And We Watch The Neo-trads Devour Their Own, Bon Appetit.

Earlier this week Cardinal William Levada, former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and, before that, Archbishop of San Francisco was arrested in Hawaii for driving under the influence of alcohol.   Levada, you may recall, was the bull dog sicced on the good Sisters of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious because they were suspect of supposedly unspeakable heresies.  The charges against the nuns were later dropped.  The charges against His Eminence probably won’t be.  

Despite his complicity in the LCWR mauling, Levada isn’t a bad man.  Like many who rose to power under Benedict and John Paul he was a careerist who bent his conscience and sold his soul to the prevailing winds of Church politics.  He had some good pastoral sense in his days as Archbishop of a very complex city.  While he stood firm on the Church’s teachings on abortion and on same-sex relationships, he refused to follow the lead of Archbishops Burke and Chaput to desacrate the Eucharist by making it a weapon in the culture wars over abortion or same-sex marriage.  When the City of San Francisco passed a regulation that all agencies dealing with the city had to offer spousal benefits for those in same-sex unions, the Archbishop bypassed the controversy by permitting Archdiocesan employees to designate any one person whomsoever of their choice—traditional spouse, parent, child, “friend,” milkman—regardless of relationship, as beneficiary.  It is hard to say why he agreed to go after the nuns.  The criminal minds behind that debacle were our old buddies Raymond Burke, William Lori, Bernard Law (aka the unholy trinity) and buffoon-in-residence, Carl Anderson—the grand poobah of the Knights of Columbus.    It may have been Benedict himself who ordered the inquisition; we will probably never know.  Pope Francis put an end to the nunsense however several months ago.

Pope Benedict replaced Cardinal Levada as the Grand Inquisitor with Gerhard Ludwig Müller when Levada turned 75.  It is normal for Cardinals who are not residential Archbishops to remain resident in Rome at least until their 80^th birthday as they remain members of the various congregations, but Francis (distanced himself from and) dismissed Cardinal Levada from this tiresome obligation and His Eminence joined other retired Archbishops of San Francisco living at Saint Patrick’s Seminar in Menlo Park.

When he was in office in Rome Cardinal Levada was a cherished icon of the Katholik Krazies.  They had had some misgivings at first given his pastoral solution to the complexities of San Francisco’s “diverse” population but had been won over by his hard line on the nuns and on other issues and especially by the support he received from Pope Benedict.  But it is interesting to see how they have turned on him now.  One particularly cheesy Krazy blog, Eponymous Flower, has gone on, without any evidence, to “expose” Levada’s “gay lifestyle,” claiming that he is “shacked up” with “life partner” and his successor in San Francisco, Archbishop George Niederauer, and implying that the night of the arrest the two were out in various gay bars on The Big Island.  In fact, Levada was alone when arrested for drunk driving and there is no mention anywhere of his having been at a bar of any sort.  But you see, this is how the crazies are.  They are so filled with anger that they devour their own when a more liberal target isn’t available.  The point of this entry isn’t about a Cardinal who had too much to drink—a sin many of us have shared at one time or another.  Or about a prelate who got behind the wheel of a car when intoxicated—a far more serious sin.  But it is about the tendency of the Krazies to make up stories and piss in the dirt to make mud to sling at whoever happens to be the object of their wrath.  Nice going, Eponymous Flower—a few more Krazies like you and the neo-traditional movement will be gone forever and never missed by Christians anywhere.  Oremus.  

Now That The Shoes Of The Fisherman Are On The Other Feet ...

I remember the afternoon John Paul II was elected.  I was at a committee meeting with our local auxiliary bishop.  The white smoke had already been seen and one of our number had been delegated to keep an eye on the television in the next room and let us know when the announcement was made.  The “spy” in question was an old Irish monsignor and he came into the room in a state of shock.  “It’s some Pole” (he didn’t use the politically correct term) “who I never heard of.”  The room exploded as everyone jumped up and made for the television room.  While everyone else seemed quite excited by the first non-Italian Pope in over four and a half centuries, I had an immediate feeling of foreboding.  Italians know how to do the Pope thing.  They’ve done it so long that the Pope is just the guy in the white robe who live down the block or over on the other side of Rome or a two-hour rail trip away.  They don’t take the pope all that seriously.  Even when they become pope, they take the whole thing a bit more lightly.  But a Pope from Poland—that spelled trouble.

Now don’t get me wrong.  There were aspects of John Paul’s reign that were absolutely brilliant.  He was a great communicator.  And he was a phenomenal political strategist.  But by and large, it was a troubled and troublesome papacy.  At least, I, for one, was not a happy camper during those long years of ever tightening and centralizing control.   He wrote some great encyclicals—and some not so great ones.  But most of all I saw good bishops with vision being replaced, successful innovations in pastoral practice being reversed, and a negative message edging out the Good News of salvation.   But he was the Pope.  I respected him and while in the classroom or in private conversation I might point out the flaws in his policies or thinking—and even the infallible have flaws—I only spoke with respect.  I had various opportunities to meet him—well, to be presented to him actually: needless to say we never sat down over a kielbasa and beer—and I always acted with due deference.  I was not a happy camper during his pontificate but I was—and remain—a Catholic and that means that there are boundaries regarding what and how we say what we say regarding the Pope.

I had more respect for Benedict.  He was a sort of papal Jimmy Carter.  While I think his pontificate was, aside from his precedent setting resignation, a disaster, I believe he is a man of unparalleled integrity.  I would probably agree with him on very little but he is a sound scholar in his field (which is not history, by the way; he doesn’t have a good grasp of historical data, even Church history) and I have a genuine empathy for the man who I believe sincerely desired to be pope to “fix” what he perceived to be the problems left behind by both Vatican II and his immediate predecessor, but who found that his professorial skills were not up to the shenanigans of the long-entrenched cesspool of monsignoral fuchsia that stood between him and his objectives.  All in all, I was no less unhappy with him in the chair of Peter than I was with John Paul II.  But again, I spoke only with respect of him.  The Pope is the Pope.  Ubi Petrus ibi Ecclesia.  While I was personally discontent with the direction in which these popes were taking the Church, I bore neither any animosity, personal or otherwise.  After all, they were Pope and I am not. 

Needless to say, I love Francis and feel thirty years younger with him on the Chair of Peter.  But not everybody shares my enthusiasm.  Last week it was announced that Gallup reported some serious drops in Francis’ popularity among Americans, especially since Laudato Si and its critique of our consumerist society.  Let’s face it, we all love our SUVs more than we love our Catholic Faith.  Jesus was obviously wrong: it is possible to love God and wealth, or at least to love some pious idea of God and the reality of our material obsessions. 

Criticism of Francis ranged from the ignorant to the vituperative.  Self-proclaimed authority on all things Catholic and Republican candidate for President, Rick Santorum, declared

The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think that we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we're really good at, which is theology and morality.”  

I think he would have a point if he knew science as well as those scientists the Pope turned towards for advice on the encyclical, or even as well as does the Pope himself.  His Holiness is no authority on science, of course, but he does have a stronger background than does climate-change denier and general fantasist Sanctimonious Santorum.  Nevertheless, the ex-Senator’s remarks were mild compared to some who aren’t running for President and are able to shoot from the blind the Internet offers.  (Admittedly, I too keep my identity concealed in cyberspace anonymity.).  Here is an exchange of anti-Francis buffoons from the Katholik Krazy blog Eponymous Flower:

AnonymousJuly 26, 2015 at 4:41 AM
   Pope Francis stinks.

AnonymousJuly 26, 2015 at 5:34 AM  
It's only the sheep' smell......don't you like it?


AnonymousJuly 26, 2015 at 5:51 AM  
"Pope Francis stinks."

That's for sure. He stinks from the rot of Vatican II !!!

Some of Francis’s strongest critics are both very public in their identity and ruthless in their critique.  Our Fancy Friend over at the Knight of Malta, Cardinal Burke, says that the Church under Francis “is a rudderless ship.”   It has been a long time since a Cardinal was so openly contemptuous of a reigning Pope, probably not since Cardinal Lucien Louis Joseph Napoléon Bonaparte, grand-nephew of the Emperor, who was given to open mockery of Pius IX, the Pope who both ordained him and named him a Cardinal.  (Curiously they remained friends despite Bonaparte’s well-known habit of ridiculing him to visitors.) 

Equally insulting to Pope Francis is Fox News Commentator, Steve Milloy who refers to Francis as “The Red Pope.”  The Fox News crowd caters to an audience that is rabidly opposed to any degree of self-restraint on the part of free-market capitalism and its raping of the planet’s resources and considers the sort of economic reforms Francis calls for sheer heresy.  One “Bruce,” responding to the KK blog, The Radical Catholic, says

Pope Francis is to the Catholic Church what Obama has been to America. Obama kicked the already weakened final supports out from under the country and America is NO MORE. Call it what you may but it is gone.

The Pope is well on his way to doing the same to a Church already turned Protestant by the Modernist Heresy. If they aren't already the confused Catholics will soon be Useful Idiots for the Global Elite who Francis apparently serves.

The electronic version of the British Conservative Magazine, The Spectator, recently produced an article: “Watch Out Pope Francis: the Catholic Civil War Has Begun.”   The article isn’t bad at all, other than calling Ross Douthat of the New York Times, a “moderate,” but it is a bit like Paul Revere hanging the lights in the tower of the Old North Church (actually Robert Newman, the church sexton hanged the lights to warn us about the Brits); we know that already, it ain’t news.  The article drew some pretty rabid responses however: who knew the Krazies were literate enough to read The Spectator? One “Gwenn Ap Nudd” responded to Phil Steinacker

Yes, this Pope teaches error so he is not a Pope. Sede Vacant (sic) - the Seat is empty. There have been a number of Anti-Popes. Francis is just one more.

And then to one “James M”

Legalism. As Rev Cekeda says, he was a manifest heretic before his election so it wasn't valid to begin with. The Council rejected the Holy Spirit and elected a heretic. I grant you it would be more complicated if a Pope fell from grace while in office. But he didn't fall, he never had it apparently - or at least since he's been in the public eye.  (Antony Cekada is a sedevacantist, “theologian” in residence and companion of Bishop Daniel Dolan, ersatz sede-vacantist bishop of no place in particular.  I have written about Dolan and Cekada elsewhere; you can check the Label list on the right side of the webpage.) 

Actually Francis is driving many of those who were clinging to hope of a pre-Vatican II restoration to sede-vacantism.  The KK blog, Eponymous Flower, draws a number of readers who espouse the idea that Francis is not the authentic pope.  One, writing under the universal veil of “anonymous” and who represents a sort of second wave sede vacantist theory (first wave being those who claim Pius XII was the last authentic pope) wrote:

Thanks guys! I see things in a different light. Pope Benedict XVl is still for me the Supreme Pontiff. And if I live to see the day of his death, then it will be Sede Vacante. I am a Traditional Catholic and Francis will not deprive me of that. May God forgive this fake Pope. In the meantime I am a CATHOLIC. And Francis is an anti-Catholic. Deo Gratias!!!

Then there are those who want to depose Francis.  A particularly Krazy blogger from Boston by the name of Carole McKinley who runs the Blog The Tenth Crusade (in various other reincarnations known as Throw The Bums Out 2010 and What The Pope Really Said) has not only had some of the blog-flies that feed off her ordure suggest that it is time to give Francis the boot but supports the idea herself.  One Michael Dowd wrote:

I suggest a petition be developed and circulated via blog network for the removal of Pope Francis. This kind of thing might get some more national media attention on this diabolical issue. Every day more and more souls are being lost due to him. He renders advocacy for Catholic doctrine ineffective by the carelessness of his moral attitude and confusing remarks. He has got to go. Go Francis Go.

An “Anonymous” came right in behind in support  

Michel Dowd is right. Enough of this. Are there no cardinals or bishops with a Catholic backbone left? Stand up to this man and boot him out. 


Ironically the post was titled “Catechized Catholics Upset With Our Holy Father’s Shtick”  When I suggested that really catechized Catholics know that there is no way for cardinals or bishops—even those who have backbone—much less petitions to remove a pope, Carol herself came in with one of her typically vitriolic exercises in unapprised idiocy:

If the Holy Father reveals himself to have been elected by the queens to contradict Church teaching, his See most certainly has the power to kick him to the curb. We are all waiting to see what kind if stunt is pulled at the next synod. The last one was orchestrated by the queens and had the collaboration and blessing of the Holy Father…,

I was only relieved that she referred to Francis as “Holy Father” but then I remembered in an earlier blog where she said she calls him that “tongue in cheek.”  One “Lazarus Gethsemane” then chimed in his opinion that Francis was foisted on the Church by a College of Cardials gone mad:

And yet - what we get from the politico Bergoglio is not truth, but rather, confusion, chaos, division, constant obfuscation of clear doctrine, and an unprecedented elevation of man and physical manna, and all at the detriment of immutable Truths and doctrines within the church itself. … 

Many of the corrupt liberal clerics in the college of cardinals (which is the majority) knew about Bergoglio, and that is exactly why they launched an illicit internal campaign to elect him to the papacy. Don't think for one blessed moment that this chaos and destruction wasn't pre-planned beyond Bergoglio.

So, yes—Francis is edging the Church towards a Civil War, or actually a schism.  It wasn’t his doing: it has been brewing for years.  The Lefebvre Schism was the first wave, the sede-vacantists the second.  They both had their roots in the Council and the papacy of Paul VI. The more measured track of John Paul II and Benedict XVI let the fires die down a bit but as nothing short of a rejection of the Council and post-conciliar Magisterium would appease the rebels, the fires remained smoldering.  Francis has fanned them into flame again.  Some hold the old grudges about the changes in the Liturgy or the ecumenical openings initiated by John XXIII and confirmed by the Council.  For others it was seeing their hopes of a restoration of the old rites promised in Summorum Pontificum dashed by a Pope who has no time for what I have referred to as the Colonial Williamsburg approach to worship.  There are those who grieve the “injustices” perceived to have been done by Francis to His Corpulence, Cardinal Burke. More are threatened by the more pastoral direction taken in regard to the divorced and remarried.  But the largest number of American discontents to Francis’ pontificate are bound to be those who see him as a threat to our socio-economic status quo.  Let Christopher Moncton and Sarah Palin and Senator Inhofe and Governor Parry and, of course, Rick Santorum continue to deny the effects of our economic strategies on our planet, but as for me I am a believer—both in Francis and in the fact that we gotta change.  Let me just conclude with this slice of Ashley Ahearn’s KUOW Seattle program on NPR this past Tuesday. 

Tribes and wild fish groups share Butler’s sentiments. River temperatures throughout the Northwest are entering lethal territory for salmon. The fish become stressed once river temperatures reach the 60s. When they exceed the 70s, temperatures can be lethal.

“When these fish are very hot they become lethargic and they don’t reach as large sizes as they would in more cool conditions,” says Adrian Tuohy, a biologist with the Wild Fish Conservancy. The nonprofit group analyzed water temperature data from the U.S. Geological Survey earlier this month on 54 rivers in Washington, Oregon and California. Thirty-nine of the rivers were at temperatures that can be lethal to salmon and trout.

"Their metabolic rates are so high that they just can't grow as fast," Tuohy says. “That affects their survival rates in the ocean.”

Warmer waters contain less oxygen and provide conditions for fish diseases like gill rot to thrive. So as the water levels drop and fish crowd into smaller and smaller pools, the results can be deadly.

So, say what you want about Pope Francis, but as for me and the fish, we’re believers.

Destined for the Rise and the Fall of Many in Israel

Pope Francis meets with Sisters
from the LCWR: they came to
the Vatican, I understand, on a
Bus.  

Well Pope Francis called the dogs of war off the American nuns and that marks another watershed day in the history of the American Church as it is a clear sign that the JPII/Benedict XVI old guard is finished, at least for the length of this papacy.  There had been a mounting tension between the American Religious Women and the Holy See dating back to 1979 when Sister Teresa Kane publically addressed Pope John Paul on behalf of U.S. nuns and asked him to consider admitting women “to all the ministries of the Church.” This opened the question of ordaining women, a question John Paul was quick to put the kibosh on and which angered him and his Curia that it was even mentioned.  Pope John Paul had very definite ideas on the place of women in the Church and in particular on how religious women should conduct themselves.  While his understanding of the role of women in the Church actually marked a step—or several steps—beyond what up to then had been Church practice, it hardly fit our current cultural conviction that men and women are equal and should have equal access to responsibility in our world today.  (I choose the word “responsibility” as it is more consistent with gospel values than the word “power,” but I certainly mean power when I speak of responsibility in this context.) 

The changes in religious life, and especially the life of religious women, has been remarkable in the decades after Vatican II.  In following the Vatican II mandate to return to the charisms of their founders, many religious women have renounced the monastic practices that were imposed on them in the late 18^th and in the 19^th centuries, adopting modern dress, moving out of large convents and the quasi-monastic life required in that sort of environment, taking more personal responsibility for their finances, and revamping authority structures to be more collaborative than directive.  They live now not as semi-monastics but as consecrated lay women living according to the evangelical counsels and devoting themselves to the works of the Church.  Of course there are still monastic and contemplative communities, generally enclosed (cloistered) but that vocation is essentially different than that of Religious Sisters in Apostolic communities.  The monastic life too has, in most places, undergone some external change, but remains essentially focused on prayer and the common life.  If anything, the changes in Religious Life after Vatican II have permitted the Apostolic and the Contemplative vocations to more clearly differentiate themselves from each other and permitted women to make the appropriate choice according to the graces given to each person. 

Of course the changes in Religious Life have also empowered women to take responsibility for their own life and mission and this has been deeply troubling to those who favor the misogynist hierchical power structures for which the Catholic Church was once so famous.  The last thing burned-out or incompetent male clerics need is to have self-confident religious women around.  And let’s face it, if there is anything the experience of the Vatican troubling the American Sisters has shown us is that the rank and file Catholics still love the nuns while the good folk in the pews are more reserved in their affection and respect for the clergy.  In 1995 the Vatican Congregation for Institutes of the Consecrated Life and Societies of the Apostolic Life (once known as the Congregation for Religious) divided out the more “traditional” religious communities of women from the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (originally known as Conference of Major Superiors of Women) and established for the more compliant nuns The Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious.  This left two distinct groupings of American Sisters.  About 80% of American Sisters belong to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. 

The LCWR’s problems began in earnest early in the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI when the Congregation of Institutes of the Consecrated Life and Societies of the Apostolic Life announced a “visitation” of American Sisters belonging to the LCWR affiliated communities.  This was supposedly “for their own good” to see why they weren’t getting the vocations they had once garnered in the 1960 vocational heyday.  The problem obviously was that most of the good sisters weren’t properly veiled and they were living in apartments and had drivers’ licenses—oh, and minds of their own, and used them.  A moving factor behind the original investigation was that nemesis of change, our own beloved Cardinal Burke who, at the time, was a member of the Congregation of Institutes of the Consecrated Life and Societies of the Apostolic Life.  (I am getting tired of typing and retyping that title—from here on out CICLSAL.)   Mother Mary Clare Millea, a Canon Lawyer and the Superior General of the Congregation of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (a community belonging to the Conference of Major Superiors of Women) was put in charge of the visitation.  This—it was thought—would be like putting Ted Cruz in charge of investigating Hillary Clinton’s campaign.  But guess what—it became clear that under the microscope of Mother Mary Clare, the Sisters of the LCWR looked just fine!!!  That wouldn’t do.  So stage II kicked in and Cardinal William Levada, an American who at the time was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (at one time known as “The Holy Roman Inquisition” and the most powerful of the Roman dicasteries) announced that the CDF was going to do a doctrinal investigation of the LCWR because they good Sisters were writing a lot of heresy and spreading false doctrines in their various ministries.  As if they had not learned with Galileo—some people just never learn.  Levada is not Torquemada and was only the front man for a cabal of the truly evil: Cardinal Burke (again!), Cardinal Law (the disgraced Archbishop of Boston whose intransience about a fictional princely immunity kicked off the sex-abuse scandal in the American Church), Archbishop Lori of Baltimore (a slimy sycophant of a prelate if there ever was one—you don’t want to know how he got where he got) and their bankrolling stooge, Carl Anderson, Grand Poobah of the Knights of Columbus whose generosity to Vatican causes with other people’s money has given him great influence in the hallowed halls of the pre-Francisco Reform Vatican Bank.  (Just mentioning these boys makes me want to take a shower.)  Well, the pyre was well on its way to being completed when Pope Benedict surprised the world with his retirement and within a month many things had begun to change.  Within a few months of his election, Pope Francis was addressing the Religious from Latin America and he said, in obvious reference to the North American nuns:

They will make mistakes, they will make a blunder [meter la pata], this will pass! Perhaps even a letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine (of the Faith) will arrive for you, telling you that you said such or such thing... But do not worry. Explain whatever you have to explain, but move forward... Open the doors, do something there where life calls for it. I would rather have a Church that makes mistakes for doing something than one that gets sick for being closed up...

Clear enough? One would think.  But just because Petrus locutus est doesn’t mean Roma locuta est, as is becoming increasingly clear in so many ways with top Cardinals publicly disagreeing with a reigning pontiff—something that hasn’t happened in a century and a half.  Ten months later, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, current Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, made it clear that the heat was still on the good Sisters.  And then this past Thursday, suddenly, the Vatican said, in tones reminiscent of Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella on SNL, “never mind.”  There, gone. Poof.  Just like that.  Oh yes, there’s a new sheriff in town—or to put it more biblically for Law, Lori, Burke, Anderson and co: there came a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph. 

As if that wasn’t enough news for one day, on Friday Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop emeritus of Chicago, passed to his eternal reward.  May God be good to him.  I will do a posting on his someday soon.  He was not a bad man, he certainly was not princely (or princessly) as some other prelates chose to be, but he represented that return to hierarchal autocracy that we witnessed during the reigns of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  It will be interesting to see that now that Chicago no longer has a living Cardinal, if the new Archbishop, Blase Cupich, will be given a red hat in the next consistory.  Of course, Archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput’s predecessor, Cardinal Rigali turns 80 next Tuesday, freeing up another possible red hat.  Cupich and Chaput are cut from very different cloth.  Chaput, despite his Capuchin/Franciscan background is more of the sort of silk popular in Benedict’s papacy; Cupich, a diocesan priest, is more of the Franciscan homespun.  Yes, it’s true: the Religious take the vow of poverty and the diocesan priests live it.  I have seen it all before.  For the best food and wines, the friars and monks will guide the way. But I digress.  The Red Hat contest is further complicated by the fact that Francis will be the guest of Chaput in September for the World Meeting of Families.  Under the two previous popes, such hospitality was usually acknowledged by a cardinal’s hat for the hosting prelate.  But Francis is quite unpredictable.  Nevertheless, it would be perceived as a snub for Cupich to get the hat and Chaput not, after Chaput had organized the September event.  In the meantime, poor Bill Lori is still sporting a green galero on his coat of arms. I am going to be surprised if that changes in this papacy.  And disappointed.