Finally! I am in total agreement with Michael Sean Winters of Fishwrap fame, and I’m tickled! Well, not exactly, but more in the way that a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Being in communion with the successor of Peter is indeed a big deal. It is for this reason that those voicing the harshest criticisms of Bergoglio, while also pledging “loyalty” to him as true pope, have a very big problem on their hands. You CANNOT disobey the teaching authority of a true pope and still remain Catholic. Because Christ told us, promised us, that the office of the papacy would be supernaturally protected from error, forever.
I’m enjoying Sunday family time, so that’s all I’ve got. The full MSW article is HERE. It’s worth a read, because it proves the other side is beginning to panic. It’s a good thing.
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The Church has been in schism since Vatican II, most of it de facto. I’m strongly in favor of real (but temporary) schism which would be Luther in reverse since most of the Catholic Church is now Protestant. How does Pope Vigano sound?
If I get to pick, the next pope would be Fr. Philip Wolfe.
His series on the Virgin of Revelation is the best 15 hours of podcast listening there is, followed closely by the 26 minute “I Will Not Offer Sacrifice Which Costs Me Nothing”.
If you haven’t listened already, you can thank me later for the link 😊
https://youtu.be/KhXgyxPIKOM
Debbie, do you know where Fr. Wolfe is now? Was he silenced by the FSSP? He’s gone from his last parish in OH and I can’t find any info on what happened. I was fortunate to have him at Mater Dei in Dallas a number of years ago.
And yes, these podcasts are excellent, though I’ve yet to get through them all.
I’ve no idea where he is. Perhaps the guy, Steve something, at Sensus Fidelium knows where he is….but he is, or at least was a firm shut up FiP (Steve, not Father). And yes, it’s my understanding too that the FSSP has silenced Fr. Wolfe. When I DM’d Steve to ask what happened, why no more podcasts from him, he said he knew but would not comment further.
Anyone reading this, would love to know where Father is now and how he’s doing.
Thanks for the link Debbie.
It sounds like Opus Dei.
Well, yes, it ‘sounds’ good but in reality, until you get all the masonic Satanists out of the Vatican and out of the Church as a whole, poor ‘Pope Vigano’ wouldn’t survive for 24 hours inside the Vatican. Likely he’d go the same route as John Paul 1, only much much quicker.
That is so true. In first noticed this on Mundabor’s blog where on the one hand he insisted in his own personal style that you couldn’t even be Catholic unless you accepted Bergoglio as Pope. Then, on the other hand, he called the Holy Father all sorts of vile, creatively profane and disgusting insults. The Holy Father = Demon Spawn …. huh!
And then, Barnhardt adds in to the conversation a discussion on “base premises”: if this is true, then that must follow.
Over at Where Peter Is blog, I have been in an extended dialogue with the host and his readers on this assertion: “The Pope can never be in schism because he cannot be in schism with himself. The Pope can never be wrong because he is guaranteed by God to never be wrong. He bonds and looses on earth as in heaven. If he says it, it is true”.
It is an interesting blog post and the follow up comments are unusually good as erudite (learned and unemotional) explanations for why someone would believe such a thing as I summarized above.
I tried to participate as best I could but was ultimately asked (politely) to leave.
To me it comes down to defined Dogma, Sacred Tradition and Scripture being the essence of the Church as it is what connects we the living to their fuller revelation in heaven (Beatific Vision) one day. These are heavenly and cannot be changed. They can be more fully revealed, expanded on as we get closer to the full revelation of eternity, but we can never *contradict* by even a punctuation mark.
And so, the Pope is a servant to these Truths. He guards them with his life, strength and talent. In union with all other Popes, in union with Jesus Christ, Logos, in union with the communion of all Saints, the Pope is fulfilling his Divine Office in full. That is when Catholics kneel before the Pope as before God – because such a Pope truly represents *only* God Himself in His fullness.
Anyway, it is interesting to see such Catholics avoid the topic of the five Dubia, similarly to their “Pope”. They turn this defense of Dogma into a heretical act by rebellious, disloyal Cardinals.
Fascinating. Here is a link if interested
https://wherepeteris.com/ncrs-winters-warns-of-a-looming-schism/
Nice to come back to clean air this blog. Keep up the good work!
Thank you, Aqua. Someone sent me a link this morning wherein I found out that the host of wherepeteris.com had blocked me. I didn’t even know his name twelve hours ago.
The common theme I’m seeing is to shut down the dialogue, hence your being asked to leave. It’s hard to believe how someone can claim to love Truth, yet be afraid of it at the same time. That makes no sense to me. You are presented with evidence that obviously contradicts your worldview, and instead of being intrigued or even curious, you run from it? It’s ostrich head in the sand personified, and I’m pretty sure it’s grounded in fear.
I actually had interesting productive discussions with his readers.
Mike Lewis, host, was another story.
It’s fine. His blog, his rules.
Too bad, though. Like you say, all that matters is arriving together at Truth, (along with Love) which is he essence of the Beatific Vision. Hard to to do that when blocking is always the subtext of everything.
Funny thing. I made my first comment on wherepeteris.com regarding the need for a change in governance for the Church using the “Pope” Francis ongoing scandal as one of the reasons. I was immediately blocked. I tried to unsubscribe but cannot. His unsubscribe button doesn’t work and direct e-mail to him are of no avail. Bottom line: He likes readers who don’t comment. We need freedom of speech in the Church with lots of open and often embarrassing discussions. Finding the truth of things is messy.
The Matrix is so instructive. Cypher, having previously red-pilled only to find the truth too “hard,” sells out the people he should care about the most in order to re-blue pill himself back into anti-realty because that steak tastes so damn good, even though he knows it’s not there. Sound about right?
Sounds about right Mark. Our motto should be that of Pope Felix III.
“Not to oppose error is to approve it; and not to defend truth is to suppress it; and indeed to neglect to confound evil men, when we can do it, is no less a sin than to encourage them.”
That is exactly right.
A quote from “Dinosaur Derek” in response to a Twitter conversation (via Canon 212), along those red pill/blue pill choice lines of yours: which do you prefer – Truth, suffering, Cross or unreality, pleasure, will.
“The Paradox of Red pill Traditionalism is that while it is a stable unmovable rock, to reside there is chaos in relation to the world.
Conversely, the comfort of the Blue pill matrix is chaos in relation to the truth”.
I thought that was about right.
Yes, that seems about right.
Father Wolfe is living in Pennsylvania and was present at the traditional ordination Mass by Cardinal Burke earlier this month. I do not have any contact information for him but when I met him, I thought he seemed to be in good spirits.
Thank you, father.
Yes, thank you Father.
Thank you very much, Father.
Hilarious. Rex Mottram (at Where Is Peter?) banned me less than an hour after my first comment.
Welcome to the club!
I comment on political blogs. From time to time, I head over to others outside of my normal ideological range and mix it up with the lefty riff raff. Every blog comment section has its own flavor to it. You open your mouth on some, be ready to receive fire. I love it.
No one blocks comments anywhere, unless for certain common key unacceptable-in-public words that everyone pretty much knows by now. We all get around that. And it’s a free for all. The outcome is that cream (the best comments and most widely shared beliefs – right or wrong) rise to the top. Which must be defended along the way.
But on Catholic blogs (so many of them) entire ideological and theological belief is completely excluded from public consideration. Frequently excluded with an insult and shaming for those so excluded. Which astonishes me, more and more as time goes by.
Here we are, supposedly with access to All Truth, with a direct commandment by God to evangelize the Gospel to all nations and to exercise the Virtues; perform spiritual works of mercy to instruct the ignorant. We have the security of having all the answers, ultimately. God is on our side.
But, no. Catholics, unlike anyone else I know …. Ban. Go away. Not welcome here. Say this. Do not say that. And then the name calling, etc.
I have asked certain questions on blogs that I have trusted (even contributed money to) over the past number of trouble-filled years, earnestly wanting to make sense of the inexplicable. And I have been treated with what is, as far as I’m concerned given the gravity of the questions and the state of my own soul, with a contemptuous equivalent of “Go to h*ll”. Because that is potentially where I go if I do what they say and just leave. I have learned to roll with it.
Those who run Catholic blogs potentially can do profoundly good service on behalf of God and the Faithful. But, as they say, with that comes great responsibility. It is a public space and on the opposite end of these comments are real people with souls hanging in the balance and the families that depend upon such fathers and mothers for salvation.
Please. Bloggers. *Let.comments.run.free*. Let us talk amongst ourselves here, since we frequently can’t at this scale and depth anywhere else. Please, do not ban. Let us work it out amongst ourselves. Even the nutties (like me).
“The ordinary and usual form of Papal teaching is not infallible”.
Ludwig Ott, FUNDAMENTALS OF CATHOLIC DOGMA, p.11
“So, then, if anyone says that the Roman pontiff has merely an office of supervision and guidance, and not the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole church, and this not only in matters of faith and morals, but also in those which concern the discipline and government of the church dispersed throughout the whole world; or that he has only the principal part, but not the absolute fullness, of this supreme power; or that this power of his is not ordinary and immediate both over all and each of the churches and over all and each of the pastors and faithful: let him be anathema.”
First Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus, Ch. 3
Have made several attempts to reply but they do not seem to go thru.
At any rate, here’s another try. The quote provided by Pastor Aeternus is not relevant to the quote from Ott. Ott is not objecting to Papal authority in any of the areas referenced in the PA quote. Ott is stating that not every word the Pope says is infallible, which is in fact exactly what the dogma says.
It goes without saying that not every word the pope says is infallible.
“Mark Docherty says: August 30, 2019 at 11:40 am
It goes without saying that not every word the pope says is infallible.”
I agree, but that is really not how many Catholics have treated Popes probably all the way back at least beginning with the close of Vatican 1. In fact, the general practice has been to essentially treat all papal teaching AS infallible. This was of course fairly easy post-Vatican 1 for quite some decades, as we had an “above-average” run of Popes. By Vatican 2 this culture had solidified among “conservative” Catholics.
And then Francis arrives, and many Catholics have been forced to either attempt to square the circles of his many problematic statements, or just chuck it and run with “He isn’t Pope”, finding clarity nowhere in between because they simply lack the mental paradigm to be able to understand a Pope that spews nonsense.
I can quote a dozen popes and saints who say you are wrong. Christ Himself promised supernatural protection to Peter and his successors, promised his faith would not fail, and promised to bind Himself to whatever Peter bound and loosed. The faithful are to loyally follow a valid pontiff, period full stop. Not just infallible teaching, but the ordinary magisterium. His power is “ordinary and immediate,” as stated in PA. Switching gears, a heretic cannot be pope. I can quote another dozen popes and saints on this question. Sorry, Benedict’s abdication failed, and the subsequent conclave was invalid.. cf Canons 332.2, 188, 359.
There is a problem with your position that every single utterance of a Pope pertaining to faith and morals is infallible. First, Pastor Aeternus, which is the developed doctrine and dogmatic definition of infallibility, states that infallibility only exists under certain circumstances. With this, Ott’s statement completely agrees. Second, for your position to be correct, then Benedict wasn’t Pope either, for he has made clear that Francis is Pope and if not, at best Benedict violated a tenet of the catechism itself in teaching ambiguously {CCC 1697}. So you would then be stuck with a Benedict who is either wrong because he stated that Francis is Pope or wrong because he fed the Church and the entire world an ambiguous and deceptive impression, or that the issue is not an issue of faith and morals and he can play with words as much as he likes.
That doesn’t sound like a much better scenario than that Francis can utter stuff that is in error, especially since Pastor Aeternus states that he can, because PA makes clear that a Pope speaks infallibly only under very specific conditions and in this it is the defining document of the dogma.
Any way you slice it, the Church faces a grave and unprecedented crisis. But then we all agree about that, I think.
As an aside, I have never heard of a criticism of Ott for that which I quoted, and his book has been a classic text for many decades. I’m all ears to criticisms of his assessment. Not saying they don’t exist. I just have never seen one.
And yes, for clarity’s sake, I’m aware that statements made by Ott are not infallible! LOL.
Ott is not at odds with the teaching on infallibility, at all. The concept I’m trying to bring to the conversation is loyalty to the pontiff, beyond infallible statements. Acres of words on this from previous popes. Maybe they were wrong. Or maybe heretics can’t be popes.
I see. But there must be a distinction made between the point Ott is made and the loyalty you rightly call to mind. My references by Ott are addressing infallibility, not loyalty. We all must be loyal to a Pope whether he happens to be speaking infallibly or not.
Regarding Francis, the phrase where infallibility does not apply, i.e. “as a private theologian or as a bishop of his diocese” referenced by Ott and others is instructive. Purely as an observation and possibly worth nothing, I am fascinated {and at the same time, mostly appalled} by the method Francis uses to, how shall we say it, deliver information. It seems to me he operates in a constant state of dialectic, of debate, tossing out this and that without asserting, if pressed, its weight as unassailable truth. Take economics for example. His continued haranguing about economics has caused many great angst, and in my pinion, rightly so, but if you remember way back, when he was pressed, he admitted he didn’t know much about economics! Thus some say this method is nothing but Jesuit style, pitching this and that with the intention that some truth may bubble up out of it. Thus, one might suggest that overall, his teaching is less “heresy” than irresponsible incoherence, tho on a few topics the former seems to better apply.
As for Benedict, he, too, has made/written some very dubious statements, ones that are cause for great concern or the need for clarity, or both. His assertion that the dogma of extra ecclesiam nulla salus was “abandoned” by the Church after Vatican 2, for example, or that for the sake of our “humanity” we no longer believe that a good man who is not a Catholic cannot be saved come to mind. Men have all sorts of ideas and at this or that moment may actually voice them, Pope or not.
I’ve always wondered what Alexander VI had to say about a number of topics on faith and morals in private, say, whilst sitting around the breakfast table chatting with his kids.
“Francis” has approved Holy Communion for public adulterers and says that God positively wills this. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t infallible, it’s a disaster for the Church if he is really pope. Chapter 8 of AL officially taught heresy. Yet Pacelli taught this:
“It is not to be thought that what is set down in Encyclical Letters does not demand assent in itself, because in this the Popes do not exercise the supreme power of their magisterium. For, these matters are taught by the ordinary magisterium, regarding which the following is pertinent: ‘He who heareth you, heareth Me’ (Luke 10:16); and usually what is set forth and inculcated in the Encyclical Letters already pertains to Catholic doctrine. But if the Supreme Pontiffs in their acts, after due consideration, express an opinion on a hitherto controversial matter, it is clear to all that this matter, according to the mind and the will of the same Pontiffs, cannot any longer be considered a question of free discussion among the theologians.”
—Pope Pius XII Encyclical Humani Generis 1950
Pick your poison.
I agree, it’s a disaster.
Free will is not without it’s downside…
Have you examined the evidence of the invalid abdication? I don’t recall your name in this combox prior to today.
Yes. Lots. From every angle.