It is so infuriating to read these things. This is going to be a headline tomorrow, “Valli says there is no pope in Rome.” But then he immediately backs down and says he only means it metaphorically. Maybe. Wink wink. Then he goes on to list innumerable heresies of Antipope Bergoglio, a very good list indeed, and suggests the heresies are why there is no metaphor pope. At the end, he talks about Bergoglio removing the title Vicar of Christ from the pontifical yearbook, relegating it to something from the past, and how this is perhaps some sort of indication that Bergoglio has detached/separated himself from it… Even if that were the case, Aldo, then Bergoglio would not be the Vicar of Christ, the essential ontology of a true successor of St. Peter, right?
He closes with the classic, “oh well, nothing we can do, it’s in God’s hands, it’s useless.”
Pope Benedict’s name is mentioned only once in this longish essay, and only to assert that he really resigned. I guess it was just a totally normal resignation, and there is no way, no indication, no clues, no evidence, that something is amiss. Eight years of obvious non-pope activity not withstanding.
Following is the google algo translation from the Italian. Link to original at the end:
20 February 2021
“Rome is without pope. The thesis I intend to support is summed up in these four words. When I say Rome I am not referring only to the city of which the pope is bishop. I say Rome to say world, to say actual reality.
Although the pope is physically there, in reality he is not there because he is not the pope. There is, but he does not carry out his task as successor of Peter and vicar of Christ. There is Jorge Mario Bergoglio, there is no Pietro.
Who is the pope? The definitions, depending on whether you want to privilege the historical, theological or pastoral aspect, can be different. But, essentially, the pope is Peter’s successor. And what were the tasks assigned by Jesus to the apostle Peter? On the one hand, “feed my sheep” (Jn 21:17); on the other hand, “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Mt 16:19).
This is what the pope must do. But today there is no one who does this task. “And you, once converted, confirm your brothers in the faith” (Lk 22:32). So says Jesus to Peter. But today Peter does not feed his sheep and does not confirm them in the faith. Why? Someone answers: because Bergoglio does not speak of God, but only of migrants, ecology, economy, social issues. It is not so. In reality Bergoglio also speaks of God, but from the whole of his preaching a God emerges who is not the God of the Bible, but an adulterated God, a God, I would say, weakened or, better still, adapted. To what? To man and his claim to be justified in living as if sin did not exist.
Bergoglio has certainly placed social issues at the center of his teaching and, with occasional exceptions, appears prey to the same obsessions as a culture dominated by politically correct, but I believe that this is not the profound reason why Rome is without pope. Even if we want to privilege social issues, we can still have an authentically Christian and Catholic perspective. The question, with Bergoglio, is another, namely that the theological perspective is deviated. And for a very specific reason: because the God Bergoglio speaks of is oriented not to forgive, but to exculpate.
In Amoris Laetitia we read that the “Church must accompany her most fragile children with care and concern”. I’m sorry, but that’s not the case. The Church must convert sinners.
Also in Amoris Laetitia we read that “the Church does not fail to value the constructive elements in those situations that do not yet correspond or no longer correspond to her teaching on marriage”. I’m sorry, but these are ambiguous words. In situations that do not correspond to his teaching there will also be “constructive elements” (but, then, in what sense?), However the Church does not have the task of enhancing these elements, but of converting to the divine love to which one adheres by observing the commandments.
In Amoris laetitia we also read that people’s conscience “can recognize not only that a situation does not objectively respond to the general proposal of the Gospel; he can also recognize with sincerity and honesty what for the moment is the generous response that can be offered to God, and discover with a certain moral certainty that this is the gift that God himself is asking for amid the concrete complexity of limits, although not is still fully the objective ideal “. Ambiguity again. First: there is no “general proposal” of the Gospel, to which one can more or less adhere. There is the Gospel with its very precise contents, there are the commandments with their cogency. Second: God can never, ever ask to live in sin. Third: no one can claim to have “a certain moral security” about what God “is demanding in the midst of the concrete complexity of limits.” These smoky expressions have only one meaning: to legitimize moral relativism and make fun of divine commandments.
This God committed more than anything else to exonerating man, this God in search of mitigating circumstances, this God who refrains from commanding and prefers to understand, this God who “is close to us like a mother who sings the lullaby”, this God who he is not a judge but he is “closeness”, this God who speaks of human “frailty” and not of sin, this God bent to the logic of “pastoral accompaniment” is a caricature of the God of the Bible. Because God, the God of the Bible, is patient, but not lax; it is loving, but not permissive; he is thoughtful, but not accommodating. In a word, he is father in the fullest and most authentic sense of the term.
The perspective assumed by Bergoglio appears instead to be that of the world: which often does not completely reject the idea of God, but rejects the features less in tune with the rampant permissiveness. The world does not want a true father, loving to the extent that he is also judgmental, but a friend; or better still, a fellow traveler who lets things happen and says “who am I to judge?”.
I have written other times that, with Bergoglio, a vision triumphs that overturns the real one: it is the vision according to which God has no rights, but only duties. He has no right to receive a worthy worship, nor to not be mocked. But he has a duty to forgive. On the contrary, according to this view, man has no duties, but only rights. He has the right to be forgiven, but not the duty to convert. As if there could be a duty of God to forgive and a human right to be forgiven.
This is why Bergoglio, portrayed as the pope of mercy, seems to me the least merciful pope imaginable. In fact, he neglects the first and fundamental form of mercy which belongs to him and to him alone: to preach the divine law and, in so doing, to point out to human creatures, from the height of supreme authority, the way to salvation and eternal life.
If Bergoglio conceived a “god” of this kind – which I deliberately indicate with a lowercase, since it is not the One and Triune God we adore – it is because for Bergoglio there is no fault for which man must ask for forgiveness, nor personal neither collective, nor original nor current. But if there is no fault, there is no Redemption either; and without the need for Redemption, the Incarnation makes no sense, much less the saving work of the one Ark of salvation which is the Holy Church. One wonders if that “god” is not rather the simia Dei, Satan, who pushes us towards damnation just when he denies that the sins and vices with which he tempts us can kill our soul and condemn us to eternal loss of the Supreme Good.
Rome is therefore without pope. But if in Guido Morselli’s Vatican dystopia (the novel entitled Rome without a pope) he was physically so, because that imaginary pope had gone to live in Zagarolo, today Rome is without a pope in a much more profound and radical way.
I already feel the objection: but how can you say that Rome is without pope when Francis is everywhere? It is on TV and in the newspapers. It has been on the covers of Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stones, even Forbes and Vanity Fair. It’s on the sites and in countless books. He is interviewed by everyone, even by the Gazzetta dello sport. Perhaps never has a pope been so present and so popular. I answer: all true, but it is Bergoglio, it is not Pietro.
It is certainly not forbidden for the Vicar of Christ to deal with the things of the world, quite the contrary. Christian faith is incarnate faith and the God of Christians is God who becomes man, who becomes history, therefore Christianity shuns the excesses of spiritualism. But it is one thing to be in the world and quite another to become like the world. By speaking as the world speaks, and by reasoning as the world reasons, Bergoglio made Peter evaporate and put himself in the foreground.
I repeat: the world, our world born of the revolution of 1968, does not want a real father. The world prefers mate. The teaching of the father, if he is a true father, is tiring, because it points the way to freedom in responsibility. It is much more convenient to have someone next to you who just keep you company, without indicating anything. And Bergoglio does just that: he shows a God who is not a father, but a companion. It is no coincidence that Bergoglio’s “outgoing church”, like all modernism, likes the verb “to accompany”. It is a church companion on the road, which justifies everything (through a distorted concept of discernment) and, in the end, relativizes everything.
The proof lies in the success that Bergoglio collects among the distant, who feel confirmed in their distance, while the neighbors, bewildered and perplexed, do not feel at all confirmed in the faith.
Jesus is quite explicit in this matter. “Woe, when all men speak well of you” (Lk 6:26). “Blessed are you when men hate you and when they banish you and insult you and despise your name as infamous because of the Son of man” (Lk 6:22).
Every now and again a rumor comes to the fore that even Bergoglio, like Benedict XVI, would think of resigning. I don’t think he has anything like this planned, but the problem is something else. The problem is that Bergoglio became the protagonist, in fact, of a process of dismissal from Peter’s duties.
I have already written elsewhere that Bergoglio has now become the chaplain of the United Nations, and I believe that this choice is of unprecedented gravity. However, even more serious than his adherence to the UN agenda and to politically correct is that he has given up talking to us about the God of the Bible and that the God at the center of his preaching is a God who excuses, not who forgives.
The crisis of the father figure and the crisis of the papacy go hand in hand. Just as the father, rejected and dismantled, was transformed into a generic companion devoid of any claim to indicate a way, in the same way the pope stopped being the bearer and interpreter of the objective divine law and preferred to become a simple companion.
Peter thus evaporated just when we most needed him to show us God as an all-round father: a loving father not because he is neutral, but because he is judgmental; merciful not because he was permissive, but because he was committed to showing the way to true good; compassionate not because he is relativist, but because he is eager to show the way to salvation.
I observe that the protagonism in which the Bergoglian ego indulges is not new, but goes back in large part to the new conciliar, anthropocentric approach, starting from which popes, bishops and clerics have placed themselves before their sacred ministry, their will to that of the Church, their own opinions on Catholic orthodoxy, their own liturgical extravagances on the sacredness of the rite.
This personalization of the papacy has become explicit since the Vicar of Christ, wanting to present himself as “one like us”, renounced the plural humilitatis with which he proved to speak not in a personal capacity, but together with all his predecessors and the same Spirit Holy. Let us think about it: that sacred We, which made Pius IX tremble in proclaiming the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and Saint Pius X in condemning modernism, could never have been used to support the idolatrous cult of the pachamama, nor to formulate the ambiguities of Amoris laetitia. or the indifferentism of all Brothers.
Regarding the process of personalization of the papacy (to which the advent and development of the mass media have made an important contribution), it should be remembered that there was a time when, at least up to Pius XII inclusive, the faithful did not care who the Pope, because in any case they knew that whoever he was would always teach the same doctrine and condemn the same errors. In applauding the pope they applauded not so much the one who was on the holy throne at that moment, but the papacy, the sacred kingship of the Vicar of Christ, the voice of the Supreme Shepherd, Jesus Christ.
Bergoglio, who does not like to present himself as the successor of the prince of the apostles and, in the Pontifical Yearbook, has made the appellative Vicar of Christ overshadowed, implicitly separates himself from the authority that Our Lord has conferred on Peter and his successors . And this is not a mere canonical question. It is a reality whose consequences are very serious for the papacy.
When will Peter return? How long will Rome remain without pope? It is useless to question ourselves. God’s designs are mysterious. We can only pray to Heavenly Father by saying, “Your will be done, not ours. And have mercy on us sinners ”.”
Aldo Maria Valli
https://www.liberoquotidiano.it/articolo_blog/blog/andrea-cionci/26278178/aldo-maria-valli-roma-senza-papa-bergoglio.html
