori a coloquio con Joseph Ratzinger, Rome:Paoline, 1985, p. 14). (Card. Ratzinger: I Did Not Change.)

... Ratzinger has always been for an advanced position and openness.

I have known him for a long time, since he was a professor, and I can assure you that he did not change.

Everyone says the opposite, that there are two Ratzingers: one before he came to Rome, and a different one later.

To the contrary, he has always remained the same!

(Hans Urs von Balthasar, "Viaggio nel Postconcilio", interview with Angelo Scola, 30 Giorni, November 1985, p. 16. (Hans Urs von Balthasar: Ratzinger Did Not Change.)

O Estado de Sao Paulo - What are the more significant differences between the Ratzinger of Vatican II and the Ratzinger of today? Who changed more: you or the Church?

Cardinal Ratzinger – I do not see a real, profound difference between my work at Vatican Council II and my present day work. While preparing this course for Bishops, I went to review a course of ecclesiology that I taught for the first time in 1956. Naturally, I found elements that needed to be updated. But as for the fundamental vision, I found a profound similarity. What I proposed to the Bishops in Rio de Janeiro (in this trip) was the same fundamental vision that I set out (then).

(Interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger by Walter Falceta, Jr, 'Acao pastoral requer espiritualidade' in O Estado de S. Paulo, July 29, 1990) (No Difference between My Work at Vatican II and Now.)

I've been taken apart various times: in my first phase as professor and in the intermediate phase, during my first phase as Cardinal and in the successive phase. Now comes a new division. Of course circumstances and situations and even people influence you because you take on different responsibilities. Let's say that my basic personality and even my basic vision have grown, but in everything that is essential I have remained identical. I'm happy that certain aspects that weren't noticed at first are now coming into the open. (Interview with Bayerische Rundfunk (ARD), ZDF, Deutsche Welle and Vatican Radio)

 

Perhaps, my friends and very few readers, it is the case that everything, including the passage about clerical celibacy, written by Pope Saint Pius X in paragraph thirty-eight of Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907, applies completely to Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI:

38. It remains for Us now to say a few words about the Modernist as reformer. From all that has preceded, it is abundantly clear how great and how eager is the passion of such men for innovation. In all Catholicism there is absolutely nothing on which it does not fasten. They wish philosophy to be reformed, especially in the ecclesiastical seminaries. They wish the scholastic philosophy to be relegated to the history of philosophy and to be classed among absolute systems, and the young men to be taught modern philosophy which alone is true and suited to the times in which we live. They desire the reform of theology: rational theology is to have modern philosophy for its foundation, and positive theology is to be founded on the history of dogma. As for history, it must be written and taught only according to their methods and modern principles. Dogmas and their evolution, they affirm, are to be harmonized with science and history. In the Catechism no dogmas are to be inserted except those that have been reformed and are within the capacity of the people. Regarding worship, they say, the number of external devotions is to he reduced, and steps must be taken to prevent their further increase, though, indeed, some of the admirers of symbolism are disposed to be more indulgent on this head. They cry out that ecclesiastical government requires to be reformed in all its branches, but especially in its disciplinary and dogmatic departments They insist that both outwardly and inwardly it must be brought into harmony with the modern conscience which now wholly tends towards democracy; a share in ecclesiastical government should therefore be given to the lower ranks of the clergy and even to the laity and authority which is too much concentrated should be decentralized The Roman Congregations and especially the index and the Holy Office, must be likewise modified The ecclesiastical authority must alter its line of conduct in the social and political world; while keeping outside political organizations it must adapt itself to them in order to penetrate them with its spirit. With regard to morals, they adopt the principle of the Americanists, that the active virtues are more important than the passive, and are to be more encouraged in practice. They ask that the clergy should return to their primitive humility and poverty, and that in their ideas and action they should admit the principles of Modernism; and there are some who, gladly listening to the teaching of their Protestant masters, would desire the suppression of the celibacy of the clergy. What is there left in the Church which is not to be reformed by them and according to their principles? (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

 

We do know, of course, that the conciliar revolutionaries, quite apart from the times that they have imposed radical changes with lightning speed, have used incremental methods to accustom Catholics to various novelties so as to break down their natural resistance to those things that betray the sensus Catholicus. 

To cite just one example, among so very many, of this one can recall the fact that the use of laymen and lay women to distribute what purports to be Holy Communion in the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service was at first described as something "extraordinary," something that should be done only when there were not enough sacred ministers to distribute Holy Communion. What were billed once as "extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist" became recognized in due course on a de facto basis as "Eucharistic ministers," whose use is quite normal and quite ordinary at Novus Ordo services even in parishes that are served by four or five priests or presbyters, all references to conciliarism's 1983 "Code of Canon Law" and the 1997 edition of the General Instruction to the Roman Missal (which was published in its definitive English translation in 2002) notwithstanding. Could this be happening now with the seeming explosion, relatively speaking, of the "ordination" of married men as conciliar presbyters? Time will tell.

There have been, to be certain, exceptions that Holy Mother Church can and has made with respect to the discipline of clerical celibacy in the Latin Rite in the past nine hundred years or so. These exceptions have been rare as Holy Mother Church has sought to preserve her priests as men who are wholly united with the One Whose Priesthood has been impressed upon their immortal souls, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who was celibate. A priest is called to give himself totally to Our Lord. The denial of his biological fatherhood equips him to be better able to be a spiritual father to the flock entrusted to his pastoral care, imitating Our Lord Himself and His foster-father, Saint Joseph, the Patron of the Universal Church and the Protector of the Faithful, who who denied his own biological fatherhood to devote himself entirely to the care of his foster-Son, He Who is the Chief Priest and Victim of the Sacrifice of the Cross. (A decent history of clerical celibacy, even as practiced by married clergy in the early centuries of the Church as they refrained from that which is proper to the married state, can be found on the Vatican website: Priestly Celibacy in Patristics and Church History.)

Accustoming Catholics to accept as ordinary and normal what is first presented to them as an "exception" is just part of the revolutionary program of conciliarism. We will know soon enough if Father Joseph Ratzinger's 1970 letter about celibacy is shaping his policies now as he continues to whittle away at the last remaining bastions of Catholicism found in the conciliar structures. The fact that there is even a "discussion" of celibacy at this time is a sign that the conciliar ethos has convinced large numbers of Catholics that almost everything about dogma and morals and discipline is open for "discussion." Then again, those who can blaspheme God by esteeming the symbols of false religions as they extol the nonexistent ability of those religions to "improve" the world consider such matters as clerical celibacy to be very minor in the larger scheme of their revolutionary goals.

We need to continue to make many acts of reparation for the crimes against Faith and Morals that have been and continue to be committed by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI as we, as ever, attempt to make reparation for our own many sins as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, praying as many Rosaries as our state-in-life permits.

Look at it this way: the mess has gotten so bad and has spread so very fast, particularly in recent years, that the restoration of the Church Militant on earth can be done only by the direct intervention of God as a result of the Triumph of His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. There is not a conciliar "bishop" alive who is going to "challenge" his "pope" publicly on this any more than they have raised a peep about "papal" violations of the First and Second Commandments. There is no putative "successor" in the conciliar structures to set things right. Only Our Lord will do so when this period of Chastisement has run its course and Our Lady's Fatima Message is fulfilled at the most unlikely time imaginable.

Take heart! This is the time that God has willed for eternity for us to be alive and to save our souls.

Take heart! The late William C. Koneazny, the founder of the Catholic Rendezvous meetings that were held is Salisbury, Connecticut, and Sheffield, Massachusetts, told one of his daughters before he died of stomach cancer on June 16, 2004: "Our Lady will come and throw the bums out." She will restore the bastions that have been razed by Father Joseph Ratzinger before and during his reign as "Benedict XVI."

Take heart! We are Catholics. This will pass. May we bear the cross of the present moment with joy and gratitude that we have access to true bishops and true priests who recognize conciliarism to be from the devil and the conciliar "popes" to be nothing other than precursors of Antichrist himself.

 

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.

Saint Matthias, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints.